“How do things stand between the sexes? An old proverb tells us: long hair, short mind.”
Thus begins Paul Julius Möbius — assistant in the neurology department in Leipzig — in his short treatise L'inferiorità mentale della donna ("The Mental Inferiority of Women"), written in 1900 and aptly described as an evergreen of reactionary thought.
Women with small skulls, insufficient brain weight… according to Möbius, ladies are entirely lacking in independent judgment. “Moreover, after a few pregnancies they decline and, as it is vulgarly said, become foolish.” Not only that: women who claim to think are troublesome, and “reflection only makes them worse.”
Echoing such statements is Italian physician, anthropologist, jurist, and criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who argued that women lie and often kill — as supposedly confirmed by proverbs from every region.
Sylvain Maréchal, writer, lawyer, and self-proclaimed revolutionary, in his Draft Law to Prohibit Women from Reading, maintained that “learning to read is something superfluous and harmful to women’s natural training,” since “reason dictates that women should count eggs in the yard rather than stars in the sky.”
Through this performance — enriched by absurd demonstrations of cephalic index measurements, to which Veronica subjects herself with sharp irony — the apex of misogynistic culture is exposed.
A patient herself — due to a past experience with depression — Pivetti also shares personal anecdotes with the audience, recalling, in Lombroso’s words, that… “the male is a more perfect female.”