David Stove's The Intellectual Capacity Of Women

By the year 1990, equality between the sexes has become unprecedentedly parallel and similar in nature despite the obvious minor differences in physiology and thinking, but an Australian philosopher by the name of David Stove challenges this idea in a very explicit and outright was in his essay The Intellectual Capacity of Women. This essay, in short, is a sharp criticism of modern feminism and challenges the belief that men are equal to women on several bases. Stove, in his essay uses many arguably unprincipled tactics to persuade his readers that women are simply inferior to men, one of which being homely reasoning. Stove, to prove his points, starts with an everyday observation and expands on it to prove his point even though the original …show more content…
Stove, within the first paragraph explicitly states his beliefs, but the analogies and examples that he uses stray far from the subject matter and at certain points are contradictory to his argument. At one point, stove argues that women do not have the physical ability to hold positions as high of a caliber of men, while earlier in the essay he argues that women have held these positions but have not had the popular advantage that men have had historically. He also defines intellectual superiority as only the ability to out process another while ignoring other fields such as creativity and capacity, fields in which women have been proven equal to men in. Stove does make a valid point when he states that men are more aggressive or “cunning” and women which is a commonly known physiological difference. Men have historically held more positions of power than women and it can be attributed to the fact that men have typically been more aggressive than women, but he twists this evidence to discredit women on the basis of intelligence. Stoves transitive logic is also a red flag in his essay as he assumes, based on the fact that men have historically performed at a higher level in a certain field, that men are therefore better in that field. The red flag is not only obvious but one of the most basic logical flaws known due to the fact that he jumps from a disproportional set of results to an absolute conclusion. However, one of the biggest reasons that stove can appear to be correct is due to his style of writing and how he doesn’t spend enough time on a certain anecdote to allow for as much criticism but rather jumps from example to example, each of which twisting its twisting its logic to make his point which prevent essay from having a common exploit, if the twisting of logic itself is