Below is a letter to Mr. Stephen Leacock, a
Canadian writer, humorist, and academic, who died in 1944.
Dear Mr. Leacock:
Recently, I had the pleasure of reading your 1922 book, My Discovery of England. As it would
no doubt not surprise you, I found it amusing, even though some of it is a bit
dated from my vantage point in the early 21st century.
Your book does not strictly limit itself to England but
makes room for some of your favorite notions. You might have wanted to
constrain yourself on some of these, especially if you cared to appeal to
readers some ninety years in the future, about whom, though, you probably did
not give much thought. But your passages on the aptitudes and appropriate
education of women, which begin as a criticism of Oxford University’s policy of
admitting women but quickly become more general, are really over the top.
I should point out in this connection that an American, Mr. Lawrence
H. Summers, currently very much alive and a sometimes academic, found himself
in a heap of trouble when he made remarks
more than eight years ago about the underrepresentation of women in the science
and engineering professions. He was at the time President of Harvard
University, but found his tenure in that position cut short the following year,
owing in part to these remarks. Mr. Summers is an economist and is hoping to
become head of the U.S. central bank, but his remarks on women in the sciences
are still remembered, especially by those who would prefer someone else for the
job.
While you apparently did not harbor ambitions to be head of
the Bank of Canada, content with your career as a famous humorist, writer, and
professor of Political Economy and Chair of the Department of Economics and
Political Science at McGill University, there is some superficial similarity
between you and Mr. Summers. I would not want to stretch it too far. Your sense
of humor – I think it would not insult Mr. Summers to say – is vastly different
and more developed than his. I do believe, though, that you both rightly share
a high regard for your own abilities.
Further, I suppose 1922 was a much different time than 2005
when Mr. Summers made his remarks, in particular with respect to what we now
call “political correctness.” Still, your remarks about women, which go way
beyond anything Mr. Summers said, have the ability to grate.
For his part, Mr. Summers hypothesized that the curve
representing the distribution of native abilities in the hard sciences is
somewhat fatter at the very high end for men than for women. He did not say
that the average women had less ability than the average man. He makes clear
that he is “talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations
above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences
in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the
available pool…” Now whether or not there are such differences in the far-out
tails of the distributions of certain intellectual abilities between the
populations of men and women is highly debatable, as Mr. Summers was quickly
made to realize. He even seemed to have an inkling he was headed for trouble.
From the transcript of the event, at the conclusion of Mr. Summers’ remarks,
there was this exchange between him and the moderator:
Q: Well, I don't want to take up much time because I know
other people have questions, so, first of all I'd like to say thank you for
your input. It's very interesting – I noticed it's being recorded so I hope
that we'll be able to have a copy of it. That would be nice.
LHS: We'll see. (LAUGHTER)
But Mr. Leacock, in your book, you are talking about averages,
not far-out tails. In fact, you dismiss the exceptional woman as irrelevant.
Let me quote you:
The fundamental trouble is that men and women are different
creatures, with different minds and different aptitudes and different paths in
life. There is no need to raise here the question of which is superior and
which is inferior (though I think, the Lord help me, I know the answer to that
too). The point lies in the fact that they are different.
But the mad passion for equality has masked this obvious
fact. When women began to demand, quite rightly, a share in higher education,
they took for granted that they wanted the same curriculum as the men. They
never stopped to ask whether their aptitudes were not in various directions
higher and better than those of the men, and whether it might not be better for
their sex to cultivate the things which were best suited to their minds. Let me
be more explicit. In all that goes with physical and mathematical science,
women, on the average, are far below the standard of men. There are, of course,
exceptions. But they prove nothing. It is no use to quote to me the case of
some brilliant girl who stood first in physics at Cornell. That's nothing.
There is an elephant in the zoo that can count up to ten, yet I refuse to
reckon myself his inferior.
And you keep on going, digging a deeper hole for yourself,
at least as far as posterity is concerned:
The careers of the men and women who go to college together
are necessarily different, and the preparation is all aimed at the man's
career. The men are going to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, business men, and
politicians. And the women are not.
There is no use pretending about it. It may sound an awful
thing to say, but the women are going to be married. That is, and always has
been, their career; and, what is more, they know it; and even at college, while
they are studying algebra and political economy, they have their eye on it sideways
all the time. The plain fact is that, after a girl has spent four years of her
time and a great deal of her parents' money in equipping herself for a career
that she is never going to have, the wretched creature goes and gets married,
and in a few years she has forgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle, and she doesn't care. She has much better things to think of.
Mr. Summers also addressed this issue, but in a somewhat
different way, and does not draw your conclusion that there should therefore be
a difference in the curriculum offered to men and to women. Here is part of
what he said:
…I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with
chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large
law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders
of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with
colleagues in higher education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally
the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial
increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now
the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five,
fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only
nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we
started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being
female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are
in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or
without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk
to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same
conversation in almost any high-powered profession. What does one make of that?
I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and
non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and
the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going
to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to
their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a
flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of
effort through the life cycle, and they expect – and this is harder to measure –
but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the
job, even when the job is not taking place…
Part of the difference, of course, is that Mr. Summers is
speaking about the people who get to the top of their professions and you are
talking about averages. But you really get into trouble when you discuss what
is most appropriate for women. What were you thinking? If you were around
today, you would have noticed great changes in the role of women in society.
You would not have lasted, much less reached, the pinnacle of the Department of
Economics and Political Science at McGill University if you were still writing
such things. Fortunately, for this book, the issue of women suffrage for
federal elections in Canada had already been settled, though women had to wait
until 1940 to vote in Quebec provincial elections. You wisely forgo discussion
of this issue, though you are said to have opposed women suffrage.
Nonetheless, I did enjoy your book, filled as it with wry
and pointed observations. Your political outlook could probably be
characterized as socially and economically conservative, sprinkled with some
libertarianism. While I would agree with your attitude towards prohibition,
some of the other things you propound as obvious may seem less so to many of us
today. Your aversion to government intervention of interference in the economy
(“bring back the profiteer”) is a case in point. Perhaps, as you experienced
the 1930s, your ideas about the proper role of government in the economy
evolved. Not being an expert on the evolution of your ideas, I do not know.
Also, I daresay, you seem to have the notion that societies
are fixed. It is this view of a static society that seems to cramp your
imagination. Philosophical conservatives have a point when they say that much
of human nature is fixed, but this inclines them too much toward a pessimistic
and fatalistic view. Societies are
dynamic. We can debate whether the American civil rights leader of the mid
twentieth century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was mostly correct when he said
(the statement may not have been original): “The arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice.” But what is irrefutable is that societies are
dynamic, and what seemed impossible at one point in time may become considered
normal at some future point. Sometimes it does not even take that long. Look at
the evolution of attitudes toward same-sex marriage in many western industrial
countries.
It is, though, your views on women which are the most
shocking. They marred the otherwise enjoyable experience of reading your book.
Sincerely
yours,
Norman
Carleton
