It is the general rule throughout the animal kingdom that wherever one sex is larger or physically more powerful than the other, the larger or physically more powerful sex will occupy the position of dominance. Humans, we know, are something more than animal, but not all men have quite realized that fact. If, as Plato said, civilization is the victory of persuasion over force, it may be that men may yet be persuaded to consider some of the origins of their sexual dominance, and even to learn that the force of argument is eventually stronger and more beneficial in its effects than the argument of force.
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It has already been pointed out that there is a remarkable parallel between the phenomenon of race prejudice and prejudice against women. This is nicely illustrated by an editorial comment on a woman's suffrage meeting held in Syracuse, New York. The editorial appeared in the New York Herald, in the September 1852 issue, and was probably written by the elder James Gordon Bennett, the Herald's founder and owner. Among other things, the editorial said,
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| | How did woman first become subject to man, as she now is all over the world? By her nature, her sex, just as the negro is and always will be to the end of time, inferior to the white race and, therefore, doomed to subjection; but she is happier than she would be in any other condition, just because it is the law of her nature!
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Everything that has been said about almost any alleged "inferior race" has been said by men about women. We have already heard that their brains are smaller, that their intelligence is lower, that they are not very good at mathematics, that one can't trust them to govern their own affairs, that they are like children, emotional, unoriginal, uncreative, unintellectual, with a severely limited attention span, and so on, through the whole dreary calendar of fables. These are the familiar arguments of the racists, their stock in trade; and every one of them has been urged as a fact in racist contexts, as well as against women in general.
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I hope that no reader of this book is naive enough to imagine that proof of the erroneousness of these beliefs would be sufficient to eliminate either race prejudice or the prejudice against women; for just as the "race" problem is in reality a problem in human
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