On the other hand, one could almost wish that all critics of literature were women. The criticisms of even stupid women are worth attention, while those of intelligent women are admirable and suggestive. They have a way of going directly to the heart of the matter. Their preoccupation with facts makes them unerring judges of the truth or falsity of a situation, and their wistful respect for imagination makes them at once aware of even its shadowy presence. Nowhere do they display more clearly than in the criticism of a book
Their Intuition.
Much nonsense has been written about this by men, who have chosen to consider it something miraculous, outside the laws of nature. It is, of course, nothing of the sort and would not be half so interesting if it were. The gift of intuition is merely the ability to think so swiftly that one’s thought barely grazes the intermediate steps in the process and appears to an outsider, and often even to oneself, to leap immediately from the initial fact to the final conclusion. Far from being contrary to logic, intuition is the most perfect example of logic. The flying thought must keep straight as an arrow to its course, disregarding instantly all irrelevancies. And the fact that women probably do possess the gift more commonly than men is the clearest disproof of the silly accusation that they are illogical. They are, it is true, illogical in argument, but that is because they do not care for or respect argument for its own sake (another silly game) but only as a practical means to an end, so that when it is going against them they shift their ground shamelessly and thereby infuriate or delight their masculine antagonists according to the latter’s emotional attitude toward them.
There are several excellent reasons why women should be more intuitive than men. One is that they are not led astray by imagination or fancy, another that they are more pragmatic, a third that those occupying so-called subordinate business positions (such as stenographers, among whom intuition is amazingly common) have better trained minds than their employers. It is largely a matter of concentration.
Their Morals.
This is a delicate subject that I would avoid but for its extreme importance.
Men are essentially moral beings. That is, when they behave badly, as they generally do, they always feel that this is not the way to behave—in short, that there is a way to behave. Women have no such conviction. A great number of them, possibly a majority, always behave ‘well’ because they have been trained to do so and have never experienced an emotion strong enough to compel them to break the habit, but there is no personally felt principle behind such virtue. Accordingly, they are at heart neither moral nor immoral, but a-moral. Husbands certainly ‘deceive’ their wives more frequently than wives their husbands, because a man’s opportunities are greater, his risk of detection is smaller, and his punishment, when he is detected, less, but an erring husband has always a sense of guilt that is absent from an erring wife. Marauding lovers themselves are often shocked by their mistresses’ insouciance and total lack of remorse. They would have a woman do wrong for their sake, but they would also have her conscious of wrong-doing. Perhaps this ridiculous desire is in part due to men’s vanity, which would have the sacrifice made for their sake as great as possible. In any case, the desire is disappointed. The one sacrifice that women do not make for men is a moral sacrifice. They have heard much talk about evil, just as a person born deaf may have read much about music, but they have no more real understanding of evil than he has of music. A wicked act is simply one which the doer feels to be wicked. Accordingly, women can, and often do, pass unscathed, unstained and fresh through experiences that would brand men’s faces as evil.
A Reservation.
It will by this time have become clear that when I write of women I do not usually mean the great sheep-like multitude of women who live their lives through more or less according to the rules taught them in childhood, but cultivated civilized women. This I feel to be not only justifiable but essential. How would it be possible to write of the capacities of women, and then spend one’s time on those in whom such capacities remain latent and unrealized? Not Babbitt but Roosevelt is called the typical American, because in Roosevelt, however rare an example he may have been, one perceives the complete development of characteristics that are innate, but remain undeveloped, in most Americans.
However, it is necessary to bear this reservation (if you can call it that) in mind when reflecting on the foregoing section of this essay; otherwise the reader might be puzzled by the seemingly contradictory existence of numerous noisy ladies engaged in combating Vice. Let them go. Poor things, they are rotten with complexes! thwarted souls, chafing (even though they do not know it) over their own inability to expand, and hating the whole world for their discomfort, as a child hates the table against which he has bumped his head! An excellent subject for a novel, they must be summarily dismissed from a brief essay.