In Defense of Women | Page 8

close contact with the general run of business and professional
men--I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted
failures--without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness,
their appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a grandson of one
American President and a great-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate
association with some of the chief business "geniuses" of that paradise of traders and
usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that he had never heard a single one of
them say anything worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men, and in a
man's world they were successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.
There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney were genuinely
intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross an driveling concerns--that their very
capacity to master and retain such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of
their inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar incompetency of
first rate men for what are called practical concerns. One could not think of Aristotle or
Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor could one
think of him remembering the range of this or that railway share for two years, or the
number of ten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to

Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at
grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at which what are called
successful men commonly divert themselves. In his great study of British genius,
Havelock Ellis found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in almost all
first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do not understand the fashionable card
games. They are puzzled by book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief,
they are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average men's
highest performances, and are easily surpassed by men who, in actual intelligence, are
about as far below them as the Simidae.
This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial character--which must inevitably
appear to a barber or a dentist as stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright
imbecility--is a character that men of the first class share with women of the first, second
and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth, something unmistakably
feminine; its appearance in a man is almost invariably accompanied by the other touch of
femaleness that I have described. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that
women, as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men as a class. One
seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the occupations which bring out such
expertness most lavishly--for example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law,
(ie., matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or
managing factories--despite the circumstance that the great majority of such occupations
are well within their physical powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable
social barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why women shouldn't
succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a
special demand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women
graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make a success
of it. There is, again, no external reason why women should not prosper at the bar, or as
editors of newspapers, or as managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale
trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small force;
various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once the door is entered
there remains no special handicap within. But, as every one knows, the number of women
actually practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of them have
attained to any distinction in competition with men.

4.
Why Women Fail
The cause thereof, as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in the same disconcerting
apprehension of the larger realities, the same impatience with the paltry and meretricious,
the same disqualification for mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in
the higher varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom of Christendom,
are especially their own, women seldom show any of that elaborately conventionalized
and half automatic proficiency which is the pride and boast of most men. It is a
commonplace of observation, indeed, that a housewife who actually knows how to