Aethlos — In Defense of Women by H. L. Mencken — Spencer Lord’s Weltanschauung

In Defense of Women

by H. L. Mencken

Contents

Introduction

I The Feminine Mind

II The War between The Sexes

III Marriage

IV Woman Suffrage

V The New Age

Introduction

As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in

the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is

to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane

and outrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and sound

that they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and

force themselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I

need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of

platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with

new labels stuck rakishly upon them. This borrowing and

refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the

invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is

not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been

thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who

volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough

for a full day's work. The most they can ever accomplish in the

way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant spurt, and half a

dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close together and show

a certain co-ordination, are enough to make a practitioner

celebrated, and even immortal. Nature, indeed, conspires against all

such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is against it

on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans unquestionably

are on this earth. The dead hand pushes all of us into intellectual

cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yield and have done.

Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doubly beset, first by a

public opinion that regards his enterprise as subversive and in bad

taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that limits his capacity for

it, and especially his capacity to throw off the prejudices and

superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel,

does not act, it reacts--and what is the instrument of reflection and

speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment of the

contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most

gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary

airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is

suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is

simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced

into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was

made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of

fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched

upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the man of

intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine

edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him,

and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce

him to the respectable level of a patriot and taxpayer.

I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present

work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able

to embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of

hitherto unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional

handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas

before me, for I wrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut

off, and so my only possible customers were Americans. Of their

unprecedented dislike for novelty in the domain of the intellect I

have often discoursed in the past, and so there is no need to go into

the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the

United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a

right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything--not only

in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters

of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen

who, in the face of an organized public clamour(usually managed by

interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan

B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief

railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the

municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron

Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention in the town

Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes

such a proposal--on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never

mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less

useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural

Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and

knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms-- this citizen

is commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It

is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And

many other planes, high and low. For an American to question any

of the articles of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for

him to run grave risks of social disaster. The old English offence of

"imagining the King's death"has been formally revived by the

American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in jail for

committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in some

parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote acts as

believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, and

speaking the language of countries recently at war with the

Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making

synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as

attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are.

For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies

that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even

half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to

penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States this is not

only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise,

not even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the

rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands upon their

ingenuity and their patriotic passion.

Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had to

change the plates of my "Book of Prefaces," a book of purely

literary criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in

order to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure

upon the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to

avoid burdening it with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal

nature. So deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the

unquenchable vanity of the intellectual snob asserting itself over all

prudence. That is to say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go

into the book that was not already so obvious that it had been

embodied in the proverbial philosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some

civilized nation, including the Chinese. To this rule I remained

faithful throughout. In its original form, as published in 1918, the

book was actuary just such a pastiche of proverbs, many of them

English, and hence familiar even to Congressmen, newspaper

editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easy to hold to

this program; over and over again I was tempted to insert notions

that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia. But

in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to get

through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There

is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized

and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it,

and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and

contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered

truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the

national decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes

to extraordinary lengths, even for the United States, some of the

newspapers actually denounced the book as German propaganda,

designed to break down American morale, and called upon the

Department of Justice to proceed against me for the crime known to

American law as "criminal anarchy," i.e., "imagining the King's

death." Why the Comstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd and

lascivious I have never been able to determine. Certainly, they

received many complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a

number of these complaints to be lodged, in the hope that the

resultant buffooneries would give me entertainment in those dull

days of war, with all intellectual activities adjourned, and maybe

promote the sale of the book. But the Comstocks were pursuing

larger fish, and so left me to the righteous indignation of

right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists. Their concern,

after all, is not with books that are denounced; what they

concentrate their moral passion on is the book that is praised.

The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more

civilized countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number of

propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be

omitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no

means pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines

of any novelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain

form certain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman

holds in petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast

mass of sentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It

is a question of capital importance to all human beings, and it

deserves to be discussed honestly and frankly, but there is so much

of social reticence, of religious superstition and of mere emotion

intermingled with it that most of the enormous literature it has

thrown off is hollow and useless. I point for example, to the

literature of the subsidiary question of woman suffrage. It fills

whole libraries, but nine tenths of it is merely rubbish, for it starts

off from assumptions that are obviously untrue and it reaches

conclusions that are at war with both logic and the facts. So with

the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally, hundreds of

volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers of pamphlets, handbills

and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves the primary problem

unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what is to be done

about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon millions by

civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In the main, it

counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as sensible as advising

a dog to forget its fleas. Here, as in other fields, I do not presume to

offer a remedy of my own. In truth, I am very suspicious of all

remedies for the major ills of life, and believe that most of them are

incurable. But I at least venture todiscuss the matter realistically,

and if what I have to say is not sagacious, it is at all events not

evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe some later investigator

will bring a better illumination to the subject.

It is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or

two about the author in each volume. I was born in Baltimore,

September 12, 1880, and come of a learned family, though my

immediate forebears were business men. The tradition of this

ancient learning has been upon me since my earliest days, and I

narrowly escaped becoming a doctor of philosophy. My father's

death, in 1899, somehow dropped me into journalism, where I had

a successful career, as such careers go. At the age of 25 1 was the

chief editor of a daily newspaper in Baltimore. During the same

year I published my first book of criticism. Thereafter, for ten or

twelve years, I moved steadily from practical journalism, with its

dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward purely aesthetic

concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I have felt a

strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me chiefly

today is what may be called public psychology, ie., the nature of the

ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes whereby

they reach them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will be in

that field. In the United States I am commonly held suspect as a

foreigner, and during the war I was variously denounced. Abroad,

especially in England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my

intolerable Americanism. The two views are less far apart than they

seem to be. The fact is that I am superficially so American, in ways

of speech and thought, that the foreigner is deceived, whereas the

native, more familiar with the true signs, sees that under the surface

there is incurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans

hold to be sound. Thus If all between two stools--but it is more

comfortable there on the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly

devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible

to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me

with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual

honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a

necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems

to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though

I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of

those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is

nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew

what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and

maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I

have not found it.

H. L. Mencken

The Feminine Mind

The Maternal Instinct

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for

his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and

with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings

seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him

for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of

the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase

makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is

simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual

immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for

distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance.

The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a

demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.

The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of

masculine manufacture. It is both insincere and untrue:

insincere because it merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is

potentially a hero to everyone else, and untrue because a valet,

being a fourth-rate man himself, is likely to be the last person in the

world to penetrate his master's charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet

who didn't envy his master wholeheartedly? who wouldn't willingly

change places with his master? who didn't secretly wish that he was

his master? A man's wife labours under no such naive folly. She

may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing

prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine

liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency,

his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the

harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general

innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile

ego; she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul.

This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe,

this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at

the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the

name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man

simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable

environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not

only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine

fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of

mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes

quite seriously. From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma

Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of

superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a single

masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a

booby.

2.

Women's Intelligence

That is should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of

the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent

intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation,

incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and

masters. One finds very few professors of the subject, even among

admitted feminists, approaching the fact as obvious; practically all

of them think it necessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to

establish what should be an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman,

W. L. George, one of the most sharp-witted of the faculty, wastes a

whole book up on the demonstration, and then, with a great air of

uttering something new, gives it the humourless title of " The

Intelligence of Women. " The intelligence of women, forsooth! As

well devote a laborious time to the sagacity of serpents, pickpockets,

or Holy Church!

Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a

monopoly of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of

intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described

as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its

manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of

cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in

physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love

what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith,

hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure. Men are

amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true

fundamentals of intelligence--in so far as they reveal a capacity

for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of delusion

and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth--to that extent,

at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their

mothers. "Human creatures," says George, borrowing from

Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no

men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an

obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and

illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show

you aman with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it;

Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in

Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to

down right homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the

male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same

time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles

and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a

truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the

frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.

It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior

talent in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine

flavour--that complete masculinity and stupidity are often

indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do

not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing to the complex

of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we call

talent; all I mean to say is that this complex is impossible without the

feminine contribution that it is a product of the interplay of the two

elements. In women of genius we see the opposite picture. They

are commonly distinctly mannish, and shave as well as shine. Think

of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa

Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The truth is that

neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary

characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human

endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too

doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to

sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a

theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of

that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist

for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what

we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects

are obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man

lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and

secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too

cynical a creature to dream at all.

3.

The Masculine Bag of Tricks

What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of

intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that

mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges,

that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief

mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is

more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of

figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile

jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish

between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the

minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession,

say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are

not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely

superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more

strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning

how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks

of the average business man, or even of the average professional

man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to

carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle

out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than intakes to

operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed,

can come into close contact with the general run of business and

professional men--I confine myself to those who seem to get on in

the world, and exclude the admitted failures--without marvelling at

their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their

appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a

grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of

another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the

chief business "geniuses" of that paradise of traders and

usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that he had never

heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing. These were

vigorous and masculine men, and in a man's world they were

successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.

There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney

were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross

an driveling concerns--that their very capacity to master and retain

such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their

inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar

incompetency of first rate men for what are called practical

concerns. One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven

multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor

could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway

share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundred

weight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by

the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at

grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at

which what are called successful men commonly divert

themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis

found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in

almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do

not understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by

book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they

are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the

average men's highest performances, and are easily surpassed by

men who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the

Simidae.

This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial

character--which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as

stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility--is

a character that men of the first class share with women of the first,

second and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth,

something unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almost

invariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I have

described. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that

women, as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men

as a class. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the

occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly--for

example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie.,

matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits,

keeping books, or managing factories--despite the circumstance that

the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical

powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social

barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why

women shouldn't succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide

open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them

on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates

in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make

a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women

should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as

managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or

as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small

force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity;

once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within.

But, as every one knows, the number of women actually

practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of

them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.

4.

Why Women Fail

The cause thereof, as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in the

same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the same

impatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same

disqualification for mechanical routine and empty technic which one

finds in the higher varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by

the custom of Christendom, are especially their own, women seldom

show any of that elaborately conventionalized and half automatic

proficiency which is the pride and boast of most men. It is a

commonplace of observation, indeed, that a housewife who actually

knows how to cook, or who can make her own clothes with enough

skill to conceal the fact from the most casual glance, or who is

competent to instruct her children in the elements of morals,

learning and hygiene--it is a platitude that such a woman is very rare

indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not usually

esteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly true in the

United States, where the position of women is higher than in any

other civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old assumption of

their intellectual inferiority has been most successfully challenged.

The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the

defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who

respects his oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and

ill-prepared victuals, evades the experience as long and as often as

he can, and resigns himself toit as he might resign himself to being

shaved by a paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more

leisure and freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do

they show a higher level of intelligence, or take part more effectively

in affairs of the first importance. But nowhere else is there worse

cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the whole

domestic economy, or a larger dependence upon the aid of external

substitutes, by men provided, for the skill that wanting where it

theoretically exists. It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of

the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of

canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans,

and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere else is there more

striking tendency to throw the whole business of training the minds

of children upon professional teachers, and the whole business of

instructing them in morals and religion upon so-called

Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and caring

for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and other

such professionals, most of them mountebanks.

In brief, women rebel--often unconsciously, sometimes even

submitting all the while--against the dull, mechanical tricks of the

trade that the present organization of society compels them to

practise for a living, and that rebellion testifies to their intelligence.

If they enjoyed and took pride in those tricks, and showed it by

diligence and skill, they would be on all fours with such men as are

headwaiters, ladies' tailors, schoolmasters or carpet-beaters, and

proud of it. The inherent tendency of any woman above the most

stupid is to evade the whole obligation, and, if she cannot actually

evade it, to reduce its demands to the minimum. And

when some accident purges her, either temporarily or

permanently, of the inclination to marriage (of which much more

anon), and she enters into competition with men in the general

business of the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves

out offers additional evidence of her mental peculiarity. In whatever

calls for no more than an invariable technic and a feeble chicanery

she usually fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and

resourcefulness she usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a

failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow

phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts

these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost

always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a

compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual

integrity revolts against it. But she is usually a success as a

sick-nurse, for that profession requires ingenuity, quick

comprehension, courage in the face of novel and disconcerting

situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating and dominating

character; and whenever she comes into competition with men

in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simple

nimbleness of mind is unaided by the masterstrokes of genius, she

holds her own invariably. The best and most intellectual--i.e., most

original and enterprising play-actors are not men, but women, and

so are the best teachers and blackmailers, and a fair share of the best

writers, and public functionaries, and executants of music. In the

demimonde one will find enough acumen and daring, and enough

resilience in the face of special difficulties, to put the equipment of

any exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the

average man required half the mental agility and readiness of

resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man

would be constantly on the verge of starvation.

5.

The Thing Called Intuition

Men, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superior

intelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they

are seldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and

evidential analysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there is

a certain specious appearance of soundness in their position;

they have forced upon women an artificial character which well

conceals their real character, and women have found it profitable to

encourage the deception. But though every normal man thus

cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of

all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to

his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her

intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment

in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than

his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a

more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine

that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing

correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague(and, in

essence, infra-human) instinct.

The true nature of this alleged instinct, however, is revealed by an

examination of the situations which inspire a man to call it to his aid.

These situations do not arise out of the purely technical problems

that are his daily concern, but out of the rarer and more

fundamental, and hence enormously more difficult problems which

beset him only at long and irregular intervals, and go offer a test,

not of his mere capacity for being drilled, but of his capacity for

genuine ratiocination. No man, I take it, save one consciously

inferior and hen-pecked, would consult his wife about hiring a clerk,

or about extending credit to some paltry customer, or about some

routine piece of tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic

man would fail to sound the sentiment of his wife about taking a

partner into his business, or about standing for public office, or

about combating unfair and ruinous competition, or about marrying

off their daughter. Such things are of massive importance; they lie

at the foundation of well-being; they call for the best thought that

the, man confronted by them can muster; the perils hidden in a

wrong decision overcome even the clamors of vanity. It is in such

situations that the superior mental grasp of women is of obvious

utility, and has to be admitted. It is here that they rise above the

insignificant sentimentalities, superstitions and formulae of men, and

apply to the business their singular talent for separating the

appearance from the substance, and so exercise what is called their

intuition.

Intuition? With all respect, bosh! Then it was intuition that led

Darwin to work out the hypothesis of natural selection. Then it was

intuition that fabricated the gigantically complex score of "Die

Walkure." Then it was intuition that convinced Columbus of the

existence of land to the west of the Azores. All this intuition of

which so much transcendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and

no less than intelligence--intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to

the hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false

semblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental

prudery that it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that

truth out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide

the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they

are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not

because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply

and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most

men could not see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips

with the essentials of a problem before men have finished debating

its mere externals. They are the supreme realists of the race.

Apparently illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle

super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a

tenacity which carries them through every phase of its incessant,

jellylike shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easily

deceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the

same merciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself--men recognized

to be more aloof and uninflammable than the general--men of

special talent for the logical--sardonic men, cynics. Men, too,

sometimes have brains. But that is a rare, rare man, I venture, who

is as steadily intelligent, as constantly sound in judgment, as little put

off by appearances, as the average women of forty-eight.

The War Between the Sexes

II

6. How Marriages are Arranged

I have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit

mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation.

The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are

is itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be brought

up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to a few

obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite the

vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.

Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most

constantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of

mind are most clearly contrasted--to the field, to wit, of

monogamous marriage. Surely no long argument is needed to

demonstrate the superior competence and effectiveness of women

here, and therewith their greater self-possession, their saner

weighing of considerations, their higher power of resisting emotional

suggestion. The very fact that marriages occur at all is a proof,

indeed, that they are more cool-headed than men, and more adept in

employing their intellectual resources, for it is plainly to a man's

interest to avoid marriage as long as possible, and as plainly to a

woman's interest to make a favourable marriage as soon as she can.

The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one of the capital

concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends. Which side

commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All normal men

fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively long

periods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (or

perhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation

with another, as every one knows, the average man is duly married

and the average woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of

women, in this clear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their

substantial superiority to the great majority of men.

Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by

marriage, at least as the [institution is now met with in Christendom.

Even assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they are

plainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries

it is no more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion and

intimidation--i.e., the feminine talent for survival in a world of

clashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence and

intelligence--has forced him into a more or less abhorrent

compromise with his own honest inclinations and best interests.

Whether that compromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his

relative cowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms

and effects, are almost identical. In the first case he marries because

he has been clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second

he resigns himself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both

cases his inherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of

his opponent. It makes him [caroche] the fiction of his enterprise,

and even of his daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious

operations against him. It makes him accept as real the bold

play-acting that women always excel at, and at no time more than

when stalking a man. It makes him, above all, see a glamour of

romance in a transaction which, even at its best, contains almost as

much gross trafficking, at bottom, as the sale of a mule.

A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature

commonly apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to

realize that marriages a bargain in which he gets the worse of it,

even when, in some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He

never, I believe, wants all that the thing offers and implies. He

wants, at most, no more than certain parts. He may desire, let us

say, a housekeeper to protect his goods and entertain his

friends--but he may shrink from the thought of sharing his bathtub