us seek in marriage--and
the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the
heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a
husband with a Rolls-Royce--is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the
underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriage
rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon
an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its
highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer
the disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this
disadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectual
enterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machines
that men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with marriage
always before them, coloring their every vision of the future, and
holding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they are
under no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts
they revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive too
feeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth of
the idiotic "knowledge" in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or even
convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the head
of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons the
business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away the
hope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the possibility that she,
may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles down in earnest to
whatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to develop
competence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborious
training and unremitting diligence, would select a woman still
definitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose
either a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of
snaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to
be pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.

18. The Process of Courtship

This bemusement of the typical woman by the notion of marriage has been
noted as self-evident by every literate student of the phenomena of sex,
from the early Christian fathers down to Nietzsche, Ellis and Shaw. That
It is denied by the current sentimentality of Christendom is surely no
evidence against it. What we have in this denial, as I have said, is
no more than a proof of woman's tale