ABSTRACT
Debates over the origins, meaning and significance of sex differences are always heated when women organize to improve the conditions of our lives. In the 1850s woman’s rights newspapers, a range of positions was debated – some writers argued that women were naturally different and superior to men, some argued that women and men were different, but not inferior or superior (see “The Sexes Are Not Comparable”), and others argued that women and men were not naturally but socially differentiated and had equal potential – physically, mentally and morally (see “Women and Men are Not So Unlike”). And of course there was what the women of the nineteenth century called the “old-fogey” position, popularized through men’s legal and religious laws and customs, that women were not only different but naturally inferior to men.
