He thought that
woman's psychic power came from the sympathy based on the maternal
instinct, which "though in itself an entirely different faculty, early
blended with or helped to create, the derivative reason-born faculty of
altruism." With Ward's view Olive Schreiner agrees, saying: "We have no
certain proof that it is so at present, but woman's long years of
servitude and physical subjection, and her experience as childbearer and
protector of infancy, may be found in the future to have endowed her ...
with an exceptional width of human sympathy and instinctive
comprehension."[14]

In all probability Lombroso came nearer to the truth in his explanation
of feminine penetration. "That woman is more subject to hysteria is a
known fact," he says, "but few know how liable she is to hypnotic
phenomena, which easily opens up the unfoldment of spiritual
faculties.... The history of observation proves that hysteria and
hypnotism take the form of magic, sorcery, and divination or prophecy,
among savage peoples. 'Women,' say the Pishawar peoples, 'are all
witches; for several reasons they may not exert their inborn powers.'
... In the Slave Coast hysterical women are believed to be possessed
with spirits. The Fuegians believed that there had been a time when
women wielded the empire through her possession of the secrets of
sorcery."[8, pp.85f.]

The history of modern spiritualism has so well confirmed this view of
Lombroso's that we are safe in accepting it as the partial explanation
of the attribute of a mysterious and uncanny power which man has always
given to the feminine nature. The power of prophecy and divination which
was possessed by women at the dawn of history and for some time
thereafter was probably not different in its essentials from the
manifestations of hysterical girls who have puzzled the wisest
physicians or the strange phenomena of those spiritualistic mediums who
have been the subject of research well into our own times.[15]

If we wish to push our inquiry still further and ask why woman should be
so much more subject than man to hysterical seizures and to hypnotic
suggestion, we shall probably find that it is an essential part of her
femininity. Modern psychology and physiology have pointed out that the
menstrual cycle of woman has a vast influence not only on her emotional
nature but on her whole psychic life, so that there are times when she
is more nervously tense, more apt to become hysterical or t