From Joan Mason
Like David Milsted, who shared some superb “regrettable quotes” with us (Forum, 19 August), I collect pronouncements by Great Men of Science, and should be delighted if readers of New Scientist would contribute examples (preferably with references), which will be gratefully acknowledged when published. My chosen field is that of “sexist quotes”.
Across the centuries, nay millennia, distinguished thinkers have sought to deduce, explain or illustrate the undoubted superiority of the male. Aristotle deduced: “A boy is like a woman in form, and the woman is like an impotent male … being incapable of concocting … semen”; “The male always perfects the work of generation, for he imparts the sensitive soul”; “Too black a hue marks the coward, as witness Egyptians and Ethiopians, and so does too white a complexion, as you may see from women. So the hue that makes for courage must be intermediate between these extremes.”
Darwin thought that the greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, energy, inventiveness and intellectual vigour of man, compared with woman, was acquired by natural selection from primeval times, through the contests of rival males for the possession of females.
According to Nietzsche: “When a woman becomes a scholar there is usually something wrong with her sex organs.”
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The great chemist Richard Willstätter wrote: “I went to Heidelberg and became engaged to Sophie Leser, which was not exactly easy. What I had to tell Miss Leser was discouraging – mainly warnings.
“I told her about my absorption in my work and lingered over one of my researches, which was very small and unimportant, telling her that I spent more time and effort on this bit of work than I can afford to spend on looking for a bride.”
Unlike Milsted, I do not restrict the field to issues which have been firmly and finally resolved.
