theorem. For
those, on the contrary, whose business is with the fugitive and
perishable--with individual facts, not kinds of facts--rapidity of
thought is a qualification next only in importance to the power of
thought itself. He who has not his faculties under immediate command,
in the contingencies of action, might as well not have them at all.
He may be fit to criticize, but he is not fit to act. Now it is in
this that women, and the men who are most like women, confessedly
excel. The other sort of man, however pre-eminent may be his
faculties, arrives slowly at complete command of them: rapidity of
judgment and promptitude of judicious action, even in the things he
knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous effort grown
into habit.

It will be said, perhaps, that the greater nervous susceptibility of
women is a disqualification for practice, in anything but domestic
life, by rendering them mobile, changeable, too vehemently under the
influence of the moment, incapable of dogged perseverance, unequal
and uncertain in the power of using their faculties. I think that
these phrases sum up the greater part of the objections commonly made
to the fitness of women for the higher class of serious business.
Much of all this is the mere overflow of nervous energy run to waste,
and would cease when the energy was directed to a definite end. Much
is also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation; as we see
by the almost total disappearance of "hysterics" and fainting fits,
since they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, when people are
brought up, like many women of the higher classes (though less so in
our own country than in any other) a kind of hot-house plants,
shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of air and temperature, and
untrained in any of the occupations and exercises which give stimulus
and development to the circulatory and muscular system, while their
nervous system, especially in its emotional department, is kept in
unnaturally active play; it is no wonder if those of them who do not
die of consumption, grow up with constitutions liable to derangement
from slight causes, both internal and external, and without stamina
to support any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity of
effort. But women brought up to work for their livelihood show none
of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are chained to an
excess of sedentary work in confined and unhealthy rooms. Women who
in