Women’s Intelligence
That it ought to nonetheless be needed, at this late stage within the senility of the human race to argue that ladies have a effective and fluent intelligence is unquestionably an eloquent proof of the faulty statement, incurable prejudice, and basic imbecility of their lords and masters. One finds only a few professors of the topic, even amongst admitted feminists, approaching the very fact as apparent; virtually all of them suppose it essential to convey up an enormous mass of proof to ascertain what must be an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman, W. L. George, probably the most sharp-witted of the school, wastes a complete guide up on the demonstration, after which, with an awesome air of uttering one thing new, provides it the humourless title of “The Intelligence of Women.” The intelligence of girls, forsooth! As effectively commit a laborious time to the sagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!
Women, in reality, will not be solely clever; they’ve virtually a monopoly of sure of the subtler and extra utile types of intelligence. The factor itself, certainly, is likely to be moderately described as a particular female character; there’s in it, in a couple of of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable because the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are robust. Men are courageous in bodily fight. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be advantage and sweetness. Men incline to religion, hope and charity. Men know learn how to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in as far as they present the true fundamentals of intelligence—in as far as they reveal a capability for locating the kernel of everlasting verity within the husk of delusion and hallucination and a ardour for bringing it forth—to that extent, at the least, they’re female, and nonetheless nourished by the milk of their moms. “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 clearly clever man, a person free from sentimentality and phantasm, a person exhausting to deceive, a person of the primary class, and I’ll present you a person with a large streak of lady 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 important traits and qualities of the male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are on the identical time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscle tissue and mush. Without a lady to rule him and suppose for him, he’s a really lamentable spectacle: a child with whiskers, a rabbit with the body of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.
It can be a straightforward matter, certainly, to display that superior expertise in man is virtually at all times accompanied by this female flavour—that full masculinity and stupidity are sometimes indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten so as to add that I don’t imply to say that masculinity contributes nothing to the advanced of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we name expertise; all I imply to say is that this advanced is inconceivable with out the female contribution that it’s a product of the interaction of the 2 components. In girls of genius we see the other image. They are generally distinctly mannish, and shave in addition to shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The fact is that neither intercourse, with out some fertilization by the complementary characters of the opposite, is able to the very best reaches of human endeavour. Man, with no saving contact of lady in him, is just too doltish, too naive and romantic, too simply deluded and lulled to sleep by his creativeness to be something above a cavalryman, a theologian or a financial institution director. And lady, with out some hint of that divine innocence which is masculine, is just too harshly the realist for these huge projections of the flamboyant which lie on the coronary heart of what we name genius. Here, as elsewhere within the universe, the very best results are obtained by a mingling of components. The wholly manly man lacks the wit needed to provide goal kind to his hovering and secret desires, and the wholly womanly lady is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream in any respect.
Extract from IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN by H. L. Mencken
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