Section 76. (d) Emotional Disposition and Related Subjects.
Madame de Krüdener writes in a letter to Bernardin de St. Pierre:
"Je voulais être sentie." These laconic words of this wise pietist
give us an insight into the significance of emotional life of woman.
Man wants to be understood, woman felt. With this emotion
she spoils much that man might do because of his sense of justice.
Indeed, a number of qualities which the woman uses to make herself
noted are bound up with her emotional life, more or less. Compassion,
self-sacrifice, religion, superstition,—all these depend on
the highly developed, almost diseased formation of her emotional
life. Feminine charity, feminine activity as a nurse, feminine
petitions for the pardon of criminals, infinite other samples of women's
kindly dispositions must convince us that these activities are an
integral part of their emotional life, and that women perform them
only, perhaps, in a kind of dark perception of their own helplessness.
On the one side an unconscious egoism impels them to the defence
of those who find themselves in
a similarcondition; on the other
side, it is a feminine characteristic to apply anything she is to judge
to herself first, and then to make her choice. That she does this,
rests on the eminent overweight of emotion. So Schopenhauer says:
"Women are very sympathetic, but they are behind man in all
matters of justice, probity, and scrupulous conscientiousness. Injustice
is the fundamental feminine
defect."[1] Schopenhauer should
have added, "because they are too sympathetic, because emotion
takes up so much place in their minds that they have not enough
left for justice." According to Proudhon, "The conscience of woman
is as much weaker than man's as her intelligence is smaller. Her
morality is of a different sort, her ideas of right and wrong are
different, being always on this or that side of justice, and never
requiring any equivalence between rights and duties which are
such a painful necessity to man." Spencer
says,
[2] briefly, that the
feminine mind shows a definite lack with regard to the sense of
justice.
These assertions show that women are deficient in justice, but do
not show why. The deficiency is to be explained only in the
super-abundance of emotional life. This superabundance clarifies a number
of facts of their daily routine. We have, of course, to make a distinction
between the feeling of a gentlewoman, of a peasant woman,
and of the innumerable grades between the two, but this distinction
is not essential. Both noble and proletarian are equally unjust,
but the rich emotion restores a thousand times what may be missing
in justice, and perhaps in many cases hits better upon what is absolutely
right than the bare masculine sense of justice. We are, of
course, frequently mistaken by relying on the testimony of women,
but only when we assume that our rigorously judicial sentence is
the only correct one, and when we do not know how women judge.
Hence, we interpret women's testimonies with difficulty and rarely
with correctness; we forget that almost every feminine statement
contains in itself much more judgment than the testimony of men;
we fail to examine how much real judgment it contains; and finally,
we weigh this judgment in other scales than those used by the
woman. We do best, therefore, when we take the testimony of
man and woman together in order to find the right average. This
is not easy, for we are unable to enter properly into the emotional
life of woman, and can not therefore discount that tendency of
hers to drag the objective truth in some biased direction. It might
be theoretically supposed that a noble, kindly, feminine feeling
would tend to reflect everything as better and gentler, and would
tend to excuse and conceal. If that were so we might have a definite
standard of valuation, and might be able to discount the feminine
bias. But that is so in perhaps no more than half the cases that
come before us. In all others woman has allowed herself to be
moved to displeasure, and appears as the punishing avenger. Hence,
she fights with all her strength on the side that seems to her to be
oppressed and innocently persecuted, irrespective of whether it is
the side of the accused or of his enemy. In consequence, we must
first of all, when judging her statements, determine the direction
in which her emotion impels her, and this can not be done with a
mere knowledge of human nature. Nothing will do except a careful
study of the specific feminine witness at the time she gives her
evidence. And this requires the expenditure of much time, for, to
plunge directly into the middle of things without having any means
of comparison or relation, is to make judgment impossible or very
unsafe. If you are to do it at all you must discuss other things
first and even permit yourself the dishonesty of asking about matters
which you already know in order to find some measure of the degree
of feminine obliqueness. Of course, one discovers here only the
degree of obliqueness, not its direction—in the case selected for
comparison the woman might have judged too kindly, in the case
in hand she may just as well be too rigorous. But all things have a
definite limit, and hence, much practice and much goodwill will
help us to discover the direction of obliqueness.
When we inquire into the emotional life of the simple, uneducated
women, we find it to be fundamentally the same as that of women
of other classes, but different in expression, and it is the expression
we have to observe. Its form is often raw, therefore difficult to
discover. It may express itself in cursing and swearing, but it is
still an expression of emotion, just as are the mother's curses or beatings
of her child because it has fallen and hurt itself. But observe
that the prevalence of emotion is so thoroughly a feminine condition
that it is clearly noticeable only where femininity itself is explicit—
therefore, always weaker among masculine women, and in the
single individual most powerful when femininity is most fully developed.
It grows in the child, remains at a constant level when
woman becomes completely woman, and decreases when, in advanced
age, the differences in sex begin to disappear. Very old
men and very old women are also in this matter very close together.
[[ id="n76.1"]]
Parerga and Paralipomena.
[[ id="n76.2"]]
Introduction to the Study of Sociology.