important element to the psychologist: but hardly any medical
practitioner is a psychologist. Respecting the mental
characteristics of women; their observations are of no more worth
than those of common men. It is a subject on which nothing final
can be known, so long as those who alone can really know it, women
themselves, have given but little testimony, and that little,
mostly suborned. It is easy to know stupid women. Stupidity is much
the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings
may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle
by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions
and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.
It is only a man here and there who has any tolerable knowledge of
the character even of the women of his own family. I do not mean,
of their capabilities; these nobody knows, not even themselves,
because most of them have never been called out. I mean their
actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man think she
perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations
with several, perhaps with many of them. 

If he is a good observer, and his experience extends to quality as
well as quantity, he may have learnt something of one narrow
department of their nature--an important department, no doubt. But
of all the rest of it, few persons are generally more ignorant,
because there are few from whom it is so carefully hidden. The most
favourable case which a man can generally have for studying the
character of a woman, is that of his own wife: for the
opportunities are greater, and the cases of complete sympathy not
so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the source from which any
knowledge worth having on the subject has, I believe, generally
come. But most men have not had the opportunity of studying in this
way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to an almost
laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like, from his
opinions about women in general. To make even this one case yield
any result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not only
a competent judge, but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and
so well adapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by
sympathetic intuition, or has nothing in himself which makes her
shy of disclosing it, Hardly anything, I believe, can be more rare
than this conjunction. It often happens that there is the most
complete unity of feeling and community of interests as to all
external things, yet the one has as little admission into the
internal life of the other as if they were common acquaintance.
Even with true affection, authority on the one side and
subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence. Though
nothing may be intentionally withheld, much is not shown. In the
analogous relation of parent and child, the corresponding
phenomenon must have been in the observation of everyone. As
between father and son, how many are the cases in which the father,
in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all the
world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son's character
familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the
position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to
complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground
in his opinion or in his feelings is so strong, that even in an
upright character, there is an unconscious tendency to show only
the best side, or the side which, though not the best, is that
which he most likes to see: and it may be confidently said that
thorough knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but between
persons who, besides being intimates, are equals. How much more
true, then, must all this be, when the one is not only under the
authority of the other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to
reckon everything else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and
to let him neither see nor feel anything coming from her, except
what is agreeable to him. All these difficulties stand in the way
of a man's obtaining any thorough knowledge even of the one woman
whom alone, in general, he has sufficient opportunity of studying.
When we further consider that to understand one woman is not
necessarily to understand any other woman; that even if he could
study many women of one rank, or of one country, he would not
thereby understand women of other ranks or countries; and even if
he did, they are still only the women of a single period of
history; we may safely assert that the knowledge which men can
acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference
to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and
always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they
have to tell. 

And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than
gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been
qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society, to
tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare
tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends,
are unwilling to hear. Let us remember in what manner, up to a very
recent time, the expression, even by a male author, of uncustomary
opinions, or what are deemed eccentric feelings, usually was, and
in some degree still is, received; and we may form some faint
conception under what impediments a woman, who is brought up to
think custom and opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in
books anything drawn from the depths of her own nature. The
greatest woman who has left writings behind her sufficient to give
her an eminent rank in the literature of her country, thought it
necessary to prefix as a motto to her boldest work, " Un homme peut
braver l'opinion; une femme doit s'y soumettre." [1] The greater
part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to men. In
the case of unmarried women, much of it seems only intended to
increase their chance of a husband. Many, both married and
unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a servility beyond what
is desired or relished by any man, except the very vulgarest. But
this is not so often the L case as, even at a quite late period, it
still was. Literary women I are becoming more free-spoken, and more