2) What predominates in man is that freer, more expansive activity in the external world, in woman the greater restriction to procreation, to family, to the house. Burdach puts it into these powerful words (p. 475): “The entire meaning of woman is focused on the family relations and the relationship between the sexes, and fulfilling the duties of these relationships alone constitutes her worth. Woman gives herself over completely to love and makes it the goal of her life, while the man asserts his independence in it and pursues other purposes. Thus woman not only unites the members of the family, she is in general more tuned to sympathy, and the predominant, general good will is also connected with a higher degree of religious sentiment.” In the intellectual realm, as well, woman shows a lesser grasp of what is more distant and deeper, though she has an all the more vivid, receptive feeling and eye for what is closer, unique. And in connection with that easier excitability, with the delicacy of feeling, and with the sense for immediate perception, woman also exceeds man in the delicate, sure tact of judgement and conduct, and in the sure and healthy understanding and judgement – even if she is unaware of the reasons – of people and life circumstances, which are not retarded by laborious inferences, not misled by brooding, and lead directly to the correct result.
3) But the chief physical and moral differences described above, in conjunction with the different purposes mentioned, also establish a new, primary moral distinction. Those male peculiarities – greater male strength and freedom, the predominance of reason and of creation, allied only too closely with destruction, and the male life purpose of the resolute protection and guidance of the family, the acquisition of property, and the political and armed struggle to that end – establish in him greater boldness, male courage – both physical and offensive – and the natural and often necessary concomitants of that same, male passion, wrath, legal obstinacy, impatience, an indomitable will and resoluteness, the rougher exterior, and a certain masculine hardness and severity. But the fairest form of all his virtues remains male honor. By contrast, in the same natural way the peculiarities of woman establish her greater weakness and softness, the preponderance of sensibility and emotion, and the sense of preservation, in conjunction with her need for protection and destiny for domestic life, female shyness and chaste modesty, softness and gentleness, the greater capacity and ability for patience and yielding and, if necessary, the courage – an often admirable moral courage – to endure, though at any rate more the courage of enthusiastic excitedness than of cold male resoluteness, and, finally, the milder, captivating form and manner of female grace – the most beautiful form of all female virtues. [ . . . ]
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