In Defense of Women | Page 9

cook,
or who can make her own clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the most
casual glance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the elements of morals,
learning and hygiene--it is a platitude that such a woman is very rare indeed, and that
when she is encountered she is not usually esteemed for her general intelligence. This is

particularly true in the United States, where the position of women is higher than in any
other civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old assumption of their intellectual
inferiority has been most successfully challenged. The American dinner-table, in truth,
becomes a monument to the defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who
respects his oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared victuals,
evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and resigns himself toit as he might
resign himself to being shaved by a paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women
more leisure and freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a
higher level of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the first importance.
But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the
whole domestic economy, or a larger dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by
men provided, for the skill that wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely no mere
coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of
canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else
ready-made. And nowhere else is there more striking tendency to throw the whole
business of training the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the whole
business of instructing them in morals and religion upon so-called Sunday-schools, and
the whole business of developing and caring for their bodies upon playground experts,
sex hygienists and other such professionals, most of them mountebanks.
In brief, women rebel--often unconsciously, sometimes even submitting all the
while--against the dull, mechanical tricks of the trade that the present organization of
society compels them to practise for a living, and that rebellion testifies to their
intelligence. If they enjoyed and took pride in those tricks, and showed it by diligence
and skill, they would be on all fours with such men as are headwaiters, ladies' tailors,
schoolmasters or carpet-beaters, and proud of it. The inherent tendency of any woman
above the most stupid is to evade the whole obligation, and, if she cannot actually evade
it, to reduce its demands to the minimum. And when some accident purges her, either
temporarily or permanently, of the inclination to marriage (of which much more anon),
and she enters into competition with men in the general business of the world, the sort of
career that she commonly carves out offers additional evidence of her mental peculiarity.
In whatever calls for no more than an invariable technic and a feeble chicanery she
usually fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness she usually
succeeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an
armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts
these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in
business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that
her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. But she is usually a success as a
sick-nurse, for that profession requires ingenuity, quick comprehension, courage in the
face of novel and disconcerting situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating and
dominating character; and whenever she comes into competition with men in the arts,
particularly on those secondary planes where simple nimbleness of mind is unaided by
the masterstrokes of genius, she holds her own invariably. The best and most
intellectual--i.e., most original and enterprising play-actors are not men, but women, and
so are the best teachers and blackmailers, and a fair share of the best writers, and public
functionaries, and executants of music. In the demimonde one will find enough acumen
and daring, and enough resilience in the face of special difficulties, to put the equipment

of any exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the average man required half
the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the
average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.

5.
The Thing Called Intuition
Men, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superior intelligence of women;
their egoism demands the denial, and they are seldom reflective enough to dispose of it
by logical and evidential analysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there