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