WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH, observed in March, puts a spotlight on female achievement. We encounter women composers, artists, authors, activists and politicians whose accomplishments range from propaganda to the truly impressive. There is nothing wrong with celebrating those who have excelled.

But can’t we do that during the course of the year instead of having a month devoted to it? Isn’t it patronizing to have a month?

There’s another problem. In general we do not encounter achievements equal to those of the great male geniuses. Women’s History Month cannot help but highlight the areas in which the most brilliant women are inferior to the most brilliant men while neglecting the areas in which women are so often superior to men.

That’s why I don’t like Women’s History Month, which truthfully comes across as a celebration of female inferiority and vanity. This political grandstanding really misses the mark when it comes to recognizing women. So many of the important contributions of women to society are hidden and not very lucrative. There is every reason why they should be hidden and not very lucrative. Selflessness, nurturance, tenderness, aid to the poor and suffering will never win Nobel Prizes or Pulitzers and rarely show up in history books.

The 19th-century Irish Whig historian William Lecky, whose wife, by the way, was an author in her own right, made interesting comments about the differences between men and women in his 1869 book A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, Vol II.

Lecky helps explain the problem with Women’s History Month:

There are few more curious subjects of enquiry than the distinctive differences between the sexes, and the manner in which those differences have affected the ideal types of different ages, nations, philosophies, and religions. Physically, men have the indisputable superiority in strength, and women in beauty. Intellectually, a certain inferiority of the female sex can hardly be denied when we remember how almost exclusively the foremost places in every department of science, literature, and art have been occupied by men, how infinitesimally small is the number of women who have shown in any form the very highest order of genius, how many of the greatest men have achieved their greatness in defiance of the most adverse circumstances, and how completely women have failed in obtaining the first position, even in music or painting, for the cultivation of which their circumstances would appear most propitious. It is as impossible to find a female Raphael, or a female Handel, as a female Shakespeare or Newton. Women are intellectually more desultory and volatile than men; they are more occupied with particular instances than with general principles, they judge rather by intuitive perceptions than by deliberate reasoning or past experience. They are, however, usually superior to men in nimbleness and rapidity of thought, and in the gift of tact or the power of seizing speedily and faithfully the finer inflexions of feeling, and they have therefore often attained very great eminence in conversation, as letter writers, as actresses, and as novelists.

Morally, the general superiority of women over men, is, I think, unquestionable. If we take the somewhat coarse and inadequate criterion of police statistics, we find that, while the male and female populations are nearly the same in number, the crimes committed by men are usually rather more than five times as numerous as those committed by women; and although it may he justly observed that men, as the stronger sex, and the sex upon whom the burden of supporting the family is thrown, have more temptations than women, it must be remembered, on the other hand, that extreme poverty which verges upon starvation is most common among women, whose means of livelihood are most restricted, and whose earnings are smallest and most precarious. Self-sacrifice is the most conspicuous element of a virtuous and religious character, and it is certainly far less common among men than among women, whose whole lives are usually spent in yielding to the will and consulting the pleasures of another. There are two great departments of virtue: the impulsive, or that which springs spontaneously from the emotions; and the deliberative, or that which is performed in obedience to the sense of duty; and in both of these I imagine women are superior to men. Their sensibility is greater, they are more chaste both in thought and act, more tender to the erring, more compassionate to the suffering, more affectionate to all about them. On the other hand, those who have traced the course of the wives of the poor, and of many who, though in narrow circumstances, can hardly be called poor, will probably admit that in no other class do we so often find entire lives spent in daily persistent self-denial, in the patient endurance of countless trials, in the ceaseless and deliberate sacrifice of their own enjoyments to the well-being or the prospects of others. Women, however, though less prone than men to intemperance and brutality, are in general more addicted to the petty forms of vanity, jealousy, spitefulness, and ambition, and they are also inferior to men in active courage. In the courage of endurance they are commonly superior; but their passive courage is not so much fortitude which bears and defies, as resignation which bears and bends. In the ethics of intellect they are decidedly inferior. To repeat an expression I have already employed, women very rarely love truth, though they love passionately what they call ‘the truth,’ or opinions they have received from others, and hate vehemently those who differ from them.

By the way, Lecky does not make the case, as I see it, in this passage or his subsequent comments, that women in general are morally superior to men. He does make the case that in some ways they are morally superior to men.

— Comments —

Rudiger writes:

By the way, Lecky does not make the case, as I see it, in this passage or his subsequent comments, that women in general are morally superior to men. He does make the case that in some ways they are morally superior to men.

I don’t understand he starts the paragraph.  that women are “generally”morally superior. Are you saying he says that but does not back it up?

If he was writing a hundred years ago, I think he would have to change his opinion now. Feminism has made miserable criminals out of women who can’t stop popping pills, killling their children or dressing and acting like prostitutes (and unpaid prostitutes at that!). I cannot agree with the moral superior of women at all. In fact, I wonder if over the centuries if men’s morality has remained constant, and women’s have been held in check by “Christian” and natural law. And it’s only when men have allowed these laws to lapse, that women are subsequently  free to act as they would have acted if the laws had never been there. In other words, women were only good because men kept them good through law. But when men let loose the laws, women quickly adapted to the new “freedom”.

Laura writes:

Yes, I was saying he does not back it up.

There’s a contradiction in what you say.

But when men let loose the laws, women quickly adapted to the new “freedom”. 

In other words, men first rejected God and the natural order. Or, men’s morality didn’t remain constant.

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