es 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