(Jeremy Spinrad) wrote in message
...(to Louis Blair):
I don't think blindfold chess drove Morphy crazy.
However, consider the view of the people at the time.
Blindfold chess was considered awesome but a potential risk.
Morphy, after astonishing the world, disappears except for a few
where-are-they-now columns, and the next thing they hear he is apparently
insane at quite a young age. People could not know that later we would find
that some masters could play far more than 8 games blindfold with no apparent
harm, and could quite rationally believe that Morphy was driven insane by
blindfold chess.

Let's suppose that there had been a 19th century woman who had chess talent
that approached Paul Morphy's. Let's suppose further that, without ever
playing any blindfold chess, she had become one of the best chess-players
in the world (comparable to Judit Polgar's ranking today) in a short but
spectacular playing career before she decided to quit chess in favour of
becoming a married woman. Let's suppose still further that, during the
remainder of her brief unhappy life, she had been afflicted by many of the
same woes that have afflicted some great male chess-players until she met
a tragic end by committing suicide while in an evident state of insanity.

Would the presumably misogynistic medical experts of the 19th century (being
unable to foresee the emergence of Judit Polgar) have likely concluded that she
must have been driven out of her wits by having dangerously played chess (which
was evidently not regarded as properly "women's work" or "women's play") at a
level far beyond what was considered 'natural' for a woman's poor brain?

Then would most men of the 19th century have drawn the self-evident
'rational conclusion' that all women must be banned from playing chess
because of the 'evidence' that it tends to drive the 'weaker sex' mad?

--Nick