at woman is man's equal because Rosa
Bonheur and Lady Butler have painted, Sappho and George Eliot have
written, and so forth; in other words, that woman is man's equal because
she can do what he can do: any capacities of hers which he does not
share being tacitly regarded as beside the point or insubstantial.

The other party has little difficulty in showing that, in point of fact,
men do things admittedly worth doing of which women are on the whole
incapable; and then triumphantly, but with logic of the order which this
party would probably call "feminine," it is assumed that woman is not
man's equal because she cannot do the things he does. That she does
things vastly better and infinitely more important which he cannot do at
all, is not a point to be considered; the baseless basis of the whole
silly controversy being the exquisite assumption, to which the women's
party have the folly to assent, that only the things which are common in
some degree to both sexes shall be taken into account, and those
peculiar to one shall be ignored.

It is my most solemn conviction that the cause of woman, which is the
cause of man, and the cause of the unborn, is by nothing more gravely
and unnecessarily prejudiced and delayed than by this doctrine of
sex-identity. It might serve some turn for a time, as many another
error has done, were it not so palpably and egregiously false. Advocated
as it is mainly by either masculine women or unmanly men, its advocates,
though in their own persons offering some sort of evidence for it, are
of a kind which is highly repugnant to less abnormal individuals of both
sexes. Hosts of women of the highest type, who are doing the silent work
of the world, which is nothing less than the creation of the life of the
world to come, are not merely dissuaded from any support of the women's
cause by the spectacle of these palpably aberrant and unfeminine women,
but are further dissuaded by the profound conviction arising out of
their woman's nature, that the doctrine of sex-identity is absurd. Many
of them would rather accept their existing status of social inferiority,
with its thousand disabilities and injustices, than have anything to do
with women who preach "Rouse yourselves, women, and be men!" and who
themselves illustrate only too fearsomely the consequences of this
doctrine.

Certainly not less disastrous, as a consequence of this most unfortunate
error of fact and of logic, is the alienation from