Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/419

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

trary to true femininism. Certainly the student of the Uraniad-problem will often class personalities about him with the Intersexuals. Independent intellectual careers exert an "asexual" effect. "Learned women" have been happy wives and mothers, but these types are in the minority. Women of abnormal intellectualism are likely by temperament to be averse to marriage, or indifferent to it. From that attitude to an absolute similisexualism the degrees are few, particularly if intimacies of school-life and college-days have given women ideas of uranian relationships. When woman muscularizes her mind beyond the harmonious vigor to make her man's companion, without her being his rival, her natural quality of sexual sentiment often suffers. There is small sensibility in her toward the normal, passional love which attracts man and surrenders to him, in the highest type of intellectual-masculine women. She is less a heart than a brain,—a sexless mind.

The types, biographies and psychology of the intellectual and aesthetic Uraniad suggest a volume, not yet written; a capital study for some Uraniad. Distinguished and royal women have been mentioned in an earlier chapter; types whose masculinity sets them apart from their apparent sex, whether they are as warriors, sovereigns and stateswomen. The less aristocratic, and robustly male Uraniad is a wide study, impossible in this work.

Anna Maria
Schurmann.

A striking example is met in Anna Maria Schurmann, the Hollander, who attracted world-wide notice during the middle of the Seventeenth Century. She was a precocious girl, with an intellectual maturity early famed in Cologne, where she was born in 1607. A brother being a student at the University of Utrecht, Anna became his fellow-student, and graduated with high distinction. Her first literary successes were in the way of Latin poems; but soon such diversions were left behind. She continued her scientific, classical and artistic education,

— 401 —