The feminine brain (a 19th century view): Information from Answers.com Mobile

The feminine brain (a 19th century view)

Many great men of science had a low opinion of women. Aristotle, who used "pure logic" to infer that women have fewer teeth than men but never bothered to count women's teeth, said that women are passive and men active. He considered women as "mutilated men." Darwin and Freud also believed in the innate inferiority of women, and during the 19th century many scientists were convinced that women had to be less intelligent because of differences in brain structure.

In 1861 the famous French physical anthropologist Paul Broca weighed the brains of deceased men and women in four Parisian hospitals and concluded that the brains of women, on the average, were 200 g (7 oz) lighter than the brains of men. Gustave Le Bon, a student of Broca, claimed that the brain of a woman was in size "closer to the brain of the gorilla than the brain of men." And according to Le Bon, "all psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women recognize that they represent an inferior form of evolution and that they are closer to the child and the savage."

Some scientists from the 19th century were convinced that intelligence was located in the frontal lobe of the brain, and therefore believed that women should have smaller frontal lobes. The year 1884 saw the publication of a scientific book in which woman is called Homo parietalis and man is called homo frontalis.

It was soon found, however, that the frontal lobes in women were generally larger than those of men, and therefore male scientists concluded that not the frontal lobe but the parietal lobe of the brain should be the seat of intelligence.

In the early 20th century scientists found that the size of the brain had nothing to do with intelligence, disproving all those learned theories from the 19th century as pure nonsense. Women are generally smaller than men, so they have smaller brains, but not smaller intelligence.