Title: In Defense of Women
Author: Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Language: English
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IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN

by H. L. Mencken



CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I. The Feminine Mind
  1. The Maternal Instinct
  2. Women’s Intelligence
  3. The Masculine Bag of Tricks
  4. Why Women Fail
  5. The Thing Called Intuition

  II. The War Between the Sexes
  6. How Marriages are Arranged
  7. The Feminine Attitude
  8. The Male Beauty
  9. Men as Aesthetes
  10. The Process of Delusion
  11. Biological Considerations
  12. Honour
  13. Women and the Emotions
  14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia
  15. Mythical Anthropophagi
  16. A Conspiracy of Silence

  III. Marriage
  17. Fundamental Motives
  18. The Process of Courtship
  19. The Actual Husband
  20. The Unattainable Ideal
  21. The Effect on the Race
  22. Compulsory Marriage
  23. Extra-Legal Devices
  24. Intermezzo on Monogamy
  25. Late Marriages
  26. Disparate Unions
  27. The Charm of Mystery
  28. Woman as Wife
  29. Marriage and the Law
  30. The Emancipated Housewife

  IV. Woman Suffrage
  31. The Crowning Victory
  32. The Woman Voter
  33. A Glance Into the Future
  34. The Suffragette
  35. A Mythical Dare-Devil
  36. The Origin of a Delusion
  37. Women as Martyrs
  38. Pathological Effects
  39. Women as Christians
  40. Piety as a Social Habit
  41. The Ethics of Women

  V. The New Age
  42. The Transvaluation of Values
  43. The Lady of Joy
  44. The Future of Marriage
  45. Effects of the War
  46. The Eternal Romance
  47. Apologia in Conclusion



Introduction


As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in
the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to
say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and
outrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and sound that
they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force
themselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not
confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes
rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck
rakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods,
as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at
all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable
human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest,
that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if
ever, have wind enough for a full day’s work. The most they can ever
accomplish in the way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant
spurt, and half a dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close
together and show a certain co-ordination, are enough to make a
practitioner celebrated, and even immortal. Nature, indeed, conspires
against all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is
against it on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans
unquestionably are on this earth. The dead hand pushes all of us into
intellectual cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yield
and have done. Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doubly
beset, first by a public opinion that regards his enterprise as
subversive and in bad taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that
limits his capacity for it, and especially his capacity to throw off
the prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The
cell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts—and what is the instrument
of reflection and speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment
of the contemporary metaphysician’s loftiest flight, when he is most
gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary
airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly
pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the
ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in
1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in
his country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product, to
mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his
wife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and
vanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has been
revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to
the natural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable level
of a patriot and taxpayer.

I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present
work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able to
embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of hitherto
unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional handicap of having
an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for I wrote
it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my only
possible customers were Americans. Of their unprecedented dislike for
novelty in the domain of the intellect I have often discoursed in the
past, and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I need
do here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among
the great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong
way to think in everything—not only in theology, or politics, or
economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in
the average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized
public clamour (usually managed by interested parties) for the erection
of an equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman
suffrage, in front of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a
dozen leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation
to the Structural Iron Workers’ Union to hold its next annual
convention in the town Symphony Hall—the citizen who, for any logical
reason, opposes such a proposal—on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony
never mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be
less useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the
Structural Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall
and knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms—this citizen is
commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only
erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And many other
planes, high and low. For an American to question any of the articles
of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for him to run grave
risks of social disaster. The old English offence of “imagining the
King’s death” has been formally revived by the American courts, and
hundreds of men and women are in jail for committing it, and it has
been so enormously extended that, in some parts of the country at
least, it now embraces such remote acts as believing that the negroes
should have equality before the law, and speaking the language of
countries recently at war with the Republic, and conveying to a private
friend a formula for making synthetic gin. All such toyings with
illicit ideas are construed as attentats against democracy, which, in a
sense, perhaps they are. For democracy is grounded upon so childish a
complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of
taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern
must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States
this is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other
enterprise, not even the trade in public offices and contracts,
occupies the rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands
upon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion.

Familiar with the risks flowing out of it—and having just had to change
the plates of my “Book of Prefaces,” a book of purely literary
criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in order
to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure upon
the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening
it with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So
deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of
the intellectual snob asserting itself over all prudence. That is to
say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go into the book that was
not already so obvious that it had been embodied in the proverbial
philosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some civilized nation, including the
Chinese. To this rule I remained faithful throughout. In its original
form, as published in 1918, the book was actually just such a pastiche
of proverbs, many of them English, and hence familiar even to
Congressmen, newspaper editors and other such illiterates. It was not
always easy to hold to this program; over and over again I was tempted
to insert notions that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe
and Asia. But in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I
managed to get through it without compromise, and so it was put into
type. There is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went
unrecognized and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer
noticed it, and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of
heresies and contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and
revered truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the
national decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes to
extraordinary lengths, even for the United States, some of the
newspapers actually denounced the book as German propaganda, designed
to break down American morale, and called upon the Department of
Justice to proceed against me for the crime known to American law as
“criminal anarchy,” i.e., “imagining the King’s death.” Why the
Comstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd and lascivious I have
never been able to determine. Certainly, they received many complaints
about it. I myself, in fact, caused a number of these complaints to be
lodged, in the hope that the resultant buffooneries would give me
entertainment in those dull days of war, with all intellectual
activities adjourned, and maybe promote the sale of the book. But the
Comstocks were pursuing larger fish, and so left me to the righteous
indignation of right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists.
Their concern, after all, is not with books that are denounced; what
they concentrate their moral passion on is the book that is praised.

The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more civilized
countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number of
propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be
omitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no means
pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines of any
novelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain form
certain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman holds in
petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast mass of
sentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It is a question of
capital importance to all human beings, and it deserves to be discussed
honestly and frankly, but there is so much of social reticence, of
religious superstition and of mere emotion intermingled with it that
most of the enormous literature it has thrown off is hollow and
useless. I point for example, to the literature of the subsidiary
question of woman suffrage. It fills whole libraries, but nine tenths
of it is merely rubbish, for it starts off from assumptions that are
obviously untrue and it reaches conclusions that are at war with both
logic and the facts. So with the question of sex specifically. I have
read, literally, hundreds of volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers
of pamphlets, handbills and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves
the primary problem unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what
is to be done about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon
millions by civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In
the main, it counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as
sensible as advising a dog to forget its fleas. Here, as in other
fields, I do not presume to offer a remedy of my own. In truth, I am
very suspicious of all remedies for the major ills of life, and believe
that most of them are incurable. But I at least venture to discuss the
matter realistically, and if what I have to say is not sagacious, it is
at all events not evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe some later
investigator will bring a better illumination to the subject.

It is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or two
about the author in each volume. I was born in Baltimore, September 12,
1880, and come of a learned family, though my immediate forebears were
business men. The tradition of this ancient learning has been upon me
since my earliest days, and I narrowly escaped becoming a doctor of
philosophy. My father’s death, in 1899, somehow dropped me into
journalism, where I had a successful career, as such careers go. At the
age of 25 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
purely aesthetic concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I
have felt a strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me
chiefly today is what may be called public psychology, ie., the nature
of the ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes
whereby they reach them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will
be in that field. In the United States I am commonly held suspect as a
foreigner, and during the war I was variously denounced. Abroad,
especially in England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my
intolerable Americanism. The two views are less far apart than they
seem to be. The fact is that I am superficially so American, in ways of
speech and thought, that the foreigner is deceived, whereas the native,
more familiar with the true signs, sees that under the surface there is
incurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans hold to be
sound. Thus I fall between two stools—but it is more comfortable there
on the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly devoid of public
spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they
seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own.
The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course,
intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail
for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends
him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and
agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the
Socialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue.
If I knew what was true, I’d probably be willing to sweat and strive
for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But
so far I have not found it.

H. L. Mencken



I. The Feminine Mind



1. The Maternal Instinct


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

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

This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this
acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the
bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the
maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she
sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his
touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent
in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman
novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into
genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From
the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got
into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of
ill-concealed derision. I can’t recall a single masculine figure
created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.



2. Women’s Intelligence


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

Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly
of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The
thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special
feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its
manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty,
masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat.
Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be
virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how
to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they
show the true fundamentals of intelligence—in so far as they reveal a
capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of
delusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth—to that
extent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of
their mothers. “Human creatures,” says George, borrowing from
Weininger, “are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no
men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.” Find me an
obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion,
a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I’ll show you a
man with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had
it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare,
if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to downright
homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the male, the
hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the
hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles and mush.
Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable
spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs,
a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.

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



3. The Masculine Bag of Tricks


What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of
intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass
of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that
collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief
mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more
intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures
more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the
stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas
of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some
sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the
law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a
profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial
accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the
mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a
penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average
business man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately
childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday
hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of
bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a
pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact
with the general run of business and professional men—I confine myself
to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted
failures—without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their
incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense. The
late Charles Francis Adams, a grandson of one American President and a
great-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate
association with some of the chief business “geniuses” of that paradise
of traders and usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that
he had never heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing.
These were vigorous and masculine men, and in a man’s world they were
successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.

There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney
were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross and
driveling concerns—that their very capacity to master and retain such
balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their
inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar
incompetency of first rate men for what are called practical concerns.
One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by
99,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering
the range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number of
ten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard from
Galveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine him
expert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other
of the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly
divert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis
found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in
almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do not
understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by
book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are
inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average
men’s highest performances, and are easily surpassed by men who, in
actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the Simidae.

This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial
character—which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as
stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility—is a
character that men of the first class share with women of the first,
second and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth,
something unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almost
invariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I have
described. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that women,
as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men as a
class. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the occupations
which bring out such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning
pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie., matching petty tricks
with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managing
factories—despite the circumstance that the great majority of such
occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them
offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is
no external reason why women shouldn’t succeed as operative surgeons;
the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special
demand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women
graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them
to make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women
should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as
managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or
as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small
force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once
the door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as
every one knows, the number of women actually practising these trades
and professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any
distinction in competition with men.



4. Why Women Fail


The cause thereof, as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in
the same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the same
impatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same disqualification
for mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in the higher
varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom of
Christendom, are especially their own, women seldom show any of that
elaborately conventionalized and half automatic proficiency which is
the pride and boast of most men. It is a commonplace of observation,
indeed, that a housewife who actually knows how to cook, or who can
make her own clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the
most casual glance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the
elements of morals, learning and hygiene—it is a platitude that such a
woman is very rare indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not
usually esteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly
true in the United States, where the position of women is higher than
in any other civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old
assumption of their intellectual inferiority has been most successfully
challenged. The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to
the defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who respects
his oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared
victuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and
resigns himself to it as he might resign himself to being shaved by a
paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and
freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher
level of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the
first importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home,
or a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger
dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for
the skill that is wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely
no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned
woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of
whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere
else is there more striking tendency to throw the whole business of
training the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the
whole business of instructing them in morals and religion upon
so-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and
caring for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and
other such professionals, most of them mountebanks.

In brief, women rebel—often unconsciously, sometimes even submitting
all the while—against the dull, mechanical tricks of the trade that the
present organization of society compels them to practise for a living,
and that rebellion testifies to their intelligence. If they enjoyed and
took pride in those tricks, and showed it by diligence and skill, they
would be on all fours with such men as are headwaiters, ladies’
tailors, schoolmasters or carpet-beaters, and proud of it. The inherent
tendency of any woman above the most stupid is to evade the whole
obligation, and, if she cannot actually evade it, to reduce its demands
to the minimum. And when some accident purges her, either temporarily
or permanently, of the inclination to marriage (of which much more
anon), and she enters into competition with men in the general business
of the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves out offers
additional evidence of her mental peculiarity. In whatever calls for no
more than an invariable technic and a feeble chicanery she usually
fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness
she usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer,
for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped
formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense,
truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for
business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and
rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it.
But she is usually a success as a sick-nurse, for that profession
requires ingenuity, quick comprehension, courage in the face of novel
and disconcerting situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating
and dominating character; and whenever she comes into competition with
men in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simple
nimbleness of mind is unaided by the masterstrokes of genius, she holds
her own invariably. The best and most intellectual—i.e., most original
and enterprising play-actors are not men, but women, and so are the
best teachers and blackmailers, and a fair share of the best writers,
and public functionaries, and executants of music. In the demimonde one
will find enough acumen and daring, and enough resilience in the face
of special difficulties, to put the equipment of any exclusively male
profession to shame. If the work of the average man required half the
mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average
prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of
starvation.



5. The Thing Called Intuition


Men, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superior
intelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they are
seldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidential
analysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there is a certain
specious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forced
upon women an artificial character which well conceals their real
character, and women have found it profitable to encourage the
deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing
unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and
particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension
by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to
say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of
capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being
disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent
intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to
some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some
half mystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human)
instinct.

The true nature of this alleged instinct, however, is revealed by an
examination of the situations which inspire a man to call it to his
aid. These situations do not arise out of the purely technical problems
that are his daily concern, but out of the rarer and more fundamental,
and hence enormously more difficult problems which beset him only at
long and irregular intervals, and so offer a test, not of his mere
capacity for being drilled, but of his capacity for genuine
ratiocination. No man, I take it, save one consciously inferior and
hen-pecked, would consult his wife about hiring a clerk, or about
extending credit to some paltry customer, or about some routine piece
of tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic man would fail to
sound the sentiment of his wife about taking a partner into his
business, or about standing for public office, or about combating
unfair and ruinous competition, or about marrying off their daughter.
Such things are of massive importance; they lie at the foundation of
well-being; they call for the best thought that the man confronted by
them can muster; the perils hidden in a wrong decision overcome even
the clamors of vanity. It is in such situations that the superior
mental grasp of women is of obvious utility, and has to be admitted. It
is here that they rise above the insignificant sentimentalities,
superstitions and formulae of men, and apply to the business their
singular talent for separating the appearance from the substance, and
so exercise what is called their intuition.

Intuition? With all respect, bosh! Then it was intuition that led
Darwin to work out the hypothesis of natural selection. Then it was
intuition that fabricated the gigantically complex score of “Die
Walkure.” Then it was intuition that convinced Columbus of the
existence of land to the west of the Azores. All this intuition of
which so much transcendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and no
less than intelligence—intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to
the hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false
semblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery
that it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth
out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the
larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are
lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because
they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely
because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not
see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the
essentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere
externals. They are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently
illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic.
Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which
carries them through every phase of its incessant, jellylike shifting
of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with
bright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity
sometimes shows itself—men recognized to be more aloof and
uninflammable than the general—men of special talent for the
logical—sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that
is a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, as
constantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the
average women of forty-eight.



II. The War Between the Sexes



6. How Marriages are Arranged


I have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit
mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation.
The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are
is itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be
brought up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to
a few obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite
the vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.

Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most
constantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of
mind are most clearly contrasted—to the field, to wit, of monogamous
marriage. Surely no long argument is needed to demonstrate the superior
competence and effectiveness of women here, and therewith their greater
self-possession, their saner weighing of considerations, their higher
power of resisting emotional suggestion. The very fact that marriages
occur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed than
men, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it
is plainly to a man’s interest to avoid marriage as long as possible,
and as plainly to a woman’s interest to make a favourable marriage as
soon as she can. The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one
of the capital concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends.
Which side commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All
normal men fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively
long periods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (or
perhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation with
another, as every one knows, the average man is duly married and the
average woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of women, in this
clear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their substantial
superiority to the great majority of men.

Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by
marriage, at least as the institution is now met with in Christendom.
Even assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they are
plainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries it is
no more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion and
intimidation—i.e., the feminine talent for survival in a world of
clashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence and
intelligence—has forced him into a more or less abhorrent compromise
with his own honest inclinations and best interests. Whether that
compromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his relative
cowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms and effects,
are almost identical. In the first case he marries because he has been
clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second he resigns
himself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both cases his
inherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of his
opponent. It makes him cherish the fiction of his enterprise, and even
of his daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious operations
against him. It makes him accept as real the bold play-acting that
women always excel at, and at no time more than when stalking a man. It
makes him, above all, see a glamour of romance in a transaction which,
even at its best, contains almost as much gross trafficking, at bottom,
as the sale of a mule.

A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly
apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that
marriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in
some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe,
wants all that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more
than certain parts. He may desire, let us say, a housekeeper to protect
his goods and entertain his friends—but he may shrink from the thought
of sharing his bathtub with anyone, and home cooking may be downright
poisonous to him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb—and yet
suffer acutely at the mere approach of relatives-in-law. He may dream
of a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial
than any a bachelor may hope to discover—and stand aghast at admitting
her to his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He may
want company and not intimacy, or intimacy and not company. He may want
a cook and not a partner in his business, or a partner in his business
and not a cook. But in order to get the precise thing or things that he
wants, he has to take a lot of other things that he doesn’t want—that
no sane man, in truth, could imaginably want—and it is to the
enterprise of forcing him into this almost Armenian bargain that the
woman of his “choice” addresses herself. Once the game is fairly set,
she searches out his weaknesses with the utmost delicacy and accuracy,
and plays upon them with all her superior resources. He carries a
handicap from the start. His sentimental and unintelligent belief in
theories that she knows quite well are not true—e.g., the theory that
she shrinks from him, and is modestly appalled by the banal carnalities
of marriage itself—gives her a weapon against him which she drives home
with instinctive and compelling art. The moment she discerns this
sentimentality bubbling within him—that is, the moment his oafish
smirks and eye rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual
disaster that is called falling in love—he is hers to do with as she
will. 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 by
the business than men, and so they are prompted by their cooler
sagacity to enter upon it on the most favourable terms possible, and
with the minimum admixture of disarming emotion. Men almost invariably
get their mates by the process called falling in love; save among the
aristocracies of the North and Latin men, the marriage of convenience
is relatively rare; a hundred men marry “beneath” them to every woman
who perpetrates the same folly. And what is meant by this so-called
falling in love? What is meant by it is a procedure whereby a man
accounts for the fact of his marriage, after feminine initiative and
generalship have made it inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze
of romance—in brief, by setting up the doctrine that an obviously
self-possessed and mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most
important adventure of her life, and with the keenest understanding of
its utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost
disembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that has
stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not acknowledge, even to
herself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the
defeat and enslavement of the man is made glorious, and even gifted
with a touch of flattering naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his
wooing has assailed and overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in
his arms; he has been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will
upon her. Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles
proudly, and divert the judicious with their boastful shouts.

Women, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious about
embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation. They never
acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase is, until the
man has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off his retreat; to do
otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads the mocking and
contumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in love thus appears
in the light of an afterthought, or, perhaps more accurately, in the
light of a contagion. The theory, it would seem, is that the love of
the man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it instantly, and by some
unintelligible magic; that it was non-existent until the heat of his
own flames set it off. This theory, it must be acknowledged, has a
certain element of fact in it. A woman seldom allows herself to be
swayed by emotion while the principal business is yet afoot and its
issue still in doubt; to do so would be to expose a degree of
imbecility that is confined only to the half-wits of the sex. But once
the man is definitely committed, she frequently unbends a bit, if only
as a relief from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so, throwing off
her customary inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury of a more or
less forced and mawkish sentiment. It is, however, almost unheard of
for her to permit herself this relaxation before the sentimental
intoxication of the man is assured. To do otherwise—that is, to
confess, even post facto, to an anterior descent,—would expose her, as
I have said, to the scorn of all other women. Such a confession would
be an admission that emotion had got the better of her at a critical
intellectual moment, and in the eyes of women, as in the eyes of the
small minority of genuinely intelligent men, no treason to the higher
cerebral centres could be more disgraceful.



8. The Male Beauty


This disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches
where it is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the
fact that women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save on the
stage, the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in amour over
his more Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is viewed with the
utmost suspicion by all women save the most stupid. In him the vanity
native to his sex is seen to mount to a degree that is positively
intolerable. It not only irritates by its very nature; it also throws
about him a sort of unnatural armour, and so makes him resistant to the
ordinary approaches. For this reason, the matrimonial enterprises of
the more reflective and analytical sort of women are almost always
directed to men whose lack of pulchritude makes them easier to bring
down, and, what is more important still, easier to hold down. The
weight of opinion among women is decidedly against the woman who falls
in love with an Apollo. She is regarded, at best, as flighty creature,
and at worst, as one pushing bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such
weaknesses are resigned to women approaching senility, and to the more
ignoble variety of women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly
fall in love with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow
may succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman
of poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be transiently
flustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness for an instant,
or confess it to her dearest friend. Women know how little such purely
superficial values are worth. The voice of their order, the first taboo
of their freemasonry, is firmly against making a sentimental debauch of
the serious business of marriage.

This disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted for by amateur
psychologists on the ground that women are anesthetic to beauty—that
they lack the quick and delicate responsiveness of man. Nothing could
be more absurd. Women, in point of fact, commonly have a far keener
aesthetic sense than men. Beauty is more important to them; they give
more thought to it; they crave more of it in their immediate
surroundings. The average man, at least in England and America, takes a
sort of bovine pride in his anaesthesia to the arts; he can think of
them only as sources of tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement;
one seldom hears of him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful
thing that his wife displays in the presence, of a fine fabric, an
effective colour, or a graceful form, say in millinery. The truth is
that women are resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and
sufficient reason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary. A truly
beautiful man, indeed, is as rare as a truly beautiful piece of
jewelry. What men mistake for beauty in themselves is usually nothing
save a certain hollow gaudiness, a revolting flashiness, the
superficial splendour of a prancing animal. The most lovely moving
picture actor, considered in the light 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 the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush
sofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate
auction room. All women, save the least intelligent, penetrate this
imposture with sharp eyes. They know that the human body, except for a
brief time in infancy, is not a beautiful thing, but a hideous thing.
Their own bodies give them no delight; it is their constant effort to
disguise and conceal them; they never expose them aesthetically, but
only as an act of the grossest sexual provocation. If it were
advertised that a troupe of men of easy virtue were to appear
half-clothed upon a public stage, exposing their chests, thighs, arms
and calves, the only women who would go to the entertainment would be a
few delayed adolescents, a psychopathic old maid or two, and a guard of
indignant members of the parish Ladies Aid Society.



9. Men as Aesthetes


Men show no such sagacious apprehension of the relatively feeble
loveliness of the human frame. The most effective lure that a woman can
hold out to a man is the lure of what he fatuously conceives to be her
beauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is almost always a pure
illusion. The female body, even at its best is very defective in form;
it has harsh curves and very clumsily distributed masses; compared to
it the average milk-jug, or even cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent
and gratifying design—in brief, an objet d’art. The fact was curiously
(and humorously) display during the late war, when great numbers of
women in all the belligerent countries began putting on uniforms.
Instantly they appeared in public in their grotesque burlesques of the
official garb of aviators, elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards,
and so on, their deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably
revealed. A man, save he be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually
looks better in uniform than in mufti; the tight lines set off his
figure. But a woman is at once given away: she look like a dumbbell run
over by an express train. Below the neck by the bow and below the waist
astern there are two masses that simply 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 ordinary clothing cunningly conceals this
fundamental imperfection. It swathes those impossible masses in
draperies soothingly uncertain of outline. But putting her into uniform
is like stripping her. Instantly all her alleged beauty vanishes.

Moreover, it is extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the
modest sightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only
the rare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art
comes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and crudely
articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she is almost
sure to be bow-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, or muddy eyes, or hair like oakum, or no chin. A woman who meets
fair tests all ’round is so uncommon that she becomes a sort of marvel,
and usually gains 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 practical
disadvantage in the primary business of their sex, for its effects are
more than overborne by the emotional suggestibility, the herculean
capacity for illusion, the almost total absence of critical sense of
men. Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the most modest doses;
they are quite content with the mere appearance of beauty. That is to
say, they show no talent whatever for differentiating between the
artificial and the real. A film of face powder, skilfully applied, is
as satisfying to them as an epidermis of damask. The hair of a dead
Chinaman, artfully dressed and dyed, gives them as much delight as the
authentic tresses of Venus. A false hip intrigues them as effectively
as the soundest one of living fascia. A pretty frock fetches them quite
as surely and securely as lovely legs, shoulders, hands or eyes. In
brief, they estimate women, and hence acquire their wives, by reckoning
up purely superficial aspects, which is just as intelligent as
estimating an egg by purely superficial aspects. They never go behind
the returns; it never occurs to them to analyze the impressions they
receive. The result is that many a man, deceived by such paltry
sophistications, never really sees his wife—that if, as God is supposed
to see her, and as 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 naive a spectator the temptation to continue practising
them is irresistible. A trained nurse tells me that even when
undergoing the extreme discomforts of parturition the great majority of
women continue to modify their complexions with pulverized talcs, and
to give thought to the arrangement of their hair. Such transparent
devices, to be sure, reduce the psychologist to a sour sort of mirth,
and yet it must be plain that they suffice to entrap and make fools of
men, even the most discreet. I know of no man, indeed, who is wholly
resistant to female beauty, and I know of no man, even among those
engaged professionally by aesthetic problems, who habitually and
automatically distinguishes the genuine, from the imitation. He may do
it now and then; he may even preen himself upon his unusual
discrimination; but given the right woman and the right stage setting,
and he will be deceived almost as readily as a yokel fresh from the
cabbage-field.



10. The Process of Delusion


Such poor fools, rolling their eyes in appraisement of such meagre
female beauty as is on display in Christendom, bring to their judgments
a capacity but slightly greater than that a cow would bring to the
estimation of epistemologies. They are so unfitted for the business
that they are even unable to agree upon its elements. Let one such man
succumb to the plaster charms of some prancing miss, and all his
friends will wonder what is the matter with him. No two are in accord
as to which is the most beautiful woman in their own town or street.
Turn six of them loose in millinery shop or the parlour of a bordello,
and there will be no dispute whatsoever; each will offer the crown of
love and beauty to a different girl.

And what aesthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness thus open the way
for, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal man has
succumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one (or, more
accurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out and grabbed him
by the nose), he defends his choice with all the heat and steadfastness
appertaining to the defense of a point of the deepest honour. To tell a
man flatly that his wife is not beautiful, or even that his
stenographer or manicurist is not beautiful, is so harsh and
intolerable an insult to his taste that even an enemy seldom ventures
upon it. One would offend him far less by arguing that his wife is an
idiot. One would relatively speaking, almost caress him by spitting
into his eye. The ego of the male is simply unable to stomach such an
affront. It is a weapon as discreditable as the poison of the Borgias.

Thus, on humane grounds, a conspiracy of silence surrounds the delusion
of female beauty, and so its victim is permitted to get quite as much
delight out of it as if it were sound. The baits he swallows most are
not edible and nourishing baits, but simply bright and gaudy ones. He
succumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a graceful twist of the body,
a synthetic complexion or a skilful display of ankles without giving
the slightest thought to the fact that a whole woman is there, and that
within the cranial cavity of the woman lies a brain, and that the
idiosyncrasies of that brain are of vastly more importance than all
imaginable physical stigmata combined. Those idiosyncrasies may make
for amicable relations in the complex and difficult bondage called
marriage; they may, on the contrary, make for joustings of a downright
impossible character. But not many men, laced in the emotional maze
preceding, are capable of any very clear examination of such facts. The
truth is that they dodge the facts, even when they are favourable, and
lay all stress upon the surrounding and concealing superficialities.
The average stupid and sentimental man, if he has a noticeably sensible
wife, is almost apologetic about it. The ideal of his sex is always a
pretty wife, and the vanity and coquetry that so often go with
prettiness are erected into charms. In other words, men play the love
game so unintelligently that they often esteem a woman in proportion as
she seems to disdain and make a mock of her intelligence. Women seldom,
if ever, make that blunder. What they commonly value in a man is not
mere showiness, whether physical or spiritual, but that compound of
small capacities which makes up masculine efficiency and passes for
masculine intelligence. This intelligence, at its highest, has a human
value substantially equal to that of their own. In a man’s world it at
least gets its definite rewards; it guarantees security, position, a
livelihood; it is a commodity that is merchantable. Women thus accord
it a 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 by
such discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is no
biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection of
women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or
physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no better
than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the
maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem,
actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportion
to weight. Their nervous responses, if anything, are a bit duller than
those of men; their muscular coordinations are surely no prompter. One
finds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many
bodily blemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites;
their senses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even
assuming that their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects
of alcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids,
gastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma,
arthritis and so on—in short, from the same disturbances of colloidal
equilibrium that produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy,
pyaemia, night sweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other
such distempers in men. They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and
appetites. They react in substantially the same way to all chemical and
mechanical agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered _per ora_
to the most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and
just as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or
an ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Cote
Rotie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional woman
shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as
maudlin and idiotic as he is.

Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not inherent
in any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not in any
advantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are rather to be
sought in a physical disadvantage—that is, in the mechanical
inferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive capacity,
their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every one knows,
is partly a direct heritage from those females of the Pongo pygmaeus
who were their probable fore-runners in the world; the same thing is to
be observed in the females of almost all other species of mammals. But
it 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 human
history, and that relative weakness has been progressively augmented in
the interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the
process of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as
refinement has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care
of them in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of
cultural complexity has made education more intricate, that the two
functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and
attention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention of
any other female. And for another thing, the consequent disability and
need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming the already large
vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to
feminine weakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in
proportion as she is self-sufficient as a social animal but in
proportion as she is dependent. 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 cannot exert as much mechanical energy in any
other way. Even her alleged superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has
demonstrated in “Man and Woman,” is almost wholly mythical; she cannot,
in point of fact, stand nearly so much hardship as a man can stand, and
so the law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of
observation in its assumption that, 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 platitude
in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that has
given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the
intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have
done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case; they
have sought compensation for their impotence in one field by employing
their resources in another field to the utmost, and out of that
constant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement of those
resources. On the one hand the sum of them present in a given woman has
been enormously increased by natural selection, so that every woman, so
to speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine mental dexterity as a mere
function of her femaleness. And on the other hand every woman, over and
above this almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, also
inherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes the
esoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is
thus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is
not only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily
competent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from his
elders little more than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry
vices and a few degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction
in all those higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies
make necessary to her security, and in particular in all those
exercises which aim at overcoming the physical, and hence social and
economic superiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity for
clear reasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality.



12. Honour


Here, it is obvious, the process of intellectual development takes
colour from the Sklavenmoral, and is, in a sense, a product of it. The
Jews, as Nietzsche has demonstrated, got their unusual intelligence by
the same process; a contrary process is working in the case of the
English and the Americans, and has begun to show itself in the case of
the French and Germans. The sum of feminine wisdom that I have just
mentioned—the body of feminine devices and competences that is handed
down from generation to generation of women—is, in fact, made up very
largely of doctrines and expedients that infallibly appear to the
average sentimental man, helpless as he is before them, as cynical and
immoral. He commonly puts this aversion into the theory that women have
no sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristically
banal. Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but it may
be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of
absolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and
woman out of which rises most of man’s complaint of its absence—to wit,
the conflict culminating in marriage, already described—the security of
the woman is not something that is in actual being, but something that
she is striving with all arms to attain. In such a conflict it must be
manifest that honor can have no place. An animal fighting for its very
existence uses all possible means of offence and defence, however foul.
Even man, for all his boasting about honor, seldom displays it when he
has anything of the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, in
gambling, for gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him
to be honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He is
honorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he
seldom permits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or
with hitting 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
of dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always well
grounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually achieves in
them is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which prompts him to be
humane to the opponent who has been wounded, or disarmed, or otherwise
made innocuous. Even here his so-called honor is little more than a
form of playacting, both maudlin and dishonest. In the actual
death-struggle he invariably bites.

Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact
that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized.
In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge
them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever
gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private
interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls
a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by
sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages.
Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect
symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who
has been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and
natural instincts-that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to
his own ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this
commonweal is always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the
greatest good to the greatest number—of petty rogues, ignoramuses and
poltroons.

The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this
cheese-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. It
must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor of
history that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race have
been, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employed in
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, Stonewall
Jackson, Bismarck, Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.



13. Women and the Emotions


The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for controlling
and concealing their emotions is not an indication that they are more
civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized. This capacity, so
rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of respect, is a
characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its loss is one of
the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon of
civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous,
knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate
assault 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 combat of
crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series
of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the
will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and
intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of
them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are
ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of
civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the
repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very
best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars
of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them
has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of
mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one’s
self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and
the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.

Women are nearly always against war in modern times, for the reasons
brought forward to justify it are usually either transparently
dishonest or childishly sentimental, and hence provoke their scorn. But
once the business is begun, they commonly favour its conduct outrance,
and are thus in accord with the theory of the great captains of more
spacious days. In Germany, during the late war, the protests against
the Schrecklichkeit practised by the imperial army and navy did not
come from women, but from sentimental men; in England and the United
States there is no record that any woman ever raised her voice against
the blockade which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children.
I was on both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot
recall meeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine
that, in so vast a combat between nations, there could still be
categories of non-combatants, with a right of asylum on armed ships and
in garrisoned towns. This imbecility was maintained only by men, large
numbers of whom simultaneously took part in wholesale massacres of such
non-combatants. The women were superior to such hypocrisy. They
recognized the nature of modern war instantly and accurately, and
advocated no disingenuous efforts to conceal it.



14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia


The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely
responsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid of
passion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with something
akin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by the fact
that very few masculine observers, on the occasions when they give
attention to the matter, are in a state of mind conducive to exact
observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no
reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that the
minority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable dimensions.
To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in the Northern
countries, makes them place a high value upon the virginal type of
woman, and so this type tends to grow more common by sexual selection,
but despite that fact, it has by no means superseded the normal type,
so realistically described by the theologians and publicists of the
Middle Ages. It would, however, be rash to assert that this long
continued sexual selection has not made itself felt, even in the normal
type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is to make it measurably easier for a
woman to conquer and conceal emotion than it is for a man. But this is
a mere reinforcement of a native quality or, at all events, a quality
long antedating the rise of the curious preference just mentioned. That
preference obviously owes its origin to the concept of private property
and is most evident in those countries in which the largest proportion
of males are property owners, i.e., in which the property-owning caste
reaches down into the lowest conceivable strata of bounders and
ignoramuses. The low-caste man is never quite sure of his wife unless
he is convinced that she is entirely devoid of amorous susceptibility.
Thus he grows uneasy whenever she shows 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 hearty response to a connubial kiss. If he could
manage to rid himself of such suspicions, there would be less public
gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with
sure cures for them, and a good deal 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 the
United States, and almost as common among the middle classes of
England, Germany and Scandinavia—does himself a serious disservice, and
that he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got himself a wife to his
austere taste, he finds that she is rather depressing—that his vanity
is almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would
have been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing
that chiefly delights a man, when some woman has gone through the
solemn buffoonery of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and
flattering contrast between her reserve in the presence of other men
and her enchanting complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his
vanity is enormously tickled. To the world in general she seems remote
and unapproachable; to him she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a
bit abandoned. It is as if some great magnifico male, some inordinate
czar or kaiser, should step down from the throne to play dominoes with
him behind the door. The greater the contrast between the lady’s two
fronts, the greater his satisfaction-up to, of course, the point where
his suspicions are aroused. Let her diminish that contrast ever so
little on the public side—by smiling at a handsome actor, by saying a
word too many to an attentive 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 once the poor fellow begins to look for
clandestine notes, to employ private inquiry agents, and to scrutinize
the eyes, ears, noses and hair of his children with shameful doubts.
This explains many domestic catastrophes.



15. Mythical Anthropophagi


The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary. One
often encounters references to her in literature, but who has ever met
her in real life? As for me, I doubt that such a monster has ever
actually existed. There are, of course, women who spend a great deal of
time denouncing and reviling men, but these are certainly not genuine
man-haters; they are simply women who have done their utmost to snare
men, and failed. Of such sort are the majority of inflammatory
suffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigid
limitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who run
no more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so
many mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such
noisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract
the attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises
that are difficult or forbidden. But certainly the enterprise of
dissuading such a propagandist from her gospel would not be difficult,
and I know of no law forbidding it.

I’ll begin to believe in the man-hater the day I am introduced to a
woman who has definitely and finally refused a chance of marriage to a
man who is of her own station in life, able to support her, unafflicted
by any loathsome disease, and of reasonably decent aspect and
manners—in brief a man who is thoroughly eligible. I doubt that any
such woman breathes the air of Christendom. Whenever one comes to
confidential terms with an unmarried woman, of course, she favours one
with a long chronicle of the men she has refused to marry, greatly to
their grief. But unsentimental cross-examination, at least in my
experience, always develops the fact that every one of these suffered
from some obvious and intolerable disqualification. Either he had a
wife already and was vague about his ability to get rid of her, or he
was drunk when he was brought to his proposal and repudiated it or
forgot it the next day, or he was a bankrupt, or he was old and
decrepit, or he was young and plainly idiotic, or he had diabetes or a
bad heart, or his relatives were impossible, or he believed in
spiritualism, or democracy, or the Baconian theory, or some other such
nonsense. Restricting the thing to men palpably eligible, I believe
thoroughly that no sane woman has ever actually muffed a chance. Now
and then, perhaps, a miraculously fortunate girl has two victims on the
mat simultaneously, and has to lose one. But they are seldom, if ever,
both good chances; one is nearly always a duffer, thrown in in the
telling to make the bourgeoisie marvel.



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 from
discussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of general
conspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of
the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment
that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity
and less discretion, area good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a
whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli’s
appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of
such men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner,
Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is
very rarely that a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the
veils which conceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is
transmitted from mother to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One
observes its practical workings, but hears little about its principles.
The causes of this secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis,
can prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security
only by keeping them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched
battle, with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic
inferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to
apply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger
of arousing the foe. He must be attached without any formal challenge,
and even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the
heart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality—in brief, a morality
based upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having
for its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.



III. Marriage



17. Fundamental Motives


How successful such a concealment may be is well displayed by the
general acceptance of the notion that women are reluctant to enter into
marriage—that they have to be persuaded to it by eloquence and
pertinacity, and even by a sort of intimidation. The truth is that, in
a world almost divested of intelligible idealism, and hence dominated
by a senseless worship of the practical, marriage offers the best
career that the average woman can reasonably aspire to, and, in the
case of very many women, the only one that actually offers a
livelihood. What is esteemed 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 she show a masculine strain that verges
upon the pathological, cannot hope to challenge men in general in this
department, but it is always open to her to exchange her sexual charm
for a lion’s share in the earnings of one man, and this is what she
almost invariably tries to do. That is to say, she tries to get a
husband, for getting a husband means, in a sense, enslaving an expert,
and so covering up her own lack of expertness, and escaping its
consequences. Thereafter she has at least one stout line of defence
against a struggle for existence in which the prospect of survival is
chiefly based, not upon the talents that are typically hers, but upon
those that she typically lacks. Before the average woman succumbs in
this struggle, some man or other must succumb first. Thus her craft
converts her handicap into an advantage.

In this security lies the most important of all the benefits that a
woman attains by marriage. It is, in fact, the most important benefit
that the mind can imagine, for the whole effort of the human race,
under our industrial society, is concentrated upon the attainment of
it. But there are other benefits, too. One of them is that increase in
dignity which goes with an obvious success; the woman who has got
herself a satisfactory husband, or even a highly imperfect husband, is
regarded with respect by other women, and has a contemptuous patronage
for those who have failed to do likewise. Again, marriage offers her
the only safe opportunity, considering the levantine view of women as
property which Christianity has preserved in our civilization, to
obtain gratification for that powerful complex of instincts which we
call the sexual, and, in particular, for the instinct of maternity. The
woman who has not had a child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more
than a little ridiculous. She is in the position of a man who has never
stood in battle; she has missed the most colossal experience of her
sex. Moreover, a social odium goes with her loss. Other women regard
her as a sort of permanent tyro, and treat her with ill-concealed
disdain, and deride the very virtue which lies at the bottom of her
experiential penury. There would seem to be, indeed, but small respect
among women for virginity per se. They are against the woman who has
got rid of hers outside marriage, not because they think she has lost
anything intrinsically valuable, but because she has made a bad
bargain, and one that materially diminishes the sentimental respect for
virtue held by men, and hence one against the general advantage and
well-being of the sex. In other words, it is a guild resentment that
they feel, not a moral resentment. Women, in general, are not actively
moral, nor, for that matter, noticeably modest. Every man, indeed, who
is in wide practice among them is occasionally astounded and horrified
to discover, on some rainy afternoon, an almost complete absence of
modesty in some women of the highest respectability.

But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable is
economic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute, but
usually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may die
without enough life insurance, or run off with some preposterous light
of love, or become an invalid or insane, or step over the intangible
and wavering line which separates business success from a prison cell.
Again, a woman may be deceived: there are stray women who are credulous
and sentimental, and stray men who are cunning. Yet again, a woman may
make false deductions from evidence accurately before her, ineptly
guessing that the clerk she marries today will be the head of the firm
tomorrow, instead of merely the bookkeeper tomorrow. But on the whole
it must be plain that a woman, in marrying, usually obtains for herself
a reasonably secure position in that station of life to which she is
accustomed. She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but realistically;
she always gives thought to the economic situation; she seldom takes a
chance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for men to marry
women who bring nothing to the joint capital of marriage save good
looks and an appearance of vivacity; it is almost unheard of for women
to neglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a rich man, at least in
America, marries his typist or the governess of his sister’s children
and is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman enters upon a comparable
marriage she is commonly set down as insane, and the disaster that
almost always ensues quickly confirms the diagnosis.

The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in marriage—and
the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the
heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a
husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the
underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before
marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress
upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its
highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the
disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this
disadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectual
enterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machines
that men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with
marriage always before them, coloring their every vision of the future,
and holding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they are
under no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts
they revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive too
feeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth of
the idiotic “knowledge” in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or
even convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the
head of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons
the business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away
the hope 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
to whatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to develop
competence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborious
training and unremitting diligence, would select a woman still
definitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose
either a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of
snaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to
be 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 been
noted as self-evident by every literate student of the phenomena of
sex, from the early Christian fathers down to Nietzsche, Ellis and
Shaw. That it is denied by the current sentimentality of Christendom is
surely no evidence against it. What we have in this denial, as I have
said, is no more than a proof of woman’s talent for a high and sardonic
form of comedy and of man’s infinite vanity. “I wooed and won her,”
says Sganarelle of his wife. “I made him run,” says the hare of the
hound. When the thing is maintained, not as a mere windy
sentimentality, but with some notion of carrying it logically, the
result is invariably a display of paralogy so absurd that it becomes
pathetic. Such nonsense one looks for in the works of gyneophile
theorists with no experience of the world, and there is where one finds
it. It is almost always wedded to the astounding doctrine that sexual
frigidity, already disposed of, is normal in the female, and that the
approach of the male is made possible, not by its melting into passion,
but by a purely intellectual determination, inwardly revolting, to
avoid his ire by pandering to his gross appetites. Thus the thing is
stated in a book called “The Sexes in Science and History,” by Eliza
Burt Gamble, an American lady anthropologist:

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

The italics are mine. From this premiss the learned doctor proceeds to
the classical sentimental argument that the males of all species,
including man, are little more than chronic seducers, and that their
chief energies are devoted to assaulting and breaking down the native
reluctance 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, no
discriminating characters have been acquired and transmitted, other
than those which have been the result of passion, namely, pugnacity and
perseverance.” Again the italics are mine. What we have here is merely
the old, old delusion of masculine enterprise in amour—the concept of
man as a lascivious monster and of woman as his shrinking victim—in
brief, the Don Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie the
springs of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of
some of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids
are led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out
that they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres,
and to 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, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have
been convinced that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation
in which their own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary
libidinousness of their swinish and unconscionable husbands.

Dr. Gamble, of course, is speaking of the lower fauna in the time of
Noah. A literal application of her theory to man today is enough to
bring it to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo sapiens actually
does the primping and parading that she describes? Which runs to
“beautiful coloring,” sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases itself
in vestments which “serve no other useful purpose than to aid in
securing the favours” of the other? The insecurity of the gifted
savante’s position is at once apparent. The more convincingly she
argues that the primeval mud-hens and she mackerel had to be
anesthetized with spectacular decorations in order to “endure the
caresses” of their beaux, the more she supports the thesis that men
have to be decoyed and bamboozled into love today. In other words, her
argument turns upon and destroys itself. Carried to its last
implication, it holds that women are all Donna Juanitas, and that if
they put off their millinery and cosmetics, and abandoned the shameless
sexual allurements of their scanty dress, men could not “endure their
caresses.”

To be sure, Dr. Gamble by no means draws this disconcerting conclusion
herself. To the contrary, she clings to the conventional theory that
the human female of today is no more than the plaything of the
concupiscent male, and that she must wait for the feminist millenium to
set her free from his abominable pawings. But she can reach this notion
only by standing her whole structure of reasoning on its head—in fact,
by knocking it over and repudiating it. On the one hand, she argues
that splendour of attire is merely a bait to overcome the reluctance of
the opposite sex, and on the other hand she argues, at least by fair
inference, 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 lady
anthropologist’s theorizings. Those facts are supported, in the field
of animal behaviour, by the almost unanimous evidence of zoologists,
including that of Dr. Gamble herself. They are supported, in the field
of human behaviour, by a body of observation and experience so colossal
that it would be quite out of the question to dispose of it. Women, as
I have shown, have a more delicate aesthetic sense than men; in a world
wholly rid of men they would probably still array themselves with
vastly more 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 of finery—to say nothing of their display of epidermis—has the
conscious purpose of attracting the masculine eye. A normal woman,
indeed, never so much as buys a pair of shoes or has her teeth plugged
without considering, in the back of her mind, the effect upon some
unsuspecting candidate 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 in the
duel of sex—has ever publicly denied this; the denial is confined
entirely to the absurd sect of female bachelors of arts and to the
generality of vain and unobservant men. The former, having failed to
attract men by the devices described, take refuge behind the sour
grapes doctrine that they have never tried, and the latter, having
fallen victims, sooth their egoism by arrogating the whole agency to
themselves, thus giving it a specious appearance of the volitional, and
even of the audacious. The average man is an almost incredible
popinjay; he can think of himself only as at the centre of situations.
All the sordid transactions of his life appear to him, and are depicted
in his accounts of them, as feats, successes, proofs of his acumen. He
regards it as an almost magical exploit to operate a stock-brokerage
shop, or to get elected to public office, or to swindle his fellow
knaves in some degrading commercial enterprise, or to profess some
nonsense or other in a college, or to write so platitudinous a book as
this one. And in the same way he views it as a great testimony to his
prowess at amour to yield up his liberty, his property and his soul to
the first woman who, in despair of finding better game, turns her
appraising eye upon him. But if you want to hear a mirthless laugh,
just present this masculine theory to a bridesmaid at a wedding,
particularly after alcohol and crocodile tears have done their
disarming work upon her. That is to say, just hint to her that the
bride harboured no notion of marriage until stormed into acquiescence
by the moonstruck and impetuous bridegroom.

I have used the phrase, “in despair of finding better game.” What I
mean is this that not one woman in a hundred ever marries her first
choice among marriageable men. That first choice is almost invariably
one who is beyond her talents, for reasons either fortuitous or
intrinsic. Let us take, for example, a woman whose relative naivete
makes the process clearly apparent, to wit, a simple shop-girl. Her
absolute first choice, perhaps, is not a living man at all, but a
supernatural abstraction in a book, say, one of the heroes of Hall
Caine, Ethel M. Dell, or Marie Corelli. After him comes a
moving-picture actor. Then another moving-picture actor. Then, perhaps,
many more—ten or fifteen head. Then a sebaceous young clergyman. Then
the junior partner in the firm she works for. Then a couple of
department managers. Then a clerk. Then a young man with no definite
profession or permanent job—one of the innumerable host which flits
from post to post, always restive, always trying something new—perhaps
a neighborhood garage-keeper in the end. Well, the girl begins with the
Caine colossus: he vanishes into thin air. She proceeds to the moving
picture actors: they are almost as far beyond her. And then to the man
of God, the junior partner, the department manager, the clerk; one and
all they are carried off by girls of greater attractions and greater
skill—girls who can cast gaudier flies. In the end, suddenly terrorized
by the first faint shadows of spinsterhood, she turns to the ultimate
numskull—and marries him out of hand.

This, allowing for class modifications, is almost the normal history of
a marriage, or, more accurately, of the genesis of a marriage, under
Protestant Christianity. Under other rites the business is taken out of
the woman’s hands, at least partly, and so she is less enterprising in
her assembling of candidates and possibilities. But when the whole
thing is left to her own heart—i.e., to her head—it is but natural that
she should seek as wide a range of choice as the conditions of her life
allow, and in a democratic society those conditions put few if any
fetters upon her fancy. The servant girl, or factory operative, or even
prostitute of today may be the chorus girl or moving picture vampire of
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 to
Cinderella. The result is that every normal American young woman, with
the practicality of her sex and the inner confidence that goes
therewith, raises her amorous eye as high as it will roll. And the
second result is that every American man of presentable exterior and
easy means is surrounded by an aura of discreet provocation: he cannot
even dictate a letter, or ask for a telephone number without being
measured for his wedding coat. On the Continent of Europe, and
especially in the Latin countries, where class barriers are more
formidable, the situation differs materially, and to the disadvantage
of the girl. If she makes an overture, it is an invitation to disaster;
her hope of lawful marriage by such means is almost nil. In
consequence, the prudent and decent girl avoids such overtures, and
they must be made by third parties or by the man himself. This is the
explanation of the fact that a Frenchman, say, is habitually
enterprising in amour, and hence bold and often offensive, whereas an
American is what is called chivalrous. The American is chivalrous for
the simple reason that the initiative is not in his hands. His chivalry
is really a sort of coquetry.



20. The Unattainable Ideal


But here I rather depart from the point, which is this: that the
average woman is not strategically capable of bringing down the most
tempting game within her purview, and must thus content herself with a
second, third, or nth choice. The only women who get their first
choices are those who run in almost miraculous luck and those too
stupid to formulate an ideal—two very small classes, it must be
obvious. A few women, true enough, are so pertinacious that they prefer
defeat to compromise. That is to say, they prefer to put off marriage
indefinitely rather than to marry beneath the highest leap of their
fancy. But such women may be quickly dismissed as abnormal, and perhaps
as downright diseased in mind; the average woman is well-aware that
marriage is far better for her than celibacy, even when it falls a good
deal short of her primary hopes, and she is also well aware that the
differences between man and man, once mere money is put aside, are so
slight as to be practically almost negligible. Thus the average woman
is under none of the common masculine illusions about elective
affinities, soul mates, love at first sight, and such phantasms. She is
quite ready to fall in love, as the phrase is, with any man who is
plainly eligible, and she usually knows a good many more such men than
one. Her primary demand in marriage is not for the agonies of romance,
but for comfort and security; she is thus easier satisfied than a man,
and oftener happy. One frequently hears of remarried widowers who
continue to moon about their dead first wives, but for a remarried
widow to show any such sentimentality would be a nine days’ wonder.
Once replaced, a dead husband is expunged from the minutes. And so is a
dead love.

One of the results of all this is a subtle reinforcement of the
contempt with which women normally regard their husbands—a contempt
grounded, as I have shown, upon a sense of intellectual superiority. To
this primary sense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a
concrete comparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the
fact that such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the
typical husband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it
than his wife. He is, taking averages, one who has been loved, as the
saying goes, 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
would have 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, by many women, and is the lost first choice of at least some of
them. Here presents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the
husband is the attained and disdained.

Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority of
bachelors, so often noted by students of mankind—a superiority so
marked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-rate
philosophers who were married men. The bachelor’s very capacity to
avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the
ordinary sentimentalism of his sex—in other words, of his greater
approximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He is able to
defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an
equipment almost comparable to their own. Herbert Spencer, until he was
fifty, was ferociously harassed by women of all sorts. Among others,
George Eliot tried very desperately to marry him. But after he had made
it plain, over a long series of years, that he was prepared to resist
marriage to the full extent of his military and naval power, the girls
dropped off one by one, and so his last decades were full of peace and
he 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 men
are thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their
superiority dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and
sentimentalities of lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a
popular delusion that the sons of great men are always dolts, the fact
is that intellectual superiority is inheritable, quite as easily as
bodily strength; and that fact has been established beyond cavil by the
laborious inquiries of Galton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians
of the English school. If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer,
Spencer, and Nietzsche had married and begotten sons, those sons, it is
probable, would have contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and
grandsons of Veit Bach contributed to music, or those of Erasmus Darwin
to biology, or those of Henry Adams to politics, or those of Hamilcar
Barca to the art of war. I have said that Herbert Spencer’s escape from
marriage facilitated his life-work, and so served the immediate good of
English philosophy, but in the long run it will work a detriment, for
he left no sons to carry on his labours, and the remaining Englishmen
of his time were unable to supply the lack. His celibacy, indeed, made
English philosophy co-extensive with his life; since his death the
whole body of metaphysical speculation produced in England has been of
little more, practical value to the world than a drove of bogs. In
precisely the same way the celibacy of Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche
has reduced German philosophy to feebleness.

Even setting aside this direct influence of heredity, there is the
equally potent influence of example and tuition. It is a gigantic
advantage to live on intimate terms with a first-rate man, and have his
care. Hamilcar not only gave the Carthagenians a great general in his
actual son; he also gave them a great general in his son-in-law,
trained in his camp. But the tendency of the first-rate man to remain a
bachelor is very strong, and Sidney Lee once showed that, of all the
great writers of England since the Renaissance, more than half were
either celibates or lived apart from their wives. Even the married ones
revealed the tendency plainly. For example, consider Shakespeare. He
was forced into marriage while still a minor by the brothers of Ann
Hathaway, who was several years his senior, and had debauched him and
gave out that she was enceinte by him. He escaped from her abhorrent
embraces as quickly as possible, and thereafter kept as far away from
her as he could. His very distaste for marriage, indeed, was the cause
of his residence in London, and hence, in all probability, of the
labours which made him immortal.

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

In America the dot is almost unknown, partly because money-getting is
easier to men than in Europe and is regarded as less degrading, and
partly because American men are more naive than Frenchmen and are thus
readily intrigued without actual bribery. But the best of them
nevertheless lean to celibacy, and plans for overcoming their habit are
frequently proposed and discussed. One such plan involves a heavy tax
on bachelors. The defect in it lies in the fact that the average
bachelor, for obvious reasons, is relatively well to do, and would pay
the tax rather than marry. Moreover, the payment of it would help to
salve his conscience, which is now often made restive, I believe, by a
maudlin feeling that he is shirking his duty to the race, and so he
would be confirmed and supported in his determination to avoid the
altar. Still further, he would escape the social odium which now
attaches to his celibacy, for whatever a man pays for is regarded as
his right. As things stand, that odium is of definite potency, and
undoubtedly has its influence upon a certain number of men in the lower
ranks of bachelors. They stand, so to speak, in the twilight zone of
bachelorhood, with one leg furtively over the altar rail; it needs only
an extra pull to bring them to the sacrifice. But if they could
compound for their immunity by a cash indemnity it is highly probable
that they would take on new resolution, and in the end they would
convert what remained of their present disrepute into a source of
egoistic satisfaction, as is done, indeed, by a great many bachelors
even today. These last immoralists are privy to the elements which
enter into that disrepute: the ire of women whose 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 prohibition
of sentimental marriages by law, and the substitution of match-making
by the common hangman. This plan, as revolutionary as it may seem,
would have several plain advantages. For one thing, it would purge the
serious business 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 paternity upon the inferior, to the damage of posterity. The
hangman, if he made his selections arbitrarily, would try to give his
office permanence and dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet
with public approbation, i.e., men obviously of sound stock and
talents, i.e., the sort of men who now habitually escape. And if he
made his selection by the hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out
of a hat, or by any other such method of pure chance, that pure chance
would fall indiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper
orders would thus lose their present comparative immunity. True enough,
a good many men would endeavour to influence him privately to their own
advantage, and it is probable that he would occasionally succumb, but
it must be plain that the men most likely to prevail in that enterprise
would not be philosophers, but politicians, and so there would be some
benefit to the race even here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy
loss when a Congressman, a member of the House of Lords or even an
ambassador or Prime Minister dies childless, but when a Herbert Spencer
goes to the grave without leaving sons behind him there is a detriment
to all the generations of the future.

I did not offer the plan, of course, as a contribution to practical
politics, but merely as a sort of hypothesis, to help clarify the
problem. Many other theoretical advantages appear in it, but its
execution is made impossible, not only by inherent defects, but also by
a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at least
offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite its
unfavourable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose the
substitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle for
the plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt rightly,
that her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangman
or the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favourable to her
opportunities. And men would oppose it because it would restrict their
liberty. This liberty, of course, is largely imaginary. In its common
manifestation, it is no more, at bottom, than the privilege of being
bamboozled and made a mock of by the first woman who ventures to essay
the business. But none the less it is quite as precious to men as any
other of the ghosts that their vanity conjures up for their
enchantment. They cherish the notion that unconditioned volition enters
into the matter, and that under volition there is not only a high
degree of sagacity but also a touch of the daring and the devilish. A
man is often almost as much pleased and flattered by his own marriage
as he would be by the achievement of what is currently called a
seduction. In the one case, as in the other, his emotion is one of
triumph. The substitution of pure chance would take away that soothing
unction.

The present system, to be sure, also involves chance. Every man
realizes it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which
he humbly whispers: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” But that
chance has a sugarcoating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion; it shows
less stark and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald
hazard of the die. Thus men prefer it, and shrink from the other. In
the same way, I have no doubt, the majority of foxes would object to
choosing lots to determine the victim of a projected fox-hunt. They
prefer to take their chances with the dogs.



23. Extra-Legal Devices


It is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration to say that all first-class
men escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that their
high qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one hand it
must be obvious that an appreciable number of them, perhaps by reason
of their very detachment and preoccupation, are intrigued into the holy
estate, and that not a few of them enter it deliberately, convinced
that it is the safest form of liaison possible under Christianity. And
on the other hand one must not forget the biological fact that it is
quite feasible to achieve offspring without the imprimatur of Church
and State. The thing, indeed, is so commonplace that I need not risk a
scandal by uncovering it in detail. What I allude to, I need not add,
is not that form of irregularity which curses innocent children with
the stigma of illegitimacy, but that more refined and thoughtful form
which safeguards their social dignity while protecting them against
inheritance from their legal fathers. English philosophy, as I have
shown, suffers by the fact that Herbert Spencer was too busy to permit
himself any such romantic altruism—just as American literature gains
enormously by the fact that Walt Whitman adventured, leaving seven sons
behind him, three of whom are now well-known American poets and in the
forefront of the New Poetry movement.

The extent of this correction of a salient evil of monogamy is very
considerable; its operations explain the private disrepute of perhaps a
majority of first-rate men; its advantages have been set forth in
George Moore’s “Euphorion in Texas,” though in a clumsy and sentimental
way. What is behind it is the profound race sense of women—the instinct
which makes them regard the unborn in their every act—perhaps, too, the
fact that the interests of the unborn are here identical, as in other
situations, with their own egoistic aspirations. As a popular
philosopher has shrewdly observed, the objections to polygamy do not
come from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer
half or a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man to the whole
devotion of a third-rate man. Considerations of much the same sort also
justify polyandry—if not morally, then at least biologically. The
average woman, as I have shown, must inevitably view her actual husband
with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence,
she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by
the fact that he is their father, nor can she help feeling guilty about
it; for she knows that he is their father only by reason of her own
initiative in the proceedings anterior to her marriage. If, now, an
opportunity presents itself to remove that handicap from at least some
of them, and at the same time to realize her ideal and satisfy her
vanity—if such a chance offers it is no wonder that she occasionally
embraces it.

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



24. Intermezzo on Monogamy


The prevalence of monogamy in Christendom is commonly ascribed to
ethical motives. This is quite as absurd as ascribing wars to ethical
motives which is, of course, frequently done. The simple truth is that
ethical motives are no more than deductions from experience, and that
they are quickly abandoned whenever experience turns against them. In
the present case experience is still overwhelming on the side of
monogamy; civilized men are in favour of it because they find that it
works. And why does it work? Because it is the most effective of all
available antidotes to the alarms and terrors of passion. Monogamy, in
brief, kills passion—and passion is the most dangerous of all the
surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon
order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The
civilized man—the ideal civilized man—is simply one who never
sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches
perfection when he even ceases to love passionately—when he reduces the
most profound of all his instinctive experience from the level of an
ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing armies and
workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant
death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it
possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of
the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety,
but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring,
and so gradually kills it.

The advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail to get
all the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example, the
important moral business of safeguarding the virtue of the
unmarried—that is, of the still passionate. The present plan in
dealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him with
scare-crows and prohibitions—to try to convince him logically that
passion is dangerous. This is both supererogation and
imbecility—supererogation because he already knows that it is
dangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a
passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rein
under unfavourable and dispiriting conditions—to bring it down, by slow
stages, 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 case would be relatively easy to enforce, instead of impossible,
as in the other. Curiosity would be satisfied; nature would get out of
her cage; even romance would get an inning. Ninety-nine young men out
of a hundred would submit, if only because it would be much easier to
submit that to resist.

And the result? Obviously, it would be laudable—that is, accepting
current definitions of the laudable. The product, after six months,
would be a well-regimented and disillusioned young man, as devoid of
disquieting and demoralizing passion as an ancient of eighty—in brief,
the ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely fails to
produce a satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one hand its
impossible prohibitions cause a multitude of lamentable revolts, often
ending in a silly sort of running amok. On the other hand they fill the
Y. M. C. A.’s with scared poltroons full of indescribably disgusting
Freudian 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, commonly
takes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is
almost always able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the
average poor clodpate, or normal man. If he actually marries early, it
is nearly always proof that some intolerable external pressure has been
applied to him, as in Shakespeare’s case, or that his mental
sensitiveness approaches downright insanity, as in Shelley’s. This
fact, curiously enough, has escaped the observation of an otherwise
extremely astute observer, namely Havelock Ellis. In his study of
British genius he notes the fact that most men of unusual capacities
are the sons of relatively old fathers, but instead of exhibiting the
true cause thereof, he ascribes it to a mysterious quality whereby a
man already in decline is capable of begetting better offspring than
one in full vigour. This is a palpable absurdity, not only because it
goes counter to facts long established by animal breeders, but also
because it tacitly assumes that talent, and hence the capacity for
transmitting it, is an acquired character, and that this character may
be transmitted. Nothing could be more unsound. Talent is not an
acquired character, but a congenital character, and the man who is born
with it has it in early life quite as well as in later life, though Its
manifestation may have to wait. James Mill was yet a young man when his
son, John Stuart Mill, was born, and not one of his principle books had
been written. But though the “Elements of Political Economy” and the
“Analysis of the Human Mind” were thus but vaguely formulated in his
mind, if they were actually so much as formulated at all, and it was
fifteen years before he wrote them, he was still 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, to
wit, that the sort of man capable of transmitting high talents to a son
is 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 to yield even then are somewhat obscure, but two or three of
them, perhaps, may be vaguely discerned. One lies in the fact that
every man, whether of the first-class or of any other class, tends to
decline in mental agility as he grows older, though in the actual range
and profundity of his intelligence he may keep on improving until he
collapses into senility. Obviously, it is mere agility of mind, and not
profundity, that is of most value and effect in so tricky and deceptive
a combat as the duel of sex. The aging man, with his agility gradually
withering, is thus confronted by women in whom it still luxuriates as a
function of their relative youth. Not only do women of his own age
aspire to ensnare him, but also women of all ages back to adolescence.
Hence his average or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger
and younger than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth
may be sufficient to tip over his tottering defences. This, I take it,
is why oldish men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is
not that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it
is that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and
youth is female. The case of the late Henrik Ibsen was typical. At
forty Ibsen was a sedate family man, and it is doubtful that he ever so
much as glanced at a woman; all his thoughts were upon the composition
of “The League of Youth,” 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 all done and his decline begun, he succumbed
preposterously to a flirtatious damsel of eighteen, and thereafter,
until actual insanity released him, he mooned like a provincial actor
in a sentimental melodrama. Had it not been, indeed, for the fact that
he was already married, and to a very sensible wife, he would have run
off with this flapper, and so made himself publicly ridiculous.

Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is
found, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the
disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages
to increase. At thirty a man is terrified by the inhibitions of
monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at
sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease
and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years,
is his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling
into neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice
between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the
wife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would
probably try to marry him anyhow; if he employs her in place of a wife
he commonly ends by finding himself married and minus a nurse, to his
confusion and discomfiture, and to the far greater discomfiture of his
heirs and assigns. This process is so obvious and so commonplace that I
apologize formally for rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this:
that a man’s instinctive aversion to marriage is grounded upon a sense
of social and economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a
mere theory when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is
on the side of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is
a powerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had half
as much to gain by marriage as women gain, then, all men would be as
ardently 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 noticeably
inferior wives. The causes of the phenomenon, so often discussed and so
seldom illuminated, should be plain by now. The first-rate man, by
postponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches it in the end
with his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open to the
advances of women whose attractions are wholly meretricious, e.g.,
empty flappers, scheming widows, and trained nurses with a highly
developed professional technic of sympathy. If he marries at all,
indeed, he must commonly marry badly, for women of genuine merit are no
longer interested in him; what was once a lodestar is now no more than
a smoking smudge. It is this circumstance that account for the low
calibre of a good many first-rate men’s sons, and gives a certain
support to the common notion that they are always third-raters. Those
sons inherit from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the
bad strain is often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain.
Mediocrity, as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and
extraordinary ability is recessive character. In a marriage between an
able man and a commonplace woman, 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 the
superman, and seeks to prevent his birth. We have, indeed, no ground
for assuming that the continued progress visualized by man is in actual
accord with the great flow of the elemental forces. Devolution is quite
as natural as evolution, and may be just as pleasing, or even a good
deal 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 superiority
perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it
is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy
to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a
subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the
reproduction of philosophers.

Per corollary, it is notorious that women of merit frequently marry
second-rate men, and bear them children, thus aiding in the war upon
progress. One is often astonished to discover that the wife of some
sordid and prosaic manufacturer or banker or professional man is a
woman of quick intelligence and genuine charm, with intellectual
interests so far above his comprehension that he is scarcely so much as
aware of them. Again, there are the leading feminists, women artists
and other such captains of the sex; their husbands are almost always
inferior men, and sometimes downright fools. But not paupers! Not
incompetents in a man’s world! Not bad husbands! What we here
encounter, of course, is no more than a fresh proof of the sagacity of
women. The first-rate woman is a realist. She sees clearly that, in a
world dominated by second-rate men, the special capacities of the
second-rate man are esteemed above all other capacities and given the
highest rewards, and she endeavours to get her share of those rewards
by marrying a second-rate man at the top of his class. The first-rate
man is an admirable creature; his qualities are appreciated by every
intelligent woman; as I have just said, it may be reasonably argued
that he is actually superior to God. But his attractions, after a
certain point, do not run in proportion to his deserts; beyond that he
ceases to be a good husband. Hence the pursuit 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, the
charm of the unlike, _heliogabalisme_. As Shakespeare has put it, there
must be some mystery in love—and there can be no mystery between
intellectual equals. I dare say that many a woman marries an inferior
man, not primarily because he is a good provider (though it is
impossible to imagine her overlooking this), but because his very
inferiority interests her, and makes her want to remedy it and mother
him. Egoism is in the impulse: it is pleasant to have a feeling of
superiority, and to be assured that it can be maintained. If now, that
feeling be mingled with sexual curiosity and economic self-interest, it
obviously supplies sufficient motivation to account for so natural and
banal a thing as a marriage. Perhaps the greatest of all these factors
is the mere disparity, the naked strangeness. A woman could not love a
man, as the phrase is, who wore skirts and pencilled his eye-brows, and
by the same token she would probably find it difficult to love a man
who matched perfectly her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems
in marriage, on the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the
exercise of that caressing irony which I have already described. She
likes to observe 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
somewhat pitying and patronizing.



27. The Charm of Mystery


Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down this
strangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an intimacy
that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at too many
points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation is
gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister.
Thus that “maximum of temptation” of which Shaw speaks has within
itself the seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty
girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He
ends by making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day
sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives,
ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as
romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal
for words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the
distaste and boredom that get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity
of woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity to it.

An estimable lady psychologist of the American Republic, Mrs. Marion
Cox, in a somewhat florid book entitled “Ventures into Worlds,” has a
sagacious essay upon this subject. She calls the essay “Our Incestuous
Marriage,” and argues accurately that, once the adventurous descends to
the habitual, it takes on an offensive and degrading character. The
intimate approach, to give genuine joy, must be a concession, a feat of
persuasion, a victory; once it loses that character it loses
everything. Such a destructive conversion is effected by the average
monogamous marriage. It breaks down all mystery and reserve, for how
can mystery and reserve survive the use of the same hot water bag and a
joint concern about butter and egg bills? What remains, at least on the
husband’s side, is esteem—the feeling one, has for an amiable aunt. And
confidence—the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist or a
fortune-teller. And habit—the thing which makes it possible to eat the
same breakfast every day, and to windup one’s watch regularly, and to
earn a living.

Mrs. Cox, if I remember her dissertation correctly, proposes to prevent
this stodgy dephlogistication of marriage by interrupting its
course—that is, by separating the parties now and then, so that neither
will become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By this means,
she, argues, curiosity will be periodically revived, and there will be
a chance for personality to expand a cappella, and so each reunion will
have in it something of the surprise, the adventure and the virtuous
satanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not come back to precisely
the same wife that he parted from, and the wife will not welcome
precisely the same husband. Even supposing them to have gone on
substantially as if together, they will have gone on out of sight and
hearing of each other, Thus each will find the other, to some extent at
least, a stranger, and hence a bit challenging, and hence a bit
charming. The scheme has merit. More, it has been tried often, and with
success. It is, indeed, a familiar observation that the happiest
couples are those who are occasionally separated, and the fact has been
embalmed in the trite maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Perhaps not actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more
curious, more eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the
widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the
average couple cannot afford a double establishment, even temporarily.
The other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the envy and
ill-nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a gabbling of
scandal. The world invariably suspects the worst. Let man and wife
separate to save their happiness from suffocation in the kitchen, the
dining room and the connubial chamber, and it will immediately conclude
that the corpse is already laid out in the drawing-room.



28. Woman as Wife


This boredom of marriage, however, is not nearly so dangerous a menace
to the institution as Mrs. Cox, with evangelistic enthusiasm, permits
herself to think it is. It bears most harshly upon the wife, who is
almost always the more intelligent of the pair; in the case of the
husband its pains are usually lightened by that sentimentality with
which men dilute the disagreeable, particularly in marriage. Moreover,
the average male gets his living by such depressing devices that
boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him. A man who spends six or
eight hours a day acting as teller in a bank, or sitting upon the bench
of a court, or looking to the inexpressibly trivial details of some
process of manufacturing, or writing imbecile articles for a newspaper,
or managing a tramway, or administering ineffective medicines to stupid
and uninteresting patients—a man so engaged during all his hours of
labour, which means a normal, typical man, is surely not one to be
oppressed unduly by the dull round of domesticity. His wife may bore
him hopelessly as mistress, just as any other mistress inevitably bores
a man (though surely not so quickly and so painfully as a lover bores a
woman), 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 tires him by her monotony, but that she tires him by her
variety—not that she is too static, but that she is too dynamic. He is
weary when he gets home, and asks only the dull peace of a hog in a
comfortable sty. This peace is broken by the greater restlessness of
his wife, the fruit of her greater intellectual resilience and
curiosity.

Of far more potency as a cause of connubial discord is the general
inefficiency of a woman at the business of what is called keeping
house—a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities. As I
have argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for mastering
these technicalities than men; the enterprise always costs them more
effort, and they are never able to reinforce mere diligent application
with that obtuse enthusiasm which men commonly bring to their tawdry
and childish concerns. But in addition to their natural incapacity,
there is a reluctance based upon a deficiency in incentive, and
deficiency in incentive is due to the maudlin sentimentality with which
men regard marriage. In this sentimentality lie the germs of most of
the evils which beset the institution in Christendom, and particularly
in the United States, where sentiment is always carried to inordinate
lengths. Having abandoned the mediaeval concept of woman as temptress
the men of the Nordic race have revived the correlative mediaeval
concept of woman as angel and to bolster up that character they have
create for her a vast and growing mass of immunities culminating of
late years in the astounding doctrine that, under the contract of
marriage, all the duties lie upon the man and all the privileges
appertain to the woman. In part this doctrine has been established by
the intellectual enterprise and 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 it is the plain product of the donkeyish vanity
which makes almost every man view the practical incapacity of his wife
as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and
consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and
efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will
figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio,
entirely discharged from every unpleasant labour and responsibility.



29. Marriage and the Law


This was not always the case. No more than a century ago, even by
American law, the most sentimental in the world, the husband was the
head of the family firm, lordly and autonomous. He had authority over
the purse-strings, over the children, and even over his wife. He could
enforce his mandates by appropriate punishment, including the corporal.
His sovereignty and dignity were carefully guarded by legislation, the
product of thousands of years of experience and ratiocination. He was
safeguarded in his self-respect by the most elaborate and efficient
devices, 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 passerby
sentimental orgy—all of the old rights of the husband have been
converted into obligations. He no longer has any control over his
wife’s property; she may devote its income to the family or she may
squander that income upon idle follies, and he can do nothing. She has
equal authority in regulating and disposing of the children, and in the
case of infants, more than he. There is no law compelling her to do her
share of the family labour: she may spend her whole time in cinema
theatres or gadding about the shops as she will. She cannot be forced
to perpetuate the family name if she does not want to. She cannot be
attacked with masculine weapons, e.g., fists and firearms, when she
makes an assault with 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 family habitat clean, the children in order, and the victuals
eatable.

Now view the situation of the husband. The instant he submits to
marriage, his wife obtains a large and inalienable share in his
property, including all he may acquire in future; in most American
states the minimum is one-third, and, failing children, one-half. He
cannot dispose of his real estate without her consent; he cannot even
deprive her of it by will. She may bring up his children carelessly and
idiotically, cursing them with abominable manners and poisoning their
nascent minds against him, and he has no redress. She may neglect her
home, gossip and lounge about all day, put impossible food upon his
table, steal his small change, pry into his private papers, hand over
his home to the Periplaneta americana, accuse him falsely of
preposterous adulteries, affront his friends, and lie about him to the
neighbours—and he can do nothing. She may compromise his honour by
indecent dressing, write letters to moving-picture actors, and expose
him to ridicule by going into politics—and he is helpless.

Let him undertake the slightest rebellion, over and beyond mere
rhetorical protest, and the whole force of the state comes down upon
him. If he corrects her with the bastinado or locks her up, he is good
for six months in jail. If he cuts off her revenues, he is incarcerated
until he makes them good. And if he seeks surcease in flight, taking
the children with him, he is pursued by the gendarmerie, brought back
to his duties, and depicted in the public press as a scoundrelly
kidnapper, fit only for the knout. In brief, she is under no legal
necessity whatsoever to carry out her part of the compact at the altar
of God, whereas he faces instant disgrace and punishment for the
slightest failure to observe its last letter. For a few grave crimes of
commission, true enough, she may be proceeded against. Open adultery is
a recreation that is denied to her. She cannot poison her husband. She
must not assault him with edged tools, or leave him altogether, or
strip off her few remaining garments and go naked. But for the vastly
more various and numerous crimes of omission—and in sum they are more
exasperating and intolerable than even overt felony—she cannot be
brought to book at all.

The scene I depict is American, but it will soon extend its horrors to
all Protestant countries. The newly enfranchised women of every one of
them cherish long programs of what they call social improvement, and
practically the whole of that improvement is based upon devices for
augmenting their own relative autonomy and power. The English wife of
tradition, so thoroughly a femme covert, is being displaced by a
gadabout, truculent, irresponsible creature, full of strange new ideas
about her rights, and strongly disinclined to submit to her husband’s
authority, or to devote herself honestly to the upkeep of his house, or
to bear him a biological sufficiency of heirs. And the German Hausfrau,
once so innocently consecrated to Kirche, Kuche und Kinder, is going
the same way.



30. The Emancipated Housewife


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

This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as
well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character of
a definite cult in the United States, and the stray woman who attends
to them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she is
apt to be dismissed as a “brood sow” (I quote literally, craving
absolution for the phrase: a jury of men during the late war, on very
thin patriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she favours her
lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious villainousness of
American cookery—a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a
French hack-driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would
brain her with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an
American home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen and
competently cooked, becomes almost as startling as to meet a Y. M. C.
A. secretary in a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing, in
most of the large cities of the Republic, scarcely has any existence.
If the average American husband wants a sound dinner he must go to a
restaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the
society of charming and well-behaved children, he has to go to an
orphan asylum. Only the immigrant 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 be
mistaken by the nobility and gentry for moral indignation. No such
feeling, in truth, is in my heart. Moral judgments, as old Friedrich
used to say, are foreign to my nature. Setting aside the vast herd
which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the
minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin
is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an
excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the
average wine-bibber is a far better fellow than the average
prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the
average poor drudge, and that the worst white, slave trader of my
acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader. In the same
way I am convinced that the average woman, whatever her deficiencies,
is greatly superior to the average man. The very ease with which she
defies and swindles him in several capital situations of life is the
clearest of proofs of her general superiority. She did not obtain her
present high immunities as a gift from the gods, but only after a long
and often bitter fight, and in that fight she exhibited forensic and
tactical talents of a truly admirable order. There was no weakness of
man that she did not penetrate and take advantage of. There was no
trick that she did not put to effective use. There was no device so
bold and inordinate that it daunted her.

The latest and greatest fruit of this feminine talent for combat is the
extension of the suffrage, now universal in the Protestant countries,
and even advancing in those of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit
was garnered, not by an attack en masse, but by a mere foray. I believe
that 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
actual polls for it; moreover, they are out of sympathy with most of
the brummagem reforms advocated by the professional suffragists, male
and female. The mere statement of the current suffragist platform, with
its long list of quack sure-cures for all the sorrows of the world, is
enough to make them smile sadly. In particular, they are sceptical of
all reforms that depend upon the mass action of immense numbers of
voters, large sections of whom are wholly devoid of sense. A normal
woman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she
believes in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be
a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never
coalesce. Nor is she susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon
which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very
dramatically in the United States at the national election of 1920, in
which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and
ignominious defeat—the first general election in which all American
women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the
side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised
women voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for
deception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effort
to fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will remember
his bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women
believe in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practically
every woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That is to
say, she has been vastly disappointed, either by failing to nab some
pretty fellow that her heart was set on, or, worse, by actually nabbing
him, 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
is not serious. When he pulled out the Vox angelica stop and began
sobbing and snuffling and blowing his nose tragically, the learned
doctor simply drove all the women voters into the arms of the Hon.
Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was too stupid to invent any issues at
all, but simply took negative 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 and who
now seek to tell them what to do with it, they will proceed to a
scotching of many of the sentimentalities which currently corrupt
politics. For one thing, I believe that they will initiate measures
against democracy—the worst evil of the present-day world. When they
come to the matter, they will certainly not ordain the extension of the
suffrage to children, criminals and the insane in brief, to those ever
more inflammable and knavish than the male hinds who have enjoyed it
for so long; they will try to bring about its restriction, bit by bit,
to the small minority that is intelligent, agnostic and
self-possessed—say six 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 his
stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He is forever
embracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all that have gone
before. But where is the delusion that women cherish—I mean habitually,
firmly, passionately? Who will draw up a list of propositions, held and
maintained by them in sober earnest, that are obviously not true? (I
allude here, of course, to genuine women, not to suffragettes and other
such pseudo-males). As for me, I should not like to undertake such a
list. I know of nothing, in fact, that properly belongs to it. Women,
as a class, believe in none of the ludicrous rights, duties and pious
obligations that men are forever gabbling about. Their superior
intelligence is in no way more eloquently demonstrated than by their
ironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude
toward men is one of aloof disdain, and their habitual attitude toward
what men believe in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is
substantially the same. It takes twice as long to convert a body of
women to some new fallacy as it takes to convert a body of men, and
even then they halt, hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The
women of Colorado had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to
prohibition sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt
it; their own majority voice was against it to the end. During the
interval the men voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had
gone shrieking to the mourners’ bench. In California, enfranchised in
1911, the women rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National
prohibition was adopted during the war without their votes—they did not
get the franchise throughout the country until it was in the
Constitution—and it is without their support today. The American man,
despite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very much afraid of
the police, and in all the regions where prohibition is now actually
enforced he makes excuses for his poltroonish acceptance of it by
arguing that it will do him good in the long run, or that he ought to
sacrifice his private desires to the common weal. But it is almost
impossible to find an American woman of any culture who is in favour of
it. One and all, they are opposed to the turmoil and corruption that it
involves, and resentful of the invasion of liberty underlying it. Being
realists, they have no belief in any program which proposes to cure the
natural swinishness of men by legislation. Every normal woman believes,
and quite accurately, that the average man is very much like her
husband, John, and she knows very well that John is a weak, silly and
knavish fellow, and that any effort to convert him into an archangel
overnight is bound to come to grief. As for her view of the average
creature of her own sex, it is marked by a cynicism so penetrating and
so destructive that a clear statement of it would shock beyond
endurance.



32. The Woman Voter


Thus there is not the slightest chance that the enfranchised women of
Protestantdom, once they become at ease in the use of the ballot, will
give any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to lead and
instruct them in politics. Years ago I predicted that these
suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They
are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to
advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly
preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh at
them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the
old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great
political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply
becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is
nothing but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the sole
intelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in
public office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister
who joins the other camorra. Parenthetically, I may add that all of the
ladies to take to this political immolation seem to me to be
frightfully plain. I know those of England, Germany and Scandinavia
only by their portraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the
United States I have studied at close range at various large political
gatherings, including the two national conventions first following the
extension of the suffrage. I am surely no fastidious fellow—in fact, I
prefer a certain melancholy decay in women to the loud, circus-wagon
brilliance of youth—but I give you my word that there were not five
women at either national convention who could have embraced me in
camera without first 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 at them.

The reform-monging suffragists seem to be equally devoid of the more
caressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but they
certainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know how to dress
their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged
lubricity of the male-the single standard, medical certificates for
bridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I believe, is
mere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued sets up the
doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a
felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes
masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to
take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are
bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness
makes her 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 senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;
whenever they hear of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet more,
the normal woman of lively charms, roving about among men, always tries
to draw the admiration of those who have previously admired elsewhere;
she prefers the professional to the amateur, and estimates her skill by
the attractiveness of the huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. The
iron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get
one wholly without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude
manoeuvres make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of pulchritude
and amiability. All such suffragists (save a few miraculous beauties)
marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up with
the sort of castoffs who are almost ready to fall in love with lady
physicists, embryologists, and embalmers.

Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignant
viragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women until
hell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the latter
enterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love would play
out, for not many men take any notice of women spontaneously. Nine men
out of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if there were no women in
the world, once they had grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all
men are their happiest when they are engaged upon activities—for
example, drinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure—to which
women are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce them from
such celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in front of the
hound. The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist
alarmists talk 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 in khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to wear
scents, or to use lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual,
mistakes the fish for the fly.



33. A Glance Into the Future


The present public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is chiefly due to
the fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very
stupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women, and so
show them politeness. But soon or late—and probably disconcertingly
soon—the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon them
and depose them, and thereafter the woman vote will be no longer at the
disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes
continue to fill the newspapers with nonsense, once that change has
been effected, it will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots,
like the Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists
and other such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extension
of the suffrage in all of the American states that made it before the
national enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated in the nation
at large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women are not
taken in by quackery as readily as men are; the hardness of their shell
of logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For one
woman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer by some
swindling patent medicine, there are at least twenty masculine
witnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, Lydia
Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies for
specifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, are
chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist tells me, by men.

My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is
that the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none the
less real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the end,
in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligent
grappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is
almost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, not
in proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible,
but in proportion as she excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases,
and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences against
them. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins;
the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright at
a new one and electing some mountebank to lay it. For a hundred years
past the people of the United States, the most terrible existing
democratic state, have scarcely had a political campaign that was not
based upon some preposterous fear—first of slavery and then of the
manumitted slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of
the old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they
are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily
into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to
snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that
would cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off
mobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this
sniffing. What we need—and in the end it must come—is a sniff so
powerful that it will 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 is describable in intelligible terms.

The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democracies
before the extension of the suffrage were usually chosen, not for their
competence but for their mere talent for idiocy; they reflected
accurately the male weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental
and feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what happened in a
salient case. Every four years the male voters of the United States
chose from among themselves one who was put forward as the man most
fit, of all resident men, to be the first citizen of the commonwealth.
He was chosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were
thoroughly canvassed; very large powers and dignities were put into his
hands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman?
We found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a
man of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile
that they must needs disgust a sentient suckling—in brief, a spouting
geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported
assumptions and hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and
platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were
flattered when they were called comprehensible—specifically, a Wilson,
a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.

This was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of
comparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a woman of
like fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh them, for
sense, for shrewdness, for intelligent grasp of obscure relations, for
intellectual 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 matter
with her, fundamentally, is simple: she is a woman who has stupidly
carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to
such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes
her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary character. In
particular, she centres this frenzy of hers upon one definite
privilege, to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity in amour, the
modern droit du seigneur. Read the books of the chief lady Savonarolas,
and you will find running through them an hysterical denunciation of
what is called the double standard of morality; there is, indeed, a
whole literature devoted exclusively to it. The existence of this
double standard seems to drive the poor girls half frantic. They bellow
raucously for its abrogation, and demand that the frivolous male be
visited with even more idiotic penalties than those which now visit the
aberrant female; some even advocate gravely his mutilation by surgery,
that he may be forced into rectitude by a physical disability for sin.

All this, of course, is hocus-pocus, and the judicious are not deceived
by it for an instant. What these virtuous bel dames actually desire in
their hearts is not that the male be reduced to chemical purity, but
that the franchise of dalliance be extended to themselves. The most
elementary acquaintance with Freudian psychology exposes their secret
animus. Unable to ensnare males under the present system, or at all
events, unable to ensnare males sufficiently appetizing to arouse the
envy of other women, they leap to the theory that it would be easier if
the rules were less exacting. This theory exposes their deficiency in
the chief character of their sex: accurate observation. The fact is
that, even if they possessed the freedom that men are supposed to
possess, they would still find it difficult to achieve their ambition,
for the average man, whatever his stupidity, is at least keen enough in
judgment to prefer a single wink from a genuinely attractive woman to
the last delirious favours of the typical suffragette. Thus the theory
of the whoopers and snorters of the cause, in its esoteric as well as
in its public aspect, is unsound. They are simply women who, in their
tastes and processes of mind, are two-thirds men, and the fact explains
their failure to achieve presentable husbands, or even consolatory
betrayal, quite as effectively as it explains the ready credence they
give to political and philosophical absurdities.



35. A Mythical Dare-Devil


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

Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than
a dissertation on major strategy by a military “expert” promoted from
dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak
without any embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough to men
to get near enough to enough men to know enough about them for their
purpose they would paralyze the Dorcas societies with no such cajoling
libels. As a matter of sober fact, the average man of our time and race
is quite incapable of all these incandescent and intriguing
divertisements. He is far more virtuous than they make him out, far
less schooled in sin, far less enterprising and ruthless. I do not say,
of course, that he is pure in heart, for the chances are that he isn’t;
what I do say is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, he is
pure in act, even in the face of temptation. And why? For several main
reasons, not to go into minor ones. One is that he lacks the courage.
Another is that he lacks the money. Another is that he is fundamentally
moral, and has a conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he
has in him to plunge into any affair save the most casual and sordid;
it takes more ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to carry it
off; it takes more money than he can conceal from his consort to
finance it. A man may force his actual wife to share the direst
poverty, but even the least vampirish woman of the third part demands
to be courted in what, considering his station in life, is the grand
manner, and the expenses of that grand manner scare off all save a
small minority of specialists in deception. So long, indeed, as a wife
knows her husband’s income accurately, she has a sure means of holding
him to his oaths.

Even more effective than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of
poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other
higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy
yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind
him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an
extra-legal affair—at all events, above the mawkish harmlessness of a
flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is of scaling the
battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing it, just as he
likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or climbing the
Matterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to imagine the thing
done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he is a bad one. But at
the bottom of all that tawdry pretence there is usually nothing more
material than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a
scraping of shins under the table. Let any woman who is disquieted by
reports of her husband’s derelictions figure to herself how long it
would have taken him to propose to her if left to his own enterprise,
and then let her ask herself if so pusillanimous a creature could be
imaged in the role of Don Giovanni.

Finally, there is his conscience—the accumulated sediment of ancestral
faintheartedness in countless generations, with vague religious fears
and 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, from
the mere fear that someone may be looking. It may be shot through with
hypocrisy, stupidity, play-acting. But nevertheless, as consciences go
in Christendom, it is genuinely entitled to the name—and it is always
in action. A man, remember, is not a being in vacuo; he is the fruit
and slave of the environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the
House of Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons
without becoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard
without shipping water. One cannot pass through a modern university
without carrying away scars. And by the same token one cannot live and
have one’s being in a modern democratic state, year in and year out,
without falling, to some extent at least, under that moral obsession
which is the hall-mark of the mob-man set free. A citizen of such a
state, his nose buried in Nietzsche, “Man and Superman,” and other such
advanced literature, may caress himself with the notion that he is an
immoralist, that his soul is full of soothing sin, that he has cut
himself loose from the revelation of God. But all the while there is a
part of him that remains a sound Christian, a moralist, a right
thinking and forward-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 he swears, or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or
goes motoring on Sunday; it may even let him alone when he goes to a
leg-show. But the moment a concrete Temptress rises before him, her
nose snow-white, her lips rouged, her eyelashes drooping
provokingly—the moment such an abandoned wench has at him, and his lack
of ready funds begins to conspire with his lack of courage to assault
and wobble him—at that precise moment his conscience flares into
function, and so finishes his business. First he sees difficulty, then
he sees the danger, then he sees wrong. The result is that he slinks
off in trepidation, and another vampire is baffled of her prey.

It is, indeed, the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in the
Protestant regions, that most men are faithful to their wives. You will
a travel a long way before you find a married man who will admit that
he is, 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 or
Augustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig, is
not far to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse
briefly:

1. The idiotic vanity of men, leading to their eternal boasting, either
by 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 would
do 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 less
critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly
augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in
the discharge of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts
in an evening ploughing through such books as “The Memoirs of Fanny
Hill,” Casanova’s Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius
Petronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises with the
conviction that life amid the red lights must be one stupendous whirl
of deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or Piccadilly at night
are out for revels that would have caused protests in Sodom and
Nineveh, that the average man who chooses hell leads an existence
comparable to that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outside the Bible
class is packed like a sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that every
man who doesn’t believe that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his whole
leisure leaping through the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. “If I were
not saved and anointed of God,” whispers the vice director into his own
ear, “that is what I, the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing.
The late King David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late
King Edward VII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name
has its suggestions. Millions of others go the same route.... Ergo, Up,
guards, and at ’em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order out the
seachlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred more policemen!
Let us chase these hell-hounds out of Christendom, and make the world
safe for monogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation!”

Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secret
aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the
unconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are
free from his other weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of
resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vast
majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there, not
to engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeably
upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish
experimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world’s fair,
and go to smutty shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the sort of
books that our vice crusading friend reads. They like to conjure up the
charms of carnality, and to help out their somewhat sluggish
imaginations by actual peeps at it, but when it comes to taking a
forthright header into the sulphur they usually fail to muster up the
courage. For one clerk who succumbs to the houris of the pave, there
are five hundred who succumb to lack of means, the warnings of the sex
hygienists, and their own depressing consciences. For one
“clubman”—i.e., bagman or suburban vestryman—who invades the women’s
shops, engages the affection of some innocent miss, lures her into
infamy and then sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who
never get any further than asking the price of cologne water and
discharging a few furtive winks. And for one husband of the Nordic race
who maintains a blonde chorus girl in oriental luxury around the
corner, there are ten thousand who are as true to their wives, year in
and year out, as so many convicts in the death-house, and would be no
more capable of any such loathsome malpractice, even in the face of
free opportunity, than they would be of cutting off the ears of their
young.

I am sorry to blow up so much romance. In particular, I am sorry for
the suffragettes who specialize in the double standard, for when they
get into pantaloons at last, and have the new freedom, they will
discover to their sorrow that they have been pursuing a chimera—that
there is really no such animal as the male anarchist they have been
denouncing and envying—that the wholesale fornication of man, at least
under Christian democracy, has little more actual existence than honest
advertising or sound cooking. They have followed the porno maniacs in
embracing a piece of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it
will turn to ashes in their arms.

Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the courage and
enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere physical valour, a
quality in which the average man is far exceeded by the average jackal
or wolf, have more of both. If the consequences, to a man, of the
slightest descent from virginity were one-tenth as swift and barbarous
as the consequences to a young girl in like case, it would take a
division of infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that lex
talionis in the whole western world. As things stand today, even with
the odds so greatly 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 show that the weekly receipts of female recruits upon
the wharves of sin are always more than the demand; that more young
women enter upon the vermilion career than can make respectable livings
at it; that the pressure of the temptation they hold out is the chief
factor in corrupting our undergraduates. What was the first act of the
American Army when it began summoning its young clerks and college boys
and plough hands to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off a
so-called moral zone around each camp, and to secure it with trenches
and machine guns, and to put a lot of volunteer termagants to
patrolling it, that the assembled jeunesse might be protected in their
rectitude from the immoral advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor
working girls.



37. Women as Martyrs


I have given three reasons for the prosperity of the notion that man is
a natural polygamist, bent eternally upon fresh dives into Lake of
Brimstone No. 7. To these another should be added: the thirst for
martyrdom which shows itself in so many women, particularly under the
higher forms of civilization. This unhealthy appetite, in fact, may be
described as one of civilization’s diseases; it is almost unheard of in
more primitive societies. The savage woman, unprotected by her rude
culture and forced to heavy and incessant labour, has retained her
physical strength and with it her honesty and self-respect. The
civilized woman, gradually degenerated by a greater ease, and helped
down that hill by the pretensions of civilized man, has turned her
infirmity into a virtue, and so affects a feebleness that is actually
far beyond the reality. It is by this route that she can most
effectively disarm masculine distrust, and get what she wants. Man is
flattered by any acknowledgment, however insincere, of his superior
strength and capacity. He likes to be leaned upon, appealed to,
followed docilely. And this tribute to his might caresses him on the
psychic plane as well as on the plane of the obviously physical. He not
only enjoys helping a woman over a gutter; he also enjoys helping her
dry her tears. The result is the vast pretence that characterizes the
relations of the sexes under civilization—the double pretence of man’s
cunning and autonomy and of woman’s dependence and deference. Man is
always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a
shoulder to put her head on.

This feminine affectation, of course, has gradually taken on the force
of a fixed habit, and so it has got a certain support, by a familiar
process of self-delusion, in reality. The civilized woman inherits that
habit as she inherits her cunning. She is born half convinced that she
is really as weak and helpless as she later pretends to be, and the
prevailing folklore offers her endless corroboration. One of the
resultant phenomena is the delight in martyrdom that one so often finds
in women, and particularly in the least alert and introspective of
them. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in suffering; it subtly
pleases them to be hard put upon; they like to picture themselves as
slaughtered saints. Thus they always find something to complain of; the
very conditions of domestic life give them a superabundance of clinical
material. And if, by any chance, such material shows a falling off,
they are uneasy and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct
is not reasonably open to question, and she will invent mythical
offences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she will be
plunged into the utmost misery and humiliation. This fact probably
explains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not too bad, but too
good. For public opinion among women, remember, does not favour the
woman who is full of a placid contentment and has no masculine torts to
report; if she says that her husband is wholly satisfactory she is
looked upon as a numskull even more dense that he is himself. A man,
speaking of his wife to other men, always praises her extravagantly.
Boasting about her soothes his vanity; he likes to stir up the envy of
his fellows. But when two women talk of their husbands it is mainly
atrocities that they describe. The most esteemed woman gossip is the
one with the longest and most various repertoire of complaints.

This yearning for martyrdom explains one of the commonly noted
characters of women: their eager flair for bearing physical pain. As we
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
they are 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 of his liberty, strength and self-esteem. It floors him,
masters him, and makes him ridiculous. But a woman, more subtle and
devious in her processes of mind, senses the dramatic effect that the
spectacle of her suffering makes upon the spectators, already filled
with compassion for her feebleness. She would thus much rather be
praised for facing pain with a martyr’s fortitude than for devising
some means of getting rid of it--the first thought of a man. No woman
could have invented chloroform, nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both
drugs offer an escape from situations and experiences that, even in
aggravated forms, women relish. The woman who drinks as men drink—that
is, to raise her threshold of sensation and ease the agony of
living—nearly always shows a deficiency in feminine characters and an
undue preponderance of masculine characters. Almost invariably you will
find her vain and boastful, and full of other marks of that bombastic
exhibitionism which is so sterlingly male.



38. Pathological Effects


This feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on a
downright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist.
Women show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman under our
Christian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is heavy with
repression and dissimulation, and this repression and dissimulation, in
the long run, cannot fail to produce effects that are indistinguishable
from disease. You will find some of them described at length in any
handbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul
Bjerre, argue, indeed, that womanliness itself, as it is encountered
under Christianity, is a disease. All women suffer from a suppressed
revolt against the inhibitions forced upon them by our artificial
culture, 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 grotesque
adoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and her
hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not put to
use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling and
neurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies and
her pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long ago, this is a man’s
world. Women have broken many of their old chains, but they are still
enmeshed in a formidable network of man-made taboos and
sentimentalities, and it will take them another generation, at least,
to get genuine freedom. That this is true is shown by the deep unrest
that yet marks the sex, despite its recent progress toward social,
political and economic equality. It is almost impossible to find a man
who honestly wishes that he were a woman, but almost every woman, at
some time 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 stupid
masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority, or
even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human
equipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine doctrine
that they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrate,
without the natural instincts and appetites of the order—to adapt a
phrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental and almost gaseous
mammals, and marked by a complete lack of certain salient mammalian
characters. The first imbecility has already concerned us at length.
One finds 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
skill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War
failed to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful
femininity and nobility of soul.” In other words, by her possession of
some recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the
ordinary mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and
preposterous. Miss Nightingale accomplished her useful work, not by
magic, but by hard common 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 feminine clear-thinking, to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded
quickly, and once it had been brought to order it was easy for other
persons to carry on what she had begun. But the opinion of a man’s
world still prefers to credit her success to some mysterious angelical
quality, unstatable in lucid terms and having no more reality than the
divine inspiration of an archbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and
accurate intelligence is thus conveniently put upon the table, and the
amour propre of man is kept inviolate. To confess frankly that she had
more sense than any male Englishman of her generation would be to utter
a truth too harsh to be bearable.

The second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, already
discussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct—that they submit
to the odious caresses of the lubricious male only by a powerful effort
of the will, and with the sole object of discharging their duty to
posterity. It would be impossible to go into this delusion with proper
candour and at due length in a work designed for reading aloud in the
domestic circle; all I can do is to refer the student to the books of
any competent authority on the psychology of sex, say Ellis, or to the
confidences (if they are obtainable) of any complaisant bachelor of his
acquaintance.



39. Women as Christians


The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly favourable to
women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord when their very
possession of souls was still doubted by the majority of rival
theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set value upon
their sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their sex, a lady
formerly in public life, was among His regular advisers. Mariolatry is
thus by no means the invention of the mediaeval popes, as Protestant
theologians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is plainly
discernible in the Four Gospels. What the mediaeval popes actually
invented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed the
elements of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of women’s inferiority,
the precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, for
sound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they had to
support it by depicting all traffic with women in the light of a
hazardous and ignominious business. The result was the deliberate
organization and development of the theory of female triviality, lack
of responsibility and general looseness of mind. Woman became a sort of
devil, but without the admired intelligence of the regular demons. The
appearance of women saints, however, offered a constant and
embarrassing criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women
were fit to sit upon the right hand of God—and they were often proving
it, and forcing the church to acknowledge it—then surely all women
could not be as bad as the books made them out. There thus arose the
concept of the angelic woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full
length in the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the end
was a sort of double doctrine, first that women were devils and
secondly that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has merged,
as we have seen, into a compromise dogma in modern times. By that dogma
it is held, on the one hand, that women are unintelligent and immoral,
and on the other hand, that they are free from all those weaknesses of
the flesh which distinguish men. This, roughly speaking, is the notion
of the average male numskull today.

Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but with
the weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore, at bottom,
their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct, was their
friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that have bound
them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the fact. Women,
indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are growing less and less
religious as year chases year. Their ordinary devotion has little if
any pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice, force on them by
the masculine notion that an appearance of holiness is proper to their
lowly station, and a masculine feeling that church-going somehow keeps
them in order, and out of doings that would be less reassuring. When
they exhibit any genuine religious fervour, its sexual character is
usually so obvious that even the majority of men are cognizant of it.
Women never go flocking ecstatically to a church in which the agent of
God in the pulpit is an elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When
one finds them driven to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and
weeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the
whole vicinage up to grace, and spending hours on their knees in
hysterical abasement before the heavenly throne, it is quite safe to
assume, even without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has
worked the miracle is a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more
aphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in modern
times have been men of suave and ingratiating habit, and the great
majority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and down, have been taken,
soon or late, in transactions far more suitable to the boudoir than to
the footstool of the Almighty. Their famous killings have always been
made among the silliest sort of women—the sort, in brief, who fall so
short of the normal acumen of their sex that they are bemused by mere
beauty in men.

Such women are in a minority, and so the sex shows a good deal fewer
religious 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 constantly
struck by the great preponderance of males in the pen devoted to the
saved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers came swarming to the
altar, loudly bawling for help against their sins, but the women were
anything but numerous, and the few who appeared were chiefly either
chlorotic adolescents or pathetic old Saufschwestern. For six nights
running I sat directly beneath the gifted exhorter without seeing a
single female convert of what statisticians call the child-bearing
age—that is, the age of maximum intelligence and charm. Among the male
simpletons bagged by his yells during this time were the president of a
railroad, half a dozen rich bankers and merchants, and the former
governor of an American state. But not a woman of comparable position
or dignity. Not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care to
chuck under the chin.

This cynical view of religious emotionalism, and with it of the whole
stock of ecclesiastical balderdash, is probably responsible, at least
in part, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal
career. In those Christian sects which still bar them from the
pulpit—usually on the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not
equal to its alleged demands upon the morals and the intellect—one
never hears of them protesting against the prohibition; they are quite
content to leave the degrading imposture to men, who are better fitted
for it by talent and conscience. And in those baroque sects, chiefly
American, which admit them they show no eagerness to put on the stole
and chasuble. When the first clergywoman appeared in the United States,
it was predicted by alarmists that men would be driven out of the
pulpit by the new competition. Nothing of the sort has occurred, nor is
it in prospect. The whole corps of female divines in the country might
be herded into one small room. Women, when literate at all, are far too
intelligent to make effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of
reality is in endless opposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade,
and their cynical humour stands against the snorting that is
inseparable from pulpit oratory.

Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost invariably
moved by some motive distinct from mere pious inflammation. It is a
commonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic countries, girls are driven into
convents by economic considerations or by disasters of amour far
oftener than they are drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives
of the female saints, and you will see how many of them tried marriage
and failed at it before ever they turned to religion. In Protestant
lands very few women adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few
a secular impulse is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly
overcome by a desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands is
nearly invariably found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a
theory that it would be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In
point of fact, she duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it
impossible to get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China,
Senegal and Somaliland, with no white competition present, it is
equally impossible to fail.



40. Piety as a Social Habit


What remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a social
habit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other and more
inviting divertissements. If you have ever observed the women of Spain
and Italy at their devotions you need not be told how much the worship
of God may be a mere excuse for relaxation and gossip. These women, in
their daily lives, are surrounded by a formidable network of mediaeval
taboos; their normal human desire for ease and freedom in intercourse
is opposed by masculine distrust and superstition; they meet no
strangers; they see and hear nothing new. In the house of the Most High
they escape from that vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders
with a crowd. Here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and
stretch their spiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some
sort of contact with men relatively more affable, cultured and charming
than their husbands and fathers—to wit, with the rev. clergy.

Elsewhere in Christendom, though women are not quite so relentlessly
watched and penned up, they feel much the same need of variety and
excitement, and both are likewise on tap in the temples of the Lord. No
one, I am sure, need be told that the average missionary society or
church sewing circle is not primarily a religious organization. Its
actual purpose is precisely that of the absurd clubs and secret orders
to which the lower and least resourceful classes of men belong: it
offers a means of refreshment, of self-expression, of personal display,
of political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor happens to
be interesting, of discreet and almost lawful intrigue. In the course
of a life largely devoted to the study of pietistic phenomena, I have
never met a single woman who cared an authentic damn for the actual
heathen. The attraction in their salvation is always almost purely
social. Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and
convicts go to church.

Finally, there is the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most parts of
Christendom, holds out the only bait of beauty that the inhabitants are
ever cognizant of. It offers music, dim lights, relatively ambitious
architecture, eloquence, formality and mystery, the caressing
meaninglessness that is at the heart of poetry. Women are far more
responsive to such things than men, who are ordinarily quite as devoid
of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The attitude of the typical
man toward beauty in its various forms is, in fact, an attitude of
suspicion and hostility. He does not regard a work of art as merely
inert and stupid; he regards it as, in some indefinable way, positively
offensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary and
scoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he would
trust 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 to
beautiful ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their great talent
for reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling of
idiots. 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 can
no more be an actual Methodist than a gentleman can be a Methodist.

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



41. The Ethics of Women


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

In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the
precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into
proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible
only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds
herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her
own security or to the well-being of those under her protection—say a
child or a husband—she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing,
however outrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a
male extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has ever
been on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of
the bar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort
of a barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her
within bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be
unduly aroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as
is commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but
simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful,
implacable and without qualms.

What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast
technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obvious
in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious
controversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology
or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed
through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not only bite
in the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dental
reach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that
they will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is so
unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to
improve my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper
in a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred
cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost
invariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of
studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical,
that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and
the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses. Many more
men than women go insane, and many more married men than single men.
The fact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to
find out what goes on, year in and year out, behind the doors of
apparently happy 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 the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is
often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife
of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to
bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and
stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air
of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings
of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these
things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the
oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and
profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of
sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac
long ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla’s efforts to play the
violin. Women survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great
capacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that
often they deceive even themselves; the average woman’s contentment,
indeed, is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must be
innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wonders that
so few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison their
husbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make it
out; the deathrate among husbands is very much higher than among wives.
More than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an acquaintance
who died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in the eyes of the
inconsolable widow.

Even in this age of emancipation, normal women have few serious
transactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands;
the business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence to
senility. When they step outside their habitual circle they show the
same alert and eager wariness that they exhibit within it. A man who
has dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and even when he
is most cautious he is often flabbergasted by their sudden and
unconscionable forays. Whenever woman goes into trade she quickly gets
a reputation as a sharp trader. Every little town in America has its
Hetty Green, each sweating blood from turnips, each the terror of all
the male usurers of the neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an
amazon of barter takes his fortune into his hands; he has little more
chance of success against the feminine technique in business than he
has against the feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the
advantage of women lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In
business they address themselves wholly to their own profit, and give
no thought whatever to the hopes, aspirations and amour propre of their
antagonists. And in the duel of sex they fence, not to make points, but
to disable and disarm. A man, when he succeeds in throwing off a woman
who has attempted to marry him, always carries away a maudlin sympathy
for her in her defeat and dismay. But no one ever heard of a woman who
pitied the poor fellow whose honest passion she had found it expedient
to 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 last
century has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly
delivered from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the
oppressions of men. But already, it must be plain, they have made
enormous progress—perhaps more than they made in the ten thousand years
preceding. The rise of the industrial system, which has borne so
harshly upon the race in general, has brought them certain unmistakable
benefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to make
marriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far broken down
that large classes of women are now almost free agents, and quite
independent of the favour of men. Most of these women, responding to
ideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, by
marriage, and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in, but the fact
remains that they now have a free choice in the matter, and that dire
necessity no longer controls them. After all, they needn’t marry if
they don’t want to; it is possible to get their bread by their own
labour in the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers were in a far
more difficult position. Failing marriage, they not only suffered a
cruel ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual
starvation. There was simply no respectable place in the economy of
those times for the free woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or
accept a disdainful patronage that was as galling as charity.

Nothing could be plainer than the effect that the increasing economic
security of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind.
The diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishing
birth rates show which way the wind is blowing. It is common for male
statisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall in
the marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. This
growing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though no
considerable body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine that
marriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain that large
numbers of them now approach the business with far greater
fastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited.
They are harder to please, and hence pleased less often. The woman of a
century 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 an
increasing minority which begins to realize that work may offer the
greater contentment, particularly if it be mellowed by a certain amount
of philandering.

There already appears in the world, indeed, a class of women, who,
while still not genuinely averse to marriage, are yet free from any
theory that it is necessary, or even invariably desirable. Among these
women are a good many somewhat vociferous propagandists, almost male in
their violent earnestness; they range from the man-eating suffragettes
to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional
shockers of the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of
birth-control, Margaret Sanger. But among them are many more who wake
the world with no such noisy eloquence, but content themselves with
carrying out their ideas in a quiet and respectable manner. The number
of such women is much larger than is generally imagined, and that
number tends to increase steadily. They are women who, with their
economic independence assured, either by inheritance or by their own
efforts, chiefly in the arts and professions, do exactly as they
please, and make no pother about it. Naturally enough, their
superiority to convention and the common frenzy makes them extremely
attractive to the better sort of men, and so it is not uncommon for one
of them to find herself voluntarily sought in marriage, without any
preliminary scheming by herself—surely an experience that very few
ordinary women ever enjoy, save perhaps in dreams or delirium.

The old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the women’s
clubs and in the women’s colleges, I have no doubt, there is still much
debate of the old and silly question: Are platonic relations possible
between the sexes? In other words, is friendship possible without sex?
Many a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with another
question: Why without sex? With the decay of the ancient concept of
women as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of the
whole sex question, and out of that reconsideration there must come a
revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest
frivolity in the female. The notion that honour in women is exclusively
a physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of the
highest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuable
thing a woman can bring to marriage is virginity—this notion is so
preposterous that no intelligent person, male or female, actually
cherishes it. It survives as one of the hollow conventions of
Christianity; nay, of the levantine barbarism that preceded
Christianity. As women throw off the other conventions which now bind
them they will throw off this one, too, and so their virtue, grounded
upon fastidiousness and self-respect instead of upon mere fear and
conformity, will become afar more laudable thing than it ever can be
under the present system. And for its absence, if they see fit to
dispose 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 less
respectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That
quality 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 prostitute
is disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything
intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is
currently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity,
against her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually
unsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world,
particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption,
e.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the
fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution
is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to
the sort of women who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly
likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a
waitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is
propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of
professional reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the
latter in 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 the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade
and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the
impulse strikes her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails
and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding
such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is
able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and
disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous
sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success
is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice, in
the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur.
And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a
vestry-room revolution he almost invariably concludes that the
sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt
some of the typographical errors in Holy Writ.

The high value set upon virginity by men, whose esteem of it is based
upon a mixture of vanity and voluptuousness, causes many women to guard
it in their own persons with a jealousy far beyond their private
inclinations and interests. It is their theory that the loss of it
would materially impair their chances of marriage. This theory is not
supported by the facts. The truth is that the woman who sacrifices her
chastity, everything else being equal, stands a much better chance of
making a creditable marriage than the woman who remains chaste. This is
especially true of women of the lower economic classes. At once they
come into contact, hitherto socially difficult and sometimes almost
impossible, with men of higher classes, and begin to take on, with the
curious facility of their sex, the refinements and tastes and points of
view of those classes. The mistress thus gathers charm, and what has
begun as a sordid sale of amiability not uncommonly ends with formal
marriage. The number of such marriages is enormously greater than
appears superficially, for both parties obviously make every effort to
conceal the facts. Within the circle of my necessarily limited personal
acquaintance I know of scores of men, some of them of wealth and
position, who have made such marriages, and who do not seem to regret
it. It is an old observation, indeed, that a woman who has previously
disposed of her virtue makes a good wife. The common theory is that
this is because she is grateful to her husband for rescuing her from
social outlawry; the truth is that she makes a good wife because she is
a shrewd woman, and has specialized professionally in masculine
weakness, and is thus extra-competent at the traditional business of
her sex. Such a woman often shows a truly magnificent sagacity. It is
very difficult to deceive her logically, and it is impossible to disarm
her emotionally. Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities
of the world was evidence, to begin with, of her intellectual
enterprise and courage, and her success as a rebel is proof of her
extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen.

Even the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, than
the 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 variety
of men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her
occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more
years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that
time certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I
lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and
some of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for
advice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common
superstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is
only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They
were enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. This truth was to
the effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career,
not in the morgue but at the altar of God, and that those who remained
unmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty
years, and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed,
that fully eighty per cent married, and that they almost always got
husbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained
virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a
dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers
and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do
tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were
studied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town’s
richest banker—that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole
community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned
that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there
polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of
great dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient
profession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward
it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is
expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she
would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual
prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men,
however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably
superior to men of the prostitute’s own class—say her father and
brothers—and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is
often rather romantic. I well remember observing, during my
collaboration with the vice-crusaders aforesaid, the delight of a lady
of joy who had attracted the notice of a police lieutenant; she was
intensely pleased by the idea of having a client of such haughty
manners, such brilliant dress, and what seemed to her to be so
dignified a profession. It is always forgotten that this weakness is
not confined to prostitutes, but run through the whole female sex. The
woman who could not imagine an illicit affair with a wealthy soap
manufacturer or even with a lawyer finds it quite easy to imagine
herself succumbing to an ambassador or a duke. There are very few
exceptions to this rule. In the most reserved of modern societies the
women who represent their highest flower are notoriously complaisant to
royalty. And royal women, to complete the circuit, not infrequently
yield to actors and musicians, i.e., to men radiating a glamour not
encountered even in princes.



44. The Future of Marriage


The transvaluation of values that is now in progress will go on slowly
and for a very long while. That it will ever be quite complete is, of
course, impossible. There are inherent differences will continue to
show themselves until the end of time. As woman gradually becomes
convinced, not only of the possibility of economic independence, but
also of its value, she will probably lose her present overmastering
desire for marriage, and address herself to meeting men in free
economic competition. That is to say, she will address herself to
acquiring that practical competence, that high talent for puerile and
chiefly mechanical expertness, which now sets man ahead of her in the
labour market of the world. To do this she will have to sacrifice some
of her present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinely
intelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer, or
buttonhole worker, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house
painter. Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid
occupations, will have to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably
much further than they will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their
present superiority to men will always remain, and with it a shade of
their relative inefficiency, and so marriage will remain attractive to
them, or at all events to most of them, and its overthrow will be
prevented. To abolish it entirely, as certain fevered reformers
propose, would be as difficult as to abolish the precession of the
equinoxes.

At the present time women vacillate somewhat absurdly between two
schemes of life, the old and the new. On the one hand, their economic
independence is still full of conditions, and on the other hand they
are in revolt against the immemorial conventions. The result is a
general unrest, with many symptoms of extravagant and unintelligent
revolt. One of those symptoms is the appearance of intellectual
striving in women—not a striving, alas, toward the genuine pearls and
rubies of the mind, but one merely toward the acquirement of the rubber
stamps that men employ in their so-called thinking. Thus we have women
who launch themselves into party politics, and fill their heads with a
vast mass of useless knowledge about political tricks, customs,
theories and personalities. Thus, too, we have the woman social
reformer, trailing along ridiculously behind a tatterdemalion posse of
male utopians, each with something to sell. And thus we have the woman
who goes in for advanced wisdom of the sort on draught in women’s
clubs—in brief, the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of
beliefs and propositions that are ignorant, unimportant and untrue.
Such banal striving is most prodigally on display in the United States,
where superficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is
due to the relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work
less than any other people in the world, and, above all, to the
relatively greater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have
been emancipated from any compulsion to productive labour without
having acquired any compensatory intellectual or artistic interest or
social duty. The result is that they swarm in the women’s clubs, and
waste their time, listening to bad poetry, worse music, and still worse
lectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the subconscious. It is
among such women that one observes the periodic rages for Bergsonism,
the Montessori method, the twilight sleep and other such follies, so
pathetically 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 all
routine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence
intolerable. Out of that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the
one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and
well-fed women engaged in public activities that, nine times out of
ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand
we behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first
onslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a
foreign expert to teach the housewives of the country the veriest
elements of thrift. No such instruction was needed by the housewives of
the Continent. They were simply told how much food they could have, and
their natural competence did the rest. There is never any avoidable
waste there, either in peace or in war. A French housewife has little
use for a garbage can, save as a depository for uplifting literature.
She does her best with the means at her disposal, not only in war time
but at all times.

As I have said over and over again in this inquiry, a woman’s
disinclination to acquire the intricate expertness that lies at the
bottom of good housekeeping is due primarily to her active
intelligence; it is difficult for her to concentrate her mind upon such
stupid and meticulous enterprises. But whether difficult or easy, it is
obviously important 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
visible in the United States. Here women reveal one of their
subterranean qualities: their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are
quite without that dog-like fidelity to duty which is one of the
shining marks of men. They never summon up a high pride in doing what
is inherently disagreeable; they always go to the galleys under
protest, and with vows of sabotage; their fundamental philosophy is
almost that of the syndicalists. The sentimentality of men connives at
this, and is thus largely responsible for it. Before the average
puella, apprenticed in the kitchen, can pick up a fourth of the
culinary subtleties that are commonplace even to the chefs on dining
cars, she has caught a man and need concern herself about them no more,
for he has to eat, in the last analysis, whatever she sets before him,
and his lack of intelligence makes it easy for her to shut off his
academic criticisms by bald appeals to his emotions. By an easy process
he finally attaches a positive value to her indolence. It is a proof,
he concludes, of her fineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty
incompetence he is abashed.

But as women, gaining economic autonomy, meet men in progressively
bitterer competition, the rising masculine distrust and fear of them
will be reflected even in the enchanted domain of marriage, and the
husband, having yielded up most of his old rights, will begin to reveal
a new jealousy of those that remain, and particularly of the right to a
fair quid pro quo for his own docile industry. In brief, as women shake
off their ancient disabilities they will also shake off some of their
ancient immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with a
soberer and more exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension of
the suffrage, I believe, will encourage this awakening; in wresting it
from the reluctant male the women of the western world have planted
dragons’ teeth, the which will presently leap up and gnaw them. Now
that women have the political power to obtain their just rights, they
will begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges by
sentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider them
anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and
caressed, but as free competitors in a harsh world. When that
reconsideration gets under way there will be a general overhauling of
the 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
or thirty years, and perhaps longer. That the first clash was
inconclusive was shown brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the
peace finally reached—a peace so artificial and dishonest that the
signing of it was almost equivalent to a new declaration of war. At
least three new contests in the grand manner are plainly insight—one
between Germany and France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak
and incompetent nation over a strong and enterprising nation, one
between Japan and the United States for the mastery of the Pacific, and
one between England and the United States for the control of the sea.
To these must be added various minor struggles, and perhaps one or two
of almost major character: 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
the Latin-Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the joint
effort of Russia and Germany (perhaps with England and Italy aiding) to
get rid of such international nuisances as the insane Polish republic,
the petty states of the Baltic, and perhaps also most of the Balkan
states. I pass over the probability of a new mutiny in India, of the
rising of China against the Japanese, and of a general struggle for a
new alignment of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, great
and small, are probable; most of them are humanly certain. They will be
fought ferociously, and with the aid of destructive engines of the
utmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery of
men, and a large proportion of these men will be under forty years of
age.

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

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

The law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for it.
The average husband, perhaps, deserves little succour. The woman who
pursues and marries him, though she may be moved by selfish aims,
should be properly rewarded by the state for her service to it—a
service surely not to be lightly estimated in a military age. And that
reward may conveniently take the form, as in the United States, of
statutes giving her title to a large share of his real property and
requiring him to surrender most of his income to her, and releasing her
from all obedience to him and from all obligation to keep his house in
order. But the woman who aspires to higher game should be quite
willing, it seems to me, to resign some of these advantages in
compensation for the greater honour and satisfaction of being wife to a
man of merit, and mother to his children. All that is needed is laws
allowing her, if she will, to resign her right of dower, her right to
maintenance and her immunity from discipline, and to make any other
terms that she may be led to regard as equitable. At present women are
unable to make most of these concessions even if they would: the laws
of the majority of western nations are inflexible. If, for example, an
Englishwoman should agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit
herself to the discipline, not of the current statutes, but of the
elder common law, which allowed a husband to correct his wife
corporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it would be
competent for any sentimental neighbour to set the agreement at naught
by haling her husband before a magistrate for carrying it out, and it
is a safe wager that the magistrate would jail him.

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 and
immunities that she has under existing laws. There are, for example,
even in America, women who practise the domestic arts with competence
and diligence, despite the plain fact that no legal penalty would be
visited upon them if they failed to do so. There are women who follow
external trades and professions, contributing a share to the family
exchequer. There are women who obey their husbands, even against their
best judgments. There are, most numerous of all, women who wink
discreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the
oath of chemical purity taken at the altar. It is a commonplace,
indeed, that many happy marriages admit a party of the third part.
There would be more of them if there were more women with enough
serenity of mind to see the practical advantage of the arrangement. The
trouble with such triangulations is not primarily that they involve
perjury or that they offer any fundamental offence to the wife; if she
avoids banal theatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of
augmenting the husband’s devotion to her and respect for her, if only
as the fruit of comparison. The trouble with them is that very few men
among us have sense enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine
mind is readily taken in by specious values; the average married man of
Protestant Christendom, if he succumbs at all, succumbs to some
meretricious and flamboyant creature, bent only upon fleecing him. Here
is where the harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to
the sentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would
no more think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than he
would think of standing for office without consulting his wife. The
result is that he is seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by
women there are at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despite
the fact that a hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort of
recreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amours
were carefully supervised by Mme. Zola from the first days of their
marriage, and in consequence his life was wholly free from scandals and
his mind was never distracted from his work.



46. The Eternal Romance


But whatever the future of monogamous marriage, there will never be any
decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies at the bottom of
all transactions between the sexes. Women may emancipate themselves,
they may borrow the whole bag of masculine tricks, and they may cure
themselves of their present desire for the vegetable security of
marriage, but they will never cease to be women, and so long as they
are women they will remain provocative to men. Their chief charm today
lies precisely in the fact that they are dangerous, that they threaten
masculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds present a menace
vastly greater than that of acts of God and the public enemy—and they
will be dangerous for ever. Men fear them, and are fascinated by them.
They know how to show their teeth charmingly; the more enlightened of
them have perfected a superb technique of fascination. It was Nietzsche
who called them the recreation of the warrior—not of the poltroon,
remember, but of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinite
capacity for rewarding masculine industry and enterprise with small and
irresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines with their
capacity for evoking ideas of beauty to make them incomparable
companions when the serious business of the day is done, and the time
has come to expand comfortably in the interstellar ether.

Every man, I daresay, has his own notion of what constitutes perfect
peace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the
fundamental conflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for me—and
I hope I may be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for
intruding my own personality—I reject the two commonest of them:
passion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is
too exciting and alarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic
to have much desire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me
try to describe it to you.

It is the close of a busy and vexatious day—say half past five or six
o’clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am
stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of
the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman
not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed—above all, a
woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she
talks—of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of:
books, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No
religion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious—but
remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and
often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty
cut of her 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 of her 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. Then to 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? The
sensation 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 a
sneaking wonder and desire. Well, here is sleep poetized and made
doubly sweet. Here is sleep set to the finest music in the world. I
match this situation 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 girl grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my
sorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own
sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been
genuinely, completely and unregrettably happy.



47. Apologia in Conclusion


At the end I crave the indulgence of the cultured reader for the
imperfections necessarily visible in all that I have here set
down—imperfections not only due to incomplete information and fallible
logic, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to certain fundamental
weaknesses of the sex to which I have the honour to belong. A man is
inseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a dog is
inseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in everything he
says and does, but they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses
the majestic mystery of woman. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in
her actual presence, so he puts on apathetic and unescapable
clownishness when he essays to dissect her in the privacy of the
laboratory. There is no book on woman by a man that is not a stupendous
compendium of posturings and imbecilities. There are but two books that
show even a superficial desire to be honest—“The Unexpurgated Case
Against Woman Suffrage,” by Sir Almroth Wright, and this one. Wright
made a gallant attempt to tell the truth, but before he got half way
through his task his ineradicable donkeyishness as a male overcame his
scientific frenzy as 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 full of sincere and indescribable regret.




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