1. THE FEMININE MIND
I
1. 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
passes 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.