Sobre la supuesta inferioridad intelectual de las mujeres. El caso de las teorías frenológicas en el siglo XIX

Abstract

Concepción Arenal redresses the 19th-century phrenological statements on women’s innate intellectual inferiority. These traditional beliefs were based on pseudo-scientific hypotheses that paralleled man’s bigger brain size and his rational superiority. Traditionally, scholars and scientists have largely rather subscribed to biased preconceptions about women than to empirical evidence. Likewise manifest in Differential Psychology, such prejudices take for granted innate differences between man’s and woman’s capacities and social spheres. This essay centres on Concepción Arenal’s redress, whose La mujer del porvenir refutes the phrenological vision about woman’s rational disabilities, and tackles the so-called «female question» and its proposals on women’s right to education.