{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_1270/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_1270","id":"gutenberg_1270","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1270","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Gender & Sexuality Studies","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Sexism","Women -- Social and moral questions","Women -- Social conditions"],"text":"IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN\n\nby H. L. Mencken\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n  Introduction\n\n  I. The Feminine Mind\n  1. The Maternal Instinct\n  2. Women\u2019s Intelligence\n  3. The Masculine Bag of Tricks\n  4. Why Women Fail\n  5. The Thing Called Intuition\n\n  II. The War Between the Sexes\n  6. How Marriages are Arranged\n  7. The Feminine Attitude\n  8. The Male Beauty\n  9. Men as Aesthetes\n  10. The Process of Delusion\n  11. Biological Considerations\n  12. Honour\n  13. Women and the Emotions\n  14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia\n  15. Mythical Anthropophagi\n  16. A Conspiracy of Silence\n\n  III. Marriage\n  17. Fundamental Motives\n  18. The Process of Courtship\n  19. The Actual Husband\n  20. The Unattainable Ideal\n  21. The Effect on the Race\n  22. Compulsory Marriage\n  23. Extra-Legal Devices\n  24. Intermezzo on Monogamy\n  25. Late Marriages\n  26. Disparate Unions\n  27. The Charm of Mystery\n  28. Woman as Wife\n  29. Marriage and the Law\n  30. The Emancipated Housewife\n\n  IV. Woman Suffrage\n  31. The Crowning Victory\n  32. The Woman Voter\n  33. A Glance Into the Future\n  34. The Suffragette\n  35. A Mythical Dare-Devil\n  36. The Origin of a Delusion\n  37. Women as Martyrs\n  38. Pathological Effects\n  39. Women as Christians\n  40. Piety as a Social Habit\n  41. The Ethics of Women\n\n  V. The New Age\n  42. The Transvaluation of Values\n  43. The Lady of Joy\n  44. The Future of Marriage\n  45. Effects of the War\n  46. The Eternal Romance\n  47. Apologia in Conclusion\n\n\n\n\nIntroduction\n\n\nAs a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in\nthe world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to\nsay, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and\noutrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and sound that\nthey will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force\nthemselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not\nconfess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes\nrescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck\nrakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods,\nas a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at\nall times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable\nhuman notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest,\nthat the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if\never, have wind enough for a full day\u2019s work. The most they can ever\naccomplish in the way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant\nspurt, and half a dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close\ntogether and show a certain co-ordination, are enough to make a\npractitioner celebrated, and even immortal. Nature, indeed, conspires\nagainst all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is\nagainst it on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans\nunquestionably are on this earth. The dead hand pushes all of us into\nintellectual cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yield\nand have done. Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doubly\nbeset, first by a public opinion that regards his enterprise as\nsubversive and in bad taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that\nlimits his capacity for it, and especially his capacity to throw off\nthe prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The\ncell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts\u2014and what is the instrument\nof reflection and speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment\nof the contemporary metaphysician\u2019s loftiest flight, when he is most\ngratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary\nairlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly\npulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the\nghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in\n1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in\nhis country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product, to\nmix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his\nwife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and\nvanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has been\nrevealed from Sinai shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to\nthe natural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable level\nof a patriot and taxpayer.\n\nI was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present\nwork, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able to\nembellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of hitherto\nunutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional handicap of having\nan audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for I wrote\nit in war-time, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my only\npossible customers were Americans. Of their unprecedented dislike for\nnovelty in the domain of the intellect I have often discoursed in the\npast, and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I need\ndo here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among\nthe great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong\nway to think in everything\u2014not only in theology, or politics, or\neconomics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in\nthe average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized\npublic clamour (usually managed by interested parties) for the erection\nof an equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman\nsuffrage, in front of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a\ndozen leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation\nto the Structural Iron Workers\u2019 Union to hold its next annual\nconvention in the town Symphony Hall\u2014the citizen who, for any logical\nreason, opposes such a proposal\u2014on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony\nnever mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be\nless useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the\nStructural Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall\nand knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms\u2014this citizen is\ncommonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only\nerroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And many other\nplanes, high and low. For an American to question any of the articles\nof fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for him to run grave\nrisks of social disaster. The old English offence of \u201cimagining the\nKing\u2019s death\u201d has been formally revived by the American courts, and\nhundreds of men and women are in jail for committing it, and it has\nbeen so enormously extended that, in some parts of the country at\nleast, it now embraces such remote acts as believing that the negroes\nshould have equality before the law, and speaking the language of\ncountries recently at war with the Republic, and conveying to a private\nfriend a formula for making synthetic gin. All such toyings with\nillicit ideas are construed as attentats against democracy, which, in a\nsense, perhaps they are. For democracy is grounded upon so childish a\ncomplex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of\ntaboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern\nmust thus be to penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States\nthis is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other\nenterprise, not even the trade in public offices and contracts,\noccupies the rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands\nupon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion.\n\nFamiliar with the risks flowing out of it\u2014and having just had to change\nthe plates of my \u201cBook of Prefaces,\u201d a book of purely literary\ncriticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in order\nto get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure upon\nthe woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening\nit with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So\ndeciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of\nthe intellectual snob asserting itself over all prudence. That is to\nsay, I laid down the rule that no idea should go into the book that was\nnot already so obvious that it had been embodied in the proverbial\nphilosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some civilized nation, including the\nChinese. To this rule I remained faithful throughout. In its original\nform, as published in 1918, the book was actually just such a pastiche\nof proverbs, many of them English, and hence familiar even to\nCongressmen, newspaper editors and other such illiterates. It was not\nalways easy to hold to this program; over and over again I was tempted\nto insert notions that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe\nand Asia. But in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I\nmanaged to get through it without compromise, and so it was put into\ntype. There is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went\nunrecognized and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer\nnoticed it, and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of\nheresies and contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and\nrevered truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the\nnational decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes to\nextraordinary lengths, even for the United States, some of the\nnewspapers actually denounced the book as German propaganda, designed\nto break down American morale, and called upon the Department of\nJustice to proceed against me for the crime known to American law as\n\u201ccriminal anarchy,\u201d i.e., \u201cimagining the King\u2019s death.\u201d Why the\nComstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd and lascivious I have\nnever been able to determine. Certainly, they received many complaints\nabout it. I myself, in fact, caused a number of these complaints to be\nlodged, in the hope that the resultant buffooneries would give me\nentertainment in those dull days of war, with all intellectual\nactivities adjourned, and maybe promote the sale of the book. But the\nComstocks were pursuing larger fish, and so left me to the righteous\nindignation of right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists.\nTheir concern, after all, is not with books that are denounced; what\nthey concentrate their moral passion on is the book that is praised.\n\nThe present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more civilized\ncountries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number of\npropositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be\nomitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no means\npretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines of any\nnovelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain form\ncertain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman holds in\npetto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast mass of\nsentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It is a question of\ncapital importance to all human beings, and it deserves to be discussed\nhonestly and frankly, but there is so much of social reticence, of\nreligious superstition and of mere emotion intermingled with it that\nmost of the enormous literature it has thrown off is hollow and\nuseless. I point for example, to the literature of the subsidiary\nquestion of woman suffrage. It fills whole libraries, but nine tenths\nof it is merely rubbish, for it starts off from assumptions that are\nobviously untrue and it reaches conclusions that are at war with both\nlogic and the facts. So with the question of sex specifically. I have\nread, literally, hundreds of volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers\nof pamphlets, handbills and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves\nthe primary problem unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what\nis to be done about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon\nmillions by civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In\nthe main, it counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as\nsensible as advising a dog to forget its fleas. Here, as in other\nfields, I do not presume to offer a remedy of my own. In truth, I am\nvery suspicious of all remedies for the major ills of life, and believe\nthat most of them are incurable. But I at least venture to discuss the\nmatter realistically, and if what I have to say is not sagacious, it is\nat all events not evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe some later\ninvestigator will bring a better illumination to the subject.\n\nIt is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or two\nabout the author in each volume. I was born in Baltimore, September 12,\n1880, and come of a learned family, though my immediate forebears were\nbusiness men. The tradition of this ancient learning has been upon me\nsince my earliest days, and I narrowly escaped becoming a doctor of\nphilosophy. My father\u2019s death, in 1899, somehow dropped me into\njournalism, where I had a successful career, as such careers go. At the\nage of 25 I was the chief editor of a daily newspaper in Baltimore.\nDuring the same year I published my first book of criticism.\nThereafter, for ten or twelve years, I moved steadily from practical\njournalism, with its dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward\npurely aesthetic concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I\nhave felt a strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me\nchiefly today is what may be called public psychology, ie., the nature\nof the ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes\nwhereby they reach them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will\nbe in that field. In the United States I am commonly held suspect as a\nforeigner, and during the war I was variously denounced. Abroad,\nespecially in England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my\nintolerable Americanism. The two views are less far apart than they\nseem to be. The fact is that I am superficially so American, in ways of\nspeech and thought, that the foreigner is deceived, whereas the native,\nmore familiar with the true signs, sees that under the surface there is\nincurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans hold to be\nsound. Thus I fall between two stools\u2014but it is more comfortable there\non the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly devoid of public\nspirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they\nseek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own.\nThe only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course,\nintellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail\nfor his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends\nhim there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and\nagree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the\nSocialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue.\nIf I knew what was true, I\u2019d probably be willing to sweat and strive\nfor it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But\nso far I have not found it.\n\nH. L. Mencken\n\n\n\n\nI. The Feminine Mind\n\n\n\n\n1. The Maternal Instinct\n\n\nA man\u2019s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his\nmerit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with\nsomething akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom\ndeceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a\nshallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the\nbest proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes\nit, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply\na sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to\nemotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly\nbetween the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal\nfamily circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor\nmountebank.\n\nThe proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of\nmasculine manufacture. It is both insincere and untrue: insincere\nbecause it merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is potentially a\nhero to everyone else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate\nman himself, is likely to be the last person in the world to penetrate\nhis master\u2019s charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet who didn\u2019t envy his\nmaster wholeheartedly? who wouldn\u2019t willingly change places with his\nmaster? who didn\u2019t secretly wish that he was his master? A man\u2019s wife\nlabours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true\nenough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities.\nShe may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his\nimpenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his\ncapacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of\nromanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never\nenvies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and\npreposterous soul.\n\nThis shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this\nacute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the\nbottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the\nmaternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she\nsees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his\ntouching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent\nin real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman\nnovelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into\ngenuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From\nthe day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got\ninto her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of\nill-concealed derision. I can\u2019t recall a single masculine figure\ncreated by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.\n\n\n\n\n2. Women\u2019s Intelligence\n\n\nThat it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility\nof the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent\nintelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation,\nincurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.\nOne finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted\nfeminists, approaching the fact as obvious; practically all of them\nthink it necessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to establish\nwhat should be an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman, W. L. George, one\nof the most sharp-witted of the faculty, wastes a whole book up on the\ndemonstration, and then, with a great air of uttering something new,\ngives it the humourless title of \u201cThe Intelligence of Women.\u201d The\nintelligence of women, forsooth! As well devote a laborious time to the\nsagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!\n\nWomen, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly\nof certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The\nthing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special\nfeminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its\nmanifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty,\nmasochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat.\nMen have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be\nvirtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how\nto sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they\nshow the true fundamentals of intelligence\u2014in so far as they reveal a\ncapacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of\ndelusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth\u2014to that\nextent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of\ntheir mothers. \u201cHuman creatures,\u201d says George, borrowing from\nWeininger, \u201care never entirely male or entirely female; there are no\nmen, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.\u201d Find me an\nobviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion,\na man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I\u2019ll show you a\nman with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had\nit; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare,\nif the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to downright\nhomosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the male, the\nhallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the\nhall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles and mush.\nWithout a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable\nspectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs,\na feeble and preposterous caricature of God.\n\nIt would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talent\nin man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour\u2014that\ncomplete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. Lest I\nbe misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say that\nmasculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiological\nreactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is that\nthis complex is impossible without the feminine contribution that it is\na product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius we\nsee the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish, and\nshave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great,\nElizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The\ntruth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the\ncomplementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest\nreaches of human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in\nhim, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and\nlulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a\ntheologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that\ndivine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for\nthose vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we\ncall genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are\nobtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit\nnecessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and\nthe wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream\nat all.\n\n\n\n\n3. The Masculine Bag of Tricks\n\n\nWhat men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of\nintelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass\nof small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that\ncollection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief\nmental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more\nintelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures\nmore accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the\nstock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas\nof rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some\nsordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the\nlaw. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a\nprofound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial\naccomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the\nmental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a\npenny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average\nbusiness man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately\nchildish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday\nhawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of\nbad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a\npan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact\nwith the general run of business and professional men\u2014I confine myself\nto those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted\nfailures\u2014without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their\nincurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense. The\nlate Charles Francis Adams, a grandson of one American President and a\ngreat-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate\nassociation with some of the chief business \u201cgeniuses\u201d of that paradise\nof traders and usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that\nhe had never heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing.\nThese were vigorous and masculine men, and in a man\u2019s world they were\nsuccessful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.\n\nThere is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney\nwere genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross and\ndriveling concerns\u2014that their very capacity to master and retain such\nbalderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their\ninferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar\nincompetency of first rate men for what are called practical concerns.\nOne could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by\n99,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering\nthe range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number of\nten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard from\nGalveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine him\nexpert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other\nof the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly\ndivert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis\nfound that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in\nalmost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do not\nunderstand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by\nbook-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are\ninert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average\nmen\u2019s highest performances, and are easily surpassed by men who, in\nactual intelligence, are about as far below them as the Simidae.\n\nThis lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial\ncharacter\u2014which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as\nstupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility\u2014is a\ncharacter that men of the first class share with women of the first,\nsecond and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth,\nsomething unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almost\ninvariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I have\ndescribed. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that women,\nas a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men as a\nclass. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the occupations\nwhich bring out such expertness most lavishly\u2014for example, tuning\npianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie., matching petty tricks\nwith some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managing\nfactories\u2014despite the circumstance that the great majority of such\noccupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them\noffer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is\nno external reason why women shouldn\u2019t succeed as operative surgeons;\nthe way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special\ndemand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women\ngraduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them\nto make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women\nshould not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as\nmanagers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or\nas hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small\nforce; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once\nthe door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as\nevery one knows, the number of women actually practising these trades\nand professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any\ndistinction in competition with men.\n\n\n\n\n4. Why Women Fail\n\n\nThe cause thereof, as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in\nthe same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the same\nimpatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same disqualification\nfor mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in the higher\nvarieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom of\nChristendom, are especially their own, women seldom show any of that\nelaborately conventionalized and half automatic proficiency which is\nthe pride and boast of most men. It is a commonplace of observation,\nindeed, that a housewife who actually knows how to cook, or who can\nmake her own clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the\nmost casual glance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the\nelements of morals, learning and hygiene\u2014it is a platitude that such a\nwoman is very rare indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not\nusually esteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly\ntrue in the United States, where the position of women is higher than\nin any other civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old\nassumption of their intellectual inferiority has been most successfully\nchallenged. The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to\nthe defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who respects\nhis oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared\nvictuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and\nresigns himself to it as he might resign himself to being shaved by a\nparalytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and\nfreedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher\nlevel of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the\nfirst importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home,\nor a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger\ndependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for\nthe skill that is wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely\nno mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned\nwoman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of\nwhole meals in cans, and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere\nelse is there more striking tendency to throw the whole business of\ntraining the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the\nwhole business of instructing them in morals and religion upon\nso-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and\ncaring for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and\nother such professionals, most of them mountebanks.\n\nIn brief, women rebel\u2014often unconsciously, sometimes even submitting\nall the while\u2014against the dull, mechanical tricks of the trade that the\npresent organization of society compels them to practise for a living,\nand that rebellion testifies to their intelligence. If they enjoyed and\ntook pride in those tricks, and showed it by diligence and skill, they\nwould be on all fours with such men as are headwaiters, ladies\u2019\ntailors, schoolmasters or carpet-beaters, and proud of it. The inherent\ntendency of any woman above the most stupid is to evade the whole\nobligation, and, if she cannot actually evade it, to reduce its demands\nto the minimum. And when some accident purges her, either temporarily\nor permanently, of the inclination to marriage (of which much more\nanon), and she enters into competition with men in the general business\nof the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves out offers\nadditional evidence of her mental peculiarity. In whatever calls for no\nmore than an invariable technic and a feeble chicanery she usually\nfails; in whatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness\nshe usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer,\nfor the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped\nformulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense,\ntruth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for\nbusiness, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and\nrogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it.\nBut she is usually a success as a sick-nurse, for that profession\nrequires ingenuity, quick comprehension, courage in the face of novel\nand disconcerting situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating\nand dominating character; and whenever she comes into competition with\nmen in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simple\nnimbleness of mind is unaided by the masterstrokes of genius, she holds\nher own invariably. The best and most intellectual\u2014i.e., most original\nand enterprising play-actors are not men, but women, and so are the\nbest teachers and blackmailers, and a fair share of the best writers,\nand public functionaries, and executants of music. In the demimonde one\nwill find enough acumen and daring, and enough resilience in the face\nof special difficulties, to put the equipment of any exclusively male\nprofession to shame. If the work of the average man required half the\nmental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average\nprostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of\nstarvation.\n\n\n\n\n5. The Thing Called Intuition\n\n\nMen, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superior\nintelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they are\nseldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidential\nanalysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there is a certain\nspecious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forced\nupon women an artificial character which well conceals their real\ncharacter, and women have found it profitable to encourage the\ndeception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing\nunction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and\nparticularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension\nby consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to\nsay, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of\ncapital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being\ndisinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent\nintelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to\nsome impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some\nhalf mystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human)\ninstinct.\n\nThe true nature of this alleged instinct, however, is revealed by an\nexamination of the situations which inspire a man to call it to his\naid. These situations do not arise out of the purely technical problems\nthat are his daily concern, but out of the rarer and more fundamental,\nand hence enormously more difficult problems which beset him only at\nlong and irregular intervals, and so offer a test, not of his mere\ncapacity for being drilled, but of his capacity for genuine\nratiocination. No man, I take it, save one consciously inferior and\nhen-pecked, would consult his wife about hiring a clerk, or about\nextending credit to some paltry customer, or about some routine piece\nof tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic man would fail to\nsound the sentiment of his wife about taking a partner into his\nbusiness, or about standing for public office, or about combating\nunfair and ruinous competition, or about marrying off their daughter.\nSuch things are of massive importance; they lie at the foundation of\nwell-being; they call for the best thought that the man confronted by\nthem can muster; the perils hidden in a wrong decision overcome even\nthe clamors of vanity. It is in such situations that the superior\nmental grasp of women is of obvious utility, and has to be admitted. It\nis here that they rise above the insignificant sentimentalities,\nsuperstitions and formulae of men, and apply to the business their\nsingular talent for separating the appearance from the substance, and\nso exercise what is called their intuition.\n\nIntuition? With all respect, bosh! Then it was intuition that led\nDarwin to work out the hypothesis of natural selection. Then it was\nintuition that fabricated the gigantically complex score of \u201cDie\nWalkure.\u201d Then it was intuition that convinced Columbus of the\nexistence of land to the west of the Azores. All this intuition of\nwhich so much transcendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and no\nless than intelligence\u2014intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to\nthe hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false\nsemblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery\nthat it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth\nout into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the\nlarger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are\nlucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because\nthey practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely\nbecause they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not\nsee with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the\nessentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere\nexternals. They are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently\nillogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic.\nApparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which\ncarries them through every phase of its incessant, jellylike shifting\nof form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with\nbright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity\nsometimes shows itself\u2014men recognized to be more aloof and\nuninflammable than the general\u2014men of special talent for the\nlogical\u2014sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that\nis a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, as\nconstantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the\naverage women of forty-eight.\n\n\n\n\nII. The War Between the Sexes\n\n\n\n\n6. How Marriages are Arranged\n\n\nI have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit\nmere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation.\nThe doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are\nis itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be\nbrought up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to\na few obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite\nthe vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.\n\nTurn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most\nconstantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of\nmind are most clearly contrasted\u2014to the field, to wit, of monogamous\nmarriage. Surely no long argument is needed to demonstrate the superior\ncompetence and effectiveness of women here, and therewith their greater\nself-possession, their saner weighing of considerations, their higher\npower of resisting emotional suggestion. The very fact that marriages\noccur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed than\nmen, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it\nis plainly to a man\u2019s interest to avoid marriage as long as possible,\nand as plainly to a woman\u2019s interest to make a favourable marriage as\nsoon as she can. The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one\nof the capital concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends.\nWhich side commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All\nnormal men fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively\nlong periods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (or\nperhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation with\nanother, as every one knows, the average man is duly married and the\naverage woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of women, in this\nclear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their substantial\nsuperiority to the great majority of men.\n\nNot many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by\nmarriage, at least as the institution is now met with in Christendom.\nEven assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they are\nplainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries it is\nno more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion and\nintimidation\u2014i.e., the feminine talent for survival in a world of\nclashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence and\nintelligence\u2014has forced him into a more or less abhorrent compromise\nwith his own honest inclinations and best interests. Whether that\ncompromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his relative\ncowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms and effects,\nare almost identical. In the first case he marries because he has been\nclearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second he resigns\nhimself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both cases his\ninherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of his\nopponent. It makes him cherish the fiction of his enterprise, and even\nof his daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious operations\nagainst him. It makes him accept as real the bold play-acting that\nwomen always excel at, and at no time more than when stalking a man. It\nmakes him, above all, see a glamour of romance in a transaction which,\neven at its best, contains almost as much gross trafficking, at bottom,\nas the sale of a mule.\n\nA man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly\napportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that\nmarriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in\nsome detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe,\nwants all that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more\nthan certain parts. He may desire, let us say, a housekeeper to protect\nhis goods and entertain his friends\u2014but he may shrink from the thought\nof sharing his bathtub with anyone, and home cooking may be downright\npoisonous to him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb\u2014and yet\nsuffer acutely at the mere approach of relatives-in-law. He may dream\nof a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial\nthan any a bachelor may hope to discover\u2014and stand aghast at admitting\nher to his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He may\nwant company and not intimacy, or intimacy and not company. He may want\na cook and not a partner in his business, or a partner in his business\nand not a cook. But in order to get the precise thing or things that he\nwants, he has to take a lot of other things that he doesn\u2019t want\u2014that\nno sane man, in truth, could imaginably want\u2014and it is to the\nenterprise of forcing him into this almost Armenian bargain that the\nwoman of his \u201cchoice\u201d addresses herself. Once the game is fairly set,\nshe searches out his weaknesses with the utmost delicacy and accuracy,\nand plays upon them with all her superior resources. He carries a\nhandicap from the start. His sentimental and unintelligent belief in\ntheories that she knows quite well are not true\u2014e.g., the theory that\nshe shrinks from him, and is modestly appalled by the banal carnalities\nof marriage itself\u2014gives her a weapon against him which she drives home\nwith instinctive and compelling art. The moment she discerns this\nsentimentality bubbling within him\u2014that is, the moment his oafish\nsmirks and eye rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual\ndisaster that is called falling in love\u2014he is hers to do with as she\nwill. Save for acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married.\n\n\n\n\n7. The Feminine Attitude\n\n\nThis sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in women.\nFor reasons that we shall examine later, they have much more to gain by\nthe business than men, and so they are prompted by their cooler\nsagacity to enter upon it on the most favourable terms possible, and\nwith the minimum admixture of disarming emotion. Men almost invariably\nget their mates by the process called falling in love; save among the\naristocracies of the North and Latin men, the marriage of convenience\nis relatively rare; a hundred men marry \u201cbeneath\u201d them to every woman\nwho perpetrates the same folly. And what is meant by this so-called\nfalling in love? What is meant by it is a procedure whereby a man\naccounts for the fact of his marriage, after feminine initiative and\ngeneralship have made it inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze\nof romance\u2014in brief, by setting up the doctrine that an obviously\nself-possessed and mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most\nimportant adventure of her life, and with the keenest understanding of\nits utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost\ndisembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that has\nstolen upon her unawares, and which she could not acknowledge, even to\nherself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the\ndefeat and enslavement of the man is made glorious, and even gifted\nwith a touch of flattering naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his\nwooing has assailed and overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in\nhis arms; he has been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will\nupon her. Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles\nproudly, and divert the judicious with their boastful shouts.\n\nWomen, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious about\nembracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation. They never\nacknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase is, until the\nman has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off his retreat; to do\notherwise would be to bring down upon their heads the mocking and\ncontumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in love thus appears\nin the light of an afterthought, or, perhaps more accurately, in the\nlight of a contagion. The theory, it would seem, is that the love of\nthe man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it instantly, and by some\nunintelligible magic; that it was non-existent until the heat of his\nown flames set it off. This theory, it must be acknowledged, has a\ncertain element of fact in it. A woman seldom allows herself to be\nswayed by emotion while the principal business is yet afoot and its\nissue still in doubt; to do so would be to expose a degree of\nimbecility that is confined only to the half-wits of the sex. But once\nthe man is definitely committed, she frequently unbends a bit, if only\nas a relief from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so, throwing off\nher customary inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury of a more or\nless forced and mawkish sentiment. It is, however, almost unheard of\nfor her to permit herself this relaxation before the sentimental\nintoxication of the man is assured. To do otherwise\u2014that is, to\nconfess, even post facto, to an anterior descent,\u2014would expose her, as\nI have said, to the scorn of all other women. Such a confession would\nbe an admission that emotion had got the better of her at a critical\nintellectual moment, and in the eyes of women, as in the eyes of the\nsmall minority of genuinely intelligent men, no treason to the higher\ncerebral centres could be more disgraceful.\n\n\n\n\n8. The Male Beauty\n\n\nThis disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches\nwhere it is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the\nfact that women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save on the\nstage, the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in amour over\nhis more Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is viewed with the\nutmost suspicion by all women save the most stupid. In him the vanity\nnative to his sex is seen to mount to a degree that is positively\nintolerable. It not only irritates by its very nature; it also throws\nabout him a sort of unnatural armour, and so makes him resistant to the\nordinary approaches. For this reason, the matrimonial enterprises of\nthe more reflective and analytical sort of women are almost always\ndirected to men whose lack of pulchritude makes them easier to bring\ndown, and, what is more important still, easier to hold down. The\nweight of opinion among women is decidedly against the woman who falls\nin love with an Apollo. She is regarded, at best, as flighty creature,\nand at worst, as one pushing bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such\nweaknesses are resigned to women approaching senility, and to the more\nignoble variety of women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly\nfall in love with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow\nmay succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman\nof poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be transiently\nflustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness for an instant,\nor confess it to her dearest friend. Women know how little such purely\nsuperficial values are worth. The voice of their order, the first taboo\nof their freemasonry, is firmly against making a sentimental debauch of\nthe serious business of marriage.\n\nThis disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted for by amateur\npsychologists on the ground that women are anesthetic to beauty\u2014that\nthey lack the quick and delicate responsiveness of man. Nothing could\nbe more absurd. Women, in point of fact, commonly have a far keener\naesthetic sense than men. Beauty is more important to them; they give\nmore thought to it; they crave more of it in their immediate\nsurroundings. The average man, at least in England and America, takes a\nsort of bovine pride in his anaesthesia to the arts; he can think of\nthem only as sources of tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement;\none seldom hears of him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful\nthing that his wife displays in the presence, of a fine fabric, an\neffective colour, or a graceful form, say in millinery. The truth is\nthat women are resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and\nsufficient reason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary. A truly\nbeautiful man, indeed, is as rare as a truly beautiful piece of\njewelry. What men mistake for beauty in themselves is usually nothing\nsave a certain hollow gaudiness, a revolting flashiness, the\nsuperficial splendour of a prancing animal. The most lovely moving\npicture actor, considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is\nno more than a piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the\nUffizi gallery or among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush\nsofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate\nauction room. All women, save the least intelligent, penetrate this\nimposture with sharp eyes. They know that the human body, except for a\nbrief time in infancy, is not a beautiful thing, but a hideous thing.\nTheir own bodies give them no delight; it is their constant effort to\ndisguise and conceal them; they never expose them aesthetically, but\nonly as an act of the grossest sexual provocation. If it were\nadvertised that a troupe of men of easy virtue were to appear\nhalf-clothed upon a public stage, exposing their chests, thighs, arms\nand calves, the only women who would go to the entertainment would be a\nfew delayed adolescents, a psychopathic old maid or two, and a guard of\nindignant members of the parish Ladies Aid Society.\n\n\n\n\n9. Men as Aesthetes\n\n\nMen show no such sagacious apprehension of the relatively feeble\nloveliness of the human frame. The most effective lure that a woman can\nhold out to a man is the lure of what he fatuously conceives to be her\nbeauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is almost always a pure\nillusion. The female body, even at its best is very defective in form;\nit has harsh curves and very clumsily distributed masses; compared to\nit the average milk-jug, or even cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent\nand gratifying design\u2014in brief, an objet d\u2019art. The fact was curiously\n(and humorously) display during the late war, when great numbers of\nwomen in all the belligerent countries began putting on uniforms.\nInstantly they appeared in public in their grotesque burlesques of the\nofficial garb of aviators, elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards,\nand so on, their deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably\nrevealed. A man, save he be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually\nlooks better in uniform than in mufti; the tight lines set off his\nfigure. But a woman is at once given away: she look like a dumbbell run\nover by an express train. Below the neck by the bow and below the waist\nastern there are two masses that simply refuse to fit into a balanced\ncomposition. Viewed from the side, she presents an exaggerated S\nbisected by an imperfect straight line, and so she inevitably suggests\na drunken dollar-mark. Her ordinary clothing cunningly conceals this\nfundamental imperfection. It swathes those impossible masses in\ndraperies soothingly uncertain of outline. But putting her into uniform\nis like stripping her. Instantly all her alleged beauty vanishes.\n\nMoreover, it is extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the\nmodest sightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only\nthe rare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art\ncomes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and crudely\narticulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she is almost\nsure to be bow-legged. If she has good legs, she is almost sure to have\nbad teeth. If she has good teeth, she is almost sure to have scrawny\nhands, or muddy eyes, or hair like oakum, or no chin. A woman who meets\nfair tests all \u2019round is so uncommon that she becomes a sort of marvel,\nand usually gains a livelihood by exhibiting herself as such, either on\nthe stage, in the half-world, or as the private jewel of some wealthy\nconnoisseur.\n\nBut this lack of genuine beauty in women lays on them no practical\ndisadvantage in the primary business of their sex, for its effects are\nmore than overborne by the emotional suggestibility, the herculean\ncapacity for illusion, the almost total absence of critical sense of\nmen. Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the most modest doses;\nthey are quite content with the mere appearance of beauty. That is to\nsay, they show no talent whatever for differentiating between the\nartificial and the real. A film of face powder, skilfully applied, is\nas satisfying to them as an epidermis of damask. The hair of a dead\nChinaman, artfully dressed and dyed, gives them as much delight as the\nauthentic tresses of Venus. A false hip intrigues them as effectively\nas the soundest one of living fascia. A pretty frock fetches them quite\nas surely and securely as lovely legs, shoulders, hands or eyes. In\nbrief, they estimate women, and hence acquire their wives, by reckoning\nup purely superficial aspects, which is just as intelligent as\nestimating an egg by purely superficial aspects. They never go behind\nthe returns; it never occurs to them to analyze the impressions they\nreceive. The result is that many a man, deceived by such paltry\nsophistications, never really sees his wife\u2014that if, as God is supposed\nto see her, and as the embalmer will see her\u2014until they have been\nmarried for years. All the tricks may be infantile and obvious, but in\nthe face of so naive a spectator the temptation to continue practising\nthem is irresistible. A trained nurse tells me that even when\nundergoing the extreme discomforts of parturition the great majority of\nwomen continue to modify their complexions with pulverized talcs, and\nto give thought to the arrangement of their hair. Such transparent\ndevices, to be sure, reduce the psychologist to a sour sort of mirth,\nand yet it must be plain that they suffice to entrap and make fools of\nmen, even the most discreet. I know of no man, indeed, who is wholly\nresistant to female beauty, and I know of no man, even among those\nengaged professionally by aesthetic problems, who habitually and\nautomatically distinguishes the genuine, from the imitation. He may do\nit now and then; he may even preen himself upon his unusual\ndiscrimination; but given the right woman and the right stage setting,\nand he will be deceived almost as readily as a yokel fresh from the\ncabbage-field.\n\n\n\n\n10. The Process of Delusion\n\n\nSuch poor fools, rolling their eyes in appraisement of such meagre\nfemale beauty as is on display in Christendom, bring to their judgments\na capacity but slightly greater than that a cow would bring to the\nestimation of epistemologies. They are so unfitted for the business\nthat they are even unable to agree upon its elements. Let one such man\nsuccumb to the plaster charms of some prancing miss, and all his\nfriends will wonder what is the matter with him. No two are in accord\nas to which is the most beautiful woman in their own town or street.\nTurn six of them loose in millinery shop or the parlour of a bordello,\nand there will be no dispute whatsoever; each will offer the crown of\nlove and beauty to a different girl.\n\nAnd what aesthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness thus open the way\nfor, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal man has\nsuccumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one (or, more\naccurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out and grabbed him\nby the nose), he defends his choice with all the heat and steadfastness\nappertaining to the defense of a point of the deepest honour. To tell a\nman flatly that his wife is not beautiful, or even that his\nstenographer or manicurist is not beautiful, is so harsh and\nintolerable an insult to his taste that even an enemy seldom ventures\nupon it. One would offend him far less by arguing that his wife is an\nidiot. One would relatively speaking, almost caress him by spitting\ninto his eye. The ego of the male is simply unable to stomach such an\naffront. It is a weapon as discreditable as the poison of the Borgias.\n\nThus, on humane grounds, a conspiracy of silence surrounds the delusion\nof female beauty, and so its victim is permitted to get quite as much\ndelight out of it as if it were sound. The baits he swallows most are\nnot edible and nourishing baits, but simply bright and gaudy ones. He\nsuccumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a graceful twist of the body,\na synthetic complexion or a skilful display of ankles without giving\nthe slightest thought to the fact that a whole woman is there, and that\nwithin the cranial cavity of the woman lies a brain, and that the\nidiosyncrasies of that brain are of vastly more importance than all\nimaginable physical stigmata combined. Those idiosyncrasies may make\nfor amicable relations in the complex and difficult bondage called\nmarriage; they may, on the contrary, make for joustings of a downright\nimpossible character. But not many men, laced in the emotional maze\npreceding, are capable of any very clear examination of such facts. The\ntruth is that they dodge the facts, even when they are favourable, and\nlay all stress upon the surrounding and concealing superficialities.\nThe average stupid and sentimental man, if he has a noticeably sensible\nwife, is almost apologetic about it. The ideal of his sex is always a\npretty wife, and the vanity and coquetry that so often go with\nprettiness are erected into charms. In other words, men play the love\ngame so unintelligently that they often esteem a woman in proportion as\nshe seems to disdain and make a mock of her intelligence. Women seldom,\nif ever, make that blunder. What they commonly value in a man is not\nmere showiness, whether physical or spiritual, but that compound of\nsmall capacities which makes up masculine efficiency and passes for\nmasculine intelligence. This intelligence, at its highest, has a human\nvalue substantially equal to that of their own. In a man\u2019s world it at\nleast gets its definite rewards; it guarantees security, position, a\nlivelihood; it is a commodity that is merchantable. Women thus accord\nit a certain respect, and esteem it in their husbands, and so seek it\nout.\n\n\n\n\n11. Biological Considerations\n\n\nSo far as I can make out by experiments on laboratory animals and by\nsuch discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is no\nbiological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection of\nwomen. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or\nphysiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no better\nthan the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the\nmaladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem,\nactually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportion\nto weight. Their nervous responses, if anything, are a bit duller than\nthose of men; their muscular coordinations are surely no prompter. One\nfinds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many\nbodily blemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites;\ntheir senses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even\nassuming that their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects\nof alcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids,\ngastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma,\narthritis and so on\u2014in short, from the same disturbances of colloidal\nequilibrium that produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy,\npyaemia, night sweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other\nsuch distempers in men. They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and\nappetites. They react in substantially the same way to all chemical and\nmechanical agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered _per ora_\nto the most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and\njust as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or\nan ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Cote\nRotie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional woman\nshows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as\nmaudlin and idiotic as he is.\n\nNay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not inherent\nin any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not in any\nadvantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are rather to be\nsought in a physical disadvantage\u2014that is, in the mechanical\ninferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive capacity,\ntheir deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every one knows,\nis partly a direct heritage from those females of the Pongo pygmaeus\nwho were their probable fore-runners in the world; the same thing is to\nbe observed in the females of almost all other species of mammals. But\nit is also partly due to the effects of use under civilization, and,\nabove all, to what evolutionists call sexual selection. In other words,\nwomen were already measurably weaker than men at the dawn of human\nhistory, and that relative weakness has been progressively augmented in\nthe interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the\nprocess of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as\nrefinement has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care\nof them in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of\ncultural complexity has made education more intricate, that the two\nfunctions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and\nattention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention of\nany other female. And for another thing, the consequent disability and\nneed of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming the already large\nvanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to\nfeminine weakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in\nproportion as she is self-sufficient as a social animal but in\nproportion as she is dependent. In this vicious circle of influences\nwomen have been caught, and as a result their chief physical character\ntoday is their fragility. A woman cannot lift as much as a man. She\ncannot walk as far. She cannot exert as much mechanical energy in any\nother way. Even her alleged superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has\ndemonstrated in \u201cMan and Woman,\u201d is almost wholly mythical; she cannot,\nin point of fact, stand nearly so much hardship as a man can stand, and\nso the law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of\nobservation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are\nexposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies\nfirst.\n\nSo far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt platitude\nin the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that has\ngiven women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the\nintellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have\ndone is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case; they\nhave sought compensation for their impotence in one field by employing\ntheir resources in another field to the utmost, and out of that\nconstant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement of those\nresources. On the one hand the sum of them present in a given woman has\nbeen enormously increased by natural selection, so that every woman, so\nto speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine mental dexterity as a mere\nfunction of her femaleness. And on the other hand every woman, over and\nabove this almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, also\ninherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes the\nesoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is\nthus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is\nnot only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily\ncompetent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from his\nelders little more than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry\nvices and a few degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction\nin all those higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies\nmake necessary to her security, and in particular in all those\nexercises which aim at overcoming the physical, and hence social and\neconomic superiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity for\nclear reasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality.\n\n\n\n\n12. Honour\n\n\nHere, it is obvious, the process of intellectual development takes\ncolour from the Sklavenmoral, and is, in a sense, a product of it. The\nJews, as Nietzsche has demonstrated, got their unusual intelligence by\nthe same process; a contrary process is working in the case of the\nEnglish and the Americans, and has begun to show itself in the case of\nthe French and Germans. The sum of feminine wisdom that I have just\nmentioned\u2014the body of feminine devices and competences that is handed\ndown from generation to generation of women\u2014is, in fact, made up very\nlargely of doctrines and expedients that infallibly appear to the\naverage sentimental man, helpless as he is before them, as cynical and\nimmoral. He commonly puts this aversion into the theory that women have\nno sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristically\nbanal. Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but it may\nbe sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of\nabsolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and\nwoman out of which rises most of man\u2019s complaint of its absence\u2014to wit,\nthe conflict culminating in marriage, already described\u2014the security of\nthe woman is not something that is in actual being, but something that\nshe is striving with all arms to attain. In such a conflict it must be\nmanifest that honor can have no place. An animal fighting for its very\nexistence uses all possible means of offence and defence, however foul.\nEven man, for all his boasting about honor, seldom displays it when he\nhas anything of the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, in\ngambling, for gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him\nto be honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He is\nhonorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he\nseldom permits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or\nwith hitting below the belt in any other sort of combat that is in\nearnest. The history of all his wars is a history of mutual allegations\nof dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always well\ngrounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually achieves in\nthem is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which prompts him to be\nhumane to the opponent who has been wounded, or disarmed, or otherwise\nmade innocuous. Even here his so-called honor is little more than a\nform of playacting, both maudlin and dishonest. In the actual\ndeath-struggle he invariably bites.\n\nPerhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact\nthat they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized.\nIn the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge\nthem round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever\ngives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private\ninterest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls\na nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by\nsentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages.\nIntrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect\nsymbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who\nhas been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and\nnatural instincts-that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to\nhis own ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this\ncommonweal is always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the\ngreatest good to the greatest number\u2014of petty rogues, ignoramuses and\npoltroons.\n\nThe capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this\ncheese-monger\u2019s civilization is far more marked in men than in women,\nand far more in inferior men than in men of the higher categories. It\nmust be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor of\nhistory that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race have\nbeen, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employed in\nnewspapers and in the pulpit. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther,\nFrederick the Great, Cromwell, Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar,\nHannibal, Alexander, and to come down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall\nJackson, Bismarck, Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.\n\n\n\n\n13. Women and the Emotions\n\n\nThe fact that women have a greater capacity than men for controlling\nand concealing their emotions is not an indication that they are more\ncivilized, but a proof that they are less civilized. This capacity, so\nrare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of respect, is a\ncharacteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its loss is one of\nthe penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon of\ncivilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous,\nknows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate\nassault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them.\nCivilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical;\nespecially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of\ncrazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace\nalarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series\nof hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the\nwill of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and\nintelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of\nthem. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are\nended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of\ncivilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the\nrepository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very\nbest men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars\nof Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them\nhas passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of\nmob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one\u2019s\nself with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and\nthe Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.\n\nWomen are nearly always against war in modern times, for the reasons\nbrought forward to justify it are usually either transparently\ndishonest or childishly sentimental, and hence provoke their scorn. But\nonce the business is begun, they commonly favour its conduct outrance,\nand are thus in accord with the theory of the great captains of more\nspacious days. In Germany, during the late war, the protests against\nthe Schrecklichkeit practised by the imperial army and navy did not\ncome from women, but from sentimental men; in England and the United\nStates there is no record that any woman ever raised her voice against\nthe blockade which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children.\nI was on both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot\nrecall meeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine\nthat, in so vast a combat between nations, there could still be\ncategories of non-combatants, with a right of asylum on armed ships and\nin garrisoned towns. This imbecility was maintained only by men, large\nnumbers of whom simultaneously took part in wholesale massacres of such\nnon-combatants. The women were superior to such hypocrisy. They\nrecognized the nature of modern war instantly and accurately, and\nadvocated no disingenuous efforts to conceal it.\n\n\n\n\n14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia\n\n\nThe feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely\nresponsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid of\npassion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with something\nakin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by the fact\nthat very few masculine observers, on the occasions when they give\nattention to the matter, are in a state of mind conducive to exact\nobservation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no\nreason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that the\nminority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable dimensions.\nTo be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in the Northern\ncountries, makes them place a high value upon the virginal type of\nwoman, and so this type tends to grow more common by sexual selection,\nbut despite that fact, it has by no means superseded the normal type,\nso realistically described by the theologians and publicists of the\nMiddle Ages. It would, however, be rash to assert that this long\ncontinued sexual selection has not made itself felt, even in the normal\ntype. Its chief effect, perhaps, is to make it measurably easier for a\nwoman to conquer and conceal emotion than it is for a man. But this is\na mere reinforcement of a native quality or, at all events, a quality\nlong antedating the rise of the curious preference just mentioned. That\npreference obviously owes its origin to the concept of private property\nand is most evident in those countries in which the largest proportion\nof males are property owners, i.e., in which the property-owning caste\nreaches down into the lowest conceivable strata of bounders and\nignoramuses. The low-caste man is never quite sure of his wife unless\nhe is convinced that she is entirely devoid of amorous susceptibility.\nThus he grows uneasy whenever she shows any sign of responding in kind\nto his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to be suspicious of even so\ntrivial a thing as a hearty response to a connubial kiss. If he could\nmanage to rid himself of such suspicions, there would be less public\ngabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with\nsure cures for them, and a good deal less cold-mutton formalism and\nboredom at the domestic hearth.\n\nI have a feeling that the husband of this sort\u2014he is very common in the\nUnited States, and almost as common among the middle classes of\nEngland, Germany and Scandinavia\u2014does himself a serious disservice, and\nthat he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got himself a wife to his\naustere taste, he finds that she is rather depressing\u2014that his vanity\nis almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would\nhave been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing\nthat chiefly delights a man, when some woman has gone through the\nsolemn buffoonery of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and\nflattering contrast between her reserve in the presence of other men\nand her enchanting complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his\nvanity is enormously tickled. To the world in general she seems remote\nand unapproachable; to him she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a\nbit abandoned. It is as if some great magnifico male, some inordinate\nczar or kaiser, should step down from the throne to play dominoes with\nhim behind the door. The greater the contrast between the lady\u2019s two\nfronts, the greater his satisfaction-up to, of course, the point where\nhis suspicions are aroused. Let her diminish that contrast ever so\nlittle on the public side\u2014by smiling at a handsome actor, by saying a\nword too many to an attentive head-waiter, by holding the hand of the\nrector of the parish, by winking amiably at his brother or at her\nsister\u2019s husband\u2014and at once the poor fellow begins to look for\nclandestine notes, to employ private inquiry agents, and to scrutinize\nthe eyes, ears, noses and hair of his children with shameful doubts.\nThis explains many domestic catastrophes.\n\n\n\n\n15. Mythical Anthropophagi\n\n\nThe man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary. One\noften encounters references to her in literature, but who has ever met\nher in real life? As for me, I doubt that such a monster has ever\nactually existed. There are, of course, women who spend a great deal of\ntime denouncing and reviling men, but these are certainly not genuine\nman-haters; they are simply women who have done their utmost to snare\nmen, and failed. Of such sort are the majority of inflammatory\nsuffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigid\nlimitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who run\nno more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so\nmany mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such\nnoisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract\nthe attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises\nthat are difficult or forbidden. But certainly the enterprise of\ndissuading such a propagandist from her gospel would not be difficult,\nand I know of no law forbidding it.\n\nI\u2019ll begin to believe in the man-hater the day I am introduced to a\nwoman who has definitely and finally refused a chance of marriage to a\nman who is of her own station in life, able to support her, unafflicted\nby any loathsome disease, and of reasonably decent aspect and\nmanners\u2014in brief a man who is thoroughly eligible. I doubt that any\nsuch woman breathes the air of Christendom. Whenever one comes to\nconfidential terms with an unmarried woman, of course, she favours one\nwith a long chronicle of the men she has refused to marry, greatly to\ntheir grief. But unsentimental cross-examination, at least in my\nexperience, always develops the fact that every one of these suffered\nfrom some obvious and intolerable disqualification. Either he had a\nwife already and was vague about his ability to get rid of her, or he\nwas drunk when he was brought to his proposal and repudiated it or\nforgot it the next day, or he was a bankrupt, or he was old and\ndecrepit, or he was young and plainly idiotic, or he had diabetes or a\nbad heart, or his relatives were impossible, or he believed in\nspiritualism, or democracy, or the Baconian theory, or some other such\nnonsense. Restricting the thing to men palpably eligible, I believe\nthoroughly that no sane woman has ever actually muffed a chance. Now\nand then, perhaps, a miraculously fortunate girl has two victims on the\nmat simultaneously, and has to lose one. But they are seldom, if ever,\nboth good chances; one is nearly always a duffer, thrown in in the\ntelling to make the bourgeoisie marvel.\n\n\n\n\n16. A Conspiracy of Silence\n\n\nThe reason why all this has to be stated here is simply that women, who\ncould state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained from\ndiscussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of general\nconspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of\nthe esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment\nthat any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity\nand less discretion, area good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a\nwhole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli\u2019s\nappalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of\nsuch men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner,\nBenvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is\nvery rarely that a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the\nveils which conceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is\ntransmitted from mother to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One\nobserves its practical workings, but hears little about its principles.\nThe causes of this secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis,\ncan prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security\nonly by keeping them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched\nbattle, with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic\ninferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to\napply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger\nof arousing the foe. He must be attached without any formal challenge,\nand even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the\nheart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality\u2014in brief, a morality\nbased upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having\nfor its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.\n\n\n\n\nIII. Marriage\n\n\n\n\n17. Fundamental Motives\n\n\nHow successful such a concealment may be is well displayed by the\ngeneral acceptance of the notion that women are reluctant to enter into\nmarriage\u2014that they have to be persuaded to it by eloquence and\npertinacity, and even by a sort of intimidation. The truth is that, in\na world almost divested of intelligible idealism, and hence dominated\nby a senseless worship of the practical, marriage offers the best\ncareer that the average woman can reasonably aspire to, and, in the\ncase of very many women, the only one that actually offers a\nlivelihood. What is esteemed and valuable, in our materialistic and\nunintelligent society, is precisely that petty practical efficiency at\nwhich men are expert, and which serves them in place of free\nintelligence. A woman, save she show a masculine strain that verges\nupon the pathological, cannot hope to challenge men in general in this\ndepartment, but it is always open to her to exchange her sexual charm\nfor a lion\u2019s share in the earnings of one man, and this is what she\nalmost invariably tries to do. That is to say, she tries to get a\nhusband, for getting a husband means, in a sense, enslaving an expert,\nand so covering up her own lack of expertness, and escaping its\nconsequences. Thereafter she has at least one stout line of defence\nagainst a struggle for existence in which the prospect of survival is\nchiefly based, not upon the talents that are typically hers, but upon\nthose that she typically lacks. Before the average woman succumbs in\nthis struggle, some man or other must succumb first. Thus her craft\nconverts her handicap into an advantage.\n\nIn this security lies the most important of all the benefits that a\nwoman attains by marriage. It is, in fact, the most important benefit\nthat the mind can imagine, for the whole effort of the human race,\nunder our industrial society, is concentrated upon the attainment of\nit. But there are other benefits, too. One of them is that increase in\ndignity which goes with an obvious success; the woman who has got\nherself a satisfactory husband, or even a highly imperfect husband, is\nregarded with respect by other women, and has a contemptuous patronage\nfor those who have failed to do likewise. Again, marriage offers her\nthe only safe opportunity, considering the levantine view of women as\nproperty which Christianity has preserved in our civilization, to\nobtain gratification for that powerful complex of instincts which we\ncall the sexual, and, in particular, for the instinct of maternity. The\nwoman who has not had a child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more\nthan a little ridiculous. She is in the position of a man who has never\nstood in battle; she has missed the most colossal experience of her\nsex. Moreover, a social odium goes with her loss. Other women regard\nher as a sort of permanent tyro, and treat her with ill-concealed\ndisdain, and deride the very virtue which lies at the bottom of her\nexperiential penury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect\namong women for virginity per se. They are against the woman who has\ngot rid of hers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost\nanything intrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad\nbargain, and one that materially diminishes the sentimental respect for\nvirtue held by men, and hence one against the general advantage and\nwell-being of the sex. In other words, it is a guild resentment that\nthey feel, not a moral resentment. Women, in general, are not actively\nmoral, nor, for that matter, noticeably modest. Every man, indeed, who\nis in wide practice among them is occasionally astounded and horrified\nto discover, on some rainy afternoon, an almost complete absence of\nmodesty in some women of the highest respectability.\n\nBut of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable is\neconomic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute, but\nusually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may die\nwithout enough life insurance, or run off with some preposterous light\nof love, or become an invalid or insane, or step over the intangible\nand wavering line which separates business success from a prison cell.\nAgain, a woman may be deceived: there are stray women who are credulous\nand sentimental, and stray men who are cunning. Yet again, a woman may\nmake false deductions from evidence accurately before her, ineptly\nguessing that the clerk she marries today will be the head of the firm\ntomorrow, instead of merely the bookkeeper tomorrow. But on the whole\nit must be plain that a woman, in marrying, usually obtains for herself\na reasonably secure position in that station of life to which she is\naccustomed. She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but realistically;\nshe always gives thought to the economic situation; she seldom takes a\nchance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for men to marry\nwomen who bring nothing to the joint capital of marriage save good\nlooks and an appearance of vivacity; it is almost unheard of for women\nto neglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a rich man, at least in\nAmerica, marries his typist or the governess of his sister\u2019s children\nand is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman enters upon a comparable\nmarriage she is commonly set down as insane, and the disaster that\nalmost always ensues quickly confirms the diagnosis.\n\nThe economic and social advantage that women thus seek in marriage\u2014and\nthe seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the\nheart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a\nhusband with a Rolls-Royce\u2014is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the\nunderlying causes of their precarious economic condition before\nmarriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress\nupon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its\nhighest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the\ndisadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this\ndisadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectual\nenterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machines\nthat men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with\nmarriage always before them, coloring their every vision of the future,\nand holding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they are\nunder no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts\nthey revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive too\nfeeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth of\nthe idiotic \u201cknowledge\u201d in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or\neven convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the\nhead of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons\nthe business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away\nthe hope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the possibility that\nshe, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles down in earnest\nto whatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to develop\ncompetence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborious\ntraining and unremitting diligence, would select a woman still\ndefinitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose\neither a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of\nsnaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to\nbe pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.\n\n\n\n\n18. The Process of Courtship\n\n\nThis bemusement of the typical woman by the notion of marriage has been\nnoted as self-evident by every literate student of the phenomena of\nsex, from the early Christian fathers down to Nietzsche, Ellis and\nShaw. That it is denied by the current sentimentality of Christendom is\nsurely no evidence against it. What we have in this denial, as I have\nsaid, is no more than a proof of woman\u2019s talent for a high and sardonic\nform of comedy and of man\u2019s infinite vanity. \u201cI wooed and won her,\u201d\nsays Sganarelle of his wife. \u201cI made him run,\u201d says the hare of the\nhound. When the thing is maintained, not as a mere windy\nsentimentality, but with some notion of carrying it logically, the\nresult is invariably a display of paralogy so absurd that it becomes\npathetic. Such nonsense one looks for in the works of gyneophile\ntheorists with no experience of the world, and there is where one finds\nit. It is almost always wedded to the astounding doctrine that sexual\nfrigidity, already disposed of, is normal in the female, and that the\napproach of the male is made possible, not by its melting into passion,\nbut by a purely intellectual determination, inwardly revolting, to\navoid his ire by pandering to his gross appetites. Thus the thing is\nstated in a book called \u201cThe Sexes in Science and History,\u201d by Eliza\nBurt Gamble, an American lady anthropologist:\n\nThe beautiful coloring of male birds and fishes, and the various\nappendages acquired by males throughout the various orders below man,\nand which, sofar as they themselves are concerned, serve no other\nuseful purpose than to aid them in securing the favours of the females,\nhave by the latter been turned to account in the processes of\nreproduction. The female made the male beautiful _That She Might Endure\nHis Caresses_.\n\nThe italics are mine. From this premiss the learned doctor proceeds to\nthe classical sentimental argument that the males of all species,\nincluding man, are little more than chronic seducers, and that their\nchief energies are devoted to assaulting and breaking down the native\nreluctance of the aesthetic and anesthetic females. In her own words:\n\u201cRegarding males, outside of the instinct for self-preservation, which,\nby the way is often overshadowed by their great sexual eagerness, no\ndiscriminating characters have been acquired and transmitted, other\nthan those which have been the result of passion, namely, pugnacity and\nperseverance.\u201d Again the italics are mine. What we have here is merely\nthe old, old delusion of masculine enterprise in amour\u2014the concept of\nman as a lascivious monster and of woman as his shrinking victim\u2014in\nbrief, the Don Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie the\nsprings of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of\nsome of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids\nare led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out\nthat they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres,\nand to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is\nthus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been\nlaunched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is\nthus, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have\nbeen convinced that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation\nin which their own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary\nlibidinousness of their swinish and unconscionable husbands.\n\nDr. Gamble, of course, is speaking of the lower fauna in the time of\nNoah. A literal application of her theory to man today is enough to\nbring it to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo sapiens actually\ndoes the primping and parading that she describes? Which runs to\n\u201cbeautiful coloring,\u201d sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases itself\nin vestments which \u201cserve no other useful purpose than to aid in\nsecuring the favours\u201d of the other? The insecurity of the gifted\nsavante\u2019s position is at once apparent. The more convincingly she\nargues that the primeval mud-hens and she mackerel had to be\nanesthetized with spectacular decorations in order to \u201cendure the\ncaresses\u201d of their beaux, the more she supports the thesis that men\nhave to be decoyed and bamboozled into love today. In other words, her\nargument turns upon and destroys itself. Carried to its last\nimplication, it holds that women are all Donna Juanitas, and that if\nthey put off their millinery and cosmetics, and abandoned the shameless\nsexual allurements of their scanty dress, men could not \u201cendure their\ncaresses.\u201d\n\nTo be sure, Dr. Gamble by no means draws this disconcerting conclusion\nherself. To the contrary, she clings to the conventional theory that\nthe human female of today is no more than the plaything of the\nconcupiscent male, and that she must wait for the feminist millenium to\nset her free from his abominable pawings. But she can reach this notion\nonly by standing her whole structure of reasoning on its head\u2014in fact,\nby knocking it over and repudiating it. On the one hand, she argues\nthat splendour of attire is merely a bait to overcome the reluctance of\nthe opposite sex, and on the other hand she argues, at least by fair\ninference, that it is not. This grotesque switching of horses, however,\nneed not detain us. The facts are too plain to be disposed of by a lady\nanthropologist\u2019s theorizings. Those facts are supported, in the field\nof animal behaviour, by the almost unanimous evidence of zoologists,\nincluding that of Dr. Gamble herself. They are supported, in the field\nof human behaviour, by a body of observation and experience so colossal\nthat it would be quite out of the question to dispose of it. Women, as\nI have shown, have a more delicate aesthetic sense than men; in a world\nwholly rid of men they would probably still array themselves with\nvastly more care and thought of beauty than men would ever show in like\ncase. But with the world what it is, it must be obvious that their\ndisplay of finery\u2014to say nothing of their display of epidermis\u2014has the\nconscious purpose of attracting the masculine eye. A normal woman,\nindeed, never so much as buys a pair of shoes or has her teeth plugged\nwithout considering, in the back of her mind, the effect upon some\nunsuspecting candidate for her \u201creluctant\u201d affections.\n\n\n\n\n19. The Actual Husband\n\n\nSo far as I can make out, no woman of the sort worth hearing\u2014that is,\nno woman of intelligence, humour and charm, and hence of success in the\nduel of sex\u2014has ever publicly denied this; the denial is confined\nentirely to the absurd sect of female bachelors of arts and to the\ngenerality of vain and unobservant men. The former, having failed to\nattract men by the devices described, take refuge behind the sour\ngrapes doctrine that they have never tried, and the latter, having\nfallen victims, sooth their egoism by arrogating the whole agency to\nthemselves, thus giving it a specious appearance of the volitional, and\neven of the audacious. The average man is an almost incredible\npopinjay; he can think of himself only as at the centre of situations.\nAll the sordid transactions of his life appear to him, and are depicted\nin his accounts of them, as feats, successes, proofs of his acumen. He\nregards it as an almost magical exploit to operate a stock-brokerage\nshop, or to get elected to public office, or to swindle his fellow\nknaves in some degrading commercial enterprise, or to profess some\nnonsense or other in a college, or to write so platitudinous a book as\nthis one. And in the same way he views it as a great testimony to his\nprowess at amour to yield up his liberty, his property and his soul to\nthe first woman who, in despair of finding better game, turns her\nappraising eye upon him. But if you want to hear a mirthless laugh,\njust present this masculine theory to a bridesmaid at a wedding,\nparticularly after alcohol and crocodile tears have done their\ndisarming work upon her. That is to say, just hint to her that the\nbride harboured no notion of marriage until stormed into acquiescence\nby the moonstruck and impetuous bridegroom.\n\nI have used the phrase, \u201cin despair of finding better game.\u201d What I\nmean is this that not one woman in a hundred ever marries her first\nchoice among marriageable men. That first choice is almost invariably\none who is beyond her talents, for reasons either fortuitous or\nintrinsic. Let us take, for example, a woman whose relative naivete\nmakes the process clearly apparent, to wit, a simple shop-girl. Her\nabsolute first choice, perhaps, is not a living man at all, but a\nsupernatural abstraction in a book, say, one of the heroes of Hall\nCaine, Ethel M. Dell, or Marie Corelli. After him comes a\nmoving-picture actor. Then another moving-picture actor. Then, perhaps,\nmany more\u2014ten or fifteen head. Then a sebaceous young clergyman. Then\nthe junior partner in the firm she works for. Then a couple of\ndepartment managers. Then a clerk. Then a young man with no definite\nprofession or permanent job\u2014one of the innumerable host which flits\nfrom post to post, always restive, always trying something new\u2014perhaps\na neighborhood garage-keeper in the end. Well, the girl begins with the\nCaine colossus: he vanishes into thin air. She proceeds to the moving\npicture actors: they are almost as far beyond her. And then to the man\nof God, the junior partner, the department manager, the clerk; one and\nall they are carried off by girls of greater attractions and greater\nskill\u2014girls who can cast gaudier flies. In the end, suddenly terrorized\nby the first faint shadows of spinsterhood, she turns to the ultimate\nnumskull\u2014and marries him out of hand.\n\nThis, allowing for class modifications, is almost the normal history of\na marriage, or, more accurately, of the genesis of a marriage, under\nProtestant Christianity. Under other rites the business is taken out of\nthe woman\u2019s hands, at least partly, and so she is less enterprising in\nher assembling of candidates and possibilities. But when the whole\nthing is left to her own heart\u2014i.e., to her head\u2014it is but natural that\nshe should seek as wide a range of choice as the conditions of her life\nallow, and in a democratic society those conditions put few if any\nfetters upon her fancy. The servant girl, or factory operative, or even\nprostitute of today may be the chorus girl or moving picture vampire of\ntomorrow and the millionaire\u2019s wife of next year. In America,\nespecially, men have no settled antipathy to such stooping alliances;\nin fact, it rather flatters their vanity to play Prince Charming to\nCinderella. The result is that every normal American young woman, with\nthe practicality of her sex and the inner confidence that goes\ntherewith, raises her amorous eye as high as it will roll. And the\nsecond result is that every American man of presentable exterior and\neasy means is surrounded by an aura of discreet provocation: he cannot\neven dictate a letter, or ask for a telephone number without being\nmeasured for his wedding coat. On the Continent of Europe, and\nespecially in the Latin countries, where class barriers are more\nformidable, the situation differs materially, and to the disadvantage\nof the girl. If she makes an overture, it is an invitation to disaster;\nher hope of lawful marriage by such means is almost nil. In\nconsequence, the prudent and decent girl avoids such overtures, and\nthey must be made by third parties or by the man himself. This is the\nexplanation of the fact that a Frenchman, say, is habitually\nenterprising in amour, and hence bold and often offensive, whereas an\nAmerican is what is called chivalrous. The American is chivalrous for\nthe simple reason that the initiative is not in his hands. His chivalry\nis really a sort of coquetry.\n\n\n\n\n20. The Unattainable Ideal\n\n\nBut here I rather depart from the point, which is this: that the\naverage woman is not strategically capable of bringing down the most\ntempting game within her purview, and must thus content herself with a\nsecond, third, or nth choice. The only women who get their first\nchoices are those who run in almost miraculous luck and those too\nstupid to formulate an ideal\u2014two very small classes, it must be\nobvious. A few women, true enough, are so pertinacious that they prefer\ndefeat to compromise. That is to say, they prefer to put off marriage\nindefinitely rather than to marry beneath the highest leap of their\nfancy. But such women may be quickly dismissed as abnormal, and perhaps\nas downright diseased in mind; the average woman is well-aware that\nmarriage is far better for her than celibacy, even when it falls a good\ndeal short of her primary hopes, and she is also well aware that the\ndifferences between man and man, once mere money is put aside, are so\nslight as to be practically almost negligible. Thus the average woman\nis under none of the common masculine illusions about elective\naffinities, soul mates, love at first sight, and such phantasms. She is\nquite ready to fall in love, as the phrase is, with any man who is\nplainly eligible, and she usually knows a good many more such men than\none. Her primary demand in marriage is not for the agonies of romance,\nbut for comfort and security; she is thus easier satisfied than a man,\nand oftener happy. One frequently hears of remarried widowers who\ncontinue to moon about their dead first wives, but for a remarried\nwidow to show any such sentimentality would be a nine days\u2019 wonder.\nOnce replaced, a dead husband is expunged from the minutes. And so is a\ndead love.\n\nOne of the results of all this is a subtle reinforcement of the\ncontempt with which women normally regard their husbands\u2014a contempt\ngrounded, as I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual superiority. To\nthis primary sense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a\nconcrete comparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the\nfact that such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the\ntypical husband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it\nthan his wife. He is, taking averages, one who has been loved, as the\nsaying goes, by but one woman, and then only as a second, third or nth\nchoice. If any other woman had ever loved him, as the idiom has it, she\nwould have married him, and so made him ineligible for his present\nhappiness. But the average bachelor is a man who has been loved, so to\nspeak, by many women, and is the lost first choice of at least some of\nthem. Here presents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the\nhusband is the attained and disdained.\n\nHere we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority of\nbachelors, so often noted by students of mankind\u2014a superiority so\nmarked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-rate\nphilosophers who were married men. The bachelor\u2019s very capacity to\navoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the\nordinary sentimentalism of his sex\u2014in other words, of his greater\napproximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He is able to\ndefeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an\nequipment almost comparable to their own. Herbert Spencer, until he was\nfifty, was ferociously harassed by women of all sorts. Among others,\nGeorge Eliot tried very desperately to marry him. But after he had made\nit plain, over a long series of years, that he was prepared to resist\nmarriage to the full extent of his military and naval power, the girls\ndropped off one by one, and so his last decades were full of peace and\nhe got a great deal of very important work done.\n\n\n\n\n21. The Effect on the Race\n\n\nIt is, of course, not well for the world that the highest sort of men\nare thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their\nsuperiority dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and\nsentimentalities of lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a\npopular delusion that the sons of great men are always dolts, the fact\nis that intellectual superiority is inheritable, quite as easily as\nbodily strength; and that fact has been established beyond cavil by the\nlaborious inquiries of Galton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians\nof the English school. If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer,\nSpencer, and Nietzsche had married and begotten sons, those sons, it is\nprobable, would have contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and\ngrandsons of Veit Bach contributed to music, or those of Erasmus Darwin\nto biology, or those of Henry Adams to politics, or those of Hamilcar\nBarca to the art of war. I have said that Herbert Spencer\u2019s escape from\nmarriage facilitated his life-work, and so served the immediate good of\nEnglish philosophy, but in the long run it will work a detriment, for\nhe left no sons to carry on his labours, and the remaining Englishmen\nof his time were unable to supply the lack. His celibacy, indeed, made\nEnglish philosophy co-extensive with his life; since his death the\nwhole body of metaphysical speculation produced in England has been of\nlittle more, practical value to the world than a drove of bogs. In\nprecisely the same way the celibacy of Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche\nhas reduced German philosophy to feebleness.\n\nEven setting aside this direct influence of heredity, there is the\nequally potent influence of example and tuition. It is a gigantic\nadvantage to live on intimate terms with a first-rate man, and have his\ncare. Hamilcar not only gave the Carthagenians a great general in his\nactual son; he also gave them a great general in his son-in-law,\ntrained in his camp. But the tendency of the first-rate man to remain a\nbachelor is very strong, and Sidney Lee once showed that, of all the\ngreat writers of England since the Renaissance, more than half were\neither celibates or lived apart from their wives. Even the married ones\nrevealed the tendency plainly. For example, consider Shakespeare. He\nwas forced into marriage while still a minor by the brothers of Ann\nHathaway, who was several years his senior, and had debauched him and\ngave out that she was enceinte by him. He escaped from her abhorrent\nembraces as quickly as possible, and thereafter kept as far away from\nher as he could. His very distaste for marriage, indeed, was the cause\nof his residence in London, and hence, in all probability, of the\nlabours which made him immortal.\n\nIn different parts of the world various expedients have been resorted\nto to overcome this reluctance to marriage among the better sort of\nmen. Christianity, in general, combats it on the ground that it is\noffensive to God\u2014though at the same time leaning toward an enforced\ncelibacy among its own agents. The discrepancy is fatal to the\nposition. On the one hand, it is impossible to believe that the same\nGod who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an\nactual sin, and on the other hand, it is obvious that the average\ncleric would be damaged but little, and probably improved appreciably,\nby having a wife to think for him, and to force him to virtue and\nindustry, and to aid him otherwise in his sordid profession. Where\nreligious superstitions have died out the institution of the dot\nprevails\u2014an idea borrowed by Christians from the Jews. The dot is\nsimply a bribe designed to overcome the disinclination of the male. It\ninvolves a frank recognition of the fact that he loses by marriage, and\nit seeks to make up for that loss by a money payment. Its obvious\neffect is to give young women a wider and better choice of husbands. A\nrelatively superior man, otherwise quite out of reach, may be brought\ninto camp by the assurance of economic ease, and what is more, he may\nbe kept in order after he has been taken by the consciousness of his\ngain. Among hardheaded and highly practical peoples, such as the Jews\nand the French, the dot flourishes, and its effect is to promote\nintellectual suppleness in the race, for the average child is thus not\ninevitably the offspring of a woman and a noodle, as with us, but may\nbe the offspring of a woman and a man of reasonable intelligence. But\neven in France, the very highest class of men tend to evade marriage;\nthey resist money almost as unanimously as their Anglo-Saxon brethren\nresist sentimentality.\n\nIn America the dot is almost unknown, partly because money-getting is\neasier to men than in Europe and is regarded as less degrading, and\npartly because American men are more naive than Frenchmen and are thus\nreadily intrigued without actual bribery. But the best of them\nnevertheless lean to celibacy, and plans for overcoming their habit are\nfrequently proposed and discussed. One such plan involves a heavy tax\non bachelors. The defect in it lies in the fact that the average\nbachelor, for obvious reasons, is relatively well to do, and would pay\nthe tax rather than marry. Moreover, the payment of it would help to\nsalve his conscience, which is now often made restive, I believe, by a\nmaudlin feeling that he is shirking his duty to the race, and so he\nwould be confirmed and supported in his determination to avoid the\naltar. Still further, he would escape the social odium which now\nattaches to his celibacy, for whatever a man pays for is regarded as\nhis right. As things stand, that odium is of definite potency, and\nundoubtedly has its influence upon a certain number of men in the lower\nranks of bachelors. They stand, so to speak, in the twilight zone of\nbachelorhood, with one leg furtively over the altar rail; it needs only\nan extra pull to bring them to the sacrifice. But if they could\ncompound for their immunity by a cash indemnity it is highly probable\nthat they would take on new resolution, and in the end they would\nconvert what remained of their present disrepute into a source of\negoistic satisfaction, as is done, indeed, by a great many bachelors\neven today. These last immoralists are privy to the elements which\nenter into that disrepute: the ire of women whose devices they have\nresisted and the envy of men who have succumbed.\n\n\n\n\n22. Compulsory Marriage\n\n\nI myself once proposed an alternative scheme, to wit, the prohibition\nof sentimental marriages by law, and the substitution of match-making\nby the common hangman. This plan, as revolutionary as it may seem,\nwould have several plain advantages. For one thing, it would purge the\nserious business of marriage of the romantic fol-de-rol that now\ncorrupts it, and so make for the peace and happiness of the race. For\nanother thing, it would work against the process which now selects out,\nas I have said, those men who are most fit, and so throws the chief\nburden of paternity upon the inferior, to the damage of posterity. The\nhangman, if he made his selections arbitrarily, would try to give his\noffice permanence and dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet\nwith public approbation, i.e., men obviously of sound stock and\ntalents, i.e., the sort of men who now habitually escape. And if he\nmade his selection by the hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out\nof a hat, or by any other such method of pure chance, that pure chance\nwould fall indiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper\norders would thus lose their present comparative immunity. True enough,\na good many men would endeavour to influence him privately to their own\nadvantage, and it is probable that he would occasionally succumb, but\nit must be plain that the men most likely to prevail in that enterprise\nwould not be philosophers, but politicians, and so there would be some\nbenefit to the race even here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy\nloss when a Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an\nambassador or Prime Minister dies childless, but when a Herbert Spencer\ngoes to the grave without leaving sons behind him there is a detriment\nto all the generations of the future.\n\nI did not offer the plan, of course, as a contribution to practical\npolitics, but merely as a sort of hypothesis, to help clarify the\nproblem. Many other theoretical advantages appear in it, but its\nexecution is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also by\na general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at least\noffers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite its\nunfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose the\nsubstitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle for\nthe plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt rightly,\nthat her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangman\nor the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favourable to her\nopportunities. And men would oppose it because it would restrict their\nliberty. This liberty, of course, is largely imaginary. In its common\nmanifestation, it is no more, at bottom, than the privilege of being\nbamboozled and made a mock of by the first woman who ventures to essay\nthe business. But none the less it is quite as precious to men as any\nother of the ghosts that their vanity conjures up for their\nenchantment. They cherish the notion that unconditioned volition enters\ninto the matter, and that under volition there is not only a high\ndegree of sagacity but also a touch of the daring and the devilish. A\nman is often almost as much pleased and flattered by his own marriage\nas he would be by the achievement of what is currently called a\nseduction. In the one case, as in the other, his emotion is one of\ntriumph. The substitution of pure chance would take away that soothing\nunction.\n\nThe present system, to be sure, also involves chance. Every man\nrealizes it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which\nhe humbly whispers: \u201cThere, but for the grace of God, go I.\u201d But that\nchance has a sugarcoating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion; it shows\nless stark and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald\nhazard of the die. Thus men prefer it, and shrink from the other. In\nthe same way, I have no doubt, the majority of foxes would object to\nchoosing lots to determine the victim of a projected fox-hunt. They\nprefer to take their chances with the dogs.\n\n\n\n\n23. Extra-Legal Devices\n\n\nIt is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration to say that all first-class\nmen escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that their\nhigh qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one hand it\nmust be obvious that an appreciable number of them, perhaps by reason\nof their very detachment and preoccupation, are intrigued into the holy\nestate, and that not a few of them enter it deliberately, convinced\nthat it is the safest form of liaison possible under Christianity. And\non the other hand one must not forget the biological fact that it is\nquite feasible to achieve offspring without the imprimatur of Church\nand State. The thing, indeed, is so commonplace that I need not risk a\nscandal by uncovering it in detail. What I allude to, I need not add,\nis not that form of irregularity which curses innocent children with\nthe stigma of illegitimacy, but that more refined and thoughtful form\nwhich safeguards their social dignity while protecting them against\ninheritance from their legal fathers. English philosophy, as I have\nshown, suffers by the fact that Herbert Spencer was too busy to permit\nhimself any such romantic altruism\u2014just as American literature gains\nenormously by the fact that Walt Whitman adventured, leaving seven sons\nbehind him, three of whom are now well-known American poets and in the\nforefront of the New Poetry movement.\n\nThe extent of this correction of a salient evil of monogamy is very\nconsiderable; its operations explain the private disrepute of perhaps a\nmajority of first-rate men; its advantages have been set forth in\nGeorge Moore\u2019s \u201cEuphorion in Texas,\u201d though in a clumsy and sentimental\nway. What is behind it is the profound race sense of women\u2014the instinct\nwhich makes them regard the unborn in their every act\u2014perhaps, too, the\nfact that the interests of the unborn are here identical, as in other\nsituations, with their own egoistic aspirations. As a popular\nphilosopher has shrewdly observed, the objections to polygamy do not\ncome from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer\nhalf or a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man to the whole\ndevotion of a third-rate man. Considerations of much the same sort also\njustify polyandry\u2014if not morally, then at least biologically. The\naverage woman, as I have shown, must inevitably view her actual husband\nwith a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence,\nshe cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by\nthe fact that he is their father, nor can she help feeling guilty about\nit; for she knows that he is their father only by reason of her own\ninitiative in the proceedings anterior to her marriage. If, now, an\nopportunity presents itself to remove that handicap from at least some\nof them, and at the same time to realize her ideal and satisfy her\nvanity\u2014if such a chance offers it is no wonder that she occasionally\nembraces it.\n\nHere we have an explanation of many lamentable and otherwise\ninexplicable violations of domestic integrity. The woman in the case is\ncommonly dismissed as vicious, but that is no more than a new example\nof the common human tendency to attach the concept of viciousness to\nwhatever is natural, and intelligent, and above the comprehension of\npoliticians, theologians and green-grocers.\n\n\n\n\n24. Intermezzo on Monogamy\n\n\nThe prevalence of monogamy in Christendom is commonly ascribed to\nethical motives. This is quite as absurd as ascribing wars to ethical\nmotives which is, of course, frequently done. The simple truth is that\nethical motives are no more than deductions from experience, and that\nthey are quickly abandoned whenever experience turns against them. In\nthe present case experience is still overwhelming on the side of\nmonogamy; civilized men are in favour of it because they find that it\nworks. And why does it work? Because it is the most effective of all\navailable antidotes to the alarms and terrors of passion. Monogamy, in\nbrief, kills passion\u2014and passion is the most dangerous of all the\nsurviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon\norder, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The\ncivilized man\u2014the ideal civilized man\u2014is simply one who never\nsacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches\nperfection when he even ceases to love passionately\u2014when he reduces the\nmost profound of all his instinctive experience from the level of an\necstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing armies and\nworkshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant\ndeath-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it\npossible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of\nthe day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety,\nbut by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring,\nand so gradually kills it.\n\nThe advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail to get\nall the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example, the\nimportant moral business of safeguarding the virtue of the\nunmarried\u2014that is, of the still passionate. The present plan in\ndealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him with\nscare-crows and prohibitions\u2014to try to convince him logically that\npassion is dangerous. This is both supererogation and\nimbecility\u2014supererogation because he already knows that it is\ndangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a\npassion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rein\nunder unfavourable and dispiriting conditions\u2014to bring it down, by slow\nstages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror. How much more,\nthen, could be accomplished if the wild young man were forbidden\npolygamy, before marriage, but permitted monogamy! The prohibition in\nthis case would be relatively easy to enforce, instead of impossible,\nas in the other. Curiosity would be satisfied; nature would get out of\nher cage; even romance would get an inning. Ninety-nine young men out\nof a hundred would submit, if only because it would be much easier to\nsubmit that to resist.\n\nAnd the result? Obviously, it would be laudable\u2014that is, accepting\ncurrent definitions of the laudable. The product, after six months,\nwould be a well-regimented and disillusioned young man, as devoid of\ndisquieting and demoralizing passion as an ancient of eighty\u2014in brief,\nthe ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely fails to\nproduce a satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one hand its\nimpossible prohibitions cause a multitude of lamentable revolts, often\nending in a silly sort of running amok. On the other hand they fill the\nY. M. C. A.\u2019s with scared poltroons full of indescribably disgusting\nFreudian suppressions. Neither group supplies many ideal citizens.\nNeither promotes the sort of public morality that is aimed at.\n\n\n\n\n25. Late Marriages\n\n\nThe marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly\ntakes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is\nalmost always able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the\naverage poor clodpate, or normal man. If he actually marries early, it\nis nearly always proof that some intolerable external pressure has been\napplied to him, as in Shakespeare\u2019s case, or that his mental\nsensitiveness approaches downright insanity, as in Shelley\u2019s. This\nfact, curiously enough, has escaped the observation of an otherwise\nextremely astute observer, namely Havelock Ellis. In his study of\nBritish genius he notes the fact that most men of unusual capacities\nare the sons of relatively old fathers, but instead of exhibiting the\ntrue cause thereof, he ascribes it to a mysterious quality whereby a\nman already in decline is capable of begetting better offspring than\none in full vigour. This is a palpable absurdity, not only because it\ngoes counter to facts long established by animal breeders, but also\nbecause it tacitly assumes that talent, and hence the capacity for\ntransmitting it, is an acquired character, and that this character may\nbe transmitted. Nothing could be more unsound. Talent is not an\nacquired character, but a congenital character, and the man who is born\nwith it has it in early life quite as well as in later life, though Its\nmanifestation may have to wait. James Mill was yet a young man when his\nson, John Stuart Mill, was born, and not one of his principle books had\nbeen written. But though the \u201cElements of Political Economy\u201d and the\n\u201cAnalysis of the Human Mind\u201d were thus but vaguely formulated in his\nmind, if they were actually so much as formulated at all, and it was\nfifteen years before he wrote them, he was still quite able to transmit\nthe capacity to write them to his son, and that capacity showed itself,\nyears afterward, in the latter\u2019s \u201cPrinciples of Political Economy\u201d and\n\u201cEssay on Liberty.\u201d\n\nBut Ellis\u2019 faulty inference is still based upon a sound observation, to\nwit, that the sort of man capable of transmitting high talents to a son\nis ordinarily a man who does not have a son at all, at least in\nwedlock, until he has advanced into middle life. The reasons which\nimpel him to yield even then are somewhat obscure, but two or three of\nthem, perhaps, may be vaguely discerned. One lies in the fact that\nevery man, whether of the first-class or of any other class, tends to\ndecline in mental agility as he grows older, though in the actual range\nand profundity of his intelligence he may keep on improving until he\ncollapses into senility. Obviously, it is mere agility of mind, and not\nprofundity, that is of most value and effect in so tricky and deceptive\na combat as the duel of sex. The aging man, with his agility gradually\nwithering, is thus confronted by women in whom it still luxuriates as a\nfunction of their relative youth. Not only do women of his own age\naspire to ensnare him, but also women of all ages back to adolescence.\nHence his average or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger\nand younger than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth\nmay be sufficient to tip over his tottering defences. This, I take it,\nis why oldish men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is\nnot that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it\nis that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and\nyouth is female. The case of the late Henrik Ibsen was typical. At\nforty Ibsen was a sedate family man, and it is doubtful that he ever so\nmuch as glanced at a woman; all his thoughts were upon the composition\nof \u201cThe League of Youth,\u201d his first social drama. At fifty he was\nalmost as preoccupied; \u201cA Doll\u2019s House\u201d was then hatching. But at\nsixty, with his best work all done and his decline begun, he succumbed\npreposterously to a flirtatious damsel of eighteen, and thereafter,\nuntil actual insanity released him, he mooned like a provincial actor\nin a sentimental melodrama. Had it not been, indeed, for the fact that\nhe was already married, and to a very sensible wife, he would have run\noff with this flapper, and so made himself publicly ridiculous.\n\nAnother reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is\nfound, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the\ndisabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages\nto increase. At thirty a man is terrified by the inhibitions of\nmonogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at\nsixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease\nand security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years,\nis his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling\ninto neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice\nbetween getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the\nwife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would\nprobably try to marry him anyhow; if he employs her in place of a wife\nhe commonly ends by finding himself married and minus a nurse, to his\nconfusion and discomfiture, and to the far greater discomfiture of his\nheirs and assigns. This process is so obvious and so commonplace that I\napologize formally for rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this:\nthat a man\u2019s instinctive aversion to marriage is grounded upon a sense\nof social and economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a\nmere theory when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is\non the side of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is\na powerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had half\nas much to gain by marriage as women gain, then, all men would be as\nardently in favour of it as women are.\n\n\n\n\n26. Disparate Unions\n\n\nThis brings us to a fact frequently noted by students of the subject:\nthat first-rate men, when they marry at all, tend to marry noticeably\ninferior wives. The causes of the phenomenon, so often discussed and so\nseldom illuminated, should be plain by now. The first-rate man, by\npostponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches it in the end\nwith his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open to the\nadvances of women whose attractions are wholly meretricious, e.g.,\nempty flappers, scheming widows, and trained nurses with a highly\ndeveloped professional technic of sympathy. If he marries at all,\nindeed, he must commonly marry badly, for women of genuine merit are no\nlonger interested in him; what was once a lodestar is now no more than\na smoking smudge. It is this circumstance that account for the low\ncalibre of a good many first-rate men\u2019s sons, and gives a certain\nsupport to the common notion that they are always third-raters. Those\nsons inherit from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the\nbad strain is often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain.\nMediocrity, as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and\nextraordinary ability is recessive character. In a marriage between an\nable man and a commonplace woman, the chances that any given child will\nresemble the mother are, roughly speaking, three to one.\n\nThe fact suggests the thought that nature is secretly against the\nsuperman, and seeks to prevent his birth. We have, indeed, no ground\nfor assuming that the continued progress visualized by man is in actual\naccord with the great flow of the elemental forces. Devolution is quite\nas natural as evolution, and may be just as pleasing, or even a good\ndeal more pleasing, to God. If the average man is made in God\u2019s image,\nthen a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God,\nand so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority\nperish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it\nis to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy\nto encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a\nsubtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the\nreproduction of philosophers.\n\nPer corollary, it is notorious that women of merit frequently marry\nsecond-rate men, and bear them children, thus aiding in the war upon\nprogress. One is often astonished to discover that the wife of some\nsordid and prosaic manufacturer or banker or professional man is a\nwoman of quick intelligence and genuine charm, with intellectual\ninterests so far above his comprehension that he is scarcely so much as\naware of them. Again, there are the leading feminists, women artists\nand other such captains of the sex; their husbands are almost always\ninferior men, and sometimes downright fools. But not paupers! Not\nincompetents in a man\u2019s world! Not bad husbands! What we here\nencounter, of course, is no more than a fresh proof of the sagacity of\nwomen. The first-rate woman is a realist. She sees clearly that, in a\nworld dominated by second-rate men, the special capacities of the\nsecond-rate man are esteemed above all other capacities and given the\nhighest rewards, and she endeavours to get her share of those rewards\nby marrying a second-rate man at the top of his class. The first-rate\nman is an admirable creature; his qualities are appreciated by every\nintelligent woman; as I have just said, it may be reasonably argued\nthat he is actually superior to God. But his attractions, after a\ncertain point, do not run in proportion to his deserts; beyond that he\nceases to be a good husband. Hence the pursuit of him is chiefly\nmaintained, not by women who are his peers, but by women who are his\ninferiors.\n\nHere we unearth another factor: the fascination of what is strange, the\ncharm of the unlike, _heliogabalisme_. As Shakespeare has put it, there\nmust be some mystery in love\u2014and there can be no mystery between\nintellectual equals. I dare say that many a woman marries an inferior\nman, not primarily because he is a good provider (though it is\nimpossible to imagine her overlooking this), but because his very\ninferiority interests her, and makes her want to remedy it and mother\nhim. Egoism is in the impulse: it is pleasant to have a feeling of\nsuperiority, and to be assured that it can be maintained. If now, that\nfeeling be mingled with sexual curiosity and economic self-interest, it\nobviously supplies sufficient motivation to account for so natural and\nbanal a thing as a marriage. Perhaps the greatest of all these factors\nis the mere disparity, the naked strangeness. A woman could not love a\nman, as the phrase is, who wore skirts and pencilled his eye-brows, and\nby the same token she would probably find it difficult to love a man\nwho matched perfectly her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems\nin marriage, on the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the\nexercise of that caressing irony which I have already described. She\nlikes to observe that her man is a fool\u2014dear, perhaps, but none the\nless damned. Her so-called love for him, even at its highest, is always\nsomewhat pitying and patronizing.\n\n\n\n\n27. The Charm of Mystery\n\n\nMonogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down this\nstrangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an intimacy\nthat is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at too many\npoints, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation is\ngone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister.\nThus that \u201cmaximum of temptation\u201d of which Shaw speaks has within\nitself the seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty\ngirl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He\nends by making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day\nsharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives,\nambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as\nromantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal\nfor words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the\ndistaste and boredom that get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity\nof woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity to it.\n\nAn estimable lady psychologist of the American Republic, Mrs. Marion\nCox, in a somewhat florid book entitled \u201cVentures into Worlds,\u201d has a\nsagacious essay upon this subject. She calls the essay \u201cOur Incestuous\nMarriage,\u201d and argues accurately that, once the adventurous descends to\nthe habitual, it takes on an offensive and degrading character. The\nintimate approach, to give genuine joy, must be a concession, a feat of\npersuasion, a victory; once it loses that character it loses\neverything. Such a destructive conversion is effected by the average\nmonogamous marriage. It breaks down all mystery and reserve, for how\ncan mystery and reserve survive the use of the same hot water bag and a\njoint concern about butter and egg bills? What remains, at least on the\nhusband\u2019s side, is esteem\u2014the feeling one, has for an amiable aunt. And\nconfidence\u2014the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist or a\nfortune-teller. And habit\u2014the thing which makes it possible to eat the\nsame breakfast every day, and to windup one\u2019s watch regularly, and to\nearn a living.\n\nMrs. Cox, if I remember her dissertation correctly, proposes to prevent\nthis stodgy dephlogistication of marriage by interrupting its\ncourse\u2014that is, by separating the parties now and then, so that neither\nwill become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By this means,\nshe, argues, curiosity will be periodically revived, and there will be\na chance for personality to expand a cappella, and so each reunion will\nhave in it something of the surprise, the adventure and the virtuous\nsatanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not come back to precisely\nthe same wife that he parted from, and the wife will not welcome\nprecisely the same husband. Even supposing them to have gone on\nsubstantially as if together, they will have gone on out of sight and\nhearing of each other, Thus each will find the other, to some extent at\nleast, a stranger, and hence a bit challenging, and hence a bit\ncharming. The scheme has merit. More, it has been tried often, and with\nsuccess. It is, indeed, a familiar observation that the happiest\ncouples are those who are occasionally separated, and the fact has been\nembalmed in the trite maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder.\nPerhaps not actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more\ncurious, more eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the\nwidespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the\naverage couple cannot afford a double establishment, even temporarily.\nThe other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the envy and\nill-nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a gabbling of\nscandal. The world invariably suspects the worst. Let man and wife\nseparate to save their happiness from suffocation in the kitchen, the\ndining room and the connubial chamber, and it will immediately conclude\nthat the corpse is already laid out in the drawing-room.\n\n\n\n\n28. Woman as Wife\n\n\nThis boredom of marriage, however, is not nearly so dangerous a menace\nto the institution as Mrs. Cox, with evangelistic enthusiasm, permits\nherself to think it is. It bears most harshly upon the wife, who is\nalmost always the more intelligent of the pair; in the case of the\nhusband its pains are usually lightened by that sentimentality with\nwhich men dilute the disagreeable, particularly in marriage. Moreover,\nthe average male gets his living by such depressing devices that\nboredom becomes a sort of natural state to him. A man who spends six or\neight hours a day acting as teller in a bank, or sitting upon the bench\nof a court, or looking to the inexpressibly trivial details of some\nprocess of manufacturing, or writing imbecile articles for a newspaper,\nor managing a tramway, or administering ineffective medicines to stupid\nand uninteresting patients\u2014a man so engaged during all his hours of\nlabour, which means a normal, typical man, is surely not one to be\noppressed unduly by the dull round of domesticity. His wife may bore\nhim hopelessly as mistress, just as any other mistress inevitably bores\na man (though surely not so quickly and so painfully as a lover bores a\nwoman), but she is not apt to bore him so badly in her other\ncapacities. What he commonly complains about in her, in truth, is not\nthat she tires him by her monotony, but that she tires him by her\nvariety\u2014not that she is too static, but that she is too dynamic. He is\nweary when he gets home, and asks only the dull peace of a hog in a\ncomfortable sty. This peace is broken by the greater restlessness of\nhis wife, the fruit of her greater intellectual resilience and\ncuriosity.\n\nOf far more potency as a cause of connubial discord is the general\ninefficiency of a woman at the business of what is called keeping\nhouse\u2014a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities. As I\nhave argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for mastering\nthese technicalities than men; the enterprise always costs them more\neffort, and they are never able to reinforce mere diligent application\nwith that obtuse enthusiasm which men commonly bring to their tawdry\nand childish concerns. But in addition to their natural incapacity,\nthere is a reluctance based upon a deficiency in incentive, and\ndeficiency in incentive is due to the maudlin sentimentality with which\nmen regard marriage. In this sentimentality lie the germs of most of\nthe evils which beset the institution in Christendom, and particularly\nin the United States, where sentiment is always carried to inordinate\nlengths. Having abandoned the mediaeval concept of woman as temptress\nthe men of the Nordic race have revived the correlative mediaeval\nconcept of woman as angel and to bolster up that character they have\ncreate for her a vast and growing mass of immunities culminating of\nlate years in the astounding doctrine that, under the contract of\nmarriage, all the duties lie upon the man and all the privileges\nappertain to the woman. In part this doctrine has been established by\nthe intellectual enterprise and audacity of woman. Bit by bit, playing\nupon masculine stupidity, sentimentality and lack of strategical sense,\nthey have formulated it, developed it, and entrenched it in custom and\nlaw. But in other part it is the plain product of the donkeyish vanity\nwhich makes almost every man view the practical incapacity of his wife\nas, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and\nconsideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and\nefficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will\nfigure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio,\nentirely discharged from every unpleasant labour and responsibility.\n\n\n\n\n29. Marriage and the Law\n\n\nThis was not always the case. No more than a century ago, even by\nAmerican law, the most sentimental in the world, the husband was the\nhead of the family firm, lordly and autonomous. He had authority over\nthe purse-strings, over the children, and even over his wife. He could\nenforce his mandates by appropriate punishment, including the corporal.\nHis sovereignty and dignity were carefully guarded by legislation, the\nproduct of thousands of years of experience and ratiocination. He was\nsafeguarded in his self-respect by the most elaborate and efficient\ndevices, and they had the support of public opinion.\n\nConsider, now, the changes that a few short years have wrought. Today,\nby the laws of most American states\u2014laws proposed, in most cases, by\nmaudlin and often notoriously extravagant agitators, and passerby\nsentimental orgy\u2014all of the old rights of the husband have been\nconverted into obligations. He no longer has any control over his\nwife\u2019s property; she may devote its income to the family or she may\nsquander that income upon idle follies, and he can do nothing. She has\nequal authority in regulating and disposing of the children, and in the\ncase of infants, more than he. There is no law compelling her to do her\nshare of the family labour: she may spend her whole time in cinema\ntheatres or gadding about the shops as she will. She cannot be forced\nto perpetuate the family name if she does not want to. She cannot be\nattacked with masculine weapons, e.g., fists and firearms, when she\nmakes an assault with feminine weapons, e.g., snuffling, invective and\nsabotage. Finally, no lawful penalty can be visited upon her if she\nfails absolutely, either deliberately or through mere incapacity, to\nkeep the family habitat clean, the children in order, and the victuals\neatable.\n\nNow view the situation of the husband. The instant he submits to\nmarriage, his wife obtains a large and inalienable share in his\nproperty, including all he may acquire in future; in most American\nstates the minimum is one-third, and, failing children, one-half. He\ncannot dispose of his real estate without her consent; he cannot even\ndeprive her of it by will. She may bring up his children carelessly and\nidiotically, cursing them with abominable manners and poisoning their\nnascent minds against him, and he has no redress. She may neglect her\nhome, gossip and lounge about all day, put impossible food upon his\ntable, steal his small change, pry into his private papers, hand over\nhis home to the Periplaneta americana, accuse him falsely of\npreposterous adulteries, affront his friends, and lie about him to the\nneighbours\u2014and he can do nothing. She may compromise his honour by\nindecent dressing, write letters to moving-picture actors, and expose\nhim to ridicule by going into politics\u2014and he is helpless.\n\nLet him undertake the slightest rebellion, over and beyond mere\nrhetorical protest, and the whole force of the state comes down upon\nhim. If he corrects her with the bastinado or locks her up, he is good\nfor six months in jail. If he cuts off her revenues, he is incarcerated\nuntil he makes them good. And if he seeks surcease in flight, taking\nthe children with him, he is pursued by the gendarmerie, brought back\nto his duties, and depicted in the public press as a scoundrelly\nkidnapper, fit only for the knout. In brief, she is under no legal\nnecessity whatsoever to carry out her part of the compact at the altar\nof God, whereas he faces instant disgrace and punishment for the\nslightest failure to observe its last letter. For a few grave crimes of\ncommission, true enough, she may be proceeded against. Open adultery is\na recreation that is denied to her. She cannot poison her husband. She\nmust not assault him with edged tools, or leave him altogether, or\nstrip off her few remaining garments and go naked. But for the vastly\nmore various and numerous crimes of omission\u2014and in sum they are more\nexasperating and intolerable than even overt felony\u2014she cannot be\nbrought to book at all.\n\nThe scene I depict is American, but it will soon extend its horrors to\nall Protestant countries. The newly enfranchised women of every one of\nthem cherish long programs of what they call social improvement, and\npractically the whole of that improvement is based upon devices for\naugmenting their own relative autonomy and power. The English wife of\ntradition, so thoroughly a femme covert, is being displaced by a\ngadabout, truculent, irresponsible creature, full of strange new ideas\nabout her rights, and strongly disinclined to submit to her husband\u2019s\nauthority, or to devote herself honestly to the upkeep of his house, or\nto bear him a biological sufficiency of heirs. And the German Hausfrau,\nonce so innocently consecrated to Kirche, Kuche und Kinder, is going\nthe same way.\n\n\n\n\n30. The Emancipated Housewife\n\n\nWhat has gone on in the United States during the past two generations\nis full of lessons and warnings for the rest of the world. The American\nhousewife of an earlier day was famous for her unremitting diligence.\nShe not only cooked, washed and ironed; she also made shift to master\nsuch more complex arts as spinning, baking and brewing. Her expertness,\nperhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she made a\ngallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new\nenlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is\nnot only incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her\ncontrol); she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious\ndischarge of her few remaining duties is, in some vague way,\ndiscreditable and degrading. To call her a good cook, I daresay, was\nnever anything but flattery; the early American cuisine was probably a\nfearful thing, indeed. But today the flattery turns into a sort of\nlibel, and she resents it, or, at all events, does not welcome it. I\nused to know an American literary man, educated on the Continent, who\nmarried a woman because she had exceptional gifts in this department.\nYears later, at one of her dinners, a friend of her husband\u2019s tried to\nplease her by mentioning the fact, to which he had always been privy.\nBut instead of being complimented, as a man might have been if told\nthat his wife had married him because he was a good lawyer, or surgeon,\nor blacksmith, this unusual housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of\nusualness, denounced the guest as a liar, ordered him out of the house,\nand threatened to leave her husband.\n\nThis disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as\nwell be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character of\na definite cult in the United States, and the stray woman who attends\nto them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she is\napt to be dismissed as a \u201cbrood sow\u201d (I quote literally, craving\nabsolution for the phrase: a jury of men during the late war, on very\nthin patriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she favours her\nlord with viable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of\nAmerican cookery\u2014a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a\nFrench hack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would\nbrain her with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an\nAmerican home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and\ncompetently cooked, becomes almost as startling as to meet a Y. M. C.\nA. secretary in a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing, in\nmost of the large cities of the Republic, scarcely has any existence.\nIf the average American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a\nrestaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the\nsociety of charming and well-behaved children, he has to go to an\norphan asylum. Only the immigrant can take his case and invite his soul\nwithin his own house.\n\n\n\n\nIV. Woman Suffrage\n\n\n\n\n31. The Crowning Victory\n\n\nIt is my sincere hope that nothing I have here exhibited will be\nmistaken by the nobility and gentry for moral indignation. No such\nfeeling, in truth, is in my heart. Moral judgments, as old Friedrich\nused to say, are foreign to my nature. Setting aside the vast herd\nwhich shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the\nminority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin\nis very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an\nexcess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the\naverage wine-bibber is a far better fellow than the average\nprohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the\naverage poor drudge, and that the worst white, slave trader of my\nacquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader. In the same\nway I am convinced that the average woman, whatever her deficiencies,\nis greatly superior to the average man. The very ease with which she\ndefies and swindles him in several capital situations of life is the\nclearest of proofs of her general superiority. She did not obtain her\npresent high immunities as a gift from the gods, but only after a long\nand often bitter fight, and in that fight she exhibited forensic and\ntactical talents of a truly admirable order. There was no weakness of\nman that she did not penetrate and take advantage of. There was no\ntrick that she did not put to effective use. There was no device so\nbold and inordinate that it daunted her.\n\nThe latest and greatest fruit of this feminine talent for combat is the\nextension of the suffrage, now universal in the Protestant countries,\nand even advancing in those of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit\nwas garnered, not by an attack en masse, but by a mere foray. I believe\nthat the majority of women, for reasons that I shall presently expose,\nwere not eager for the extension, and regard it as of small value\ntoday. They know that they can get what they want without going to the\nactual polls for it; moreover, they are out of sympathy with most of\nthe brummagem reforms advocated by the professional suffragists, male\nand female. The mere statement of the current suffragist platform, with\nits long list of quack sure-cures for all the sorrows of the world, is\nenough to make them smile sadly. In particular, they are sceptical of\nall reforms that depend upon the mass action of immense numbers of\nvoters, large sections of whom are wholly devoid of sense. A normal\nwoman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she\nbelieves in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be\na class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never\ncoalesce. Nor is she susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon\nwhich the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very\ndramatically in the United States at the national election of 1920, in\nwhich the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and\nignominious defeat\u2014the first general election in which all American\nwomen could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the\nside of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised\nwomen voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for\ndeception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effort\nto fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will remember\nhis bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women\nbelieve in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practically\nevery woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That is to\nsay, she has been vastly disappointed, either by failing to nab some\npretty fellow that her heart was set on, or, worse, by actually nabbing\nhim, and then discovering him to be a bounder or an imbecile, or both.\nThus walking the world with broken hearts, women know that the injury\nis not serious. When he pulled out the Vox angelica stop and began\nsobbing and snuffling and blowing his nose tragically, the learned\ndoctor simply drove all the women voters into the arms of the Hon.\nWarren Gamaliel Harding, who was too stupid to invent any issues at\nall, but simply took negative advantage of the distrust aroused by his\nopponent.\n\nOnce the women of Christendom become at ease in the use of the ballot,\nand get rid of the preposterous harridans who got it for them and who\nnow seek to tell them what to do with it, they will proceed to a\nscotching of many of the sentimentalities which currently corrupt\npolitics. For one thing, I believe that they will initiate measures\nagainst democracy\u2014the worst evil of the present-day world. When they\ncome to the matter, they will certainly not ordain the extension of the\nsuffrage to children, criminals and the insane in brief, to those ever\nmore inflammable and knavish than the male hinds who have enjoyed it\nfor so long; they will try to bring about its restriction, bit by bit,\nto the small minority that is intelligent, agnostic and\nself-possessed\u2014say six women to one man. Thus, out of their greater\ninstinct for reality, they will make democracy safe for a democracy.\n\nThe curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his\nstupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He is forever\nembracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all that have gone\nbefore. But where is the delusion that women cherish\u2014I mean habitually,\nfirmly, passionately? Who will draw up a list of propositions, held and\nmaintained by them in sober earnest, that are obviously not true? (I\nallude here, of course, to genuine women, not to suffragettes and other\nsuch pseudo-males). As for me, I should not like to undertake such a\nlist. I know of nothing, in fact, that properly belongs to it. Women,\nas a class, believe in none of the ludicrous rights, duties and pious\nobligations that men are forever gabbling about. Their superior\nintelligence is in no way more eloquently demonstrated than by their\nironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude\ntoward men is one of aloof disdain, and their habitual attitude toward\nwhat men believe in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is\nsubstantially the same. It takes twice as long to convert a body of\nwomen to some new fallacy as it takes to convert a body of men, and\neven then they halt, hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The\nwomen of Colorado had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to\nprohibition sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt\nit; their own majority voice was against it to the end. During the\ninterval the men voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had\ngone shrieking to the mourners\u2019 bench. In California, enfranchised in\n1911, the women rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National\nprohibition was adopted during the war without their votes\u2014they did not\nget the franchise throughout the country until it was in the\nConstitution\u2014and it is without their support today. The American man,\ndespite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very much afraid of\nthe police, and in all the regions where prohibition is now actually\nenforced he makes excuses for his poltroonish acceptance of it by\narguing that it will do him good in the long run, or that he ought to\nsacrifice his private desires to the common weal. But it is almost\nimpossible to find an American woman of any culture who is in favour of\nit. One and all, they are opposed to the turmoil and corruption that it\ninvolves, and resentful of the invasion of liberty underlying it. Being\nrealists, they have no belief in any program which proposes to cure the\nnatural swinishness of men by legislation. Every normal woman believes,\nand quite accurately, that the average man is very much like her\nhusband, John, and she knows very well that John is a weak, silly and\nknavish fellow, and that any effort to convert him into an archangel\novernight is bound to come to grief. As for her view of the average\ncreature of her own sex, it is marked by a cynicism so penetrating and\nso destructive that a clear statement of it would shock beyond\nendurance.\n\n\n\n\n32. The Woman Voter\n\n\nThus there is not the slightest chance that the enfranchised women of\nProtestantdom, once they become at ease in the use of the ballot, will\ngive any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to lead and\ninstruct them in politics. Years ago I predicted that these\nsuffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They\nare now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to\nadvocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly\npreposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh at\nthem; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the\nold-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great\npolitical parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply\nbecomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is\nnothing but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the sole\nintelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in\npublic office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister\nwho joins the other camorra. Parenthetically, I may add that all of the\nladies to take to this political immolation seem to me to be\nfrightfully plain. I know those of England, Germany and Scandinavia\nonly by their portraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the\nUnited States I have studied at close range at various large political\ngatherings, including the two national conventions first following the\nextension of the suffrage. I am surely no fastidious fellow\u2014in fact, I\nprefer a certain melancholy decay in women to the loud, circus-wagon\nbrilliance of youth\u2014but I give you my word that there were not five\nwomen at either national convention who could have embraced me in\ncamera without first giving me chloral. Some of the chief stateswomen\non show, in fact, were so downright hideous that I felt faint every\ntime I had to look at them.\n\nThe reform-monging suffragists seem to be equally devoid of the more\ncaressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but they\ncertainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know how to dress\ntheir hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged\nlubricity of the male-the single standard, medical certificates for\nbridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I believe, is\nmere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued sets up the\ndoctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a\nfelony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes\nmasculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to\ntake care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are\nbold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness\nmakes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being\nharassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women\nthat I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her\nright senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;\nwhenever they hear of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet more,\nthe normal woman of lively charms, roving about among men, always tries\nto draw the admiration of those who have previously admired elsewhere;\nshe prefers the professional to the amateur, and estimates her skill by\nthe attractiveness of the huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. The\niron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get\none wholly without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude\nmanoeuvres make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of pulchritude\nand amiability. All such suffragists (save a few miraculous beauties)\nmarry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up with\nthe sort of castoffs who are almost ready to fall in love with lady\nphysicists, embryologists, and embalmers.\n\nFortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignant\nviragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women until\nhell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the latter\nenterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love would play\nout, for not many men take any notice of women spontaneously. Nine men\nout of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if there were no women in\nthe world, once they had grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all\nmen are their happiest when they are engaged upon activities\u2014for\nexample, drinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure\u2014to which\nwomen are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce them from\nsuch celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in front of the\nhound. The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist\nalarmists talk about is to shave the heads of all the pretty girls in\nthe world, and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their teeth, and put\nthem in khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to wear\nscents, or to use lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual,\nmistakes the fish for the fly.\n\n\n\n\n33. A Glance Into the Future\n\n\nThe present public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is chiefly due to\nthe fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very\nstupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women, and so\nshow them politeness. But soon or late\u2014and probably disconcertingly\nsoon\u2014the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon them\nand depose them, and thereafter the woman vote will be no longer at the\ndisposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes\ncontinue to fill the newspapers with nonsense, once that change has\nbeen effected, it will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots,\nlike the Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists\nand other such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extension\nof the suffrage in all of the American states that made it before the\nnational enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated in the nation\nat large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women are not\ntaken in by quackery as readily as men are; the hardness of their shell\nof logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For one\nwoman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer by some\nswindling patent medicine, there are at least twenty masculine\nwitnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, Lydia\nPinkham\u2019s Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies for\nspecifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, are\nchiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist tells me, by men.\n\nMy own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is\nthat the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none the\nless real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the end,\nin our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligent\ngrappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is\nalmost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, not\nin proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible,\nbut in proportion as she excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases,\nand the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences against\nthem. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins;\nthe male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright at\na new one and electing some mountebank to lay it. For a hundred years\npast the people of the United States, the most terrible existing\ndemocratic state, have scarcely had a political campaign that was not\nbased upon some preposterous fear\u2014first of slavery and then of the\nmanumitted slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of\nthe old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they\nare not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily\ninto such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to\nsnuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that\nwould cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off\nmobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this\nsniffing. What we need\u2014and in the end it must come\u2014is a sniff so\npowerful that it will call a halt upon the navigation of the ship from\nthe forecastle, and put a competent staff on the bridge, and lay a\ncourse that is describable in intelligible terms.\n\nThe officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democracies\nbefore the extension of the suffrage were usually chosen, not for their\ncompetence but for their mere talent for idiocy; they reflected\naccurately the male weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental\nand feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what happened in a\nsalient case. Every four years the male voters of the United States\nchose from among themselves one who was put forward as the man most\nfit, of all resident men, to be the first citizen of the commonwealth.\nHe was chosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were\nthoroughly canvassed; very large powers and dignities were put into his\nhands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman?\nWe found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a\nman of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile\nthat they must needs disgust a sentient suckling\u2014in brief, a spouting\ngeyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported\nassumptions and hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and\nplatitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were\nflattered when they were called comprehensible\u2014specifically, a Wilson,\na Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.\n\nThis was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of\ncomparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a woman of\nlike fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh them, for\nsense, for shrewdness, for intelligent grasp of obscure relations, for\nintellectual honesty and courage, with the ideas of the average\nmidwife.\n\n\n\n\n34. The Suffragette\n\n\nI have spoken with some disdain of the suffragette. What is the matter\nwith her, fundamentally, is simple: she is a woman who has stupidly\ncarried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to\nsuch a point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes\nher blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary character. In\nparticular, she centres this frenzy of hers upon one definite\nprivilege, to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity in amour, the\nmodern droit du seigneur. Read the books of the chief lady Savonarolas,\nand you will find running through them an hysterical denunciation of\nwhat is called the double standard of morality; there is, indeed, a\nwhole literature devoted exclusively to it. The existence of this\ndouble standard seems to drive the poor girls half frantic. They bellow\nraucously for its abrogation, and demand that the frivolous male be\nvisited with even more idiotic penalties than those which now visit the\naberrant female; some even advocate gravely his mutilation by surgery,\nthat he may be forced into rectitude by a physical disability for sin.\n\nAll this, of course, is hocus-pocus, and the judicious are not deceived\nby it for an instant. What these virtuous bel dames actually desire in\ntheir hearts is not that the male be reduced to chemical purity, but\nthat the franchise of dalliance be extended to themselves. The most\nelementary acquaintance with Freudian psychology exposes their secret\nanimus. Unable to ensnare males under the present system, or at all\nevents, unable to ensnare males sufficiently appetizing to arouse the\nenvy of other women, they leap to the theory that it would be easier if\nthe rules were less exacting. This theory exposes their deficiency in\nthe chief character of their sex: accurate observation. The fact is\nthat, even if they possessed the freedom that men are supposed to\npossess, they would still find it difficult to achieve their ambition,\nfor the average man, whatever his stupidity, is at least keen enough in\njudgment to prefer a single wink from a genuinely attractive woman to\nthe last delirious favours of the typical suffragette. Thus the theory\nof the whoopers and snorters of the cause, in its esoteric as well as\nin its public aspect, is unsound. They are simply women who, in their\ntastes and processes of mind, are two-thirds men, and the fact explains\ntheir failure to achieve presentable husbands, or even consolatory\nbetrayal, quite as effectively as it explains the ready credence they\ngive to political and philosophical absurdities.\n\n\n\n\n35. A Mythical Dare-Devil\n\n\nThe truth is that the picture of male carnality that such women conjure\nup belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already observed in\ndealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on\na somewhat higher plane. As they depict him in their fevered treatises\non illegitimacy, white-slave trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the\naverage male adult of the Christian and cultured countries leads a life\nof gaudy lubricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to another,\nand with an almost endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers,\ncharwomen, parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison\nand despair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it,\nis the life of a leading actor in a boulevard revue. He is a\npolygamous, multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and\nunconscionable debauche, a monster of promiscuity; prodigiously\nunfaithful to his wife, and even to his friends\u2019 wives; fathomlessly\nlibidinous and superbly happy.\n\nNeedless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than\na dissertation on major strategy by a military \u201cexpert\u201d promoted from\ndramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak\nwithout any embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough to men\nto get near enough to enough men to know enough about them for their\npurpose they would paralyze the Dorcas societies with no such cajoling\nlibels. As a matter of sober fact, the average man of our time and race\nis quite incapable of all these incandescent and intriguing\ndivertisements. He is far more virtuous than they make him out, far\nless schooled in sin, far less enterprising and ruthless. I do not say,\nof course, that he is pure in heart, for the chances are that he isn\u2019t;\nwhat I do say is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, he is\npure in act, even in the face of temptation. And why? For several main\nreasons, not to go into minor ones. One is that he lacks the courage.\nAnother is that he lacks the money. Another is that he is fundamentally\nmoral, and has a conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he\nhas in him to plunge into any affair save the most casual and sordid;\nit takes more ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to carry it\noff; it takes more money than he can conceal from his consort to\nfinance it. A man may force his actual wife to share the direst\npoverty, but even the least vampirish woman of the third part demands\nto be courted in what, considering his station in life, is the grand\nmanner, and the expenses of that grand manner scare off all save a\nsmall minority of specialists in deception. So long, indeed, as a wife\nknows her husband\u2019s income accurately, she has a sure means of holding\nhim to his oaths.\n\nEven more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of\npoltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other\nhigher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy\nyielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind\nhim. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an\nextra-legal affair\u2014at all events, above the mawkish harmlessness of a\nflirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is of scaling the\nbattlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing it, just as he\nlikes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or climbing the\nMatterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to imagine the thing\ndone, and he admits by winks and blushes that he is a bad one. But at\nthe bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is usually nothing more\nmaterial than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a\nscraping of shins under the table. Let any woman who is disquieted by\nreports of her husband\u2019s derelictions figure to herself how long it\nwould have taken him to propose to her if left to his own enterprise,\nand then let her ask herself if so pusillanimous a creature could be\nimaged in the role of Don Giovanni.\n\nFinally, there is his conscience\u2014the accumulated sediment of ancestral\nfaintheartedness in countless generations, with vague religious fears\nand superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a conscience? Yes,\ndear friends, a conscience. That conscience may be imperfect, inept,\nunintelligent, brummagem. It may be indistinguishable, at times, from\nthe mere fear that someone may be looking. It may be shot through with\nhypocrisy, stupidity, play-acting. But nevertheless, as consciences go\nin Christendom, it is genuinely entitled to the name\u2014and it is always\nin action. A man, remember, is not a being in vacuo; he is the fruit\nand slave of the environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the\nHouse of Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons\nwithout becoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard\nwithout shipping water. One cannot pass through a modern university\nwithout carrying away scars. And by the same token one cannot live and\nhave one\u2019s being in a modern democratic state, year in and year out,\nwithout falling, to some extent at least, under that moral obsession\nwhich is the hall-mark of the mob-man set free. A citizen of such a\nstate, his nose buried in Nietzsche, \u201cMan and Superman,\u201d and other such\nadvanced literature, may caress himself with the notion that he is an\nimmoralist, that his soul is full of soothing sin, that he has cut\nhimself loose from the revelation of God. But all the while there is a\npart of him that remains a sound Christian, a moralist, a right\nthinking and forward-looking man. And that part, in times of stress,\nasserts itself. It may not worry him on ordinary occasions. It may not\nstop him when he swears, or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or\ngoes motoring on Sunday; it may even let him alone when he goes to a\nleg-show. But the moment a concrete Temptress rises before him, her\nnose snow-white, her lips rouged, her eyelashes drooping\nprovokingly\u2014the moment such an abandoned wench has at him, and his lack\nof ready funds begins to conspire with his lack of courage to assault\nand wobble him\u2014at that precise moment his conscience flares into\nfunction, and so finishes his business. First he sees difficulty, then\nhe sees the danger, then he sees wrong. The result is that he slinks\noff in trepidation, and another vampire is baffled of her prey.\n\nIt is, indeed, the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in the\nProtestant regions, that most men are faithful to their wives. You will\na travel a long way before you find a married man who will admit that\nhe is, but the facts are the facts, and I am surely not one to flout\nthem.\n\n\n\n\n36. The Origin of a Delusion\n\n\nThe origin of the delusion that the average man is a Leopold II or\nAugustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig, is\nnot far to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse\nbriefly:\n\n1. The idiotic vanity of men, leading to their eternal boasting, either\nby open lying or sinister hints.\n\n2. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M. C. A.\nsecretaries, and other such libidinous poltroons as to what they would\ndo themselves if they had the courage.\n\n3. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to ditto.\n\nHere you have the genesis of a generalization that gives the less\ncritical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly\naugments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in\nthe discharge of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts\nin an evening ploughing through such books as \u201cThe Memoirs of Fanny\nHill,\u201d Casanova\u2019s Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius\nPetronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises with the\nconviction that life amid the red lights must be one stupendous whirl\nof deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or Piccadilly at night\nare out for revels that would have caused protests in Sodom and\nNineveh, that the average man who chooses hell leads an existence\ncomparable to that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outside the Bible\nclass is packed like a sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that every\nman who doesn\u2019t believe that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his whole\nleisure leaping through the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. \u201cIf I were\nnot saved and anointed of God,\u201d whispers the vice director into his own\near, \u201cthat is what I, the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing.\nThe late King David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late\nKing Edward VII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name\nhas its suggestions. Millions of others go the same route.... Ergo, Up,\nguards, and at \u2019em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order out the\nseachlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred more policemen!\nLet us chase these hell-hounds out of Christendom, and make the world\nsafe for monogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation!\u201d\n\nThus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secret\naspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the\nunconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are\nfree from his other weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of\nresourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vast\nmajority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there, not\nto engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeably\nupon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish\nexperimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world\u2019s fair,\nand go to smutty shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the sort of\nbooks that our vice crusading friend reads. They like to conjure up the\ncharms of carnality, and to help out their somewhat sluggish\nimaginations by actual peeps at it, but when it comes to taking a\nforthright header into the sulphur they usually fail to muster up the\ncourage. For one clerk who succumbs to the houris of the pave, there\nare five hundred who succumb to lack of means, the warnings of the sex\nhygienists, and their own depressing consciences. For one\n\u201cclubman\u201d\u2014i.e., bagman or suburban vestryman\u2014who invades the women\u2019s\nshops, engages the affection of some innocent miss, lures her into\ninfamy and then sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who\nnever get any further than asking the price of cologne water and\ndischarging a few furtive winks. And for one husband of the Nordic race\nwho maintains a blonde chorus girl in oriental luxury around the\ncorner, there are ten thousand who are as true to their wives, year in\nand year out, as so many convicts in the death-house, and would be no\nmore capable of any such loathsome malpractice, even in the face of\nfree opportunity, than they would be of cutting off the ears of their\nyoung.\n\nI am sorry to blow up so much romance. In particular, I am sorry for\nthe suffragettes who specialize in the double standard, for when they\nget into pantaloons at last, and have the new freedom, they will\ndiscover to their sorrow that they have been pursuing a chimera\u2014that\nthere is really no such animal as the male anarchist they have been\ndenouncing and envying\u2014that the wholesale fornication of man, at least\nunder Christian democracy, has little more actual existence than honest\nadvertising or sound cooking. They have followed the porno maniacs in\nembracing a piece of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it\nwill turn to ashes in their arms.\n\nTheir error, as I say, lies in overestimating the courage and\nenterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere physical valour, a\nquality in which the average man is far exceeded by the average jackal\nor wolf, have more of both. If the consequences, to a man, of the\nslightest descent from virginity were one-tenth as swift and barbarous\nas the consequences to a young girl in like case, it would take a\ndivision of infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that lex\ntalionis in the whole western world. As things stand today, even with\nthe odds so greatly in his favour, the average male hesitates and is\nthus not lost. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders if you\ndoubt it. They show that the weekly receipts of female recruits upon\nthe wharves of sin are always more than the demand; that more young\nwomen enter upon the vermilion career than can make respectable livings\nat it; that the pressure of the temptation they hold out is the chief\nfactor in corrupting our undergraduates. What was the first act of the\nAmerican Army when it began summoning its young clerks and college boys\nand plough hands to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off a\nso-called moral zone around each camp, and to secure it with trenches\nand machine guns, and to put a lot of volunteer termagants to\npatrolling it, that the assembled jeunesse might be protected in their\nrectitude from the immoral advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor\nworking girls.\n\n\n\n\n37. Women as Martyrs\n\n\nI have given three reasons for the prosperity of the notion that man is\na natural polygamist, bent eternally upon fresh dives into Lake of\nBrimstone No. 7. To these another should be added: the thirst for\nmartyrdom which shows itself in so many women, particularly under the\nhigher forms of civilization. This unhealthy appetite, in fact, may be\ndescribed as one of civilization\u2019s diseases; it is almost unheard of in\nmore primitive societies. The savage woman, unprotected by her rude\nculture and forced to heavy and incessant labour, has retained her\nphysical strength and with it her honesty and self-respect. The\ncivilized woman, gradually degenerated by a greater ease, and helped\ndown that hill by the pretensions of civilized man, has turned her\ninfirmity into a virtue, and so affects a feebleness that is actually\nfar beyond the reality. It is by this route that she can most\neffectively disarm masculine distrust, and get what she wants. Man is\nflattered by any acknowledgment, however insincere, of his superior\nstrength and capacity. He likes to be leaned upon, appealed to,\nfollowed docilely. And this tribute to his might caresses him on the\npsychic plane as well as on the plane of the obviously physical. He not\nonly enjoys helping a woman over a gutter; he also enjoys helping her\ndry her tears. The result is the vast pretence that characterizes the\nrelations of the sexes under civilization\u2014the double pretence of man\u2019s\ncunning and autonomy and of woman\u2019s dependence and deference. Man is\nalways looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a\nshoulder to put her head on.\n\nThis feminine affectation, of course, has gradually taken on the force\nof a fixed habit, and so it has got a certain support, by a familiar\nprocess of self-delusion, in reality. The civilized woman inherits that\nhabit as she inherits her cunning. She is born half convinced that she\nis really as weak and helpless as she later pretends to be, and the\nprevailing folklore offers her endless corroboration. One of the\nresultant phenomena is the delight in martyrdom that one so often finds\nin women, and particularly in the least alert and introspective of\nthem. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in suffering; it subtly\npleases them to be hard put upon; they like to picture themselves as\nslaughtered saints. Thus they always find something to complain of; the\nvery conditions of domestic life give them a superabundance of clinical\nmaterial. And if, by any chance, such material shows a falling off,\nthey are uneasy and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct\nis not reasonably open to question, and she will invent mythical\noffences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she will be\nplunged into the utmost misery and humiliation. This fact probably\nexplains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not too bad, but too\ngood. For public opinion among women, remember, does not favour the\nwoman who is full of a placid contentment and has no masculine torts to\nreport; if she says that her husband is wholly satisfactory she is\nlooked upon as a numskull even more dense that he is himself. A man,\nspeaking of his wife to other men, always praises her extravagantly.\nBoasting about her soothes his vanity; he likes to stir up the envy of\nhis fellows. But when two women talk of their husbands it is mainly\natrocities that they describe. The most esteemed woman gossip is the\none with the longest and most various repertoire of complaints.\n\nThis yearning for martyrdom explains one of the commonly noted\ncharacters of women: their eager flair for bearing physical pain. As we\nhave seen, they have actually a good deal less endurance than men;\nmassive injuries shock them more severely and kill them more quickly.\nBut when acute algesia is unaccompanied by any profounder phenomena\nthey are undoubtedly able to bear it with a far greater show of\nresignation. The reason is not far to seek. In pain a man sees only an\ninvasion of his liberty, strength and self-esteem. It floors him,\nmasters him, and makes him ridiculous. But a woman, more subtle and\ndevious in her processes of mind, senses the dramatic effect that the\nspectacle of her suffering makes upon the spectators, already filled\nwith compassion for her feebleness. She would thus much rather be\npraised for facing pain with a martyr\u2019s fortitude than for devising\nsome means of getting rid of it--the first thought of a man. No woman\ncould have invented chloroform, nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both\ndrugs offer an escape from situations and experiences that, even in\naggravated forms, women relish. The woman who drinks as men drink\u2014that\nis, to raise her threshold of sensation and ease the agony of\nliving\u2014nearly always shows a deficiency in feminine characters and an\nundue preponderance of masculine characters. Almost invariably you will\nfind her vain and boastful, and full of other marks of that bombastic\nexhibitionism which is so sterlingly male.\n\n\n\n\n38. Pathological Effects\n\n\nThis feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on a\ndownright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist.\nWomen show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman under our\nChristian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is heavy with\nrepression and dissimulation, and this repression and dissimulation, in\nthe long run, cannot fail to produce effects that are indistinguishable\nfrom disease. You will find some of them described at length in any\nhandbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul\nBjerre, argue, indeed, that womanliness itself, as it is encountered\nunder Christianity, is a disease. All women suffer from a suppressed\nrevolt against the inhibitions forced upon them by our artificial\nculture, and this suppressed revolt, by well known Freudian means,\nproduces a complex of mental symptoms that is familiar to all of us. At\none end of the scale we observe the suffragette, with her grotesque\nadoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and her\nhysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not put to\nuse if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling and\nneurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies and\nher pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long ago, this is a man\u2019s\nworld. Women have broken many of their old chains, but they are still\nenmeshed in a formidable network of man-made taboos and\nsentimentalities, and it will take them another generation, at least,\nto get genuine freedom. That this is true is shown by the deep unrest\nthat yet marks the sex, despite its recent progress toward social,\npolitical and economic equality. It is almost impossible to find a man\nwho honestly wishes that he were a woman, but almost every woman, at\nsome time or other in her life, is gnawed by a regret that she is not a\nman.\n\nTwo of the hardest things that women have to bear are (a) the stupid\nmasculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority, or\neven their equality, or even their possession of a normal human\nequipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine doctrine\nthat they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrate,\nwithout the natural instincts and appetites of the order\u2014to adapt a\nphrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental and almost gaseous\nmammals, and marked by a complete lack of certain salient mammalian\ncharacters. The first imbecility has already concerned us at length.\nOne finds traces of it even in works professedly devoted to disposing\nof it. In one such book, for example, I come upon this: \u201cWhat all the\nskill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War\nfailed to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful\nfemininity and nobility of soul.\u201d In other words, by her possession of\nsome recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the\nordinary mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and\npreposterous. Miss Nightingale accomplished her useful work, not by\nmagic, but by hard common sense. The problem before her was simply one\nof organization. Many men had tackled it, and all of them had failed\nstupendously. What she did was to bring her feminine sharpness of wit,\nher feminine clear-thinking, to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded\nquickly, and once it had been brought to order it was easy for other\npersons to carry on what she had begun. But the opinion of a man\u2019s\nworld still prefers to credit her success to some mysterious angelical\nquality, unstatable in lucid terms and having no more reality than the\ndivine inspiration of an archbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and\naccurate intelligence is thus conveniently put upon the table, and the\namour propre of man is kept inviolate. To confess frankly that she had\nmore sense than any male Englishman of her generation would be to utter\na truth too harsh to be bearable.\n\nThe second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, already\ndiscussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct\u2014that they submit\nto the odious caresses of the lubricious male only by a powerful effort\nof the will, and with the sole object of discharging their duty to\nposterity. It would be impossible to go into this delusion with proper\ncandour and at due length in a work designed for reading aloud in the\ndomestic circle; all I can do is to refer the student to the books of\nany competent authority on the psychology of sex, say Ellis, or to the\nconfidences (if they are obtainable) of any complaisant bachelor of his\nacquaintance.\n\n\n\n\n39. Women as Christians\n\n\nThe glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly favourable to\nwomen. He lifted them to equality before the Lord when their very\npossession of souls was still doubted by the majority of rival\ntheologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set value upon\ntheir sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their sex, a lady\nformerly in public life, was among His regular advisers. Mariolatry is\nthus by no means the invention of the mediaeval popes, as Protestant\ntheologians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is plainly\ndiscernible in the Four Gospels. What the mediaeval popes actually\ninvented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed the\nelements of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of women\u2019s inferiority,\nthe precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, for\nsound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they had to\nsupport it by depicting all traffic with women in the light of a\nhazardous and ignominious business. The result was the deliberate\norganization and development of the theory of female triviality, lack\nof responsibility and general looseness of mind. Woman became a sort of\ndevil, but without the admired intelligence of the regular demons. The\nappearance of women saints, however, offered a constant and\nembarrassing criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women\nwere fit to sit upon the right hand of God\u2014and they were often proving\nit, and forcing the church to acknowledge it\u2014then surely all women\ncould not be as bad as the books made them out. There thus arose the\nconcept of the angelic woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full\nlength in the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the end\nwas a sort of double doctrine, first that women were devils and\nsecondly that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has merged,\nas we have seen, into a compromise dogma in modern times. By that dogma\nit is held, on the one hand, that women are unintelligent and immoral,\nand on the other hand, that they are free from all those weaknesses of\nthe flesh which distinguish men. This, roughly speaking, is the notion\nof the average male numskull today.\n\nChristianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but with\nthe weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore, at bottom,\ntheir enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct, was their\nfriend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that have bound\nthem for a thousand years they show appreciation of the fact. Women,\nindeed, are not naturally religious, and they are growing less and less\nreligious as year chases year. Their ordinary devotion has little if\nany pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice, force on them by\nthe masculine notion that an appearance of holiness is proper to their\nlowly station, and a masculine feeling that church-going somehow keeps\nthem in order, and out of doings that would be less reassuring. When\nthey exhibit any genuine religious fervour, its sexual character is\nusually so obvious that even the majority of men are cognizant of it.\nWomen never go flocking ecstatically to a church in which the agent of\nGod in the pulpit is an elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When\none finds them driven to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and\nweeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the\nwhole vicinage up to grace, and spending hours on their knees in\nhysterical abasement before the heavenly throne, it is quite safe to\nassume, even without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has\nworked the miracle is a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more\naphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in modern\ntimes have been men of suave and ingratiating habit, and the great\nmajority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and down, have been taken,\nsoon or late, in transactions far more suitable to the boudoir than to\nthe footstool of the Almighty. Their famous killings have always been\nmade among the silliest sort of women\u2014the sort, in brief, who fall so\nshort of the normal acumen of their sex that they are bemused by mere\nbeauty in men.\n\nSuch women are in a minority, and so the sex shows a good deal fewer\nreligious enthusiasts per mille than the sex of sentiment and belief.\nAttending, several years ago, the gladiatorial shows of the Rev. Dr.\nBilly Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I was constantly\nstruck by the great preponderance of males in the pen devoted to the\nsaved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers came swarming to the\naltar, loudly bawling for help against their sins, but the women were\nanything but numerous, and the few who appeared were chiefly either\nchlorotic adolescents or pathetic old Saufschwestern. For six nights\nrunning I sat directly beneath the gifted exhorter without seeing a\nsingle female convert of what statisticians call the child-bearing\nage\u2014that is, the age of maximum intelligence and charm. Among the male\nsimpletons bagged by his yells during this time were the president of a\nrailroad, half a dozen rich bankers and merchants, and the former\ngovernor of an American state. But not a woman of comparable position\nor dignity. Not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care to\nchuck under the chin.\n\nThis cynical view of religious emotionalism, and with it of the whole\nstock of ecclesiastical balderdash, is probably responsible, at least\nin part, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal\ncareer. In those Christian sects which still bar them from the\npulpit\u2014usually on the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not\nequal to its alleged demands upon the morals and the intellect\u2014one\nnever hears of them protesting against the prohibition; they are quite\ncontent to leave the degrading imposture to men, who are better fitted\nfor it by talent and conscience. And in those baroque sects, chiefly\nAmerican, which admit them they show no eagerness to put on the stole\nand chasuble. When the first clergywoman appeared in the United States,\nit was predicted by alarmists that men would be driven out of the\npulpit by the new competition. Nothing of the sort has occurred, nor is\nit in prospect. The whole corps of female divines in the country might\nbe herded into one small room. Women, when literate at all, are far too\nintelligent to make effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of\nreality is in endless opposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade,\nand their cynical humour stands against the snorting that is\ninseparable from pulpit oratory.\n\nThose women who enter upon the religious life are almost invariably\nmoved by some motive distinct from mere pious inflammation. It is a\ncommonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic countries, girls are driven into\nconvents by economic considerations or by disasters of amour far\noftener than they are drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives\nof the female saints, and you will see how many of them tried marriage\nand failed at it before ever they turned to religion. In Protestant\nlands very few women adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few\na secular impulse is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly\novercome by a desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands is\nnearly invariably found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a\ntheory that it would be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In\npoint of fact, she duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it\nimpossible to get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China,\nSenegal and Somaliland, with no white competition present, it is\nequally impossible to fail.\n\n\n\n\n40. Piety as a Social Habit\n\n\nWhat remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a social\nhabit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other and more\ninviting divertissements. If you have ever observed the women of Spain\nand Italy at their devotions you need not be told how much the worship\nof God may be a mere excuse for relaxation and gossip. These women, in\ntheir daily lives, are surrounded by a formidable network of mediaeval\ntaboos; their normal human desire for ease and freedom in intercourse\nis opposed by masculine distrust and superstition; they meet no\nstrangers; they see and hear nothing new. In the house of the Most High\nthey escape from that vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders\nwith a crowd. Here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and\nstretch their spiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some\nsort of contact with men relatively more affable, cultured and charming\nthan their husbands and fathers\u2014to wit, with the rev. clergy.\n\nElsewhere in Christendom, though women are not quite so relentlessly\nwatched and penned up, they feel much the same need of variety and\nexcitement, and both are likewise on tap in the temples of the Lord. No\none, I am sure, need be told that the average missionary society or\nchurch sewing circle is not primarily a religious organization. Its\nactual purpose is precisely that of the absurd clubs and secret orders\nto which the lower and least resourceful classes of men belong: it\noffers a means of refreshment, of self-expression, of personal display,\nof political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor happens to\nbe interesting, of discreet and almost lawful intrigue. In the course\nof a life largely devoted to the study of pietistic phenomena, I have\nnever met a single woman who cared an authentic damn for the actual\nheathen. The attraction in their salvation is always almost purely\nsocial. Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and\nconvicts go to church.\n\nFinally, there is the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most parts of\nChristendom, holds out the only bait of beauty that the inhabitants are\never cognizant of. It offers music, dim lights, relatively ambitious\narchitecture, eloquence, formality and mystery, the caressing\nmeaninglessness that is at the heart of poetry. Women are far more\nresponsive to such things than men, who are ordinarily quite as devoid\nof aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The attitude of the typical\nman toward beauty in its various forms is, in fact, an attitude of\nsuspicion and hostility. He does not regard a work of art as merely\ninert and stupid; he regards it as, in some indefinable way, positively\noffensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary and\nscoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he would\ntrust a coloured clergyman in his hen-yard. It was men, and not women,\nwho invented such sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites,\nDunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to\nbeautiful ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their great talent\nfor reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling of\nidiots. The normal woman, in so far as she has any religion at all,\nmoves irresistibly toward Catholicism, with its poetical obscurantism.\nThe evangelical Protestant sects have a hard time holding her. She can\nno more be an actual Methodist than a gentleman can be a Methodist.\n\nThis inclination toward beauty, of course, is dismissed by the average\nmale blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality. The truth is\nthat it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not sentimentality to\nbe moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the mass, or even,\nsay, by those timid imitations of it which one observes in certain\nProtestant churches. Such proceedings, whatever their defects from the\nstandpoint of a pure aesthetic, are at all events vastly more beautiful\nthan any of the private acts of the folk who take part in them. They\nlift themselves above the barren utilitarianism of everyday life, and\nno less above the maudlin sentimentalities that men seek pleasure in.\nThey offer a means of escape, convenient and inviting, from that sordid\nroutine of thought and occupation which women revolt against so\npertinaciously.\n\n\n\n\n41. The Ethics of Women\n\n\nI have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct in\nthe world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, of\ncourse, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are,\nin fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they\nare bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly\non the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations\ncommanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout\ntheir substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really\nhumble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her,\nchooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that\ndirection is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No\nwoman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek.\n\nIn their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the\nprecepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into\nproverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible\nonly in situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds\nherself confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her\nown security or to the well-being of those under her protection\u2014say a\nchild or a husband\u2014she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing,\nhowever outrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a\nmale extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the\ntruth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has ever\nbeen on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of\nthe bar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort\nof a barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her\nwithin bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be\nunduly aroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as\nis commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but\nsimply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful,\nimplacable and without qualms.\n\nWhat is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast\ntechnical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obvious\nin freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious\ncontroversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology\nor amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed\nthrough a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not only bite\nin the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dental\nreach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that\nthey will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is so\nunfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to\nimprove my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper\nin a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred\ncases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost\ninvariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of\nstudied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical,\nthat the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and\nthe very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses. Many more\nmen than women go insane, and many more married men than single men.\nThe fact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to\nfind out what goes on, year in and year out, behind the doors of\napparently happy homes. A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of\nthem do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death\nupon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is\noften, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife\nof an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to\nbear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and\nstupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air\nof a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings\nof the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour\u2014all these\nthings must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the\noafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and\nprofound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of\nsense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac\nlong ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla\u2019s efforts to play the\nviolin. Women survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great\ncapacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that\noften they deceive even themselves; the average woman\u2019s contentment,\nindeed, is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must be\ninnumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wonders that\nso few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison their\nhusbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make it\nout; the deathrate among husbands is very much higher than among wives.\nMore than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an acquaintance\nwho died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in the eyes of the\ninconsolable widow.\n\nEven in this age of emancipation, normal women have few serious\ntransactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands;\nthe business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence to\nsenility. When they step outside their habitual circle they show the\nsame alert and eager wariness that they exhibit within it. A man who\nhas dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and even when he\nis most cautious he is often flabbergasted by their sudden and\nunconscionable forays. Whenever woman goes into trade she quickly gets\na reputation as a sharp trader. Every little town in America has its\nHetty Green, each sweating blood from turnips, each the terror of all\nthe male usurers of the neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an\namazon of barter takes his fortune into his hands; he has little more\nchance of success against the feminine technique in business than he\nhas against the feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the\nadvantage of women lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In\nbusiness they address themselves wholly to their own profit, and give\nno thought whatever to the hopes, aspirations and amour propre of their\nantagonists. And in the duel of sex they fence, not to make points, but\nto disable and disarm. A man, when he succeeds in throwing off a woman\nwho has attempted to marry him, always carries away a maudlin sympathy\nfor her in her defeat and dismay. But no one ever heard of a woman who\npitied the poor fellow whose honest passion she had found it expedient\nto spurn. On the contrary, women take delight in such clownish agonies,\nand exhibit them proudly, and boast about them to other women.\n\n\n\n\nV. The New Age\n\n\n\n\n42. The Transvaluation of Values\n\n\nThe gradual emancipation of women that has been going on for the last\ncentury has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly\ndelivered from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the\noppressions of men. But already, it must be plain, they have made\nenormous progress\u2014perhaps more than they made in the ten thousand years\npreceding. The rise of the industrial system, which has borne so\nharshly upon the race in general, has brought them certain unmistakable\nbenefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to make\nmarriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far broken down\nthat large classes of women are now almost free agents, and quite\nindependent of the favour of men. Most of these women, responding to\nideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, by\nmarriage, and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in, but the fact\nremains that they now have a free choice in the matter, and that dire\nnecessity no longer controls them. After all, they needn\u2019t marry if\nthey don\u2019t want to; it is possible to get their bread by their own\nlabour in the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers were in a far\nmore difficult position. Failing marriage, they not only suffered a\ncruel ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual\nstarvation. There was simply no respectable place in the economy of\nthose times for the free woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or\naccept a disdainful patronage that was as galling as charity.\n\nNothing could be plainer than the effect that the increasing economic\nsecurity of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind.\nThe diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishing\nbirth rates show which way the wind is blowing. It is common for male\nstatisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall in\nthe marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. This\ngrowing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though no\nconsiderable body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine that\nmarriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain that large\nnumbers of them now approach the business with far greater\nfastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited.\nThey are harder to please, and hence pleased less often. The woman of a\ncentury ago could imagine nothing more favourable to her than marriage;\neven marriage with a fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all.\nThis notion is gradually feeling the opposition of a contrary notion.\nWomen in general may still prefer marriage to work, but there is an\nincreasing minority which begins to realize that work may offer the\ngreater contentment, particularly if it be mellowed by a certain amount\nof philandering.\n\nThere already appears in the world, indeed, a class of women, who,\nwhile still not genuinely averse to marriage, are yet free from any\ntheory that it is necessary, or even invariably desirable. Among these\nwomen are a good many somewhat vociferous propagandists, almost male in\ntheir violent earnestness; they range from the man-eating suffragettes\nto such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional\nshockers of the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of\nbirth-control, Margaret Sanger. But among them are many more who wake\nthe world with no such noisy eloquence, but content themselves with\ncarrying out their ideas in a quiet and respectable manner. The number\nof such women is much larger than is generally imagined, and that\nnumber tends to increase steadily. They are women who, with their\neconomic independence assured, either by inheritance or by their own\nefforts, chiefly in the arts and professions, do exactly as they\nplease, and make no pother about it. Naturally enough, their\nsuperiority to convention and the common frenzy makes them extremely\nattractive to the better sort of men, and so it is not uncommon for one\nof them to find herself voluntarily sought in marriage, without any\npreliminary scheming by herself\u2014surely an experience that very few\nordinary women ever enjoy, save perhaps in dreams or delirium.\n\nThe old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the women\u2019s\nclubs and in the women\u2019s colleges, I have no doubt, there is still much\ndebate of the old and silly question: Are platonic relations possible\nbetween the sexes? In other words, is friendship possible without sex?\nMany a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with another\nquestion: Why without sex? With the decay of the ancient concept of\nwomen as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of the\nwhole sex question, and out of that reconsideration there must come a\nrevision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest\nfrivolity in the female. The notion that honour in women is exclusively\na physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of the\nhighest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuable\nthing a woman can bring to marriage is virginity\u2014this notion is so\npreposterous that no intelligent person, male or female, actually\ncherishes it. It survives as one of the hollow conventions of\nChristianity; nay, of the levantine barbarism that preceded\nChristianity. As women throw off the other conventions which now bind\nthem they will throw off this one, too, and so their virtue, grounded\nupon fastidiousness and self-respect instead of upon mere fear and\nconformity, will become afar more laudable thing than it ever can be\nunder the present system. And for its absence, if they see fit to\ndispose of it, they will no more apologize than a man apologizes today.\n\n\n\n\n43. The Lady of Joy\n\n\nEven prostitution, in the long run, may become a more or less\nrespectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That\nquality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary;\nwhatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion,\nfashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prostitute\nis disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything\nintrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is\ncurrently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity,\nagainst her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually\nunsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world,\nparticularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption,\ne.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the\nfall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution\nis one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to\nthe sort of women who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly\nlikes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a\nwaitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is\npropagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of\nprofessional reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the\nlatter in order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in\nprison, questioned by tee-totalers, always ascribe their rascality to\nalcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is\nunder the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade\nand go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the\nimpulse strikes her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails\nand kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding\nsuch nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is\nable to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and\ndisposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous\nsisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success\nis below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice, in\nthe courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur.\nAnd when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a\nvestry-room revolution he almost invariably concludes that the\nsinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt\nsome of the typographical errors in Holy Writ.\n\nThe high value set upon virginity by men, whose esteem of it is based\nupon a mixture of vanity and voluptuousness, causes many women to guard\nit in their own persons with a jealousy far beyond their private\ninclinations and interests. It is their theory that the loss of it\nwould materially impair their chances of marriage. This theory is not\nsupported by the facts. The truth is that the woman who sacrifices her\nchastity, everything else being equal, stands a much better chance of\nmaking a creditable marriage than the woman who remains chaste. This is\nespecially true of women of the lower economic classes. At once they\ncome into contact, hitherto socially difficult and sometimes almost\nimpossible, with men of higher classes, and begin to take on, with the\ncurious facility of their sex, the refinements and tastes and points of\nview of those classes. The mistress thus gathers charm, and what has\nbegun as a sordid sale of amiability not uncommonly ends with formal\nmarriage. The number of such marriages is enormously greater than\nappears superficially, for both parties obviously make every effort to\nconceal the facts. Within the circle of my necessarily limited personal\nacquaintance I know of scores of men, some of them of wealth and\nposition, who have made such marriages, and who do not seem to regret\nit. It is an old observation, indeed, that a woman who has previously\ndisposed of her virtue makes a good wife. The common theory is that\nthis is because she is grateful to her husband for rescuing her from\nsocial outlawry; the truth is that she makes a good wife because she is\na shrewd woman, and has specialized professionally in masculine\nweakness, and is thus extra-competent at the traditional business of\nher sex. Such a woman often shows a truly magnificent sagacity. It is\nvery difficult to deceive her logically, and it is impossible to disarm\nher emotionally. Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities\nof the world was evidence, to begin with, of her intellectual\nenterprise and courage, and her success as a rebel is proof of her\nextraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen.\n\nEven the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, than\nthe virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do,\nit is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater variety\nof men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her\noccupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more\nyears ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that\ntime certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I\nlived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and\nsome of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for\nadvice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common\nsuperstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is\nonly five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They\nwere enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. This truth was to\nthe effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career,\nnot in the morgue but at the altar of God, and that those who remained\nunmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty\nyears, and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed,\nthat fully eighty per cent married, and that they almost always got\nhusbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained\nvirtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a\ndozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers\nand minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do\ntradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were\nstudied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town\u2019s\nrichest banker\u2014that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole\ncommunity. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned\nthat harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there\npolished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of\ngreat dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient\nprofession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward\nit. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is\nexpected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she\nwould shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual\nprostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men,\nhowever gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably\nsuperior to men of the prostitute\u2019s own class\u2014say her father and\nbrothers\u2014and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is\noften rather romantic. I well remember observing, during my\ncollaboration with the vice-crusaders aforesaid, the delight of a lady\nof joy who had attracted the notice of a police lieutenant; she was\nintensely pleased by the idea of having a client of such haughty\nmanners, such brilliant dress, and what seemed to her to be so\ndignified a profession. It is always forgotten that this weakness is\nnot confined to prostitutes, but run through the whole female sex. The\nwoman who could not imagine an illicit affair with a wealthy soap\nmanufacturer or even with a lawyer finds it quite easy to imagine\nherself succumbing to an ambassador or a duke. There are very few\nexceptions to this rule. In the most reserved of modern societies the\nwomen who represent their highest flower are notoriously complaisant to\nroyalty. And royal women, to complete the circuit, not infrequently\nyield to actors and musicians, i.e., to men radiating a glamour not\nencountered even in princes.\n\n\n\n\n44. The Future of Marriage\n\n\nThe transvaluation of values that is now in progress will go on slowly\nand for a very long while. That it will ever be quite complete is, of\ncourse, impossible. There are inherent differences will continue to\nshow themselves until the end of time. As woman gradually becomes\nconvinced, not only of the possibility of economic independence, but\nalso of its value, she will probably lose her present overmastering\ndesire for marriage, and address herself to meeting men in free\neconomic competition. That is to say, she will address herself to\nacquiring that practical competence, that high talent for puerile and\nchiefly mechanical expertness, which now sets man ahead of her in the\nlabour market of the world. To do this she will have to sacrifice some\nof her present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinely\nintelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer, or\nbuttonhole worker, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house\npainter. Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid\noccupations, will have to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably\nmuch further than they will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their\npresent superiority to men will always remain, and with it a shade of\ntheir relative inefficiency, and so marriage will remain attractive to\nthem, or at all events to most of them, and its overthrow will be\nprevented. To abolish it entirely, as certain fevered reformers\npropose, would be as difficult as to abolish the precession of the\nequinoxes.\n\nAt the present time women vacillate somewhat absurdly between two\nschemes of life, the old and the new. On the one hand, their economic\nindependence is still full of conditions, and on the other hand they\nare in revolt against the immemorial conventions. The result is a\ngeneral unrest, with many symptoms of extravagant and unintelligent\nrevolt. One of those symptoms is the appearance of intellectual\nstriving in women\u2014not a striving, alas, toward the genuine pearls and\nrubies of the mind, but one merely toward the acquirement of the rubber\nstamps that men employ in their so-called thinking. Thus we have women\nwho launch themselves into party politics, and fill their heads with a\nvast mass of useless knowledge about political tricks, customs,\ntheories and personalities. Thus, too, we have the woman social\nreformer, trailing along ridiculously behind a tatterdemalion posse of\nmale utopians, each with something to sell. And thus we have the woman\nwho goes in for advanced wisdom of the sort on draught in women\u2019s\nclubs\u2014in brief, the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of\nbeliefs and propositions that are ignorant, unimportant and untrue.\nSuch banal striving is most prodigally on display in the United States,\nwhere superficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is\ndue to the relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work\nless than any other people in the world, and, above all, to the\nrelatively greater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have\nbeen emancipated from any compulsion to productive labour without\nhaving acquired any compensatory intellectual or artistic interest or\nsocial duty. The result is that they swarm in the women\u2019s clubs, and\nwaste their time, listening to bad poetry, worse music, and still worse\nlectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the subconscious. It is\namong such women that one observes the periodic rages for Bergsonism,\nthe Montessori method, the twilight sleep and other such follies, so\npathetically characteristic of American culture.\n\nOne of the evil effects of this tendency I have hitherto descanted\nupon, to wit, the growing disposition of American women to regard all\nroutine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence\nintolerable. Out of that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the\none hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and\nwell-fed women engaged in public activities that, nine times out of\nten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand\nwe behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first\nonslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a\nforeign expert to teach the housewives of the country the veriest\nelements of thrift. No such instruction was needed by the housewives of\nthe Continent. They were simply told how much food they could have, and\ntheir natural competence did the rest. There is never any avoidable\nwaste there, either in peace or in war. A French housewife has little\nuse for a garbage can, save as a depository for uplifting literature.\nShe does her best with the means at her disposal, not only in war time\nbut at all times.\n\nAs I have said over and over again in this inquiry, a woman\u2019s\ndisinclination to acquire the intricate expertness that lies at the\nbottom of good housekeeping is due primarily to her active\nintelligence; it is difficult for her to concentrate her mind upon such\nstupid and meticulous enterprises. But whether difficult or easy, it is\nobviously important for the average woman to make some effort in that\ndirection, for if she fails to do so there is chaos. That chaos is duly\nvisible in the United States. Here women reveal one of their\nsubterranean qualities: their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are\nquite without that dog-like fidelity to duty which is one of the\nshining marks of men. They never summon up a high pride in doing what\nis inherently disagreeable; they always go to the galleys under\nprotest, and with vows of sabotage; their fundamental philosophy is\nalmost that of the syndicalists. The sentimentality of men connives at\nthis, and is thus largely responsible for it. Before the average\npuella, apprenticed in the kitchen, can pick up a fourth of the\nculinary subtleties that are commonplace even to the chefs on dining\ncars, she has caught a man and need concern herself about them no more,\nfor he has to eat, in the last analysis, whatever she sets before him,\nand his lack of intelligence makes it easy for her to shut off his\nacademic criticisms by bald appeals to his emotions. By an easy process\nhe finally attaches a positive value to her indolence. It is a proof,\nhe concludes, of her fineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty\nincompetence he is abashed.\n\nBut as women, gaining economic autonomy, meet men in progressively\nbitterer competition, the rising masculine distrust and fear of them\nwill be reflected even in the enchanted domain of marriage, and the\nhusband, having yielded up most of his old rights, will begin to reveal\na new jealousy of those that remain, and particularly of the right to a\nfair quid pro quo for his own docile industry. In brief, as women shake\noff their ancient disabilities they will also shake off some of their\nancient immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with a\nsoberer and more exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension of\nthe suffrage, I believe, will encourage this awakening; in wresting it\nfrom the reluctant male the women of the western world have planted\ndragons\u2019 teeth, the which will presently leap up and gnaw them. Now\nthat women have the political power to obtain their just rights, they\nwill begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges by\nsentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider them\nanew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and\ncaressed, but as free competitors in a harsh world. When that\nreconsideration gets under way there will be a general overhauling of\nthe relations between the sexes, and some of the fair ones, I suspect,\nwill begin to wonder why they didn\u2019t let well enough alone.\n\n\n\n\n45. Effects of the War\n\n\nThe present series of wars, it seems likely, will continue for twenty\nor thirty years, and perhaps longer. That the first clash was\ninconclusive was shown brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the\npeace finally reached\u2014a peace so artificial and dishonest that the\nsigning of it was almost equivalent to a new declaration of war. At\nleast three new contests in the grand manner are plainly insight\u2014one\nbetween Germany and France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak\nand incompetent nation over a strong and enterprising nation, one\nbetween Japan and the United States for the mastery of the Pacific, and\none between England and the United States for the control of the sea.\nTo these must be added various minor struggles, and perhaps one or two\nof almost major character: the effort of Russia to regain her old unity\nand power, the effort of the Turks to put down the slave rebellion (of\nGreeks, Armenians, Arabs, etc.)which now menaces them, the effort of\nthe Latin-Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the joint\neffort of Russia and Germany (perhaps with England and Italy aiding) to\nget rid of such international nuisances as the insane Polish republic,\nthe petty states of the Baltic, and perhaps also most of the Balkan\nstates. I pass over the probability of a new mutiny in India, of the\nrising of China against the Japanese, and of a general struggle for a\nnew alignment of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, great\nand small, are probable; most of them are humanly certain. They will be\nfought ferociously, and with the aid of destructive engines of the\nutmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery of\nmen, and a large proportion of these men will be under forty years of\nage.\n\nAs a result there will be a shortage of husbands in Christendom, and as\na second result the survivors will be appreciably harder to snare than\nthe men of today. Every man of agreeable exterior and easy means will\nbe pursued, not merely by a few dozen or score of women, as now, but by\nwhole battalions and brigades of them, and he will be driven in sheer\nself-defence into very sharp bargaining. Perhaps in the end the state\nwill have to interfere in the business, to prevent the potential\nhusband going to waste in the turmoil of opportunity.\n\nJust what form this interference is likely to take has not yet appeared\nclearly. In France there is already a wholesale legitimization of\nchildren born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there has been a\nclamour for the legalization of polygamy, but these devices do not meet\nthe main problem, which is the encouragement of monogamy to the utmost.\nA plan that suggests itself is the amelioration of the position of the\nmonogamous husband, now rendered increasingly uncomfortable by the laws\nof most Christian states. I do not think that the more intelligent sort\nof women, faced by a perilous shortage of men, would object seriously\nto that amelioration. They must see plainly that the present system, if\nit is carried much further, will begin to work powerfully against their\nbest interests, if only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination to\nmarriage that already exists among the better sort of men. The woman of\ntrue discretion, I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior\nman, even on unfavourable terms, than make John Smith her husband, serf\nand prisoner at one stroke.\n\nThe law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for it.\nThe average husband, perhaps, deserves little succour. The woman who\npursues and marries him, though she may be moved by selfish aims,\nshould be properly rewarded by the state for her service to it\u2014a\nservice surely not to be lightly estimated in a military age. And that\nreward may conveniently take the form, as in the United States, of\nstatutes giving her title to a large share of his real property and\nrequiring him to surrender most of his income to her, and releasing her\nfrom all obedience to him and from all obligation to keep his house in\norder. But the woman who aspires to higher game should be quite\nwilling, it seems to me, to resign some of these advantages in\ncompensation for the greater honour and satisfaction of being wife to a\nman of merit, and mother to his children. All that is needed is laws\nallowing her, if she will, to resign her right of dower, her right to\nmaintenance and her immunity from discipline, and to make any other\nterms that she may be led to regard as equitable. At present women are\nunable to make most of these concessions even if they would: the laws\nof the majority of western nations are inflexible. If, for example, an\nEnglishwoman should agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit\nherself to the discipline, not of the current statutes, but of the\nelder common law, which allowed a husband to correct his wife\ncorporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it would be\ncompetent for any sentimental neighbour to set the agreement at naught\nby haling her husband before a magistrate for carrying it out, and it\nis a safe wager that the magistrate would jail him.\n\nThis plan, however novel it may seem, is actually already in operation.\nMany a married woman, in order to keep her husband from revolt, makes\nmore or less disguised surrenders of certain of the rights and\nimmunities that she has under existing laws. There are, for example,\neven in America, women who practise the domestic arts with competence\nand diligence, despite the plain fact that no legal penalty would be\nvisited upon them if they failed to do so. There are women who follow\nexternal trades and professions, contributing a share to the family\nexchequer. There are women who obey their husbands, even against their\nbest judgments. There are, most numerous of all, women who wink\ndiscreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the\noath of chemical purity taken at the altar. It is a commonplace,\nindeed, that many happy marriages admit a party of the third part.\nThere would be more of them if there were more women with enough\nserenity of mind to see the practical advantage of the arrangement. The\ntrouble with such triangulations is not primarily that they involve\nperjury or that they offer any fundamental offence to the wife; if she\navoids banal theatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of\naugmenting the husband\u2019s devotion to her and respect for her, if only\nas the fruit of comparison. The trouble with them is that very few men\namong us have sense enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine\nmind is readily taken in by specious values; the average married man of\nProtestant Christendom, if he succumbs at all, succumbs to some\nmeretricious and flamboyant creature, bent only upon fleecing him. Here\nis where the harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to\nthe sentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would\nno more think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than he\nwould think of standing for office without consulting his wife. The\nresult is that he is seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by\nwomen there are at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despite\nthe fact that a hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort of\nrecreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amours\nwere carefully supervised by Mme. Zola from the first days of their\nmarriage, and in consequence his life was wholly free from scandals and\nhis mind was never distracted from his work.\n\n\n\n\n46. The Eternal Romance\n\n\nBut whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never be any\ndecay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at the bottom of\nall transactions between the sexes. Women may emancipate themselves,\nthey may borrow the whole bag of masculine tricks, and they may cure\nthemselves of their present desire for the vegetable security of\nmarriage, but they will never cease to be women, and so long as they\nare women they will remain provocative to men. Their chief charm today\nlies precisely in the fact that they are dangerous, that they threaten\nmasculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menace\nvastly greater than that of acts of God and the public enemy\u2014and they\nwill be dangerous for ever. Men fear them, and are fascinated by them.\nThey know how to show their teeth charmingly; the more enlightened of\nthem have perfected a superb technique of fascination. It was Nietzsche\nwho called them the recreation of the warrior\u2014not of the poltroon,\nremember, but of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinite\ncapacity for rewarding masculine industry and enterprise with small and\nirresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines with their\ncapacity for evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparable\ncompanions when the serious business of the day is done, and the time\nhas come to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether.\n\nEvery man, I daresay, has his own notion of what constitutes perfect\npeace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the\nfundamental conflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for me\u2014and\nI hope I may be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for\nintruding my own personality\u2014I reject the two commonest of them:\npassion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is\ntoo exciting and alarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic\nto have much desire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me\ntry to describe it to you.\n\nIt is the close of a busy and vexatious day\u2014say half past five or six\no\u2019clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am\nstretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of\nthe divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman\nnot too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed\u2014above all, a\nwoman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she\ntalks\u2014of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of:\nbooks, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No\nreligion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious\u2014but\nremember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and\noften picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty\ncut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her\neye-brow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite\nmurmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep\u2014but only for an instant.\nAt once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am\nawake. Then to sleep again\u2014slowly and charmingly down that slippery\nhill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.\n\nI ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful? The\nsensation of falling asleep is to me the most exquisite in the world. I\ndelight in it so much that I even look forward to death itself with a\nsneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and made\ndoubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I\nmatch this situation against any that you ran think of. It is not only\nenchanting; it is also, in a very true sense, ennobling. In the end,\nwhen the girl grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my\nsorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own\nsight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been\ngenuinely, completely and unregrettably happy.\n\n\n\n\n47. Apologia in Conclusion\n\n\nAt the end I crave the indulgence of the cultured reader for the\nimperfections necessarily visible in all that I have here set\ndown\u2014imperfections not only due to incomplete information and fallible\nlogic, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to certain fundamental\nweaknesses of the sex to which I have the honour to belong. A man is\ninseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a dog is\ninseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in everything he\nsays and does, but they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses\nthe majestic mystery of woman. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in\nher actual presence, so he puts on apathetic and unescapable\nclownishness when he essays to dissect her in the privacy of the\nlaboratory. There is no book on woman by a man that is not a stupendous\ncompendium of posturings and imbecilities. There are but two books that\nshow even a superficial desire to be honest\u2014\u201cThe Unexpurgated Case\nAgainst Woman Suffrage,\u201d by Sir Almroth Wright, and this one. Wright\nmade a gallant attempt to tell the truth, but before he got half way\nthrough his task his ineradicable donkeyishness as a male overcame his\nscientific frenzy as a psychologist, and so he hastily washed his hands\nof the business, and affronted the judicious with a half baked and\npreposterous book. Perhaps I have failed too, and even more\ningloriously. If so, I am full of sincere and indescribable regret.","title":"In Defense of Women","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":41664}