The Problems with Women’s Brains
According to the author of the article “Women’s Brains,” the problems that scientists had found previously with women’s brains were not as bad as they thought. In the nineteenth century, much of the European leaders of anthropometry believed that men were more intelligent than women. Anthropometry is the study of the human body and in the nineteenth century it and the measuring of skulls were common practices. According to the measurement of male and female skulls, men were more intelligent because their brains were bigger.
Paul Broca did extensive research on the size of men’s and women’s brains and came to the conclusion that men’s brains are on average fourteen percent larger than women’s brains. This of course all happened before scientists realized that one must test the intelligence of a person of an individual basis. Also, even though all of Broca’s research was valid, it still did not mean anything, because it was just a compilation of numbers and facts and science is more than that. He did acknowledge that the fact that men are taller than women and that might have something to do with the size difference, but never proved it either way. Broca insisted also that women’s unintelligence was due to both their physical inferiority and their mental inferiority.
In 1879, Gustave Le Bon wrote one of the most malicious attacks on women to date. He wrote that a woman’s brain was comparable to that of a gorilla’s. he also stated that a woman is one of the most inferior forms of evolution, ranking closer to a savage or a child than to an adult man. Le Bon even conceded that there were some smart women in the world but stated that they were rare and compared them to a gorilla both with two heads. Although this was not what was being taught in Broca’s school of thought, it sure does reflect some of his findings. I find the fact that men repressed women so much horrible. Even L. Manouvrier, was knew of...