Women's Intuition

She says: As Jem lays unconscious and wounded in his room with various characters getting "the story" straight, Aunt Alexandra prepares to exit when she pauses in a moment of guilt and says:

"Atticus, I had a feeling about this tonight-I-this is my fault...I should have-"

At which point Mr. Tate tries to comfort her telling her:

"You go ahead, Miss Alexandra, I know it's been a shock to you. And don't you fret yourself about anything-why, if we followed our feelings all the time we'd be like cats chasin' their tails."

This has prompted me to consider whether or not I believe that perhaps Women are more intuitive or apt to follow their instincts than men. I found the following article interesting in regards to this topic:
Women's vs. Men's Intuition
What do you think Atticus?

He says: You know, Scout, I had a feeling you were going to ask me that. :)

Thanks for that link! A couple of points of special interest:

...although the average woman doesn't have more empathic ability than the average man, we could create a heightened level of motivation in the women by reminding them that the task was one in which women should excel.

In other words, people live up to our expectations! Since we've been talking about child-rearing lately, let's add that concept to the list of things that conscientious parents
need to know and practice.

Here's another interesting one:

...men as a group aren't poor "everyday mind readers"; they are simply unmotivated ones.

So, men can be just as sensitive as women, given the right incentives. The paper described one experiment that showed that men could be sensitive if you paid them to be sensitive, ha, ha!

Perhaps it's true that, in general, men are more motivated by tangible things than women, and we men don't get a chance to show our sensitive sides very often because the tangible incentives we need usually aren't there. Uh, oh. I'm getting that "I've stepped into a minefield" feeling.

Bringing these topics back around to our book: When I read that same part that you quoted, it actually kind of jarred me--it almost seemed out of character for Heck Tate. Up until that point in the book, he seemed to be a decent enough man, but I had no idea that he would be so empathetic to Aunt Alexandra in that scene. Maybe there was a back story there that I missed?