SCIENCE AND FEMINISM 283
equality of man's and woman's intellectual endowment now seek to ex- plain this fact on the score of alleged greater male variability.
About a century ago the anatomist Meckel in his ^^ Manual of De- scriptive and Pathological Anatomy concluded on pathological groimds that the human female was more variable than the human male; and he thought that, ^^ since woman is the inferior animal^ and variation a sign of inferiority, the conclusion is justified/' Later, when variability came to be regarded as a sign of superiority and as a trait affording the greatest hope for progress, anatomists and naturalists arrived at the conclusion that the male is more variable. Men of science who had gone 80 far as to take the stand that women are on the average equally able with men, now inferred from the alleged greater anatomical variabilily of males that males must also be mentally more variable, and declared women's failure in intellectual achievement to be due to this fact.
Unfortunately for this theory of inherently greater male variability, however, there appears to be no support for it in precise data. Karl Pearson, in his ^^ Variation in Man and Woman" (1897), showedl that when anatomical measurements of adults are treated with proper statistical precision, "there is no evidence of greater male variability, but rather of a slightly greater female variability." More recently Montague and Hollingworth® have shown from a study of 2,000 new- bom infants that there is no demonstrable difference in variability between the sexes at birth. As for mental variability, the precise data at present available have been summed up by Leta S. HoUingworth* in a critique recently published. "So proof of greater male variability in mental traits can be found in the scant and inconclusive data available on the subject. The theory exists, but the evidence does not.
Yet it is possible to admit equal endowment and equal variability and still to regard as impossible equal achievement on the part of woman. The traditions and tales of savages are replete with the primi- tive superstitions that center round the functional periodicity of women. And the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is replete with dogmatic assertions respecting the same subject. A long and patient search through this literature brings to light a veritable mass of conflicting statements by men of science, misogynists, practitioners, and general writers as to the dire effects of periodicity on the mental and physical life of women; but the search reveals scarcely a single fact upon which the earnest, but critical, seeker after truth can lay his hand and say, " Here is a point established." Men eminent in their profes- sions are found announcing the most dogmatic and contradictory no- tions. "Unfortunately for the scientifically minded, they fail, for the most part, to give any hint of the methods by which they arrive at their
> Helen Montagae and Leta S. HoUingworth, * * Tlie Comparative Variability of the Sexes at Birth," Amer. Jowr. of Sociology, 1914.
^Leta 6. HoUingworth, "Variability as Belated to Bex Differences in Aehievement," Amer, Jour. Sociology, 1914.
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