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.