Our nervous woman is well. Slowly, very slowly, she has won flesh and
color, which means gain in quality and quantity of blood. By degrees,
too, she has been able to return to the habits and endurances of health.
And now she asks that other question, "I have daughters who are yet
young, but how shall I guard them against nervousness?" and again puts
forward this single complex symptom in disregard of the states of body
which usually accompany it, and are to us matters quite as grave. She
knows well that the mass of women are by physiological nature more
liable to be nervous than are men. It is a sad drawback in the face of
the duties of life, that a very little emotional disturbance will
suffice to overcome the woman as it does not do the man, and that the
same disease which makes him irritable makes her nervous. Says Romanes,
in an admirable and impartial article on the mental differences of men
and women, "She is pre-eminent for affection, sympathy, devotion,
self-denial, modesty, long-suffering or patience under pain,
disappointment, and adversity, for reverence, veneration, religious
feeling, and general morality." I accept his statement to add that these
very virtues do many of them lead to the automatic development of
emotion, which, in its excesses and its uncontrolled states, is the
parent of much of the nervousness not due to the enfeeblement of
disease.[5]

[Footnote 5: _Journal of Popular Science_, July, 1887.]

With the intellectual differences between man and woman I have here
little to do. That there is difference, both quantitative and in a
measure qualitative, I believe, nor do I think any educational change in
generations of women will ever set her, as to certain mental and moral
qualifications, as an equal beside the man. It would be as impossible as