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.