IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN

by H. L. Mencken

Contents

 Introduction I The Feminine Mind II The War between The Sexes III Marriage IV Woman Suffrage V The New Age

Introduction

As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business inthe world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is tosay, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane andoutrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and sound thatthey will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and forcethemselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need notconfess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudesrescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuckrakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at alltimes and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable humannotions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, thatthe sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, ifever, have wind enough for a full day's work. The most they can everaccomplish in the way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliantspurt, and half a dozen such spurts, particularly if they come closetogether and show a certain co-ordination, are enough to make apractitioner celebrated, and even immortal. Nature, indeed, conspiresagainst all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that Godis against it on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisansunquestionably are on this earth. The dead hand pushes all of us intointellectual cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yieldand have done. Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doublybeset, first by a public opinion that regards his enterprise assubversive and in bad taste, and secondly by an inner weakness thatlimits his capacity for it, and especially his capacity to throw offthe prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts--and what is the instrument ofreflection and speculation save a congeries of cells? At the momentof the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is mostgratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinaryairlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenlypulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply theghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official inhis country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by hiswife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity andvanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has beenrevealed from Sinai shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to thenatural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable level of apatriot and taxpayer. 

I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the presentwork, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able toembellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of hithertounutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional handicap of havingan audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for Iwrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my onlypossible customers were Americans. Of their unprecedented dislike fornovelty in the domain of the intellect I have often discoursed in thepast, and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I need dohere is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among thegreat nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong wayto think in everything--not only in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the averageAmerican city the citizen who, in the face of an organized publicclamour (usually managed by interested parties) for the erection of anequestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, infront of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a dozenleopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to theStructural Iron Workers' Union to hold its next annual convention inthe town Symphony Hall--the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposessuch a proposal--on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never mounted ahorse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less useful thana gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural Iron Workerswould spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and knock down the bustsof Bach, Beethoven and Brahms--this citizen is commonly denounced as ananarchist and a public enemy. It is not only erroneous to think thus;it has come to be immoral. And many other planes, high and low. For anAmerican to question any of the articles of fundamental faith cherishedby the majority is for him to run grave risks of social disaster. Theold English offence of "imagining the King's death" has been formallyrevived by the American courts, and hundreds of men and women are injail for committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, insome parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote actsas believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, andspeaking the language of countries recently at war with the Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as attentats againstdemocracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are. For democracy isgrounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must beprotected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argueit to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free playof ideas. In the United States this is not only its first concern, butalso its last concern. No other enterprise, not even the trade in publicoffices and contracts, occupies the rulers of the land so steadily, ormakes heavier demands upon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion. 

Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had tochange the plates of my "Book of Prefaces, " a book of purely literarycriticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in orderto get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure upon thewoman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening itwith any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of theintellectual snob asserting itself over all prudence. That is to say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go into the book that wasnot already so obvious that it had been embodied in the proverbialphilosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some civilized nation, including theChinese. To this rule I remained faithful throughout. In its originalform, as published in 1918, the book was actuary just such a pastiche ofproverbs, many of them English, and hence familiar even to Congressmen, newspaper editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easyto hold to this program; over and over again I was tempted to insertnotions that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia. But in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to getthrough it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There isno need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized andunrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it, and mostof them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered truths about thewoman question, a headlong assault upon the national decencies. In theSouth, where the suspicion of ideas goes to extraordinary lengths, evenfor the United States, some of the newspapers actually denounced thebook as German propaganda, designed to break down American morale, andcalled upon the Department of Justice to proceed against me for thecrime known to American law as "criminal anarchy, " i. E. , "imagining theKing's death. " Why the Comstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd andlascivious I have never been able to determine. Certainly, they receivedmany complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a number of thesecomplaints to be lodged, in the hope that the resultant buffoonerieswould give me entertainment in those dull days of war, with allintellectual activities adjourned, and maybe promote the sale of thebook. But the Comstocks were pursuing larger fish, and so left me tothe righteous indignation of right-thinking reviewers, especiallythe suffragists. Their concern, after all, is not with books that aredenounced; what they concentrate their moral passion on is the book thatis praised. 

The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in morecivilized countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a numberof propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to beomitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no meanspretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines of anynovelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain formcertain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman holdsin petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast mass ofsentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It is a question ofcapital importance to all human beings, and it deserves to be discussedhonestly and frankly, but there is so much of social reticence, ofreligious superstition and of mere emotion intermingled with it thatmost of the enormous literature it has thrown off is hollow and useless. I point for example, to the literature of the subsidiary question ofwoman suffrage. It fills whole libraries, but nine tenths of it ismerely rubbish, for it starts off from assumptions that are obviouslyuntrue and it reaches conclusions that are at war with both logicand the facts. So with the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally, hundreds of volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers ofpamphlets, handbills and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves theprimary problem unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what is tobe done about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon millionsby civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In themain, it counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as sensible asadvising a dog to forget its fleas. Here, as in other fields, I do notpresume to offer a remedy of my own. In truth, I am very suspicious ofall remedies for the major ills of life, and believe that most ofthem are incurable. But I at least venture to discuss the matterrealistically, and if what I have to say is not sagacious, it is atall events not evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe some laterinvestigator will bring a better illumination to the subject. 

It is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or twoabout the author in each volume. I was born in Baltimore, September 12, 1880, and come of a learned family, though my immediate forebears werebusiness men. The tradition of this ancient learning has been upon mesince my earliest days, and I narrowly escaped becoming a doctorof philosophy. My father's death, in 1899, somehow dropped me intojournalism, where I had a successful career, as such careers go. Atthe age of 25 I was the chief editor of a daily newspaper in Baltimore. During the same year I published my first book of criticism. Thereafter, for ten or twelve years, I moved steadily from practical journalism, with its dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward purelyaesthetic concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I havefelt a strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me chieflytoday is what may be called public psychology, ie. , the nature of theideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes whereby theyreach them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will be in thatfield. In the United States I am commonly held suspect as a foreigner, and during the war I was variously denounced. Abroad, especiallyin England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my intolerableAmericanism. The two views are less far apart than they seem to be. The fact is that I am superficially so American, in ways of speechand thought, that the foreigner is deceived, whereas the native, morefamiliar with the true signs, sees that under the surface there isincurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans hold to besound. Thus If all between two stools--but it is more comfortable thereon the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly devoid of publicspirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and theyseek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jailfor his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sendshim there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist andagree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, theSocialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive forit, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so farI have not found it. 

H. L. Mencken

I. The Feminine Mind

1. The Maternal Instinct

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his meritand authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with somethingakin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them;they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and patheticfellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminineintelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurateperception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearanceand the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is ahero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank. 

The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of masculinemanufacture. It is both insincere and untrue: insincere because itmerely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is potentially a hero toeveryone else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate manhimself, is likely to be the last person in the world to penetrate hismaster's charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet who didn't envy his masterwholeheartedly? who wouldn't willingly change places with his master?who didn't secretly wish that he was his master? A man's wife laboursunder no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. Shemay envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, hisimpenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloakof romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But shenever envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy andpreposterous soul. 

This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acuteunderstanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottomof that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternalinstinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees intohis helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching selfdelusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; itsets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if shebe skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuineself-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From the dayof George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got intoher character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealedderision. I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a womanwho is not, at bottom, a booby. 

2. Women's Intelligence

That is should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility ofthe human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligenceis surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurableprejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. One findsvery few professors of the subject, even among admitted feminists, approaching the fact as obvious; practically all of them think itnecessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to establish what shouldbe an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman, W. L. George, one of themost sharp-witted of the faculty, wastes a whole book up on thedemonstration, and then, with a great air of uttering something new, gives it the humourless title of "The Intelligence of Women. " Theintelligence of women, forsooth! As well devote a laborious time to thesagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!

Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopolyof certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. Thething itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a specialfeminine character; there is in it, in more than one of itsmanifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to bevirtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know howto sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as theyshow the true fundamentals of intelligence--in so far as they reveala capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk ofdelusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth--to thatextent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk oftheir mothers. "Human creatures, " says George, borrowing from Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there areno women, but only sexual majorities. " Find me an obviously intelligentman, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you aman with a wide streakof woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it;Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to bebelieved, it amounted to down right homosexuality. The essential traitsand qualities of the male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman isall muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, heis a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with theframe of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God. 

It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talentin man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour--thatcomplete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. LestI be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say thatmasculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiologicalreactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is thatthis complex is impossible without the feminine contribution that it isa product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius wesee the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish, andshave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by thecomplementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reachesof human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is toodoltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleepby his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian ora bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divineinnocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vastprojections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by amingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary togive objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the whollywomanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all. 

3. The Masculine Bag of Tricks

What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency ofintelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that massof small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, thatcollection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief mentalequipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligentthan his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rivalpoliticians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid anddegrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. Butthese empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profoundintelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, andtheir acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than achimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of theaverage professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no moreactual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of theworld, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than intakes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observantperson, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run ofbusiness and professional men--I confine myself to those who seem to geton in the world, and exclude the admitted failures--without marvellingat their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, theirappalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, agrandson of one American President and a great-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the chiefbusiness "geniuses" of that paradise of traders and usurers, the UnitedStates, reported in his old age that he had never heard a single one ofthem say anything worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men, and in a man's world they were successful men, but intellectually theywere all blank cartridges. 

There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidneywere genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross andriveling concerns--that their very capacity to master and retainsuch balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of theirinferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiarincompetency of first rate men for what are called practical concerns. One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3, 472, 701 by99, 999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of him rememberingthe range of this or that railway share for two years, or the numberof ten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard fromGalveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine himexpert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any otherof the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonlydivert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellisfound that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible inalmost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do notunderstand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are inert andimpotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average men'shighest performances, and are easily surpassed by men who, in actualintelligence, are about as far below them as the Simidae. 

This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivialcharacter--which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist asstupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility--isa character that men of the first class share with women of the first, second and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth, something unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almostinvariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I havedescribed. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that women, as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men as aclass. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the occupationswhich bring out such expertness most lavishly--for example, tuningpianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie. , matching petty trickswith some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managingfactories--despite the circumstance that the great majority of suchoccupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of themoffer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There isno external reason why women shouldn't succeed as operative surgeons;the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a specialdemand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many womengraduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of themto make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why womenshould not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or asmanagers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very smallforce; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; oncethe door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, asevery one knows, the number of women actually practising these tradesand professions is very small, and few of them have attained to anydistinction in competition with men. 

4. Why Women Fail

The cause thereof, as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies inthe same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the sameimpatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same disqualificationfor mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in thehigher varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom ofChristendom, are especially their own, women seldom show any of thatelaborately conventionalized and half automatic proficiency which is thepride and boast of most men. It is a commonplace of observation, indeed, that a housewife who actually knows how to cook, or who can make herown clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the most casualglance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the elementsof morals, learning and hygiene--it is a platitude that such a woman isvery rare indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not usuallyesteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly true in theUnited States, where the position of women is higher than in any othercivilized or semi-civilized country, and the old assumption of theirintellectual inferiority has been most successfully challenged. TheAmerican dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the defectivetechnic of the American housewife. The guest who respects hisoesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-preparedvictuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, andresigns himself toit as he might resign himself to being shaved by aparalytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and freedomto improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher levelof intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the firstimportance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, ora more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a largerdependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, forthe skill that wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely nomere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman isalso the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole mealsin cans, and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere else is theremore striking tendency to throw the whole business of training theminds of children upon professional teachers, and the whole business ofinstructing them in morals and religion upon so-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and caring for their bodies uponplayground experts, sex hygienists and other such professionals, most ofthem mountebanks. 

In brief, women rebel--often unconsciously, sometimes even submittingall the while--against the dull, mechanical tricks of the trade that thepresent organization of society compels them to practise for a living, and that rebellion testifies to their intelligence. If they enjoyed andtook pride in those tricks, and showed it by diligence and skill, theywould be on all fours with such men as are headwaiters, ladies' tailors, schoolmasters or carpet-beaters, and proud of it. The inherent tendencyof any woman above the most stupid is to evade the whole obligation, and, if she cannot actually evade it, to reduce its demands to theminimum. And when some accident purges her, either temporarily orpermanently, of the inclination to marriage (of which much more anon), and she enters into competition with men in the general business of theworld, the sort of career that she commonly carves out offers additionalevidence of her mental peculiarity. In whatever calls for no more thanan invariable technic and a feeble chicanery she usually fails; inwhatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness she usuallysucceeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the lawrequires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth andjustice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries thather sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. But sheis usually a success as a sick-nurse, for that profession requiresingenuity, quick comprehension, courage in the face of novel anddisconcerting situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating anddominating character; and whenever she comes into competition withmen in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simplenimbleness of mind is unaided by the masterstrokes of genius, she holdsher own invariably. The best and most intellectual--i. E. , most originaland enterprising play-actors are not men, but women, and so are the bestteachers and blackmailers, and a fair share of the best writers, andpublic functionaries, and executants of music. In the demimonde onewill find enough acumen and daring, and enough resilience in the faceof special difficulties, to put the equipment of any exclusively maleprofession to shame. If the work of the average man required half themental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the averageprostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge ofstarvation. 

5. The Thing Called Intuition

Men, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superiorintelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they areseldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidentialanalysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there is a certainspecious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forcedupon women an artificial character which well conceals their realcharacter, and women have found it profitable to encourage thedeception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothingunction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, andparticularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretensionby consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is tosay, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters ofcapital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, beingdisinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competentintelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to someimpenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some halfmystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human) instinct. 

The true nature of this alleged instinct, however, is revealed by anexamination of the situations which inspire a man to call it to his aid. These situations do not arise out of the purely technical problems thatare his daily concern, but out of the rarer and more fundamental, andhence enormously more difficult problems which beset him only at longand irregular intervals, and go offer a test, not of his mere capacityfor being drilled, but of his capacity for genuine ratiocination. Noman, I take it, save one consciously inferior and hen-pecked, wouldconsult his wife about hiring a clerk, or about extending credit to somepaltry customer, or about some routine piece of tawdry swindling; butnot even the most egoistic man would fail to sound the sentiment of hiswife about taking a partner into his business, or about standing forpublic office, or about combating unfair and ruinous competition, or about marrying off their daughter. Such things are of massiveimportance; they lie at the foundation of well-being; they call for thebest thought that the man confronted by them can muster; the perilshidden in a wrong decision overcome even the clamors of vanity. It isin such situations that the superior mental grasp of women is of obviousutility, and has to be admitted. It is here that they rise above theinsignificant sentimentalities, superstitions and formulae of men, and apply to the business their singular talent for separating theappearance from the substance, and so exercise what is called theirintuition. 

Intuition? With all respect, bosh! Then it was intuition that led Darwinto work out the hypothesis of natural selection. Then it was intuitionthat fabricated the gigantically complex score of "Die Walkure. " Thenit was intuition that convinced Columbus of the existence of land to thewest of the Azores. All this intuition of which so muchtranscendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and no less thanintelligence--intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to the hiddentruth through the most formidable wrappings of false semblance anddemeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery that it isequal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth out into thelight, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the larger questionsof life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, notbecause they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magicinherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights andtelescopes; they are at grips with the essentials of a problem beforemen have finished debating its mere externals. They are the supremerealists of the race. Apparently illogical, they are the possessors ofa rare and subtle super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hang to thetruth with a tenacity which carries them through every phase of itsincessant, jellylike shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easilydeceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the samemerciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself--men recognized to be morealoof and uninflammable than the general--men of special talent for thelogical--sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. Butthat is a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, asconstantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as theaverage women of forty-eight. 

II. The War Between the Sexes

6. How Marriages are Arranged

I have said that women are not sentimental, i. E. , not prone to permitmere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation. The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are isitself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be broughtup to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to a fewobvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite the vastaccumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary. 

Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come mostconstantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits ofmind are most clearly contrasted--to the field, to wit, of monogamousmarriage. Surely no long argument is needed to demonstrate the superiorcompetence and effectiveness of women here, and therewith their greaterself-possession, their saner weighing of considerations, their higherpower of resisting emotional suggestion. The very fact that marriagesoccur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed thanmen, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it isplainly to a man's interest to avoid marriage as long as possible, andas plainly to a woman's interest to make a favourable marriage as soonas she can. The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one ofthe capital concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends. Whichside commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All normalmen fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively longperiods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (orperhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation withanother, as every one knows, the average man is duly married and theaverage woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of women, inthis clear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their substantialsuperiority to the great majority of men. 

Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value bymarriage, at least as the institution is now met with in Christendom. Even assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they areplainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries it isno more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion andintimidation--i. E. , the feminine talent for survival in a worldof clashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence andintelligence--has forced him into a more or less abhorrent compromisewith his own honest inclinations and best interests. Whether thatcompromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his relativecowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms and effects, are almost identical. In the first case he marries because he hasbeen clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second he resignshimself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both cases hisinherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of his opponent. It makes him [caroche] the fiction of his enterprise, and even of hisdaring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious operations againsthim. It makes him accept as real the bold play-acting that women alwaysexcel at, and at no time more than when stalking a man. It makes him, above all, see a glamour of romance in a transaction which, even at itsbest, contains almost as much gross trafficking, at bottom, as the saleof a mule. 

A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonlyapportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize thatmarriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in somedetail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe, wantsall that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more thancertain parts. He may desire, let us say, a housekeeper to protect hisgoods and entertain his friends--but he may shrink from the thoughtof sharing his bathtub with anyone, and home cooking may be downrightpoisonous to him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb--and yetsuffer acutely at the me reapproach of relatives-in-law. He may dreamof a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial thanany a bachelor may hope to discover--and stand aghast at admitting herto his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He may wantcompany and not intimacy, or intimacy and not company. He may want acook and not a partner in his business, or a partner in his businessand not a cook. But in order to get the precise thing or things that hewants, he has to take a lot of other things that he doesn't want--thatno sane man, in truth, could imaginably want--and it is to theenterprise of forcing him into this almost Armenian bargain that thewoman of his "choice" addresses herself. Once the game is fairly set, shesearches out his weaknesses with the utmost delicacy and accuracy, andplays upon them with all her superior resources. He carries a handicapfrom the start. His sentimental and unintelligent belief in theoriesthat she knows quite well are not true--e. G. , the theory that sheshrinks from him, and is modestly appalled by the banal carnalities ofmarriage itself--gives her a weapon against him which she drives homewith instinctive and compelling art. The moment she discerns thissentimentality bubbling within him--that is, the moment his oafishsmirks and eye rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectualdisaster that is called falling in love--he is hers to do with as shewill. Save for acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married. 

7. The Feminine Attitude

This sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in women. For reasons that we shall examine later, they have much more to gain bythe business than men, and so they are prompted by their cooler sagacitytenter upon it on the most favourable terms possible, and with theminimum admixture of disarming emotion. Men almost invariably gettheir mates by the process called falling in love; save among thearistocracies of the North and Latin men, the marriage of convenience isrelatively rare; a hundred men marry "beneath" them to every woman whoperpetrates the same folly. And what is meant by this so-called fallingin love? What is meant by it is a procedure whereby a man accounts forthe fact of his marriage, after feminine initiative and generalship havemade it inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze of romance--inbrief, by setting up the doctrine that an obviously self-possessed andmammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most important adventure ofher life, and with the keenest understanding of its utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost disembodied creature, enchanted andmade perfect by a passion that has stolen upon her unawares, and whichshe could not acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man ismade glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and overcome her maidenmodesty; she trembles in his arms; he has been granted a free franchiseto work his wicked will upon her. Thus do the ambulant images of Godcloak their shackles proudly, and divert the judicious with theirboastful shouts. 

Women, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious aboutembracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation. They neveracknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase is, until theman has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off his retreat; todo otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads the mocking andcontumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in love thus appearsin the light of an afterthought, or, perhaps more accurately, in thelight of a contagion. The theory, it would seem, is that the love ofthe man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it instantly, and by someunintelligible magic; that it was non-existent until the heat of his ownflames set it off. This theory, it must be acknowledged, has a certainelement of fact in it. A woman seldom allows herself to be swayed byemotion while the principal business is yet afoot and its issue stillin doubt; to do so would be to expose a degree of imbecility thatis confined only to the half-wits of the sex. But once the man isdefinitely committed, she frequently unbends a bit, if only as a relieffrom the strain of a fixed purpose, and so, throwing off her customaryinhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury of a more or less forced andmawkish sentiment. It is, however, almost unheard of for her to permitherself this relaxation before the sentimental intoxication of the manis assured. To do otherwise--that is, to confess, even post facto, to ananterior descent, --would expose her, as I have said, to the scorn of allother women. Such a confession would be an admission that emotion hadgot the better of her at a critical intellectual moment, and in the eyesof women, as in the eyes of the small minority of genuinely intelligentmen, no treason to the higher cerebral centres could be moredisgraceful. 

8. The Male Beauty

This disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches whereit is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the factthat women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save on the stage, the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in amour over hismore Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is viewed with the utmostsuspicion by all women save the most stupid. In him the vanity native tohis sex is seen to mount to a degree that is positively intolerable. Itnot only irritates by its very nature; it also throws about him asort of unnatural armour, and so makes him resistant to the ordinaryapproaches. For this reason, the matrimonial enterprises of the morereflective and analytical sort of women are almost always directed tomen whose lack of pulchritude makes them easier to bring down, and, what is more important still, easier to hold down. The weight of opinionamong women is decidedly against the woman who falls in love with anApollo. She is regarded, at best, as flighty creature, and at worst, as one pushing bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such weaknesses areresigned to women approaching senility, and to the more ignoble varietyof women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in lovewith a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may succumbto a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman of poise andself-respect, even supposing her to be transiently flustered by a lovelybuck, would yield to that madness for an instant, or confess it to herdearest friend. Women know how little such purely superficial values areworth. The voice of their order, the first taboo of their freemasonry, is firmly against making a sentimental debauch of the serious businessof marriage. 

This disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted for by amateurpsychologists on the ground that women are anesthetic to beauty--thatthey lack the quick and delicate responsiveness of man. Nothing couldbe more absurd. Women, in point of fact, commonly have a far keeneraesthetic sense than men. Beauty is more important to them; theygive more thought to it; they crave more of it in their immediatesurroundings. The average man, at least in England and America, takesa sort of bovine pride in his anaesthesia to the arts; he can think ofthem only as sources of tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement; oneseldom hears of him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful thingthat his wife displays in the presence, of a fine fabric, an effectivecolour, or a graceful form, say in millinery. The truth is that womenare resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and sufficientreason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary. A truly beautiful man, indeed, is as rare as a truly beautiful piece of jewelry. What menmistake for beauty in themselves is usually nothing save a certainhollow gaudiness, a revolting flashiness, the superficial splendour of aprancing animal. The most lovely moving picture actor, considered in thelight of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a piece of vulgarity;his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or among theharmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo clocks andhand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction room. All women, savethe least intelligent, penetrate this imposture with sharp eyes. Theyknow that the human body, except for a brief time in infancy, is nota beautiful thing, buta hideous thing. Their own bodies give them nodelight; it is their constant effort to disguise and conceal them; theynever expose them aesthetically, but only as an act of the grossestsexual provocation. If it were advertised that a troupe of men of easyvirtue were to appear half-clothed upon a public stage, exposing theirchests, thighs, arms and calves, the only women who would go to theentertainment would be a few delayed adolescents, a psychopathic oldmaid or two, and a guard of indignant members of the parish Ladies AidSociety. 

9. Men as Aesthetes

Men show no such sagacious apprehension of the relatively feebleloveliness of the human frame. The most effective lure that a woman canhold out to a man is the lure of what he fatuously conceives to beher beauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is almost always a pureillusion. The female body, even at its best is very defective in form;it has harsh curves and very clumsily distributed masses; compared toit the average milk-jug, or even cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent andgratifying design--in brief, an objet d'art. The fact was curiously (andhumorously) display during the late war, when great numbers of women inall the belligerent countries began putting on uniforms. Instantly theyappeared in public in their grotesque burlesques of the official garb ofaviators, elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards, and so on, theirdeplorable deficiency in design was unescapably revealed. A man, save hebe fat, i. E. , of womanish contours, usually looks better in uniform thanin mufti; the tight lines set off his figure. But a woman is at oncegiven away: she look like a dumbbell run over by an express train. Belowthe neck by the bow and below the waist astern there are two masses thatsimply refuse to fit into a balanced composition. Viewed from the side, she presents an exaggerated S bisected by an imperfect straight line, and so she inevitably suggests a drunken dollar-mark. Her ordinaryclothing cunningly conceals this fundamental imperfection. It swathesthose impossible masses in draperies soothingly uncertain of outline. But putting her into uniform is like stripping her. Instantly all heralleged beauty vanishes. 

Moreover, it is extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the modestsightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only therare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art comes toher aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she is almost sure to bebow-legged. If she has good legs, she is almost sure to have bad teeth. If she has good teeth, she is almost sure to have scrawny hands, ormuddy eyes, or hair like oakum, or no chin. A woman who meets fair testsall 'round is so uncommon that she becomes a sort of marvel, and usuallygains a livelihood by exhibiting herself as such, either on the stage, in the half-world, or as the private jewel of some wealthy connoisseur. 

But this lack of genuine beauty in women lays on them no practicaldisadvantage in the primary business of their sex, for its effectsare more than overborne by the emotional suggestibility, the herculeancapacity for illusion, the almost total absence of critical sense ofmen. Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the most modest doses;they are quite content with the mere appearance of beauty. That isto say, they show no talent whatever for differentiating between theartificial and the real. A film of face powder, skilfully applied, isas satisfying to them as an epidermis of damask. The hair of a deadChinaman, artfully dressed and dyed, gives them as much delight as theauthentic tresses of Venus. A false hip intrigues them as effectively asthe soundest one of living fascia. A pretty frock fetches them quite assurely and securely as lovely legs, shoulders, hands or eyes. In brief, they estimate women, and hence acquire their wives, by reckoning uppurely superficial aspects, which is just as intelligent as estimatingan egg by purely superficial aspects. They never go behind the returns;it never occurs to them to analyze the impressions they receive. Theresult is that many a man, deceived by such paltry sophistications, never really sees his wife--that if, as God is supposed to see, her, andas the embalmer will see her--until they have been married for years. All the tricks may be infantile and obvious, but in the face of so naivea spectator the temptation to continue practising them is irresistible. A trained nurse tells me that even when undergoing the extremediscomforts of parturition the great majority of women continue tomodify their complexions with pulverized talcs, and to give thought tothe arrangement of their hair. Such transparent devices, to be sure, reduce the psychologist to a sour sort of mirth, and yet it must beplain that they suffice to entrap and make fools of men, even the mostdiscreet. I know of no man, indeed, who is wholly resistant to femalebeauty, and I know of no man, even among those engaged professionally byaesthetic problems, who habitually and automatically distinguishes thegenuine, from the imitation. He may doit now and then; he may even preenhimself upon is on unusual discrimination; but given the right woman andthe right stage setting, and he will be deceived almost as readily as ayokel fresh from the cabbage-field. 

10. The Process of Delusion

Such poor fools, rolling their eyes in appraisement of such meagrefemale beauty as is on display in Christendom, bring to their judgmentsa capacity but slightly greater than that a cow would bring to theestimation of epistemologies. They are so unfitted for the businessthat they are even unable to agree upon its elements. Let one suchman succumb to the plaster charms of some prancing miss, and all hisfriends will wonder what is the matter with him. No two are in accord asto which is the most beautiful woman in their own town or street. Turnsix of them loose in millinery shop or the parlour of a bordello, andthere will be no dispute whatsoever; each will offer the crown of loveand beauty to a different girl. 

And what aesthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness thus open the wayfor, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal man hassuccumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one (or, moreaccurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out and grabbed himby the nose), he defends his choice with all the heat and steadfastnessappertaining to the defense of a point of the deepest honour. To tell aman flatly that his wife is not beautiful, or even that his stenographeror manicurist is not beautiful, is so harsh and intolerable an insult tohis taste that even an enemy seldom ventures upon it. One would offendhim far less by arguing that his wife is an idiot. One would relativelyspeaking, almost caress him by spitting into his eye. The ego of themale is simply unable to stomach such an affront. It is a weapon asdiscreditable as the poison of the Borgias. 

Thus, on humane grounds, a conspiracy of silence surrounds the delusionof female beauty, and so its victim is permitted to get quite as muchdelight out of it as if it were sound. The baits he swallows most arenot edible and nourishing baits, but simply bright and gaudy ones. Hesuccumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a graceful twist of the body, a synthetic complexion or a skilful display of ankles without givingthe slightest thought to the fact that a whole woman is there, andthat within the cranial cavity of the woman lies a brain, and that theidiosyncrasies of that brain are of vastly more importance than allimaginable physical stigmata combined. Those idiosyncrasies may make foramicable relations in the complex and difficult bondage called marriage;they may, on the contrary, make for joustings of a downright impossiblecharacter. But not many men, laced in the emotional maze preceding, arecapable of any very clear examination of such facts. The truth is thatthey dodge the facts, even when they are favourable, and lay all stressupon the surrounding and concealing superficialities. The average stupidand sentimental man, if he has a noticeably sensible wife, is almostapologetic about it. The ideal of his sex is always a pretty wife, andthe vanity and coquetry that so often go with prettiness are erectedinto charms. In other words, men play the love game so unintelligentlythat they often esteem a woman in proportion as she seems to disdainand make a mock of her intelligence. Women seldom, if ever, make thatblunder. What they commonly value in a man is not mere showiness, whether physical or spiritual, but that compound of small capacitieswhich makes up masculine efficiency and passes for masculineintelligence. This intelligence, at its highest, has a human valuesubstantially equal to that of their own. In a man's world it atleast gets its definite rewards; it guarantees security, position, alivelihood; it is a commodity that is merchantable. Women thus accord ita certain respect, and esteem it in their husbands, and so seek it out. 

11. Biological Considerations

So far as I can make out by experiments on laboratory animals and bysuch discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there isno biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspectionof women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical orphysiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no betterthan the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to themaladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem, actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportionto weight. Their nervous responses, if anything, are a bit duller thanthose of men; their muscular coordinations are surely no prompter. Onefinds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many bodilyblemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites; theirsenses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even assumingthat their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects ofalcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids, gastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma, arthritisand so on--in short, from the same disturbances of colloidal equilibriumthat produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy, pyaemia, nightsweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other such distempers inmen. They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and appetites. They reactin substantially the same way to all chemical and mechanical agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered per ora to the most sagaciouswoman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and just as deleteriouslyas it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or an ambassador to theCourt of St. James. And once a bottle of Cte Rtie or Scharlachbergeris in her, even the least emotional woman shows the same complex ofsentimentalities that a man shows, and is as maudlin and idiotic as heis. 

Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not inherentin any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not in anyadvantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are rather tobe sought in a physical disadvantage--that is, in the mechanicalinferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive capacity, their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every one knows, is partly a derricked heritage from those females of the Pongo pygmaeuswho were their probable fore-runners in the world; the same thing is tobe observed in the females of almost all other species of mammals. Butit is also partly due to the effects of use under civilization, and, above all, to what evolutionists call sexual selection. In other words, women were already measurably weaker than men at the dawn of humanhistory, and that relative weakness has been progressively augmented inthe interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the processof bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinementhas replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of themin infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of culturalcomplexity has made education more intricate, that the two functions nowlay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and attention of a womanthan they lay upon the strength and attention of any other female. And for another thing, the consequent disability and need of physicalprotection, by feeding and inflaming the already large vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to feminineweakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in proportion asshe is self-sufficient as a social animal but in proportion as she isdependent. In this vicious circle of influences women have been caught, and as a result their chief physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannotexert as much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her allegedsuperior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in "Man andWoman, " is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of fact, standnearly so much hardship as aman can stand, and so the law, usually anass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of observation in its assumptionthat, whenever husband and wife are exposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies first. 

So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt platitudein the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty thathas given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on theintellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have doneis what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case; they havesought compensation for their impotence in one field by employing theirresources in another field to the utmost, and out of that constant andmaximum use has come a marked enlargement of those resources. On theone hand the sum of them present in a given woman has been enormouslyincreased by natural selection, so that every woman, so to speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine mental dexterity as a mere functionof her femaleness. And on the other hand every woman, over and abovethis almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, alsoinherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes theesoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence isthus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for sheis not only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarilycompetent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from hiselders little more than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry vicesand a few degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction in allthose higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies makenecessary to her security, and in particular in all those exerciseswhich aim at overcoming the physical, and hence social and economicsuperiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity for clearreasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality. 

12. Honour

Here, it is obvious, the process of intellectual development takescolour from the Sklavenmoral, and is, in a sense, a product of it. TheJews, as Nietzsche has demonstrated, got their unusual intelligenceby the same process; a contrary process is working in the case of theEnglish and the Americans, and has begun to show itself in the caseof the French and Germans. The sum of feminine wisdom that I have justmentioned--the body of feminine devices and competences that is handeddown from generation to generation of women--is, in fact, made upvery largely of doctrines and expedients that infallibly appear to theaverage sentimental man, helpless as he is before them, as cynical andimmoral. He commonly puts this aversion into the theory that women haveno sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristicallybanal. Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but itmay be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling ofabsolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man andwoman out of which rises most of man's complaint of its absence--to wit, the conflict culminating in marriage, already described--the security ofthe woman is not something that is in actual being, but something thatshe is striving with all arms to attain. In such a conflict it must bemanifest that honor can have no place. An animal fighting for its veryexistence uses all possible means of offence and defence, however foul. Even man, for all his boasting about honor, seldom displays it when hehas anything of the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, ingambling, for gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for himto be honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He ishonorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he seldompermits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or withhitting below the belt in any other sort of combat that is in earnest. The history of all his wars is a history of mutual allegations ofdishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always wellgrounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually achieves inthem is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which prompts him to behumane to the opponent who has been wounded, or disarmed, or otherwisemade innocuous. Even here his so-called honor is little more than a formof playacting, both maudlin and dishonest. In the actual death-strugglehe invariably bites. 

Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact thatthey are dishonorable, i. E. , that they are relatively uncivilized. Inthe midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge themround, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman evergives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her privateinterest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wellscalls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up bysentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfectsymbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man whohas been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and naturalinstincts-that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to his ownego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this commonweal isalways overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good tothe greatest number--of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons. 

The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under thischeese-monger's civilization is far more marked in men than in women, and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher categories. Itmust be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor ofhistory that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the racehave been, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employedin newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther, Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar, Hannibal, Alexander, and to come down to our own time, Grant, StonewallJackson, Bismarck, Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes. 

13. Women and the Emotions

The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for controllingand concealing their emotions is not an indication that they are morecivilized, but a proof that they are less civilized. This capacity, so rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of respect, is acharacteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its loss is oneof the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon ofcivilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous, knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperateassault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical;especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combatof crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populacealarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless seriesof hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged bythe will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately andintelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out ofthem. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; theyare ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effectof civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once therepository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the verybest men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the warsof Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of themhas passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands ofmob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one's selfwith war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the OldDessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples. 

Women are nearly always against war in modern times, for the reasonsbrought forward to justify it are usually either transparently dishonestor childishly sentimental, and hence provoke their scorn. But once thebusiness is begun, they commonly favour its conduct outrance, and arethus in accord with the theory of the great captains of more spaciousdays. In Germany, during the late war, the protests against theSchrecklichkeit practised by the imperial army and navy did not comefrom women, but from sentimental men; in England and the United Statesthere is no record that any woman ever raised her voice against theblockade which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children. I wason both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot recallmeeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine that, inso vast a combat between nations, there could still be categories ofnon-combatants, with aright of asylum on armed ships and in garrisonedtowns. This imbecility was maintained only by men, large numbers of whomsimultaneously took part in wholesale massacres of such non-combatants. The women were superior to such hypocrisy. They recognized the natureof modern war instantly and accurately, and advocated no disingenuousefforts to conceal it. 

14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia

The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largelyresponsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid ofpassion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with somethingakin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by the fact thatvery few masculine observers, on the occasions when they give attentionto the matter, are in a state of mind conducive to exact observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no reason to believethat the normal woman is passionless, or that the minority of women whounquestionably are is of formidable dimensions. To be sure, the peculiarvanity of men, particularly in the Northern countries, makes them placea high value upon the virginal type of woman, and so this type tends togrow more common by sexual selection, but despite that fact, it has byno means superseded the normal type, so realistically described by thetheologians and publicists of the Middle Ages. It would, however, berash to assert that this long continued sexual selection has not madeitself felt, even in the normal type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is tomake it measurably easier for a woman to conquer and conceal emotionthan it is for a man. But this is a mere reinforcement of a nativequality or, at all events, a quality long antedating the rise of thecurious preference just mentioned. That preference obviously owes itsorigin to the concept of private property and is most evident in thosecountries in which the largest proportion of males are property owners, i. E. , in which the property-owning caste reaches down into the lowestconceivable strata of bounders and ignoramuses. The low-caste man isnever quite sure of his wife unless he is convinced that she is entirelydevoid of amorous susceptibility. Thus he grows uneasy whenever sheshows any sign of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to be suspicious of even so trivial a thing as a heartyresponse to a connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of suchsuspicions, there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a gooddeal less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth. 

I have a feeling that the husband of this sort--he is very common in theUnited States, and almost as common among the middle classes of England, Germany and Scandinavia--does himself a serious disservice, and that heis uneasily conscious of it. Having got himself a wife to his austeretaste, he finds that she is rather depressing--that his vanity is almostas painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have beenby a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chieflydelights a man, when some, woman has gone through the solemn buffooneryof yielding to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrastbetween her reserve in the presence of other men and her enchantingcomplaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is enormouslytickled. To the world in general she seems remote and unapproachable; tohim she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a bit abandoned. It isas if some great magnifico male, some inordinate czar or kaiser, shouldstep down from the throne to play dominoes with him behind the door. The greater the contrast between the lady's two fronts, the greaterhis satisfaction-up to, of course, the point where his suspicions arearoused. Let her diminish that contrast ever so little on the publicside--by smiling at a handsome actor, by saying a word too many to anattentive head-waiter, by holding the hand of the rector of the parish, by winking amiably at his brother or at her sister's husband--and at oncethe poor fellow begins to look for clandestine notes, to employ privateinquiry agents, and to scrutinize the eyes, ears, noses and hair of hischildren with shameful doubts. This explains many domestic catastrophes. 

15. Mythical Anthropophagi

The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary. Oneoften encounters references to her in literature, but who has evermet hex in real life? As for me, I doubt that such a monster has everactually existed. There are, of course, women who spend a great deal oftime denouncing and reviling men, but these are certainly not genuineman-haters; they are simply women who have done their utmost tosnare men, and failed. Of such sort are the majority of inflammatorysuffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigidlimitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who runno more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than somany mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in suchnoisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attractthe attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises thatare difficult or forbidden. But certainly the enterprise of dissuadingsuch a propagandist from her gospel would not be difficult, and I knowof no law forbidding it. 

I'll begin to believe in the man-hater the day I am introduced to awoman who has definitely and finally refused a chance of marriage toaman who is of her own station in life, able to support her, unafflictedby any loathsome disease, and of reasonably decent aspect andmanners--in brief a man who is thoroughly eligible. I doubt that anysuch woman breathes the air of Christendom. Whenever one comes toconfidential terms with an unmarried woman, of course, she favours onewith a long chronicle of the men she has refused to marry, greatlyto their grief. But unsentimental cross-examination, at least in myexperience, always develops the fact that every one of these sufferedfrom some obvious and intolerable disqualification. Either he had a wifealready and was vague about his ability to get rid of her, or he wasdrunk when he was brought to his proposal and repudiated it or forgotit the next day, or he was a bankrupt, or he was old and decrepit, or hewas young and plainly idiotic, or he had diabetes or a bad heart, or hisrelatives were impossible, or he believed in spiritualism, or democracy, or the Baconian theory, or some other such nonsense. Restricting thething to men palpably eligible, I believe thoroughly that no sane womanhas ever actually muffed a chance. Now and then, perhaps, a miraculouslyfortunate girl has two victims on the mat simultaneously, and has tolose one. But they are seldom, if ever, both good chances; one isnearly always a duffer, thrown in in the telling to make the bourgeoisiemarvel. 

16. A Conspiracy of Silence

The reason why all this has to be stated here is simply that women, who could state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained fromdiscussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of generalconspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of theesoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment that anysuch body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity and lessdiscretion, area good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a wholeliterature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli's appallingconfession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such menas Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, BenvenutoCellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is very rarelythat a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the veils whichconceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is transmittedfrom mother to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One observes itspractical workings, but hears little about its principles. The causesof this secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis, can prevailagainst men in the great struggle for power and security only by keepingthem disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched battle, with thedevil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic inferioritywould inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to apply theirpeculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger of arousingthe foe. He must be attached without any formal challenge, and evenwithout any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the heart ofwhat Nietzsche called the slave morality--in brief, a morality basedupon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having for itsforemost character a bold denial of its actual aim. 

III. Marriage

17. Fundamental Motives

How successful such a concealment may be is well displayed by thegeneral acceptance of the notion that women are reluctant to enterinto marriage--that they have to be persuaded to it by eloquence andpertinacity, and even by a sort of intimidation. The truth is that, in aworld almost divested of intelligible idealism, and hence dominated by asenseless worship of the practical, marriage offers the best career thatthe average woman can reasonably aspire to, and, in the case of verymany women, the only one that actually offers a livelihood. What isesteemed and valuable, in our materialistic and unintelligent society, is precisely that petty practical efficiency at which men are expert, and which serves them in place of free intelligence. A woman, save sheshow a masculine strain that verges upon the pathological, cannot hopeto challenge men in general in this department, but it is always open toher to exchange her sexual charm for a lion's share in the earnings ofone man, and this is what she almost invariably tries to do. That isto say, she tries to get a husband, for getting a husband means, ina sense, enslaving an expert, and so covering up her own lack ofexpertness, and escaping its consequences. Thereafter she has at leastone stout line of defence against a struggle for existence in which theprospect of survival is chiefly based, not upon the talents that aretypically hers, but upon those that she typically lacks. Before theaverage woman succumbs in this struggle, some man or other must succumbfirst. Thus her craft converts her handicap into an advantage. 

In this security lies the most important of all the benefits that awoman attains by marriage. It is, in fact, the most important benefitthat the mind can imagine, for the whole effort of the human race, underour industrial society, is concentrated upon the attainment of it. Butthere are other benefits, too. One of them is that increase in dignitywhich goes with an obvious success; the woman who has got herself asatisfactory husband, or even a highly imperfect husband, is regardedwith respect by other women, and has a contemptuous patronage for thosewho have failed to do likewise. Again, marriage offers her the only safeopportunity, considering the levantine view of women as property whichChristianity has preserved in our civilization, to obtain gratificationfor that powerful complex of instincts which we call the sexual, and, inparticular, for the instinct of maternity. The woman who has not hada child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more than a littleridiculous. She is in the position of a man who has never stoodin battle; she has missed the most colossal experience of her sex. Moreover, a social odium goes with her loss. Other women regard her asa sort of permanent tyro, and treat her with ill-concealed disdain, and deride the very virtue which lies at the bottom of her experientialpenury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect among womenfor virginity per se. They are against the woman who has got rid ofhers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost anythingintrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad bargain, and onethat materially diminishes the sentimental respect for virtue held bymen, and hence one against the general advantage an dwell-being of thesex. In other words, it is a guild resentment that they feel, not amoral resentment. Women, in general, are not actively moral, nor, for that matter, noticeably modest. Every man, indeed, who is in widepractice among them is occasionally astounded and horrified to discover, on some rainy afternoon, an almost complete absence of modesty in somewomen of the highest respectability. 

But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable iseconomic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute, butusually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may diewithout enough life insurance, or run off with some preposterous lightof love, or become an invalid or insane, or step over the intangibleand wavering line which separates business success from a prison cell. Again, a woman may be deceived: there are stray women who are credulousand sentimental, and stray men who are cunning. Yet again, a womanmay make false deductions from evidence accurately before her, ineptlyguessing that the clerk she marries today will be the head of the firmtomorrow, instead of merely the bookkeeper tomorrow. But on the whole itmust be plain that a woman, in marrying, usually obtains for herselfa reasonably secure position in that station of life to which she isaccustomed. She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but realistically;she always gives thought to the economic situation; she seldom takesa chance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for men to marrywomen who bring nothing to the joint capital of marriage save good looksand an appearance of vivacity; it is almost unheard of for women toneglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a rich man, at least in America, marries his typist or the governess of his sister's children andis happy thereafter, but when a rare woman enters upon a comparablemarriage she is commonly set down as insane, and the disaster thatalmost always ensues quickly confirms the diagnosis. 

The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in marriage--andthe seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to theheart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for ahusband with a Rolls-Royce--is, by a curious twist of fate, one of theunderlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriagerescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress uponan uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers itshighest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they sufferthe disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of thisdisadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectualenterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machinesthat men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with marriagealways before them, coloring their every vision of the future, andholding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they areunder no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid artsthey revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive toofeeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth ofthe idiotic "knowledge" in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or evenconvince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the headof the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons thebusiness. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away thehope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the possibility that she, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles down in earnest towhatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to developcompetence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborioustraining and unremitting diligence, would select a woman stilldefinitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would chooseeither a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable ofsnaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as tobe pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex. 

18. The Process of Courtship

This bemusement of the typical woman by the notion of marriage has beennoted as self-evident by every literate student of the phenomena of sex, from the early Christian fathers down to Nietzsche, Ellis and Shaw. ThatIt is denied by the current sentimentality of Christendom is surely noevidence against it. What we have in this denial, as I have said, isno more than a proof of woman's talent for a high and sardonic formof comedy and of man's infinite vanity. "I wooed and won her, " saysSganarelle of his wife. "I made him run, " says the hare of the hound. When the thing is maintained, not as a mere windy sentimentality, butwith some notion of carrying it logically, the result is invariably adisplay of paralogy so absurd that it becomes pathetic. Such nonsenseone looks for in the works of gyneophile theorists with no experience ofthe world, and there is where one finds it. It is almost always weddedto the astounding doctrine that sexual frigidity, already disposedof, is normal in the female, and that the approach of the male is madepossible, not by its melting into passion, but by a purely intellectualdetermination, inwardly revolting, to avoid his ire by pandering to hisgross appetites. Thus the thing is stated in a book called "The Sexesin Science and History, " by Eliza Burt Gamble, an American ladyanthropologist:

The beautiful coloring of male birds and fishes, and the variousappendages acquired by males throughout the various orders below man, and which, sofar as they themselves are concerned, serve no other usefulpurpose than to aid them in securing the favours of the females, have bythe latter been turned to account in the processes of reproduction. Thefemale made the male beautiful _That She Might Endure His Caresses_. 

The italics are mine. From this premiss the learned doctor proceedsto the classical sentimental argument that the males of all species, including man, are little more than chronic seducers, and that theirchief energies are devoted to assaulting and breaking down the nativereluctance of the aesthetic and anesthetic females. In her own words:"Regarding males, outside of the instinct for self-preservation, which, by the way is often overshadowed by their great sexual eagerness, nodiscriminating characters have been acquired and transmitted, otherthan those which have been the result of passion, namely, pugnacity andperseverance. " Again the italics are mine. What we have here is merelythe old, old delusion of masculine enterprise in amour--the concept ofman as a lascivious monster and of woman as his shrinking victim--inbrief, the Don Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie thesprings of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and ofsome of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids areled to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out thatthey have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres, andto watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been launched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is thus, moreimportantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have been convincedthat their children are monuments, not to a co-operation in which theirown share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary libidinousnessof their swinish and unconscionable husbands. 

Dr. Gamble, of course, is speaking of the lower fauna in the time ofNoah. A literal application of her theory toman today is enough to bringit to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo sapiens actually doesthe primping and parading that she describes? Which runs to "beautifulcoloring, " sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases itself in vestmentswhich "serve no other useful purpose than to aid in securing thefavours" of the other? The insecurity of the gifted savante's positionis at once apparent. The more convincingly she argues that the primevalmud-hens and she mackerel had to be anesthetized with spectaculardecorations in order to "endure the caresses" of their beaux, the moreshe supports the thesis that men have to be decoyed and bamboozled intolove today. In other words, her argument turns upon and destroys itself. Carried to its last implication, it holds that women are all DonnaJuanitas, and that if they put off their millinery and cosmetics, andabandoned the shameless sexual allurements of their scanty dress, mencould not "endure their caresses. "

To be sure, Dr. Gamble by no means draws this disconcerting conclusionherself. To the contrary, she clings to the conventional theory that thehuman female of today is no more than the plaything of the concupiscentmale, and that she must wait for the feminist millenium to set herfree from his abominable pawings. But she can reach this notion onlyby standing her whole structure of reasoning on its head--in fact, byknocking it over and repudiating it. On the one hand, she argues thatsplendour of attire is merely a bait to overcome the reluctance ofthe opposite sex, and on the other hand she argues, at least by fairinference, that it is not. This grotesque switching of horses, however, need not detain us. The facts are too plain to be disposed of by a ladyanthropologist's theorizings. Those facts are supported, in the fieldof animal behaviour, by the almost unanimous evidence of zoologists, including that of Dr. Gamble herself. They are supported, in the fieldof human behaviour, by a body of observation and experience so colossalthat it would be quite out of the question to dispose of it. Women, asI have shown, have a more delicate aesthetic sense than men; in a worldwholly rid of men they would probably still array themselves with vastlymore care and thought of beauty than men would ever show in like case. But with the world what it is, it must be obvious that their display offinery--to say nothing of their display of epidermis--has the consciouspurpose of attracting the masculine eye. Anormal woman, indeed, neverso much as buys a pair of shoes or has her teeth plugged withoutconsidering, in the back of her mind, the effect upon some unsuspectingcandidate for her "reluctant" affections. 

19. The Actual Husband

So far as I can make out, no woman of the sort worth hearing--that is, no woman of intelligence, humour and charm, and hence of success inthe duel of sex--has ever publicly denied this; the denial is confinedentirely to the absurd sect of female bachelors of arts and to thegenerality of vain and unobservant men. The former, having failed toattract men by the devices described, take refuge behind the sour grapesdoctrine that they have never tried, and the latter, having fallenvictims, sooth their egoism by arrogating the whole agency tothemselves, thus giving it a specious appearance of the volitional, and even of the audacious. The average man is an almost incrediblepopinjay; he can think of himself only as at the centre of situations. All the sordid transactions of his life appear to him, and are depictedin his accounts of them, as feats, successes, proofs of his acumen. Heregards it as an almost magical exploit to operate a stock-brokerageshop, or to get elected to public office, or to swindle his fellowknaves in some degrading commercial enterprise, or to profess somenonsense or other in a college, or to write so platitudinous a book asthis one. And in the same way he views it as a great testimony to hisprowess at amour to yield up his liberty, his property and his soulto the first woman who, in despair of finding better game, turns herappraising eye upon him. But if you want to hear a mirthless laugh, justpresent this masculine theory to a bridesmaid at a wedding, particularlyafter alcohol and crocodile tears have done their disarming work uponher. That is to say, just hint to her that the bride harboured nonotion of marriage until stormed into acquiescence by the moonstruck andimpetuous bridegroom. 

I have used the phrase, "in despair of finding better game. " What I meanis this that not one woman in a hundred ever marries her first choiceamong marriageable men. That first choice is almost invariably one whois beyond her talents, for reasons either fortuitous or intrinsic. Letus take, for example, a woman whose relative navetete makes the processclearly apparent, to wit, a simple shop-girl. Her absolute first choice, perhaps, is not a living man at all, but a supernatural abstraction ina book, say, one of the heroes of Hall Caine, Ethel M. Dell, orMarie Corelli. After him comes a moving-picture actor. Then anothermoving-picture actor. Then, perhaps, many more--ten or fifteen head. Then a sebaceous young clergyman. Then the junior partner in the firmshe works for. Then a couple of department managers. Then a clerk. Thena young man with no definite profession or permanent job--one of theinnumerable host which flits from post to post, always restive, alwaystrying something new--perhaps a neighborhood garage-keeper in the end. Well, the girl begins with the Caine colossus: he vanishes into thinair. She proceeds to the moving picture actors: they are almost asfar beyond her. And then to the man of God, the junior partner, thedepartment manager, the clerk; one and all they are carried off by girlsof greater attractions and greater skill--girls who can cast gaudierflies. In the end, suddenly terrorized by the first faint shadows ofspinsterhood, she turns to the ultimate numskull--and marries him out ofhand. 

This, allowing for class modifications, is almost the normal historyof a marriage, or, more accurately, of the genesis of a marriage, underProtestant Christianity. Under other rites the business is taken out ofthe woman's hands, at least partly, and so she is less enterprising inher assembling of candidates and possibilities. But when the whole thingis left to her own heart--i. E. , to her head--it is but natural thatshe should seek as wide a range of choice as the conditions of herlife allow, and in a democratic society those conditions put few if anyfetters upon her fancy. The servant girl, or factory operative, or evenprostitute of today may be the chorus girl or moving picture vampireof tomorrow and the millionaire's wife of next year. In America, especially, men have no settled antipathy to such stooping alliances;in fact, it rather flatters their vanity to play Prince Charming toCinderella. The result is that every normal American young woman, with the practicality of her sex and the inner confidence that goestherewith, raises her amorous eye as high as it will roll. And thesecond result is that every American man of presentable exterior andeasy means is surrounded by an aura of discreet provocation: he cannoteven dictate a letter, or ask for a telephone number without beingmeasured for his wedding coat. On the Continent of Europe, andespecially in the Latin countries, where class barriers are moreformidable, the situation differs materially, and to the disadvantage ofthe girl. If she makes an overture, it is an invitation to disaster; herhope of lawful marriage by such means is almost nil. In consequence, theprudent and decent girl avoids such overtures, and they must be made bythird parties or by the man himself. This is the explanation of the factthat a Frenchman, say, is habitually enterprising in amour, andhence bold and often offensive, whereas an American is what is calledchivalrous. The American is chivalrous for the simple reason thatthe initiative is not in his hands. His chivalry is really a sort ofcoquetry. 

20. The Unattainable Ideal

But here I rather depart from the point, which is this: that the averagewoman is not strategically capable of bringing down the most temptinggame within her purview, and must thus content herself with a second, third, or nth choice. The only women who get their first choicesare those who run in almost miraculous luck and those too stupid toformulate an ideal--two very small classes, it must be obvious. A fewwomen, true enough, are so pertinacious that they prefer defeat tocompromise. That is to say, they prefer to put off marriage indefinitelyrather than to marry beneath the highest leap of their fancy. But suchwomen may be quickly dismissed as abnormal, and perhaps as downrightdiseased in mind; the average woman is well-aware that marriage is farbetter for her than celibacy, even when it falls a good deal shortof her primary hopes, and she is also well aware that the differencesbetween man and man, once mere money is put aside, are so slight as tobe practically almost negligible. Thus the average woman is under noneof the common masculine illusions about elective affinities, soul mates, love at first sight, and such phantasms. She is quite ready to fall inlove, as the phrase is, with any man who is plainly eligible, and sheusually knows a good many more such men than one. Her primary demandin marriage is not for the agonies of romance, but for comfort andsecurity; she is thus easier satisfied than a man, and oftener happy. One frequently hears of remarried widowers who continue to moon abouttheir dead first wives, but for a remarried widow to show any suchsentimentality would be a nine days' wonder. Once replaced, a deadhusband is expunged from the minutes. And so is a dead love. 

One of the results of all this is a subtle reinforcement of the contemptwith which women normally regard their husbands--a contempt grounded, asI have shown, upon a sense of intellectual superiority. To this primarysense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a concretecomparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the factthat such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the typicalhusband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it than hiswife. He is, taking averages, one who has been loved, as the sayinggoes, by but one woman, and then only as a second, third or nth choice. If any other woman had ever loved him, as the idiom has it, she wouldhave married him, and so made him ineligible for his present happiness. But the average bachelor is a man who has been loved, so to speak, bymany women, and is the lost first choice of at least some of them. Herepresents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the husband is theattained and disdained. 

Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority ofbachelors, so often noted by students of mankind--a superiority somarked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-ratephilosophers who were married men. The bachelor's very capacity toavoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom fromthe ordinary sentimentalism of his sex--in other words, of his greaterapproximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He is able todefeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business anequipment almost comparable to their own. Herbert Spencer, until he wasfifty, was ferociously harassed by women of all sorts. Among others, George Eliot tried very desperately to marry him. But after he had madeit plain, over a long series of years, that he was prepared to resistmarriage to the full extent of his military and naval power, the girlsdropped off one by one, and so his last decades were full of peace andhe got a great deal of very important work done. 

21. The Effect on the Race

It is, of course, not well for the world that the highest sort of menare thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their superioritydies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and sentimentalities oflesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a popular delusion thatthe sons of great men are always dolts, the fact is that intellectualsuperiority is inheritable, quite as easily as bodily strength; and thatfact has been established beyond cavil by the laborious inquiries ofGalton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians of the English school. If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzschehad married and begotten sons, those sons, it is probable, would havecontributed as much to philosophy as the sons and grandsons of Veit Bachcontributed to music, or those of Erasmus Darwin to biology, or those ofHenry Adams to politics, or those of Hamilcar Barcato the art of war. I have said that Herbert Spencer's escape from marriage facilitated hislife-work, and so served the immediate good of English philosophy, butin the long run it will work a detriment, for he left no sons to carryon his labours, and the remaining Englishmen of his time were unableto supply the lack. His celibacy, indeed, made English philosophyco-extensive with his life; since his death the whole body ofmetaphysical speculation produced in England has been of little more, practical value to the world than a drove of bogs. In precisely the sameway the celibacy of Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche has reduced Germanphilosophy to feebleness. 

Even setting aside this direct influence of heredity, there is theequally potent influence of example and tuition. It is a giganticadvantage to live on intimate terms with a first-rate, man, and have hiscare. Hamilcar not only gave the Carthagenians a great general in hisactual son; he also gave them a great general in his son-in-law, trainedin his camp. But the tendency of the first-rate man to remain a bacheloris very strong, and Sidney Lee once showed that, of all the greatwriters of England since the Renaissance, more than half were eithercelibates or lived apart from their wives. Even the married onesrevealed the tendency plainly. For example, consider Shakespeare. Hewas forced into marriage while still a minor by the brothers of AnnHathaway, who was several years his senior, and had debauched him andgave out that she was enceinte by him. He escaped from her abhorrentembraces as quickly as possible, and thereafter kept as far away fromher as he could. His very distaste for marriage, indeed, was the causeof his residence in London, and hence, in all probability, of thelabours which made him immortal. 

In different parts of the world various expedients have been resorted toto overcome this reluctance to marriage among the better sort of men. Christianity, in general, combats it on the ground that it is offensiveto God--though at the same time leaning toward an enforced celibacyamong its own agents. The discrepancy is fatal to the position. On theone hand, it is impossible to believe that the same God who permittedHis own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin, and onthe other hand, it is obvious that the average cleric would be damagedbut little, and probably improved appreciably, by having a wife tothink for him, and to force him to virtue and industry, and to aid himotherwise in his sordid profession. Where religious superstitionshave died out the institution of the dot prevails--an idea borrowed byChristians from the Jews. The dot is simply a bribe designed to overcomethe disinclination of the male. It involves a frank recognition of thefact that he loses by marriage, and it seeks to make up for that loss bya money payment. Its obvious effect is to give young women a wider andbetter choice of husbands. A relatively superior man, otherwise quiteout of reach, may be brought into camp by the assurance of economicease, and what is more, he may be kept in order after he has been takenby the consciousness of his gain. Among hardheaded and highly practicalpeoples, such as the Jews and the French, the dot flourishes, andits effect is to promote intellectual suppleness in the race, for theaverage child is thus not inevitably the offspring of a woman and anoodle, as with us, but may be the offspring of a woman and a man ofreasonable intelligence. But even in France, the very highest class ofmen tend to evade marriage; they resist money almost as unanimously astheir Anglo-Saxon brethren resist sentimentality. 

In America the dot is almost unknown, partly because money-getting iseasier to men than in Europe and is regarded as less degrading, andpartly because American men are more naive than Frenchmen and arethus readily intrigued without actual bribery. But the best of themnevertheless lean to celibacy, and plans for overcoming their habit arefrequently proposed and discussed. One such plan involves a heavy tax onbachelors. The defect in it lies in the fact that the average bachelor, for obvious reasons, is relatively well to do, and would pay the taxrather than marry. Moreover, the payment of it would help to salve hisconscience, which is now often made restive, I believe, by a maudlinfeeling that he is shirking his duty to the race, and so he would beconfirmed and supported in his determination to avoid the altar. Stillfurther, he would escape the social odium which now attaches to hiscelibacy, for whatever a man pays for is regarded as his right. Asthings stand, that odium is of definite potency, and undoubtedly has itsinfluence upon a certain number of men in the lower ranks of bachelors. They stand, so to speak, in the twilight zone of bachelorhood, with oneleg furtively over the altar rail; it needs only an extra pull to bringthem to the sacrifice. But if they could compound for their immunityby a cash indemnity it is highly probable that they would take on newresolution, and in the end they would convert what remained of theirpresent disrepute into a source of egoistic satisfaction, as is done, indeed, by a great many bachelors even today. These last immoralists areprivy to the elements which enter into that disrepute: the ire of womenwhose devices they have resisted and the envy of men who have succumbed. 

22. Compulsory Marriage

I myself once proposed an alternative scheme, to wit, the prohibitionof sentimental marriages by law, and the substitution of match-makingby the common hangman. This plan, as revolutionary as it may seem, wouldhave several plain advantages. For one thing, it would purge the seriousbusiness of marriage of the romantic fol-de-rol that now corrupts it, and so make for the peace and happiness of the race. For another thing, it would work against the process which now selects out, as I have said, those men who are most fit, and so throws the chief burden of paternityupon the inferior, to the damage of posterity. The hangman, if he madehis selections arbitrarily, would try to give his office permanenceand dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet with publicapprobation, i. E. , men obviously of sound stock and talents, i. E. , thesort of men who now habitually escape. And if he made his selection bythe hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out of a hat, or byany other such method of pure chance, that pure chance would fallindiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper orders would thuslose their present comparative immunity. True enough, a good many menwould endeavour to influence him privately to their own advantage, andit is probable that he would occasionally succumb, but it must be plainthat the men most likely to prevail in that enterprise would not bephilosophers, but politicians, and so there would be some benefit tothe race even here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy loss whena Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an ambassador orPrime Minister dies childless, but when a Herbert Spencer goes to thegrave without leaving sons behind him there is a detriment to all thegenerations of the future. 

I did not offer the plan, of course, as a contribution to practicalpolitics, but merely as a sort of hypothesis, to help clarify theproblem. Many other theoretical advantages appear in it, but itsexecution is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also bya general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at leastoffers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despiteits unfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose thesubstitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle forthe plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt rightly, that her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangmanor the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favourable to heropportunities. And men would oppose it because it would restrict theirliberty. This liberty, of course, is largely imaginary. In its commonmanifestation, it is no more, at bottom, than the privilege of beingbamboozled and made a mock of by the first woman who ventures to essaythe business. But none the less it is quite as precious to menas anyother of the ghosts that their vanity conjures up for their enchantment. They cherish the notion that unconditioned volition enters into thematter, and that under volition there is not only a high degree ofsagacity but also a touch of the daring and the devilish. A man is oftenalmost as much pleased and flattered by his own marriage as he would beby the achievement of what is currently called a seduction. In the onecase, as in the other, his emotion is one of triumph. The substitutionof pure chance would take away that soothing unction. 

The present system, to be sure, also involves chance. Every man realizesit, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which he humblywhispers: "There, but for the grace of God, go I. " But that chance hasa sugarcoating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion; it shows less starkand intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald hazard of thedie. Thus men prefer it, and shrink from the other. In the same way, Ihave no doubt, the majority of foxes would object to choosing lots todetermine the victim of a projected fox-hunt. They prefer to take theirchances with the dogs. 

23. Extra-Legal Devices

It is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration to say that all first-classmen escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that theirhigh qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one hand itmust be obvious that an appreciable number of them, perhaps by reasonof their very detachment and preoccupation, are intrigued into the holyestate, and that not a few of them enter it deliberately, convinced thatit is the safest form of liaison possible under Christianity. And onthe other hand one must not forget the biological fact that it is quitefeasible to achieve offspring without the imprimatur of Church andState. The thing, indeed, is so commonplace that I need not risk ascandal by uncovering it in detail. What I allude to, I need not add, is not that form of irregularity which curses innocent children with thestigma of illegitimacy, but that more refined and thoughtful formwhich safeguards their social dignity while protecting them againstinheritance from their legal fathers. English philosophy, as I haveshown, suffers by the fact that Herbert Spencer was too busy to permithimself any such romantic altruism--just as American literature gainsenormously by the fact that Walt Whitman adventured, leaving seven sonsbehind him, three of whom are now well-known American poets and in theforefront of the New Poetry movement. 

The extent of this correction of a salient evil of monogamy is veryconsiderable; its operations explain the private disrepute of perhaps amajority of first-rate men; its advantages have been set forth in GeorgeMoore's "Euphorion in Texas, " though in a clumsy and sentimental way. What is behind it is the profound race sense of women--the instinctwhich makes them regard the unborn in their every act--perhaps, too, thefact that the interests of the unborn are here identical, as inother situations, with their own egoistic aspirations. As a popularphilosopher has shrewdly observed, the objections to polygamy do notcome from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer halfor a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man to the whole devotionof a third-rate man. Considerations of much the same sort also justifypolyandry--if not morally, then at least biologically. The averagewoman, as I have shown, must inevitably view her actual husband witha certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, shecannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by thefact that he is their father, nor can she help feeling guilty aboutit; for she knows that he is their father only by reason of her owninitiative in the proceedings anterior to her marriage. If, now, anopportunity presents itself to remove that handicap from at least someof them, and at the same time to realize her ideal and satisfy hervanity--if such a chance offers it is no wonder that she occasionallyembraces it. 

Here we have an explanation of many lamentable and otherwiseinexplicable violations of domestic integrity. The woman in the case iscommonly dismissed as vicious, but that is no more than a new exampleof the common human tendency to attach the concept of viciousness towhatever is natural, and intelligent, and above the comprehension ofpoliticians, theologians and green-grocers. 

24. Intermezzo on Monogamy

The prevalence of monogamy in Christendom is commonly ascribed toethical motives. This is quite as absurd as ascribing wars to ethicalmotives which is, of course, frequently done. The simple truth is thatethical motives are no more than deductions from experience, and thatthey are quickly abandoned whenever experience turns against them. In the present case experience is still overwhelming on the side ofmonogamy; civilized men are in favour of it because they find that itworks. And why does it work? Because it is the most effective of allavailable antidotes to the alarms and terrors of passion. Monogamy, in brief, kills passion--and passion is the most dangerous of all thesurviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based uponorder, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. Thecivilized man--the ideal civilized man--is simply one who neversacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reachesperfection when he even ceases to love passionately--when he reducesthe most profound of all his instinctive experience from the level ofan ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing armies andworkshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infantdeath-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making itpossible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour ofthe day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, andso gradually kills it. 

The advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail to getall the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example, the important moral business of safeguarding the virtue of theunmarried--that is, of the still passionate. The present plan indealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him withscare-crows and prohibitions--to try to convince him logicallythat passion is dangerous. This is both supererogation andimbecility--supererogation because he already knows that it isdangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill apassion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it reinunder unfavourable and dispiriting conditions--to bring it down, by slowstages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror. How much more, then, could be accomplished if the wild young man were forbidden polygamy, before marriage, but permitted monogamy! The prohibition in this casewould be relatively easy to enforce, instead of impossible, as in theother. Curiosity would be satisfied; nature would get out of her cage;even romance would get an inning. Ninety-nine young men out of a hundredwould submit, if only because it would be much easier to submit that toresist. 

And the result? Obviously, it would be laudable--that is, acceptingcurrent definitions of the laudable. The product, after six months, would be a well-regimented and disillusioned young man, as devoid ofdisquieting and demoralizing, passion as an ancient of eighty--in brief, the ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely fails toproduce a satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one hand itsimpossible prohibitions cause a multitude of lamentable revolts, oftenending in a silly sort of running amok. On the other hand they fill theY. M. C. A. 's with scared poltroons full of indescribably disgustingFreudian suppressions. Neither group supplies many ideal citizens. Neither promotes the sort of public morality that is aimed at. 

25. Late Marriages

The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonlytakes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is almostalways able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the averagepoor clodpate, or normal man. If he actually marries early, it is nearlyalways proof that some intolerable external pressure has been appliedto him, as in Shakespeare's case, or that his mental sensitivenessapproaches downright insanity, as in Shelley's. This fact, curiouslyenough, has escaped the observation of an otherwise extremely astuteobserver, namely Havelock Ellis. In his study of British genius he notesthe fact that most men of unusual capacities are the sons of relativelyold fathers, but instead of exhibiting the true cause thereof, heascribes it to a mysterious quality whereby a man already in decline iscapable of begetting better offspring than one in full vigour. This isa palpable absurdity, not only because it goes counter to facts longestablished by animal breeders, but also because it tacitly assumesthat talent, and hence the capacity for transmitting it, is an acquiredcharacter, and that this character may be transmitted. Nothing couldbe more unsound. Talent is not an acquired character, but a congenitalcharacter, and the man who is born with it has it in early life quite aswell as in later life, though Its manifestation may have to wait. JamesMill was yet a young man when his son, John Stuart Mill, was born, andnot one of his principle books had been written. But though the "Elementsof Political Economy" and the "Analysis of the Human Mind" were thusbut vaguely formulated in his mind, if they were actually so much asformulated at all, and it was fifteen years before he wrote them, he wasstill quite able to transmit the capacity to write them to his son, and that capacity showed itself, years afterward, in the latter's"Principles of Political Economy" and "Essay on Liberty. "

But Ellis' faulty inference is still based upon a sound observation, towit, that the sort of man capable of transmitting high talents to a sonis ordinarily a man who does not have a son at all, at least in wedlock, until he has advanced into middle life. The reasons which impel him toyield even then are somewhat obscure, but two or three of them, perhaps, may be vaguely discerned. One lies in the fact that every man, whetherof the first-class or of any other class, tends to decline in mentalagility as he grows older, though in the actual range and profundityof his intelligence he may keep on improving until he collapses intosenility. Obviously, it is mere agility of mind, and not profundity, that is of most value and effect in so tricky and deceptive a combat asthe duel of sex. The aging man, with his agility gradually withering, is thus confronted by women in whom it still luxuriates as a function oftheir relative youth. Not only do women of his own age aspire to ensnarehim, but also women of all ages back to adolescence. Hence his averageor typical opponent tends to be progressively younger and younger thanhe is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth may be sufficientto tip over his tottering defences. This, I take it, is why oldish menare so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is not that age callsmaudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it is that age is nomatch for youth, especially when age is male and youth is female. Thecase of the late Henrik Ibsen was typical. At forty Ibsen was a sedatefamily man, and it is doubtful that he ever so much as glanced at awoman; all his thoughts were upon the composition of "The League ofYouth, " his first social drama. At fifty he was almost as preoccupied;"A Doll's House" was then hatching. But at sixty, with his best work alldone and his decline begun, he succumbed preposterously to a flirtatiousdamsel of eighteen, and thereafter, until actual insanity released him, he mooned like a provincial actor in a sentimental melodrama. Had it notbeen, indeed, for the fact that he was already married, and to a verysensible wife, he would have run off with this flapper, and so madehimself publicly ridiculous. 

Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men isfound, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the disabilitieshe suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages to increase. At thirty aman is terrified by the inhibitions of monogamy and haslittle taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at sixty he is beyondamorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What heis oftenest conscious of, in these later years, is his physical decay;he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling into neglect andhelplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice between getting awife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the wife as the lessexpensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marryhim anyhow; if he employs her in place of a wife he commonly endsby finding himself married and minus a nurse, to his confusion anddiscomfiture, and to the far greater discomfiture of his heirs andassigns. This process is so obvious and so commonplace that I apologizeformally for rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this: thataman's instinctive aversion to marriage is grounded upon a sense ofsocial and economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a meretheory when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is onthe side of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is apowerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had halfas much to gain by marriage as women gain, then, all men would be asardently in favour of it as women are. 

26. Disparate Unions

This brings us to a fact frequently noted by students of the subject:that first-rate men, when they marry at all, tend to marry noticeablyinferior wives. The causes of the phenomenon, so often discussed andso seldom illuminated, should be plain by now. The first-rate man, bypostponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches it in theend with his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open to theadvances of women whose attractions are wholly meretricious, e. G. , emptyflappers, scheming widows, and trained nurses with a highly developedprofessional technic of sympathy. If he marries at all, indeed, hemust commonly marry badly, for women of genuine merit are no longerinterested in him; what was once a lodestar is now no more than asmoking smudge. It is this circumstance that account for the low calibreof a good many first-rate men's sons, and gives a certain support to thecommon notion that they are always third-raters. Those sons inherit fromtheir mothers as well as from their fathers, and the bad strain is oftensufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain. Mediocrity, as everyMendelian knows, is a dominant character, and extraordinary ability isrecessive character. In a marriage between an able man and a commonplacewoman, the chances that any given child will resemble the mother are, roughly speaking, three to one. 

The fact suggests the thought that nature is secretly against thesuperman, and seeks to prevent his birth. We have, indeed, no groundfor assuming that the continued progress visualized by man is in actualaccord with the great flow of the elemental forces. Devolution is quiteas natural as evolution, and may be just as pleasing, or even a gooddeal more pleasing, to God. If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiorityperish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult itis to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracyto encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, buta subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against thereproduction of philosophers. 

Per corollary, it is notorious that women of merit frequently marrysecond-rate men, and bear them children, thus aiding in the war uponprogress. One is often astonished to discover that the wife of somesordid and prosaic manufacturer or banker or professional man is a womanof quick intelligence and genuine charm, with intellectual interestsso far above his comprehension that he is scarcely so much as aware ofthem. Again, there are the leading feminists, women artists and othersuch captains of the sex; their husbands are almost always inferior men, and sometimes downright fools. But not paupers! Not incompetents in aman's world! Not bad husbands! What we here encounter, of course, is nomore than a fresh proof of the sagacity of women. The first-rate womanis a realist. She sees clearly that, in a world dominated by second-ratemen, the special capacities of the second-rate man are esteemed aboveall other capacities and given the highest rewards, and she endeavoursto get her share of those rewards by marrying a second-rate man atthe to of his class. The first-rate man is an admirable creature; hisqualities are appreciated by every intelligent woman; as I have justsaid, it may be reasonably argued that he is actually superior to God. But his attractions, after a certain point, do not run in proportionto his deserts; beyond that he ceases to be a good husband. Hence thepursuit of him is chiefly maintained, not by women who are his peers, but by women who are his inferiors. 

Here we unearth another factor: the fascination of what is strange, thecharm of the unlike, hliogabalisme. As Shakespeare has put it, theremust be some mystery in love--and there can be no mystery betweenintellectual equals. I dare say that many a woman marries an inferiorman, not primarily because he is a good provider (though it isimpossible to imagine her overlooking this), but because his veryinferiority interests her, and makes her want to remedy it and motherhim. Egoism is in the impulse: it is pleasant to have a feeling ofsuperiority, and to be assured that it can be maintained. If now, thatfeeling he mingled with sexual curiosity and economic self-interest, itobviously supplies sufficient motivation to account for so natural andbanal a thing as a marriage. Perhaps the greatest of all these factorsis the mere disparity, the naked strangeness. A woman could not love aman, as the phrase is, who wore skirts and pencilled his eye-brows, andby the same token she would probably find it difficult to love a man whomatched perfectly her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems inmarriage, on the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the exerciseof that caressing irony which I have already described. She likes toobserve that her man is a fool--dear, perhaps, but none the less damned. Her so-called love for him, even at its highest, is always somewhatpitying and patronizing. 

27. The Charm of Mystery

Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down thisstrangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an intimacythat is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at too manypoints, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation isgone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister. Thusthat "maximum of temptation" of which Shaw speaks has within itself theseeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, hiswife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends bymaking machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day sharerof his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as romantic as havinghis boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not allthe native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredomthat get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attachany appearance of gusto and spontaneity toit. 

An estimable lady psychologist of the American Republic, Mrs. MarionCox, in a somewhat florid book entitled "Ventures into Worlds, " has asagacious essay upon this subject. She calls the essay "Our IncestuousMarriage, " and argues accurately that, once the adventurous descendsto the habitual, it takes on an offensive and degrading character. Theintimate approach, to give genuine joy, must be a concession, a feat ofpersuasion, a victory; once it loses that character it loses everything. Such a destructive conversion is effected by the average monogamousmarriage. It breaks down all mystery and reserve, for how can mysteryand reserve survive the use of the same hot water bag and a jointconcern about butter and egg bills? What remains, at least on thehusband's side, is esteem--the feeling one, has for an amiable aunt. And confidence--the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist orafortune-teller. And habit--the thing which makes it possible to eat thesame breakfast every day, and to windup one's watch regularly, and toearn a living. 

Mrs. Cox, if I remember her dissertation correctly, proposes toprevent this stodgy dephlogistication of marriage by interrupting itscourse--that is, by separating the parties now and then, so that neitherwill become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By this means, she, argues, curiosity will be periodically revived, and there will bea chance for personality to expand a cappella, and so each reunion willhave in it something of the surprise, the adventure and the virtuoussatanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not come back to preciselythe same wife that he parted from, and the wife will not welcomeprecisely the same husband. Even supposing them to have gone onsubstantially as if together, they will have gone on out of sight andhearing of each other, Thus each will find the other, to some extentat least, a stranger, and hence a bit challenging, and hence a bitcharming. The scheme has merit. More, it has been tried often, and withsuccess. It is, indeed, a familiar observation that the happiest couplesare those who are occasionally separated, and the fact has been embalmedin the trite maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhapsnot actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, moreeager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the widespreadadoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the average couplecannot afford a double establishment, even temporarily. The other liesin the fact that it inevitably arouses the envy and ill-nature of thosewho cannot adopt it, and so causes a gabbling of scandal. The worldinvariably suspects the worst. Let man and wife separate to save theirhappiness from suffocation in the kitchen, the dining room and theconnubial chamber, and it will immediately conclude that the corpse isalready laid out in the drawing-room. 

28. Woman as Wife

This boredom of marriage, however, is not nearly so dangerous a menaceto the institution as Mrs. Cox, with evangelistic enthusiasm, permitsherself to think it is. It bears most harshly upon the wife, who isalmost always the more intelligent of the pair; in the case of thehusband its pains are usually lightened by that sentimentality withwhich men dilute the disagreeable, particularly in marriage. Moreover, the average male gets his living by such depressing devices that boredombecomes a sort of natural state to him. A man who spends six or eighthours a day acting as teller in a bank, or sitting upon the bench of acourt, or looking to the inexpressibly trivial details of some processof manufacturing, or writing imbecile articles for a newspaper, ormanaging a tramway, or administering ineffective medicines to stupid anduninteresting patients--a man so engaged during all his hours of labour, which means a normal, typical man, is surely not one to be oppressedunduly by the dull round of domesticity. His wife may bore himhopelessly as mistress, just as any other mistress inevitably bores aman (though surely not so quickly and so painfully as a lover bores awoman), but she is not apt to bore him so badly in her other capacities. What he commonly complains about in her, in truth, is not that she tireshim by her monotony, but that she tires him by her variety--not thatshe is too static, but that she is too dynamic. He is weary when he getshome, and asks only the dull peace of a hog in a comfortable sty. Thispeace is broken by the greater restlessness of his wife, the fruit ofher greater intellectual resilience and curiosity. 

Of far more potency as a cause of connubial discord is the generalinefficiency of a woman at the business of what is called keepinghouse--a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities. As Ihave argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for masteringthese technicalities than men; the enterprise always costs them moreeffort, and they are never able to reinforce mere diligent applicationwith that obtuse enthusiasm which men commonly bring to their tawdry andchildish concerns. But in addition to their natural incapacity, thereis a reluctance based upon a deficiency in incentive, and deficiencyin incentive is due to the maudlin sentimentality with which men regardmarriage. In this sentimentality lie the germs of most of the evilswhich beset the institution in Christendom, and particularly in theUnited States, where sentiment is always carried to inordinate lengths. Having abandoned the mediaeval concept of woman as temptress the men ofthe Nordic race have revived the correlative mediaeval concept of womanas angel and to bolster up that character they have create for her avast and growing mass of immunities culminating of late years in theastounding doctrine that, under the contract of marriage, all the dutieslie upon the man and all the privileges appertain to the woman. In partthis doctrine has been established by the intellectual enterpriseand audacity of woman. Bit by bit, playing upon masculine stupidity, sentimentality and lack of strategical sense, they have formulated it, developed it, and entrenched it in custom and law. But in other part itis the plain product of the donkeyish vanity which makes almost everyman view the practical incapacity of his wife as, in some vague way, atribute to his own high mightiness and consideration. Whatever is revoltagainst her immediate indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearlyalways a situation in which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio, entirely discharged from everyunpleasant labour and responsibility. 

29. Marriage and the Law

This was not always the case. No more than a century ago, even byAmerican law, the most sentimental in the world, the husband was thehead of the family firm, lordly and autonomous. He had authority overthe purse-strings, over the children, and even over his wife. He couldenforce his mandates by appropriate punishment, including the corporal. His sovereignty and dignity were carefully guarded by legislation, theproduct of thousands of years of experience and ratiocination. He wassafeguarded in his self-respect by the most elaborate and efficientdevices, and they had the support of public opinion. 

Consider, now, the changes that a few short years have wrought. Today, by the laws of most American states--laws proposed, in most cases, by maudlin and often notoriously extravagant agitators, and passerbysentimental orgy--all of the old rights of the husband have beenconverted into obligations. He no longer has any control over his wife'sproperty; she may devote its income to the family or she may squanderthat income upon idle follies, and he can do nothing. She has equalauthority in regulating and disposing of the children, and in the caseof infants, more than he. There is no law compelling her to do her shareof the family labour: she may spend her whole time in cinema theatres orgadding about the shops an she will. She cannot be forced to perpetuatethe family name if she does not want to. She cannot be attacked withmasculine weapons, e. G. , fists and firearms, when she makes an assaultwith feminine weapons, e. G. , snuffling, invective and sabotage. Finally, no lawful penalty can be visited upon her if she fails absolutely, either deliberately or through mere incapacity, to keep the familyhabitat clean, the children in order, and the victuals eatable. 

Now view the situation of the husband. The instant he submits tomarriage, his wife obtains a large and inalienable share in hisproperty, including all he may acquire in future; in most Americanstates the minimum is one-third, and, failing children, one-half. Hecannot dispose of his real estate without her consent; He cannot evendeprive her of it by will. She may bring up his children carelessly andidiotically, cursing them with abominable manners and poisoning theirnascent minds against him, and he has no redress. She may neglect herhome, gossip and lounge about all day, put impossible food upon histable, steal his small change, pry into his private papers, handover his home to the Periplaneta americana, accuse him falsely ofpreposterous adulteries, affront his friends, and lie about him to theneighbours--and he can do nothing. She may compromise his honour byindecent dressing, write letters to moving-picture actors, and exposehim to ridicule by going into politics--and he is helpless. 

Let him undertake the slightest rebellion, over and beyond mererhetorical protest, and the whole force of the state comes down uponhim. If he corrects her with the bastinado or locks her up, he is goodfor six months in jail. If he cuts off her revenues, he is incarcerateduntil he makes them good. And if he seeks surcease in flight, taking thechildren with him, he is pursued by the gendarmerie, brought back to hisduties, and depicted in the public press as a scoundrelly kidnapper, fitonly for the knout. In brief, she is under no legal necessity whatsoeverto carry out her part of the compact at the altar of God, whereas hefaces instant disgrace and punishment for the slightest failure toobserve its last letter. For a few grave crimes of commission, trueenough, she may be proceeded against. Open adultery is a recreation thatis denied to her. She cannot poison her husband. She must not assaulthim with edged tools, or leave him altogether, or strip off her fewremaining garments and go naked. But for the vastly more various andnumerous crimes of omission--and in sum they are more exasperating andintolerable than even overt felony--she cannot be brought to book atall. 

The scene I depict is American, but it will soon extend its horrors toall Protestant countries. The newly enfranchised women of every one ofthem cherish long programs of what they call social improvement, andpractically the whole of that improvement is based upon devices foraugmenting their own relative autonomy and power. The English wifeof tradition, so thoroughly a femme covert, is being displaced by agadabout, truculent, irresponsible creature, full of strange new ideasabout her rights, and strongly disinclined to submit to her husband'sauthority, or to devote herself honestly to the upkeep of his house, orto bear him a biological sufficiency of heirs. And the German Hausfrau, once so innocently consecrated to Kirche, Kche und Kinder, is going thesame way. 

30. The Emancipated Housewife

What has gone on in the United States during the past two generationsis full of lessons and warnings for the rest of the world. The Americanhousewife of an earlier day was famous for her unremitting diligence. She not only cooked, washed and ironed; she also made shift to mastersuch more complex arts as spinning, baking and brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level, but at all events she madea gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the newenlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is notonly incompetent (alack, as I have argued, rather beyond her control);she is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of herfew remaining duties is, in some vague way, discreditable and degrading. To call her a good cook, I daresay, was never anything but flattery; theearly American cuisine was probably a fearful thing, indeed. But todaythe flattery turns into a sort of libel, and she resents it, or, at allevents, does not welcome it. I used to know an American literaryman, educated on the Continent, who married a woman because she hadexceptional gifts in this department. Years later, at one of herdinners, a friend of her husband's tried to please her by mentioningthe fact, to which he had always been privy. But instead of beingcomplimented, as a man might have been if told that his wife had marriedhim because he was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, thisunusual housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of usualness, denounced theguest as a liar, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leaveher husband. 

This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might aswell be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character ofa definite cult in the United States, and the stray woman who attends tothem faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she is aptto be dismissed as a "brood sow" (I quote literally, craving absolutionfor the phrase: a jury of men during the late war, on very thinpatriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she favours her lord withviable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of Americancookery--a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a Frenchhack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would brainher with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an Americanhome of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and competentlycooked, becomes almost as startling as to meet a Y. M. C. A. Secretaryin a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing, in most of thelarge cities of the Republic, scarcely has any existence. If the averageAmerican husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a restaurant to getit, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the society of charmingand well-behaved children, he has to go to an orphan asylum. Only theimmigrant can take his case and invite his soul within his own house. 

IV. Woman Suffrage

31. The Crowning Victory

It is my sincere hope that nothing I have here exhibited will bemistaken by the nobility and gentry for moral indignation. No suchfeeling, in truth, is in my heart. Moral judgments, as old Friedrichused to say, are foreign to my nature. Setting aside the vast herd whichshows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the minoritydistinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin is verymuch more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess ofvirtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the averagewine-bibber is a far better fellow than the average prohibitionist, andthat the average rogue is better company than the average poor drudge, and that the worst white, slave trader of my acquaintance is a decenterman than the best vice crusader. In the same way I am convinced thatthe average woman, whatever her deficiencies, is greatly superior tothe average man. The very ease with which she defies and swindles himin several capital situations of life is the clearest of proofs of hergeneral superiority. She did not obtain her present high immunities as agift from the gods, but only after a long and often bitter fight, andin that fight she exhibited forensic and tactical talents of a trulyadmirable order. There was no weakness of man that she did not penetrateand take advantage of. There was no trick that she did not put toeffective use. There was no device so bold and inordinate that itdaunted her. 

The latest and greatest fruit of this feminine talent for combat is theextension of the suffrage, now universal in the Protestant countries, and even advancing in those of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruitwas garnered, not by an attack en masse, but by a mere foray. I believethat the majority of women, for reasons that I shall presently expose, were not eager for the extension, and regard it as of small value today. They know that they can get what they want without going to the actualpolls for it; moreover, they are out of sympathy with most of thebrummagem reforms advocated by the professional suffragists, male andfemale. The mere statement of the current suffragist platform, withits long list of quack sure-cures for all the sorrows of the world, isenough to make them smile sadly. In particular, they are scepticalof all reforms that depend upon the mass action of immense numbers ofvoters, large sections of whom are wholly devoid of sense. A normalwoman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than shebelieves in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there mustbe a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can nevercoalesce. Nor is she, susceptible to the stock sentimentalities uponwhich the whole democratic process is based. This was shown verydramatically in them United States at the national election of 1920, in which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal andignominious defeat--The first general election in which all Americanwomen could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on theside of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchisedwomen voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents fordeception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effortto fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will rememberhis bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few womenbelieve in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practicallyevery woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That isto say, she has been vastly disappointed, either by failing to nab somepretty fellow that her heart was set on, or, worse, by actually nabbinghim, and then discovering him to be a bounder or an imbecile, or both. Thus walking the world with broken hearts, women know that the injury isnot serious. When he pulled out the Vox angelica stop and began sobbingand snuffling and blowing his nose tragically, the learned doctor simplydrove all the women voters into the arms of the Hon. Warren GamalielHarding, who was too stupid to invent any issues at all, but simply tooknegative advantage of the distrust aroused by his opponent. 

Once the women of Christendom become at ease in the use of the ballot, and get rid of the preposterous harridans who got it for them andwho now seek to tell them what to do with it, they will proceed toa scotching of many of the sentimentalities which currently corruptpolitics. For one thing, I believe that they will initiate measuresagainst democracy--the worst evil of the present-day world. When theycome to the matter, they will certainly not ordain the extension of thesuffrage to children, criminals and the insane in brief, to those evermore inflammable and knavish than the male hinds who have enjoyed it forso long; they will try to bring about its restriction, bit by bit, tothe small minority that is intelligent, agnostic and self-possessed--saysix women to one man. Thus, out of their greater instinct for reality, they will make democracy safe for a democracy. 

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is hisstupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He is foreverembracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all hat have gonebefore. But where is the delusion that women cherish--I mean habitually, firmly, passionately? Who will draw up a list of propositions, held andmaintained by them in sober earnest, that are obviously not true? (Iallude here, of course, to genuine women, not to suffragettes and othersuch pseudo-males). As for me, I should not like to undertake such alist. I know of nothing, in fact, that properly belongs to it. Women, as a class, believe in none of the ludicrous rights, duties andpious obligations that men are forever gabbling about. Their superiorintelligence is in no way more eloquently demonstrated than by theirironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude towardmen is one of aloof disdain, and their habitual attitude toward what menbelieve in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is substantiallythe same, It takes twice as long to convert a body of women to some newfallacy as it takes to convert a body of men, and even then they halt, hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The women of Coloradohad been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to prohibitionsufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt it; their ownmajority voice was against it to the end. During the interval the menvoters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking to themourners' bench. In California, enfranchised in 1911, the women rejectedthe dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition was adopted during thewar without their votes--they did not get the franchise throughoutthe country until it was in the Constitution--and it is without theirsupport today. The American man, despite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very much afraid of the police, and in all the regionswhere prohibition is now actually enforced he makes excuses for hispoltroonish acceptance of it by arguing that it will do him good inthe long run, or that he ought to sacrifice his private desires to thecommon weal. But it is almost impossible to find an American woman ofany culture who is in favour of it. One and all, they are opposed to theturmoil and corruption that it involves, and resentful of the invasionof liberty underlying it. Being realists, they have no belief inany program which proposes to cure the natural swinishness of men bylegislation. Every normal woman believes, and quite accurately, that theaverage man is very much like her husband, John, and she knows very wellthat John is a weak, silly and knavish fellow, and that any effort toconvert him into an archangel overnight is bound to come to grief. Asfor her view of the average creature of her own sex, it is marked by acynicism so penetrating and so destructive that a clear statement of itwould shock beyond endurance. 

32. The Woman Voter

Thus there is not the slightest chance that the enfranchised women ofProtestantdom, once they become at ease in the use of the ballot, will give, any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to leadand instruct them in politics. Years ago I predicted that thesesuffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. Theyare now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselvesto advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterlypreposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laughat them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments ofthe old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the greatpolitical parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomesan imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is nothingbut an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the soleintelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels inpublic office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sisterwho joins the other camorra. Parenthetically, I may add that all of theladies to take to this political immolation seem to me to be frightfullyplain. I know those of England, Germany and Scandinavia only by theirportraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the United StatesI have studied at close range at various large political gatherings, including the two national conventions first following the extensionof the suffrage. I am surely no fastidious fellow--in fact, I prefer acertain melancholy decay in women to the loud, circus-wagon brillianceof youth--but I give you my word that there were not five women ateither national convention who could have embraced me in camera withoutfirst giving me chloral. Some of the chief stateswomen on show, in fact, were so downright hideous that I felt faint every time I had to look atthem. 

The reform-monging suffragists seem to be equally devoid of the morecaressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but theycertainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know how to dresstheir hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the allegedlubricity of the male-the single standard, medical certificates forbridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I believe, is mere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued sets up thedoctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it afelony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likesmasculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able totake care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are boldenough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makesher extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right senseshas ever been actually seduced since the world began; whenever they bearof a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet more, the normal womanof lively charms, roving about among men, always tries to draw theadmiration of those who have previously admired elsewhere; she prefersthe professional to the amateur, and estimates her skill by theattractiveness of the huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. Theiron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must getone wholly without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crudemanoeuvres make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of pulchritudeand amiability. All such suffragists (save a few miraculous beauties)marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up withthe sort of castoffs who are almost ready to fall in love with ladyphysicists, embryologists, and embalmers. 

Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignantviragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women untilhell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the latterenterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love would playout, for not many men take any notice of women spontaneously. Nine menout of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if there were no women inthe world, once they had grown accustomed to the quiet. Practicallyall men are their happiest when they are engaged upon activities--forexample, drinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure--to whichwomen are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce them from suchcelibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in front of the hound. The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist alarmiststalk about is to shave the heads of all the pretty girls in the world, and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their teeth, and put them inkhaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to wear scents, orto use lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual, mistakes thefish for the fly. 

33. A Glance Into the Future

The present public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is chiefly dueto the fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally verystupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women, and soshow them politeness. But soon or late--and probably disconcertinglysoon--the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon themand depose them, and thereafter the woman vote will be no longer atthe disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettescontinue to fill the newspapers with nonsense, once that change has beeneffected, it will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots, likethe Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists andother such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extensionof the suffrage in all of the American states that made it before thenational enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated in the nationat large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women are not takenin by quackery as readily as men are; the hardness of their shell oflogic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For onewoman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer bysome swindling patent medicine, there are at least twenty masculinewitnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, LydiaPinkham's Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies forspecifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, arechiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist tells me, by men. 

My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is thatthe grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none the lessreal beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the end, in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligentgrappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth isalmost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, notin proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible, but in proportion a she excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences againstthem. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins;the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright ata new one and electing some mountebank to lay it. For a hundred yearspast the people of the United States, the most terrible existingdemocratic state, have scarcely had apolitical campaign that was notbased upon some preposterous fear--first of slavery and then of themanumitted slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first ofthe old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that theyare not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readilyinto such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting tosnuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that wouldcause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off mobocracy andsafeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this sniffing. Whatwe need--and in the end it must come--is a sniff so powerful that itwill call a halt upon the navigation of the ship from the forecastle, and put a competent staff on the bridge, and lay a course that isdescribable in intelligible terms. 

The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democraciesbefore the extension of the suffrage were, usually chosen, not fortheir competence but for their mere talent for idiocy; they reflectedaccurately thymol weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimentaland feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what happened in a salientcase. Every four years the male voters of the United States chose fromamong themselves one who was put forward as the man most fit, of allresident men, to be the first citizen of the commonwealth. He waschosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were thoroughlycanvassed; very large powers and dignities were put into his hands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman? Wefound, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a manof notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile thatthey must needs disgust a sentient suckling--in brief, a spouting geyserof fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported assumptionsand hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were flattered when they werecalled comprehensible--specifically, a Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or aHarding. 

This was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty ofcomparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a womanof like fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh them, forsense, for shrewdness, for intelligent grasp of obscure relations, forintellectual honesty and courage, with the ideas of the average midwife. 

34. The Suffragette

I have spoken with some disdain of the suffragette. What is the matterwith her, fundamentally, is simple: she is a woman who has stupidlycarried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to sucha point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes herblind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary character. Inparticular, she centres this frenzy of hers upon one definite privilege, to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity in amour, the modern droitdu seigneur. Read the books of the chief lady Savonarolas, and you willfind running through them an hysterical denunciation of what is calledthe double standard of morality; there is, indeed, a whole literaturedevoted exclusively to it. The existence of this double standard seemsto drive the poor girls half frantic. They bellow raucously for itsabrogation, and demand that the frivolous male be visited with even moreidiotic penalties than those which now visit the aberrant female; someeven advocate gravely his mutilation by surgery, that he may be forcedinto rectitude by a physical disability for sin. 

All this, of course, is hocus-pocus, and the judicious are not deceivedby it for an instant. What these virtuous bel dames actually desire intheir hearts is not that the male be reduced to chemical purity, butthat the franchise of dalliance be extended to themselves. The mostelementary acquaintance with Freudian psychology exposes their secretanimus. Unable to ensnare males under the present system, or at allevents, unable to ensnare males sufficiently appetizing to arouse theenvy of other women, they leap to the theory that it would be easier ifthe rules were less exacting. This theory exposes their deficiency inthe chief character of their sex: accurate observation. The fact isthat, even if they possessed the freedom that men are supposed topossess, they would still find it difficult to achieve their ambition, for the average man, whatever his stupidity, is at least keen enough injudgment to prefer a single wink from a genuinely attractive woman tothe last delirious favours of the typical suffragette. Thus the theoryof the whoopers and snorters of the cause, in its esoteric as well asin its public aspect, is unsound. They are simply women who, in theirtastes and processes of mind, are two-thirds men, and the fact explainstheir failure to achieve presentable husbands, or even consolatorybetrayal, quite as effectively as it explains the ready credence theygive to political an philosophical absurdities. 

35. A Mythical Dare-Devil

The truth is that the picture of male carnality that such women conjureup belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already observed indealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on asomewhat higher plane. As they depict him in their fevered treatises onillegitimacy, white-slave trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the averagemale adult of the Christian and cultured countries leads a life of gaudylubricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to another, andwith an almost endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen, parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison anddespair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, isthe life of a leading actor in a boulevard revue. He is a polygamous, multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and unconscionable debauche, amonster of promiscuity; prodigiously unfaithful to his wife, and even tohis friends' wives; fathomlessly libidinous and superbly happy. 

Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts thana dissertation on major strategy by a military "expert" promoted fromdramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak withoutany embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough to men to getnear enough to enough men to know enough about them for their purposethey would paralexia the Dorcas societies with no such cajoling libels. As a matter of sober fact, the average man of our time and race is quiteincapable of all these incandescent and intriguing divertisements. He isfar more virtuous than they make him out, far less schooled in sin farless enterprising and ruthless. I do not say, of course, that he is purein heart, for the chances are that he isn't; what I do say is that, inthe overwhelming majority of cases, he is pure in act, even in the faceof temptation. And why? For several main reasons, not to go into minorones. One is that he lacks the courage. Another is that he lacks themoney. Another is that he is fundamentally moral, and has a conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he has in him to plunge into anyaffair save the most casual and sordid; it takes more ingenuity andintrepidity than he has in him to carry it off; it takes more moneythan he can conceal from his consort to finance it. A man may force hisactual wife to share the direst poverty, but even the least vampirishwoman of the third part demands to be courted in what, considering hisstation in life, is the grand manner, and the expenses of that grandmanner scare off all save a small minority of specialists in deception. So long, indeed, as a wife knows her husband's in come accurately, shehas a sure means of holding him to his oaths. 

Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier ofpoltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the otherhigher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easyyielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behindhim. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating anextra-legal affair--at all events, above the mawkish harmlessness ofa flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is of scaling thebattlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing it, just ashe likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or climbing theMatterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to imagine the thingdone, and he admits by winks and blushes that he is a bad one. But atthe bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is usually nothing morematerial than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a scrapingof shins under the table. Let any woman who is disquieted by reportsof her husband's derelictions figure to herself how long it would havetaken him to propose to her if left to his own enterprise, and then lether ask herself if so pusillanimous a creature could be imaged in therole of Don Giovanni. 

Finally, there is his conscience--the accumulated sediment of ancestralfaintheartedness in countless generations, with vague religious fearsand superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a conscience? Yes, dear friends, a conscience. That conscience may be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, brummagem. It may be indistinguishable, at times, fromthe mere fear that someone may be looking. It may be shot through withhypocrisy, stupidity, play-acting. But nevertheless, as consciences goin Christendom, it is genuinely entitled to the name--and it is alwaysin action. A man, remember, is not a being in vacuo; he is the fruit andslave of the environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the Houseof Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons withoutbecoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard withoutshipping water. One cannot pass through a modern university withoutcarrying away scars. And by the same token one cannot live and haveone's being in a modern democratic state, year in and year out, withoutfalling, to some extent at least, under that moral obsession which isthe hall-mark of the mob-man set free. A citizen of such a state, hisnose buried in Nietzsche, "Man and Superman, " and other such advancedliterature, may caress himself with the notion that he is an immoralist, that his soul is full of soothing sin, that he has cut himself loosefrom the revelation of God. But all the while there is a part ofhim that remains a sound Christian, a moralist, a right thinking andforward-looking man. And that part, in times of stress, asserts itself. It may not worry him on ordinary occasions. It may not stop him when heswears, or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or goes motoring onSunday; it may even let him alone when he goes to a leg-show. But themoment a concrete Temptress rises before him, her noses now-white, herlips rouged, her eyelashes drooping provokingly--the moment such anabandoned wench has at him, and his lack of ready funds begins toconspire with his lack of courage to assault and wobble him--at thatprecise moment his conscience flares into function, and so finishes hisbusiness. First he sees difficulty, then he sees the danger, then hesees wrong. The result is that he slinks off in trepidation, and anothervampire is baffled of her prey. 

It is, indeed, the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in theProtestant regions, that most men are faithful to their wives. You willa travel a long way before you find a married man who will admit that heis, but the facts are the facts, and I am surely not one to flout them. 

36. The Origin of a Delusion

The origin of the delusion that the average man is a Leopold II orAugustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig, is notfar to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse briefly:

1. The idiotic vanity of men, leading to their eternal boasting, eitherby open lying or sinister hints. 

2. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M. C. A. Secretaries, and other such libidinous poltroons as to what they woulddo themselves if they had the courage. 

3. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to ditto. 

Here you have the genesis of a generalization that gives the lesscritical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastlyaugments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, inthe discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, putsin an evening ploughing through such books as "The Memoirs of FannyHill, " Casanova's Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of GaiusPetronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises with theconviction that life amid the red lights must be one stupendous whirl ofdeviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or Piccadilly at nightare out for revels that would have caused protests in Sodom and Nineveh, that the average man who chooses hell leads an existence comparableto that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outside the Bible class ispacked like a sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that every man whodoesn't believe that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his whole leisureleaping through the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. "If I were not savedand anointed of God, " whispers the vice director into his own ear, "thatis what I, the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late KingDavid did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late King EdwardVII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name has itssuggestions. Millions of others go the same route.... Ergo, Up, guards, and at 'em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order out the seachlightsand scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred more policemen! Let uschase these hell-hounds out of Christendom, and make the world safe formonogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation!"

Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secretaspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that theunconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debauch and betray, arefree from his other weaknesses, e. G. , his timidity, his lack ofresourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vastmajority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there, notto engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeablyupon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish experimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world's fair, and go to smuttyshows, and take in sex magazines, and read the sort of books that ourvice crusading friend reads. They like to conjure up the charms ofcarnality, and to help out their somewhat sluggish imaginations byactual peeps at it, but when it comes to taking a forthright header intothe sulphur they usually fail to muster up the courage. For one clerkwho succumbs to the houris of the pave, there are five hundred whosuccumb to lack of means, the warnings of the sex hygienists, and theirown depressing consciences. For one "clubman"--i. E. , bagman or suburbanvestryman--who invades the women's shops, engages the affection of someinnocent miss, lures her into infamy and then sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who never get any further than asking the priceof cologne water and discharging a few furtive winks. And for onehusband of the Nordic race who maintains a blonde chorus girl inoriental luxury around the corner, there are ten thousand who are astrue to their wives, year in and year out, as so many convicts inthe death-house, and would be no more capable of any such loathsomemalpractice, even in the face of free opportunity, than they would be ofcutting off the ears of their young. 

I am sorry to blow up so much romance. In particular, I am sorry for thesuffragettes who specialize in the double standard, for when they getinto pantaloons at last, and have the new freedom, they will discoverto their sorrow that they have been pursuing a chimera--that there isreally no such animal as the male anarchist they have been denouncingand envying--that the wholesale fornication of man, at least underChristian democracy, has little more actual existence than honestadvertising or sound cooking. They have followed the porno maniacs inembracing a piece of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes itwill turn to ashes in their arms. 

Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the courage and enterpriseof man. They themselves, barring mere physical valour, a quality inwhich the average man is far exceeded by the average jackal or wolf, have more of both. If the consequences, to a man, of the slightestdescent from virginity were one-tenth as swift and barbarous as theconsequences to a young girl in like case, it would take a division ofinfantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that lex talionis inthe whole western world. As things stand today, even with the odds sogreatly in his favour, the average male hesitates and is thus not lost. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders if you doubt it. They showthat the weekly receipts of female recruits upon the wharves of sinare always more than the demand; that more young women enter upon thevermilion career than can make respectable livings at it; that thepressure of the temptation they hold out is the chief factor incorrupting our undergraduates. What was the first act of the AmericanArmy when it began summoning its young clerks and college boys andplough hands to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off aso-called moral zone around each camp, and to secure it with trenchesand machine guns, and to put a lot of volunteer termagants to patrollingit, that the assembled jeunesse might be protected in their rectitudefrom the immoral advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor workinggirls. 

37. Women as Martyrs

I have given three reasons for the prosperity of the notion that manis a natural polygamist, bent eternally upon fresh dives into Lakeof Brimstone No. 7. To these another should be added: the thirst formartyrdom which shows itself in so many women, particularly under thehigher forms of civilization. This unhealthy appetite, in fact, may bedescribed as one of civilization's diseases; it is almost unheard ofin more primitive societies. The savage woman, unprotected by her rudeculture and forced to heavy and incessant labour, has retained herphysical strength and with it her honesty and self-respect. Thecivilized woman, gradually degenerated by a greater ease, and helpeddown that hill by the pretensions of civilized man, has turned herinfirmity into a virtue, and so affects a feebleness that is actuallyfar beyond the reality. It is by this route that she can mosteffectively disarm masculine distrust, and get what she wants. Man isflattered by any acknowledgment, however insincere, of his superiorstrength and capacity. He likes to be leaned upon, appealed to, followeddocilely. And this tribute to his might caresses him on the psychicplane as well as on the plane of the obviously physical. He not onlyenjoys helping a woman over a gutter; he also enjoys helping her dry hertears. The result is the vast pretence that characterizes the relationsof the sexes under civilization--the double pretence of man's cunningand autonomy and of woman's dependence and deference. Man is alwayslooking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulderto put her head on. 

This feminine affectation, of course, has gradually taken on the forceof a fixed habit, and so it has got a certain support, by a familiarprocess of self-delusion, in reality. The civilized woman inherits thathabit as she inherits her cunning. She is born half convinced that sheis really as weak and helpless as she later pretends to be, and theprevailing folklore offers her endless corroboration. One of theresultant phenomena is the delight in martyrdom that one so often findsin women, and particularly in the least alert and introspective of them. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in suffering; it subtly pleasesthem to be bard put upon; they like to picture themselves as slaughteredsaints. Thus they always find something to complain of; the veryconditions of domestic life give them a superabundance of clinicalmaterial. And if, by any chance, such material shows a falling off, theyare uneasy and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct is notreasonably open to question, and she will invent mythical offences tomake him bearable. And if her invention fails she will be plunged intothe utmost misery and humiliation. This fact probably explains manymysterious divorces: the husband was not too bad, but too good. Forpublic opinion among women, remember, does not favour the woman who isfull of a placid contentment and has no masculine torts to report; ifshe says that her husband is wholly satisfactory she is looked upon as anumskull even more dense that he is himself. A man, speaking of hiswife to other men, always praises her extravagantly. Boasting about hersoothes his vanity; he likes to stir up the envy of his fellows. Butwhen two women talk of their husbands it is mainly atrocities that theydescribe. The most esteemed woman gossip is the one with the longest andmost various repertoire of complaints. 

This yearning for martyrdom explains one of the commonly notedcharacters of women: their eager flair for bearing physical pain. Aswe have seen, they have actually a good deal less endurance than men;massive injuries shock them more severely and kill them more quickly. But when acute algesia is unaccompanied by any profounder phenomena theyare undoubtedly able to bear it with a far greater show of resignation. The reason is not far to seek. In pain a man sees only an invasion ofhis liberty, strength and self-esteem. It floors him, masters him, and makes him ridiculous. But a woman, more subtle and devious in herprocesses of mind, senses the dramatic effect that the spectacle of hersuffering makes upon the spectators, already filled with compassion forher feebleness. She would thus much rather be praised for facing painwith a martyr's fortitude than for devising some means of getting rid ofit the first thought of a man. No woman could have invented chloroform, nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both drugs offer an escape fromsituations and experiences that, even in aggravated forms, women relish. The woman who drinks as men drink--that is, to raise her threshold ofsensation and ease the agony of living--nearly always shows a deficiencyin feminine characters and an undue preponderance of masculinecharacters. Almost invariably you will find her vain and boastful, and full of other marks of that bombastic exhibitionism which is sosterlingly male. 

38. Pathological Effects

This feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on adownright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist. Women show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman under ourChristian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is heavy withrepression and dissimulation, and this repression and dissimulation, inthe long run, cannot fail to produce effects that are indistinguishablefrom disease. You will find some of them described at length in anyhandbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, PoulBjerre, argue, indeed, that womanliness itself, as it is encounteredunder Christianity, is a disease. All women suffer from a suppressedrevolt against the inhibitions forced upon them by our artificialculture, and this suppressed revolt, by well known Freudian means, produces a complex of mental symptoms that is familiar to all of us. At one end of the scale we observe the suffragette, with her grotesqueadoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and herhysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not putto use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling andneurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies andher pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long ago, this is a man'sworld. Women have broken many of their old chains, but they arestill enmeshed in a formidable network of man-made taboos andsentimentalities, and it will take them another generation, at least, toget genuine freedom. That this is true is shown by the deep unrest thatyet marks the sex, despite its recent progress toward social, politicaland economic equality. It is almost impossible to find a man whohonestly wishes that he were a woman, but almost every woman, at sometime or other in her life, is gnawed by a regret that she is not a man. 

Two of the hardest things that women have to bear are (a) the stupidmasculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority, or even their equality, or even their possession of a normal humanequipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine doctrinethat they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrate, without the natural instincts and appetites of the order--to adapt aphrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental and almost gaseousmammals, and marked by a complete lack of certain salient mammaliancharacters. The first imbecility has already concerned us at length. Onefinds traces of it even in works professedly devoted to disposing of it. In one such book, for example, I come upon this: "What all the skilland constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed toaccomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininityand nobility of soul. " In other words, by her possession of somerecondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the ordinarymental processes of man. The theory is unsound and preposterous. MissNightingale accomplished her useful work, not by magic, but by hardcommon sense. The problem before her was simply one of organization. Many men had tackled it, and all of them had failed stupendously. What she did was to bring her feminine sharpness of wit, her feminineclear-thinking, to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded quickly, andonce it had been brought to order it was easy for other persons to carryon what she had begun. But the opinion of a man's world still prefers tocredit her success to some mysterious angelical quality, unstatable inlucid terms and having no more reality than the divine inspiration of anarchbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and accurate intelligence is thusconveniently put upon the table, and the amour propre of man is keptinviolate. To confess frankly that she had more sense than any maleEnglishman of her generation would be to utter a truth too harsh to bebearable. 

The second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, alreadydiscussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct--that they submitto the odious caresses of the lubricious male only by a powerful effortof the will, and with the sole object of discharging their duty toposterity. It would be impossible to go into this delusion with propercandour and at due length in a work designed for reading aloud in thedomestic circle; all I can do is to refer the student to the books ofany competent authority on the psychology of sex, say Ellis, or to theconfidences (if they are obtainable) of any complaisant bachelor of hisacquaintance. 

39. Women as Christians

The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly favourableto women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord when theirvery possession of souls was still doubted by the majority of rivaltheologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set value upontheir sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their sex, a ladyformerly in public life, was among His regular advisers. Mariolatry isthus by no means the invention of the mediaeval popes, as Protestanttheologians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is plainlydiscernible in the Four Gospels. What the mediaeval popes actuallyinvented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed theelements of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of women's inferiority, the precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, forsound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they hadto support it by depicting all traffic with women in the light ofa hazardous and ignominious business. The result was the deliberateorganization and development of the theory of female triviality, lackof responsibility and general looseness of mind. Woman became a sort ofdevil, but without the admired intelligence of the regular demons. Theappearance of women saints, however, offered a constant and embarrassingcriticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women were fit to situpon the right hand of God--and they were often proving it, and forcingthe church to acknowledge it--then surely all women could not be as badas the books made them out. There thus arose the concept of the angelicwoman, the natural vestal; we see her at full length in the romancesof mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the end was a sort of doubledoctrine, first that women were devils and secondly that they wereangels. This preposterous dualism has merged, as we have seen, into acompromise dogma in modern times. By that dogma it is held, on the onehand, that women are unintelligent and immoral, and on the otherhand, that they are free from all those weaknesses of the flesh whichdistinguish men. This, roughly speaking, is the notion of the averagemale numskull today. 

Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but withthe weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore at bottom, their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct, was theirfriend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that have boundthem for a thousand years they show appreciation of the fact. Women, indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are growing less and lessreligious as year chases year. Their ordinary devotion has little if anypious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice, force on them by themasculine notion that an appearance of holiness is proper to their lowlystation, and a masculine feeling that church-going somehow keeps themin order, and out of doings that would be less reassuring. When theyexhibit any genuine religious fervour, its sexual character is usuallyso obvious that even the majority of men are cognizant of it. Womennever go flocking ecstatically to a church in which the agent of God inthe pulpit is an elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When one findsthem driven to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping overthe sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinageup to grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasementbefore the heavenly throne, it is quite safe to assume, even without anactual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has worked the miracle is a fairand toothsome fellow, and a good deal more aphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in modern times have been men of suaveand ingratiating habit, and the great majority of them, from Henry WardBeecher up and down, have been taken, soon or late, in transactionsfar more suitable to the boudoir than to the footstool of the Almighty. Their famous killings have always been made among the silliest sort ofwomen--the sort, in brief, who fall so short of the normal acumen oftheir sex that they are bemused by mere beauty in men. 

Such women are in a minority, and so the sex shows a good deal fewerreligious enthusiasts per mille than the sex of sentiment and belief. Attending, several years ago, the gladiatorial shows of the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I was constantlystruck by the great preponderance of males in the pen devoted to thesaved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers came swarming to thealtar, loudly bawling for help against their sins, but the women wereanything but numerous, and the few who appeared were chiefly eitherchlorotic adolescents or pathetic old Saufschwestern. For six nightsrunning I sat directly beneath the gifted exhorter without seeing asingle female convert of what statisticians call the child-bearingage--that is, the age of maximum intelligence and charm. Among the malesimpletons bagged by his yells during this time were the president ofa railroad, half a dozen rich bankers and merchants, and the formergovernor of an American state. But not a woman of comparable positionor dignity. Not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care tochuck under the chin. 

This cynical view of religious emotionalism, and with it of the wholestock of ecclesiastical balderdash, is probably responsible, at least inpart, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal career. In those Christian sects which still bar them from the pulpit--usuallyon the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not equal to itsalleged demands upon the morals and the intellect--one never hears ofthem protesting against the prohibition; they are quite content to leavethe degrading imposture to men, who are better fitted for it by talentand conscience. And in those baroque sects, chiefly American, whichadmit them they show no eagerness to put on the stole and chasuble. Whenthe first clergywoman appeared in the United States, it was predictedby alarmists that men would be driven out of the pulpit by the newcompetition. Nothing of the sort has occurred, nor is it in prospect. The whole corps of female divines in the country might be herded intoone small room. Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent tomake effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of reality is in endlessopposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humourstands against the snorting that is inseparable from pulpit oratory. 

Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost invariablymoved by some motive distinct from mere pious inflammation. It is acommonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic countries, girls are driven intoconvents by economic considerations or by disasters of amour far oftenerthan they are drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives of thefemale saints, and you will see how many of them tried marriage andfailed at it before ever they turned to religion. In Protestant landsvery few women adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few asecular impulse is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenlyovercome by a desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands isnearly invariably found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a theorythat it would be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In pointof fact, she duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found itimpossible to get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China, Senegal and Somaliland, with no white competition present, it is equallyimpossible to fail. 

40. Piety as a Social Habit

What remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a socialhabit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other and moreinviting divertissements. If you have ever observed the women of Spainand Italy at their devotions you need not be told how much the worshipof God may be a mere excuse for relaxation and gossip. These women, intheir daily lives, are surrounded by a formidable network of mediaevaltaboos; their normal human desire for ease and freedom in intercourse isopposed by masculine distrust and superstition; they meet no strangers;they see and hear nothing new. In the house of the Most High they escapefrom that vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders with a crowd. Here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and stretch theirspiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some sort of contactwith men relatively more affable, cultured and charming than theirhusbands and fathers--to wit, with the rev. Clergy. 

Elsewhere in Christendom, though women are not quite so relentlesslywatched and penned up, they feel much the same need of variety andexcitement, and both are likewise on tap in the temples of the Lord. No one, I am sure, need be told that the average missionary societyor church sewing circle is not primarily a religious organization. Itsactual purpose is precisely that of the absurd clubs and secret ordersto which the lower and least resourceful classes of men belong: itoffers a means of refreshment, of self-expression, of personal display, of political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor happens to beinteresting, of discreet and almost lawful intrigue. In the course of alife largely devoted to the study of pietistic phenomena, I have nevermet a single woman who cared an authentic damn for the actual heathen. The attraction in their salvation is always almost purely social. Womengo to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church. 

Finally, there is the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most parts ofChristendom, holds out the only bait of beauty that the inhabitants areever cognizant of. It offers music, dim lights, relatively ambitiousarchitecture, eloquence, formality and mystery, the caressingmeaninglessness that is at the heart of poetry. Women are far moreresponsive to such things than men, who are ordinarily quite as devoidof aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The attitude of the typicalman toward beauty in its various forms is, in fact, an attitude ofsuspicion and hostility. He does not regard a work of art as merelyinert and stupid; he regards it as, in some indefinable way, positivelyoffensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary andscoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he wouldtrust a coloured clergyman in his hen-yard. It was men, and not women, who invented such sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites, Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy tobeautiful ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their great talentfor reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling ofidiots. The normal woman, in so far as she has any religion at all, moves irresistibly toward Catholicism, with its poetical obscurantism. The evangelical Protestant sects have a hard time holding her. She canno more be an actual Methodist than a gentleman can be a Methodist. 

This inclination toward beauty, of course, is dismissed by the averagemale blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality. The truth isthat it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not sentimentality to bemoved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the mass, or even, say, by those timid imitations of it which one observes in certain Protestantchurches. Such proceedings, whatever their defects from the standpointof a pure aesthetic, are at all events vastly more beautiful than any ofthe private acts of the folk who take part in them. They lift themselvesabove the barren utilitarianism of everyday life, and no less above themaudlin sentimentalities that men seek pleasure in. They offer a meansof escape, convenient and inviting, from that sordid routine of thoughtand occupation which women revolt against so pertinaciously. 

41. The Ethics of Women

I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinctin the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, ofcourse, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are, in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they arebad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on theside of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commandedby the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout theirsubstance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble;she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, choosesself-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction isa spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yieldswhen she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek. 

In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the preceptsof the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible only insituations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds herselfconfronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her ownsecurity or to the well-being of those under her protection--say a childor a husband--she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing, howeveroutrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a maleextremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but thetruth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has everbeen on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of thebar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort ofa barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her withinbounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be undulyaroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as iscommonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but simplyand solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful, implacable andwithout qualms. 

What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vasttechnical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obviousin freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a seriouscontroversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theologyor amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passedthrough a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not only bitein the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dentalreach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate thatthey will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is sounfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring toimprove my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaperin a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundredcases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almostinvariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales ofstudied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical, thatthe learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and thevery catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses. Many more menthan women go insane, and many more married men than single men. Thefact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to findout what goes on, year in and year out, behind the doors of apparentlyhappy homes. A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon thegallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of anordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard tobear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness andstupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air ofa cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summoningsof the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour--all thesethings must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of theoafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest andprofound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of senseand refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac longago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play theviolin. Women survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their greatcapacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically thatoften they deceive even themselves; the average woman's contentment, indeed, is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must beinnumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wondersthat so few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison theirhusbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make itout; the deathrate among husbands is very much higher than among wives. More than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an acquaintancewho died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in the eyes of theinconsolable widow. 

Even in this age of emancipation, normal women have few serioustransactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands;the business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence tosenility. When they step outside their habitual circle they show thesame alert and eager wariness that they exhibit within it. A man whohas dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and even when heis most cautious he is often flabbergasted by their sudden andunconscionable forays. Whenever woman goes into trade she quickly gets areputation as a sharp trader. Every little town in America has its HettyGreen, each sweating blood from turnips, each the terror of all themale usurers of the neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an amazonof barter takes his fortune into his hands; he has little more chance ofsuccess against the feminine technique in business than he has againstthe feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the advantage ofwomen lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In business theyaddress themselves wholly to their own profit, and give no thoughtwhatever to the hopes, aspirations and amour propre of theirantagonists. And in the duel of sex they fence, not to make points, butto disable and disarm. Aman, when he succeeds in throwing off a womanwho has attempted to marry him, always carries away a maudlin sympathyfor her in her defeat and dismay. But no one ever heard of a woman whopitied the poor fellow whose honest passion she had found it expedientto spurn. On the contrary, women take delight in such clownish agonies, and exhibit them proudly, and boast about them to other women. 

V. The New Age

42. The Transvaluation of Values

The gradual emancipation of women that has been going on for the lastcentury has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly deliveredfrom their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the oppressionsof men. But already, it must be plain, they have made enormousprogress--perhaps more than they made in the ten thousand yearspreceding. The rise of the industrial system, which has borne soharshly upon the race in general, has brought them certain unmistakablebenefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to makemarriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far brokendown that large classes of women are now almost free agents, and quiteindependent of the favour of men. Most of these women, respondingto ideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, bymarriage, and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in, but the factremains that they now have a free choice in the matter, and that direnecessity no longer controls them. After all, they needn't marry if theydon't want to; it is possible to get their bread by their own labourin the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers were in a far moredifficult position. Failing marriage, they not only suffered a cruelignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual starvation. Therewas simply no respectable place in the economy of those times for thefree woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or accept a disdainfulpatronage that was as galling as charity. 

Nothing could be, plainer than the effect that the increasing economicsecurity of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind. Thediminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishingbirth rates how which way the wind is blowing. It is common for malestatisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall inthe marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. Thisgrowing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though noconsiderable, body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine thatmarriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain thatlarge numbers of them now approach the business with far greaterfastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited. They are harder to please, and hence pleased less often. The woman of acentury ago could imagine nothing more favourable to her than marriage;even marriage with a fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all. This notion is gradually feeling the opposition of a contrary notion. Women in general may still prefer marriage, to work, but there is anincreasing minority which begins to realize that work may offer thegreater contentment, particularly if it be mellowed by a certain amountof philandering. 

There already appears in the world, indeed, a class of women, who, whilestill not genuinely averse to marriage, are yet free from any theorythat it is necessary, or even invariably desirable. Among these womenare a goodman somewhat vociferous propagandists, almost male in theirviolent earnestness; they range from the man eating suffragettes to suchpreachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional shockersof the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of birth-control, MargaretSanger. But among them are many more who wake the world with no suchnoisy eloquence, but content themselves with carrying out their ideas ina quiet and respectable manner. The number of such women is much largerthan is generally imagined, and that number tends to increase steadily. They are women who, with their economic independence assured, eitherby inheritance or by their own efforts, chiefly in the arts andprofessions, do exactly as they please, and make no pother about it. Naturally enough, their superiority to convention and the common frenzymakes them extremely attractive to the better sort of men, and so itis not uncommon for one of them to find herself voluntarily soughtin marriage, without any preliminary scheming by herself--surely anexperience that very few ordinary women ever enjoy, save perhaps indreams or delirium. 

The old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the women'sclubs and in the women's colleges, I have no doubt, there is still muchdebate of the old and silly question: Are platonic relations possiblebetween the sexes? In other words, is friendship possible withoutsex? Many a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with anotherquestion: Why without sex? With the decay of the ancient concept ofwomen as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of thewhole sex question, and out of that reconsideration there must comea revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightestfrivolity in the female. The notion that honour in women is exclusivelya physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of thehighest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuablething a woman can bring to marriage is virginity--this notion is sopreposterous that no intelligent person, male or female, actuallycherishes it. It survives as one of the hollow conventions ofChristianity; nay, of the levantine barbarism that precededChristianity. As women throw off the other conventions which now bindthem they will throw off this one, too, and so their virtue, groundedupon fastidiousness and self-respect instead of upon mere fear andconformity, will become afar more laudable thing than it ever canbe under the present system. And for its absence, if they see fit todispose of it, they will no more apologize than a man apologizes today. 

43. The Lady of Joy

Even prostitution, in the long run, may become a more or lessrespectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. Thatquality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary;whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prostituteis disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anythingintrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she iscurrently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity, againsther dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually unsound isno objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world, particularlyin the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption, e. G. , thatGod observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of aSunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution is one ofthe most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort ofwomen who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly likes herwork, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a waitressfor anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is propagatedby unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of professionalreformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latterin order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in prison, questioned by tee-totalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under theslightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go intoa shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikesher; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnapperscomes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense tothe credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a goodliving, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast itegotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complainsof it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice, in the courts. A bad physicianis a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergymanis forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution be almostinvariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, andsometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors inHoly Writ. 

The high value set upon virginity by men, whose esteem of it is basedupon a mixture of vanity and voluptuousness, causes many women toguard it in their own persons with a jealousy far beyond their privateinclinations and interests. It is their theory that the loss of itwould materially impair their chances of marriage. This theory is notsupported by the facts. The truth is that the woman who sacrifices herchastity, everything else being equal, stands a much better chance ofmaking a creditable marriage than the woman who remains chaste. Thisis especially true of women of the lower economic classes. At once theycome into contact, hitherto socially difficult and sometimes almostimpossible, with men of higher classes, and begin to take on, with thecurious facility of their sex, the refinements and tastes and pointsof view of those classes. The mistress thus gathers charm, and what hasbegun as a sordid sale of amiability not uncommonly ends with formalmarriage. The number of such marriages is enormously greater thanappears superficially, for both parties obviously make every effort toconceal the facts. Within the circle of my necessarily limited personalacquaintance I know of scores of men, some of them of wealth andposition, who have made such marriages, and who do not seem to regretit. It is an old observation, indeed, that a woman who has previouslydispose of her virtue makes a good wife. The common theory is that thisis because she is grateful to her husband for rescuing her from socialoutlawry; the truth is that she makes a good wife because she is ashrewd woman, and has specialized professionally in masculine weakness, and is thus extra-competent at the traditional business of her sex. Sucha woman often shows a truly magnificent sagacity. It is verydifficult to deceive her logically, and it is impossible to disarm heremotionally. Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities ofthe world was evidence, to begin with, of her intellectual enterpriseand courage, and her success as a rebel is proof of her extraordinarypertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen. 

Even the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, thanthe virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater varietyof men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is heroccupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more yearsago I observed a some what amusing proof of this last. At that timecertain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I livedundertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and some ofthem came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for advice as tohow to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superstitionthat the professional life of the average prostitute is only five yearslong, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormouslyamazed When they unearthed the truth. This truth was to the effect thatthe average prostitute of that town ended her career, not in the morguebut at the altar of God, and that those who remained unmarried oftencontinued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, and thenretired on competences. It was established, indeed, that fully eightyper cent married, and that they almost always got husbands who wouldhave been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For onewho married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a dozen who marriedrespectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen andprofessional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studiedthere was actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richestbanker--that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harshand dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polishedand civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame ofgreat dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancientprofession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude towardit. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew isexpected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she wouldshrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prostitutesuffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross andrepulsive they may appear to her, are measurably superior to men of theprostitute's own class--say her father and brothers--and that communionwith them, far from being disgusting, is often rather romantic. I wellremember observing, during my collaboration with the vice-crusadersaforesaid, the delight of a lady of joy who had attracted the notice ofa police lieutenant; she was intensely pleased by the idea of having aclient of such haughty manners, such brilliant dress, and what seemedto her to be so dignified a profession. It is always forgotten thatthis weakness is not confined to prostitutes, but run through the wholefemale sex. The woman who could not imagine an illicit affair with awealthy soap manufacturer or even with a lawyer finds it quite easy toimagine herself succumbing to an ambassador or a duke. There are veryfew exceptions to this rule. In the most reserved of modern societiesthe women who represent their highest flower are notoriously complaisantto royalty. And royal women, to complete the circuit, not infrequentlyyield to actors and musicians, i. E. , to men radiating a glamour notencountered even in princes. 

44. The Future of Marriage

The transvaluation of values that is now in progress will go on slowlyand for a very long while. That it will ever be quite complete is, ofcourse, impossible. There are inherent differences will continue to showthemselves until the end of time. As woman gradually becomes convinced, not only of the possibility of economic independence, but also of itsvalue, she will probably lose her present overmastering desirefor marriage, and address herself to meeting men in free economiccompetition. That is to say, she will address herself to acquiringthat practical competence, that high talent for puerile and chieflymechanical expertness, which now sets man ahead of her in the labourmarket of the world. To do this she will have to sacrifice some ofher present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinelyintelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer, or buttonholeworker, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house painter. Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid occupations, willhave to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably much further thanthey will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their present superiorityto men will always remain, and with it a shade of their relativeinefficiency, and so marriage will remain attractive to them, or at allevents to most of them, and its overthrow will be prevented. To abolishit entirely, as certain fevered reformers propose, would be as difficultas to abolish the precession of the equinoxes. 

At the present time women vacillate somewhat absurdly between twoschemes of life, the old and the new. On the one hand, their economicindependence is still full of conditions, and on the other hand they arein revolt against the immemorial conventions. The result is a generalunrest, with many symptoms of extravagant and unintelligent revolt. One of those symptoms is the appearance of intellectual striving inwomen--not a striving, alas, toward the genuine pearls and rubies of themind, but one merely toward the acquirement of the rubber stamps thatmen employ in their so-called thinking. Thus we have women who launchthemselves into party politics, and fill their heads with a vast massof useless knowledge about political tricks, customs, theories andpersonalities. Thus, too, we have the woman social reformer, trailingalong ridiculously behind a tatterdemalion posse of male utopians, each with something to sell. And thus we have the woman who goes in foradvanced wisdom of the sort on draught in women's clubs--in brief, the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of beliefs andpropositions that are ignorant, unimportant and untrue. Such banalstriving is most prodigally on display in the United States, wheresuperficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is due tothe relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work lessthan any other people in the world, and, above all, to the relativelygreater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have beenemancipated from any compulsion to productive labour without havingacquired any compensatory intellectual or artistic interest or socialduty. The result is that they swarm in the women's clubs, and wastetheir time, listening to bad poetry, worse music, and still worselectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the subconscious. It isamong such women that one observes the periodic rages for Bergsonism, the Montessori method, the twilight sleep and other such follies, sopathetically characteristic of American culture. 

One of the evil effects of this tendency I have hitherto descanted upon, to wit, the growing disposition of American women to regard allroutine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and henceintolerable. Out of' that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. Onthe one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy andwell-fed women engage in public activities that, nine times out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand webehold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first onslaught ofthe late war, the national government had to import a foreign expert toteach the housewives of the country the veriest elements of thrift. Nosuch instruction was needed by the housewives of the Continent. Theywere simply told how much food they could have, and their naturalcompetence did the rest. There is never any avoidable waste there, either in peace or in war. A French housewife has little use for agarbage can, save as a depository for uplifting literature. She doesher best with the means at her disposal, not only in war time but at alltimes. 

As I have said over and over again in this inquiry, a woman'sdisinclination to acquire the intricate expertness that lies at thebottom of good housekeeping is due primarily to her active intelligence;it is difficult for her to concentrate her mind upon such stupid andmeticulous enterprises. But whether difficult or easy, it is obviouslyimportant for the average woman to make some effort in that direction, for if she fails to do so there is chaos. That chaos is duly visiblein the United States. Here women reveal one of their subterraneanqualities: their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are quite withoutthat dog-like fidelity to duty which is one of the shining marks ofmen. They never summon up a high pride in doing what is inherentlydisagreeable; they always go to the galleys under protest, and withvows of sabotage; their fundamental philosophy is almost that of thesyndicalists. The sentimentality of men connives at this, and is thuslargely responsible for it. Before the average puella, apprenticed inthe kitchen, can pick up a fourth of the culinary subtleties that arecommonplace even to the chefs on dining cars, she has caught aman andneed concern herself about them no more, for he has to eat, in the lastanalysis, whatever she sets before him, and his lack of intelligencemakes it easy for her to shut off his academic criticisms by baldappeals to his emotions. By an easy process he finally attaches apositive value to her indolence. It is a proof, he concludes, of herfineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty incompetence he isabashed. 

But as women, gaining economic autonomy, meet men in progressivelybitterer competition, the rising masculine distrust and fear of themwill be reflected even in the enchanted domain of marriage, and thehusband, having yielded up most of his old rights, will begin to revealanew jealousy of those that remain, and particularly of the right to afair quid pro quo for his own docile industry. In brief, as women shakeoff their ancient disabilities they will also shake off some of theirancient immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with asoberer and more exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension ofthe suffrage, I believe, will encourage this awakening; in wrestingit from the reluctant male the women of the western world have planteddragons' teeth, the which will presently leap up and gnaw them. Now thatwomen have the political power to obtain their just rights, theywill begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges bysentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider themanew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddledand caressed, but as free competitors in a harsh world. When thatreconsideration gets under way there will be a general overhauling ofthe relations between the sexes, and some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn't let well enough alone. 

45. Effects of the War

The present series of wars, it seems likely, will continue for twenty orthirty years, and perhaps longer. That the first clash was inconclusivewas shown brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the peace finallyreached--a peace so artificial and dishonest that the signing of itwas almost equivalent to anew declaration of war. At least three newcontests in the grand manner are plainly insight--one between Germanyand France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak and incompetentnation over a strong and enterprising nation, one between Japan and theUnited States for the mastery of the Pacific, and one between Englandand the United States for the control of the sea. To these must beadded various minor struggles, and perhaps one or two of almost majorcharacter: the effort of Russia to regain her old unity and power, the effort of the Turks to put down the slave rebellion (of Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, etc. )which now menaces them, the effort of theLatin-Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the jointeffort of Russia and Germany (perhaps with England and Italy aiding) toget rid of such international nuisances as the insane polish republic, the petty states of the Baltic, and perhaps also most of the Balkanstates. I pass over the probability of a new mutiny in India, of therising of China against the Japanese, and of a general struggle for anew alignment of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, greatand small, are probable; most of them are humanly certain. They willbe fought ferociously, and with the aid of destructive engines of theutmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery ofmen, and a large proportion of these men will be under forty years ofage. 

As a result there will be a shortage of husbands in Christendom, and asa second result the survivors will be appreciably harder to snare thanthe men of today. Every man of agreeable exterior and easy means willbe pursued, not merely by a few dozen or score of women, as now, but bywhole battalions and brigades of them, and he will be driven in sheerself-defence into very sharp bargaining. Perhaps in the end the statewill have to interfere in the business, to prevent the potential husbandgoing to waste in the turmoil of opportunity. 

Just what form this interference is likely to take has not yet appearedclearly. In France there is already a wholesale legitimization ofchildren born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there has been aclamour for the legalization of polygamy, but these devices do not meetthe main problem, which is the encouragement of monogamy to the utmost. A plan that suggests itself is the amelioration of the position of themonogamous husband, now rendered increasingly uncomfortable by the lawsof most Christian states. I do not think that the more intelligent sortof women, faced by a perilous shortage of men, would object seriously tothat amelioration. They must see plainly that the present system, ifit is carried much further, will begin to work powerfully against theirbest interests, if only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination tomarriage that already exists among the better sort of men. The woman oftrue discretion, I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior man, even on unfavourable terms, than make John Smith her husband, serf andprisoner at one stroke. 

The law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for it. The average husband, perhaps, deserves little succour. The woman whopursues and marries him, though she may be moved by selfish aims, shouldbe properly rewarded by the state for her service to it--a servicesurely not to be lightly estimated in a military age. And that rewardmay conveniently take the form, as in the United States, of statutesgiving her title to a large share of his real property and requiringhim to surrender most of his income to her, and releasing her from allobedience to him and from all obligation to keep his house in order. Butthe woman who aspires to higher game should be quite willing, it seemsto me, to resign some of these advantages in compensation for thegreater honour and satisfaction of being wife to a man of merit, andmother to his children. All that is needed is laws allowing her, if shewill, to resign her right of dower, her right to maintenance and herimmunity from discipline, and to make any other terms that she may beled to regard as equitable. At present women are unable to make mostof these concessions even if they would: the laws of the majority ofwestern nations are inflexible. If, for example, an Englishwoman shouldagree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit herself to the discipline, not of the current statutes, but of the elder common law, which alloweda husband to correct his wife corporally with a stick no thicker thanhis thumb, it would be competent for any sentimental neighbour to setthe agreement at naught by haling her husband before a magistrate forcarrying it out, and it is a safe wager that the magistrate would jailhim. 

This plan, however novel it may seem, is actually already in operation. Many a married woman, in order to keep her husband from revolt, makes more or less disguised surrenders of certain of the rights andimmunities that she has under existing laws. There are, for example, even in America, women who practise the domestic arts with competenceand diligence, despite the plain fact that no legal penalty would bevisited upon them if they failed to do so. There are women who followexternal trades and professions, contributing a share to the familyexchequer. There are women who obey their husbands, even againsttheir best judgments. There are, most numerous of all, women who winkdiscreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from theoath of chemical purity taken at the altar. It is a commonplace, indeed, that many happy marriages admit a party of the third part. There wouldbe more of them if there were more women with enough serenity of mindto see the practical advantage of the arrangement. The trouble with suchtriangulations is not primarily that they involve perjury or thatthey offer any fundamental offence to the wife; if she avoids banaltheatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of augmenting thehusband's devotion to her and respect for her, if only as the fruit ofcomparison. The trouble with them is that very few men among us havesense enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine mind is readilytaken in by specious values; the average married man of ProtestantChristendom, if he succumbs at all, succumbs to some meretricious andflamboyant creature, bent only upon fleecing him. Here is wherethe harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to thesentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would nomore think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than hewould think of standing for office without consulting his wife. Theresult is that he is seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined bywomen there are at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despitethe fact that a hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort ofrecreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amourswere carefully supervised by Mme. Zola from the first days of theirmarriage, and inconsequence his life was wholly free from scandals andhis mind was never distracted from his work. 

46. The Eternal Romance

But whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never be anydecay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at the bottomof all transactions between the sexes. Women may emancipate themselves, they may borrow the whole bag of masculine tricks, and they may curethemselves of their present desire for the vegetable security ofmarriage, but they will never cease to be women, and so long as they arewomen they will remain provocative to men. Their chief charm todaylies precisely in the fact that they are dangerous, that they threatenmasculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menacevastly greater than that of acts of God and the public enemy--and theywill be dangerous for ever. Men fear them, and are fascinated by them. They know how to show their teeth charmingly; the more enlightened ofthem have perfected a superb technique of fascination. It was Nietzschewho called them the recreation of the warrior--not of the poltroon, remember, but of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinitecapacity for rewarding masculine industry and enterprise with small andirresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines withtheir capacity for evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparablecompanions when the serious business of the day is done, and the timehas come to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether. 

Every man, I daresay, has his own notion of what constitutes perfectpeace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the fundamentalconflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for me--and I hope Imay be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for intruding my ownpersonality--I reject the two commonest of them: passion, at leastin its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is too exciting andalarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic to have muchdesire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me try todescribe it to you. 

It is the close of a busy and vexatious day--say half past five or sixo'clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and amstretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of thedivan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman nottoo young, but still good-looking and well-dressed--above all, a womanwith a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks--ofanything, everything, all the things that women talk of: books, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No religion. Nometaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious--but remember, sheis intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and oftenpicturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut ofher frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her eye-brow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur ofher voice. Gradually I fall asleep--but only for an instant. At once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Thento sleep again--slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on. 

I ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful? Thesensation of falling asleep is to me The most exquisite in the world. I delight in it so much that I even look forward to death itself with asneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and made doublysweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I match thissituation against any that you ran think of. It is not only enchanting;it is also, in a very true sense, ennobling. In the end, when the girlgrows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows somehowpurged and glorified. I am a better man in my own sight. I have grazedupon the fields of asphodel. I have been genuinely, completely andunregrettably happy. 

47. Apologia in Conclusion

At the end I crave the indulgence of the cultured reader for theimperfections necessarily visible in all that I have here setdown--imperfections not only due to incomplete information and falliblelogic, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to certain fundamentalweaknesses of the sex to which I have the honour to belong. A man isinseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a dog isinseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in everything he saysand does, but they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses themajestic mystery of woman. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in heractual presence, so he puts on apathetic and unescapable clownishnesswhen he essays to dissect her in the privacy of the laboratory. Thereis no book on woman by a man that is not a stupendous compendium ofposturings and imbecilities. There are but two books that show even asuperficial desire to be honest--"The Unexpurgated Case Against WomanSuffrage, " by Sir Almroth Wright, and this one. Wright made a gallantattempt to tell the truth, but before he got half way through his taskhis ineradicable donkeyishness as a male overcame his scientific frenzyas a psychologist, and so he hastily washed his hands of the business, and affronted the judicious with a half baked and preposterous book. Perhaps I have failed too, and even more ingloriously. If so, I am fullof sincere and indescribable regret.