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. (more…)
