Sexism; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Intuition? With all respect, bosh! Then it was intuition that led
Darwin to work out the hypothesis of natural selection. Then it was
intuition that fabricated the gigantically complex score of “Die
Walkure.” Then it was intuition that convinced Columbus of the
existence of land to the west of the Azores. All this intuition of
which so much transcendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and no
less than intelligence—intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to
the hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false
semblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery
that it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth
out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the
larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are
lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because
they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely
because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not
see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the
essentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere
externals. They are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently
illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic.
Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which
carries them through every phase of its incessant, jellylike shifting
of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with
bright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity
sometimes shows itself—men recognized to be more aloof and
uninflammable than the general—men of special talent for the
logical—sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that
is a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, as
constantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the
average women of forty-eight.
II. The War Between the Sexes
6. How Marriages are Arranged
I have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit
mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation.
The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are
is itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be
brought up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to
a few obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite
the vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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