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.