It is a subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those whoalone can really know it, women themselves, have given but little testimony,and that little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know stupid women. Stupidityis much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelingsmay confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by whichthe person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings arean emanation from their own nature and faculties. It is only a man here andthere who has any tolerable knowledge of the character even of the womenof his own family. I do not mean, of their capabilities; these nobody knows,not even themselves, because most of them have never been called out. I meantheir actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man think she perfectlyunderstands women, because he has had amatory relations with several, perhapswith many of them. If he is a good observer, and his experience extends toquality as well as quantity, he may have learnt something of one narrow departmentof their nature -- an important department, no doubt. But of all the restof it, few persons are generally more ignorant, because there are few fromwhom it is so carefully hidden. The most favourable case which a man cangenerally have for studying the character of a woman, is that of his ownwife: for the opportunities are greater, and the cases of complete sympathynot so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the source from which any knowledgeworth having on the subject has, I believe, generally come. But most menhave not had the opportunity of studying in this way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to an almost laughable degree, infer what a man's wifeis like, from his opinions about women in general. To make even this onecase yield any result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not onlya competent judge, but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and so welladapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by sympathetic intuition,or has nothing in himself which makes her shy of disclosing it, Hardly anything,I believe, can be more rare than this conjunction. It often happens thatthere is the most complete unity of feeling and community of interests asto all external things, yet the one has as little admission into the internallife of the other as if they were common acquaintance. Even with true affection,authority on the one side and subordination on the other prevent perfectconfidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld, much is not shown.
In the analogous relation of parent and child, the corresponding phenomenonmust have been in the observation of everyone. As between father and son,how many are the cases in which the father, in spite of real affection onboth sides, obviously to all the world does not know, nor suspect, partsof the son's character familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is,that the position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to completesincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground in his opinionor in his feelings is so strong, that even in an upright character, thereis an unconscious tendency to show only the best side, or the side which,though not the best, is that which he most likes to see: and it may be confidentlysaid that thorough knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but betweenpersons who, besides being intimates, are equals. How much more true, then,must all this be, when the one is not only under the authority of the other,but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything else subordinateto his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither see nor feel anythingcoming from her, except what is agreeable to him. All these difficultiesstand in the way of a man's obtaining any thorough knowledge even of theone woman whom alone, in general, he has sufficient opportunity of studying.
When we further consider that to understand one woman is not necessarilyto understand any other woman; that even if he could study many women ofone rank, or of one country, he would not thereby understand women of otherranks or countries; and even if he did, they are still only the women ofa single period of history; we may safely assert that the knowledge whichmen can acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without referenceto what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and alwayswill be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than gradually.
