Lombroso on intelligence in women

Compared to male intelligence, female intelligence is deficient primarily in creative power.

Genius

This deficiency reveals itself immediately in the absence of female geniuses. There is no lack of names of illustrious women: in poetry, Sappho, Corinna, Telesilla, Browning, David John, Gauthier, Ackermann; in literature, Eliot, Sand, Stern, DeStael in art, Bonheur, Lebrun, Maraino, Sirani; in science, Sommerville, Royer, Tarnowsky, Germain. Yet it is clear that we are far from the greatness of male geniuses such as Shakespeare, Balzac, Aristotle, Newton, Michelangelo. With respect to the frequency of geniuses in the two sexes, the man’s superiority is widely recognized as immense.

Some, such as Sagnol,h attribute this inferiority to social conditions, especially to enforced ignorance in which woman is held and her lack of opportunity for intellectual labor. But women’s ignorance is not in fact as general as some think. In the 1500s in Italy and in the first century of the Roman Empire, upper-class women received the same education as men; and in the French aristocracy of the last century, women were well educated and attended lectures by Lavoisier, Cuvier, and so on, and so on. Yet even under these favorable conditions no genius appeared. As for environmental difficulties, these did not impede Browning or Sommerville from emerging; and they are by no means as large as those that an impoverished male genius encounters. Yet from males of the lower classes geniuses emerge more often than from women, even women of the wealthy classes.

Moreover, as I have already demonstrated,51 women of genius frequently have masculine appearances. Female genius can be explained as Darwin explained the coloration of certain female birds that resemble the males of their species: by a confusion of secondary sexual characteristics produced by a mismatch of paternal and maternal heredity. One need only look at pictures of women of genius of our day to realize that they seem to be men in disguise.

Lack of Originality/Monotony

While woman is barred from creating great things by her lack of genius, she is also less adapted than man to the minor productions at which average men succeed. This is due to her lack of originality, which is overdeveloped in the man of genius and found in more modest proportions in the average man. In fact, women have no particular talent for any art, science, or profession. They write, paint, embroider, sing; they move from dressmaking to millinery to being florists, good at everything and at nothing; but only rarely do they carry the stamp of true origi nality in any branch of work. This is the effect of a lesser differentiation in their brain functioning.

Automatic Types of Intelligence

Woman’s lack of creative power is definitively demonstrated by the distinctly automatic nature of her most typical form of intelligence. This is her intuition, which is specifically adapted to discovering the feelings and thoughts of people. “Women,” writes Spencer, “have another ability that is susceptible to cultivation and development: that of quickly perceiving the mental state of the people who surround them. Generally this particular gift consists of a true intuition which is not based on any specific logic” (op. cit.).52 Intuition is psychological and a type of instinct; it also appears, though less strongly, in children and in animals such as the dog. It calls up from the well of hereditary unconsciousness images that are pleasing or repulsive according to their associations with the experiences of her ancestors.

Logical Sentiments

All this demonstrates that female intelligence is deficient in creative power. This phenomenon can be clarified by studying what Wundt calls the logical sentiments: those which accompany the processes of thinking and knowing, agreement and contradiction.53

The criterion for truth is different in women and men. Because women are more suggestible, they often believe things simply through their own suggestion or that of others, and thus they have little need to see and touch before believing. From this follows their quickness to believe in miracles and their openness to religious proselytizing.

In the American West, women were admitted to juries, but the law allowing this had to be abrogated since the jurors judged on the basis of feeling rather than evidence (A. Barine, Revue des Deux Mondes, giugno 1883).54In girls’ boarding schools intellectual tasks that are too demanding and abstract produce amenorrhea, hysteria, and nervousness (Dujardin-Beaumetz). “Women in general,” writes Lafitte, “seem more struck by facts than by rules and more by specific ideas than by general concepts. A book by a woman, even by DeStael [sic] or Eliot,55 will always be more beautiful in its details than its totality. The female intelligence is concrete, that of man abstract.”i

This explains why women have acquired farne as travel writers and students of manners, topics for which the first requirement is to give specific and telling details; we see this in the works of Pfeiffer, DeStael [sic], Montaigue, Madame Adam, and so on, and so on. It is a sign of inferiority because abstraction is the highest grade of mental development. Animals, as Romanes observes, think in images.56

Diligence

Woman has more patience than man, as the types of work in which she engages demonstrates. Since the dawn of civilization weaving has been almost exclusively (except in Egypt) women’s work; and it is well known how much patience weaving required before the invention of the automated loom. Work with pearls and diamonds, as well as the manufacture of certain musical and surgical instruments which require a great deal of patience and delicacy, is completely in the hands of women (A. Kuliscioff, Il monopolio dell’uomo, Milano, 1890)57 Lace making and embroidery, highly painstaking forms of work, have become symbols of femininity. Only women are employed in the production of lace and in the French Gobelins tapestry factory.

That women are more patient explains their great numbers in modern industry, where we now have machines that require little from their operators in terms of muscular strength but rather continuous surveillance and patience. For the same reason women often do better than men in factory work; where work is piecework, the wife and daughters often carry home more earnings than the father and brothers (Kuliscioff, op. cit.). The professions in which woman does better than man are also those that require great patience, for example, elementary school teaching, for which women have been found preferable to men in Milan, England, and America.

Savage women manifest this same superiority in patience, sometimes even more clearly.

These observations might seem to contradict Darwin, who claims that men have more patience than women. But women’s patience is an effect of her lesser sensibility and lower degree of cortical excitability, which lower her need for stimulation. Hers is not the type of patience that flows from great potency in the inhibitory centers, a power that enabled Darwin, for example, to spend years accumulating proofs for his miraculous discovery. In this respect man is superior. In fact, Vogt observed that his female students were attentive in class but highly incompetent at homework. Man has perseverance, woman has patience; and her patience is more that of the camel than of the man of genius.

Causes

It is indisputable that the inferior development of women’s intelligence is partially caused by the physical inertia that men have imposed on her. But it would be an error to label this a man-made cause because the inferiority is also natural and because it reflects a general tendency among all animals on the evolutionary scale for males to participate more fully in the struggle for existence. It is mainly the male that fights to defend the species. Furthermore, he must fight other males to conquer the female, even more in the human than the animal world, because the variable of female choice has been almost eliminated. He is now free to select a woman as long as he has absolutely subdued his rivals. Among animals, on the other hand, it sometimes happens that while two males fight, the female flees with a third male who is weaker but more agreeable.

It is not so much work itself as the need to surpass rivals in the same activity that has developed the intelligence of man. This is demonstrated by the fact that among many savages, it is the woman who works (pitching tents, weaving, and so on) while the man fights wars and hunts. Yet that does not make the woman more intelligent.

And to the explanations for men’s intellectual superiority one must add another natural cause—the way men continually change their types of activities and life circumstances. Rarely does the son enter the same profession and under the same conditions as the father. On the other hand, the woman must devote a precious part of her time to the duties of motherhood, which are always the same and therefore do not awaken and nurture the intelligence as does the constant mobility of men. In antiquity as at the present time, most of those who emigrate are men.

Underlying all these other causes is a biological one that serves as the foundation. The intelligence of the male, like his organic structure, has a primitive potentiality greater than that of the female thanks to his lesser role in the reproduction of the species. As I have demonstrated, intelligence varies inversely to fecundity in the entire animal kingdom; there is an antagonism between the reproductive and intellectual functions. Today, the work of reproduction has for the most part devolved onto the woman, and for this biological reason she has been left behind in intellectual development.

In fact, certain female bees, termites, and ants have acquired a superiority of intelligence over other females of the species by giving up sex. The queen, in contrast, is fecund and stupid. Moreover, as savages step by step become civilized, their females grow less fecund. Women of high intelligence, as Wirey noted, are often sterile.

It is amazing, then, that woman is not even less intelligent than she is. One can explain this only by agreeing with Darwin that a part of the male’s acquired intelligence must be transmitted to women. Otherwise, the gap would be even greater.

Certainly greater participation in the collective life of society would raise woman’s intelligence. In fact, such participation is already the case in the most evolved races, as in England and North America, where most literary and artistic journalism is now entrusted solely to women.

From: Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman

by Cesare Lombroso