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The Intelligence Of Woman
by
1. Truthfully, with a defensive touch, if she is alone with another woman.
2. With intent to cause male rivalry if she is with two men.
3. With false modesty and seductive evasiveness if she is with one man and one woman.
4. With a clear intention to repel or attract if she is with a man alone.
And there are variations of these four cases! A man investigating woman’s points of view often finds the response more emotional than intellectual. Owing to the system under which we live, where man is a valuable prey, woman has contracted the habit of trying to attract. Even aggressive insolence on her part may conceal the desire to attract by exasperating. These notes must, therefore, be taken only as hints, and the reader may be interested to know that they are based on the observation of sixty-five women, subdivided as follows: Intimate acquaintance, five; adequate acquaintance, nineteen; slight acquaintance, forty-one; married, thirty-nine; status uncertain, eight; celibate, eighteen. Ages, seventeen to sixty-eight (average age, about thirty-five).
It is most difficult to deduce the quality of woman’s intellect from her conduct, because her impulses are frequently obscured by her policy. The physical circumstances of her life predispose her to an interest in sex more dominant than is the case with man. As intellect flies out through the window when emotion comes in at the door, this is a source of complications. The intervention of love is a difficulty, for love, though blind, is unfortunately not dumb, and habitually uses speech for the concealment of truth. It does this with the best of intentions, and the best of intentions generally yield the worst of results. It should be said that sheer intellect is very seldom displayed by man. Intellect is the ideal skeleton of a man’s mental power. It may be defined as an aspiration toward material advantage, absolute truth, or achievement, combined with a capacity for taking steps toward successful achievement or attaining truth. From this point of view such men as Napoleon, Machiavelli, Epictetus, Leo XIII, Bismarck, Voltaire, Anatole France, are typical intellectuals. They are not perfect: all, so far as we can tell, are tainted with moral feeling or emotion,–a frailty which probably explains why there has never been a British or American intellectual of the first rank. Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Cromwell, all alike suffered grievously from good intentions. The British and American mind has long been honeycombed with moral impulse, at any rate since the Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Intellect, as I conceive it, is seeing life sanely and seeing it whole, without much pity, without love; seeing life as separate from man, whose pains and delights are only phenomena; seeing love as a reaction to certain stimuli.
In this sense it can probably be said that no woman has ever been an intellectual. A few may have pretensions, as, for instance, “Vernon Lee,” Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Wharton, perhaps Mrs. Hetty Green. I do not know, for these women can be judged only by their works. The greatest women in history–Catherine of Russia, Joan of Arc, Sappho, Queen Elizabeth–appear to have been swayed largely by their passions, physical or religious. I do not suppose that this will always be the case. For reasons which I shall indicate further on in this chapter, I believe that woman’s intellect will tend toward approximation with that of man. But meanwhile it would be futile not to recognize that there exist to-day between man and woman some sharp intellectual divergences.
One of the sharpest lies in woman’s logical faculty. This may be due to her education (which is seldom mathematical or scientific); it may proceed from a habit of mind; it may be the result of a secular withdrawal from responsibilities other than domestic. Whatever the cause, it must be acknowledged that, with certain trained exceptions, woman has not of logic the same conception as man. I have devoted particular care to this issue, and have collected a number of cases where the feminine conception of logic clashes with that of man. Here are a few transcribed from my notebook: