The transvaluation of values that is now in progress will go on slowly
and for a very long while. That it will ever be quite complete is, of
course, impossible. There are inherent differences will continue to
show themselves until the end of time. As woman gradually becomes
convinced, not only of the possibility of economic independence, but
also of its value, she will probably lose her present overmastering
desire for marriage, and address herself to meeting men in free
economic competition. That is to say, she will address herself to
acquiring that practical competence, that high talent for puerile and
chiefly mechanical expertness, which now sets man ahead of her in the
labour market of the world. To do this she will have to sacrifice some
of her present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinely
intelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer, or
buttonhole worker, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house
painter. Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid
occupations, will have to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably
much further than they will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their
present superiority to men will always remain, and with it a shade of
their relative inefficiency, and so marriage will remain attractive to
them, or at all events to most of them, and its overthrow will be
prevented. To abolish it entirely, as certain fevered reformers
propose, would be as difficult as to abolish the precession of the
equinoxes.
At the present time women vacillate somewhat absurdly between two
schemes of life, the old and the new. On the one hand, their economic
independence is still full of conditions, and on the other hand they
are in revolt against the immemorial conventions. The result is a
general unrest, with many symptoms of extravagant and unintelligent
revolt. One of those symptoms is the appearance of intellectual
striving in women—not a striving, alas, toward the genuine pearls and
rubies of the mind, but one merely toward the acquirement of the rubber
stamps that men employ in their so-called thinking. Thus we have women
who launch themselves into party politics, and fill their heads with a
vast mass of useless knowledge about political tricks, customs,
theories and personalities. Thus, too, we have the woman social
reformer, trailing along ridiculously behind a tatterdemalion posse of
male utopians, each with something to sell. And thus we have the woman
who goes in for advanced wisdom of the sort on draught in women’s
clubs—in brief, the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of
beliefs and propositions that are ignorant, unimportant and untrue.
Such banal striving is most prodigally on display in the United States,
where superficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is
due to the relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work
less than any other people in the world, and, above all, to the
relatively greater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have
been emancipated from any compulsion to productive labour without
having acquired any compensatory intellectual or artistic interest or
social duty. The result is that they swarm in the women’s clubs, and
waste their time, listening to bad poetry, worse music, and still worse
lectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the subconscious. It is
among such women that one observes the periodic rages for Bergsonism,
the Montessori method, the twilight sleep and other such follies, so
pathetically characteristic of American culture.
One of the evil effects of this tendency I have hitherto descanted
upon, to wit, the growing disposition of American women to regard all
routine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence
intolerable. Out of that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the
one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and
well-fed women engaged in public activities that, nine times out of
ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand
we behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first
onslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a
foreign expert to teach the housewives of the country the veriest
elements of thrift. No such instruction was needed by the housewives of
the Continent. They were simply told how much food they could have, and
their natural competence did the rest. There is never any avoidable
waste there, either in peace or in war. A French housewife has little
use for a garbage can, save as a depository for uplifting literature.
She does her best with the means at her disposal, not only in war time
but at all times.
As I have said over and over again in this inquiry, a woman’s
disinclination to acquire the intricate expertness that lies at the
bottom of good housekeeping is due primarily to her active
intelligence; it is difficult for her to concentrate her mind upon such
stupid and meticulous enterprises. But whether difficult or easy, it is
obviously important for the average woman to make some effort in that
direction, for if she fails to do so there is chaos. That chaos is duly
visible in the United States. Here women reveal one of their
subterranean qualities: their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are
quite without that dog-like fidelity to duty which is one of the
shining marks of men. They never summon up a high pride in doing what
is inherently disagreeable; they always go to the galleys under
protest, and with vows of sabotage; their fundamental philosophy is
almost that of the syndicalists. The sentimentality of men connives at
this, and is thus largely responsible for it. Before the average
puella, apprenticed in the kitchen, can pick up a fourth of the
culinary subtleties that are commonplace even to the chefs on dining
cars, she has caught a man and need concern herself about them no more,
for he has to eat, in the last analysis, whatever she sets before him,
and his lack of intelligence makes it easy for her to shut off his
academic criticisms by bald appeals to his emotions. By an easy process
he finally attaches a positive value to her indolence. It is a proof,
he concludes, of her fineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty
incompetence he is abashed.
But as women, gaining economic autonomy, meet men in progressively
bitterer competition, the rising masculine distrust and fear of them
will be reflected even in the enchanted domain of marriage, and the
husband, having yielded up most of his old rights, will begin to reveal
a new jealousy of those that remain, and particularly of the right to a
fair quid pro quo for his own docile industry. In brief, as women shake
off their ancient disabilities they will also shake off some of their
ancient immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with a
soberer and more exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension of
the suffrage, I believe, will encourage this awakening; in wresting it
from the reluctant male the women of the western world have planted
dragons’ teeth, the which will presently leap up and gnaw them. Now
that women have the political power to obtain their just rights, they
will begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges by
sentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider them
anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and
caressed, but as free competitors in a harsh world. When that
reconsideration gets under way there will be a general overhauling of
the relations between the sexes, and some of the fair ones, I suspect,
will begin to wonder why they didn’t let well enough alone.