s 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 inte