Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.com THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN BY W. L. GEORGE [Illustration] BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1916 _Copyright, 1916_, BY W. L. GEORGE. _All rights reserved_ Published, November, 1916 Norwood Press Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN 1 II FEMINIST INTENTIONS 61 III UNIFORMS FOR WOMEN 94 IV WOMAN AND THE PAINT POT 119 V THE DOWNFALL OF THE HOME 130 VI THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY 165 VII SOME NOTES ON MARRIAGE 204 I THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN 1 Men have been found to deny woman an intellect; they have credited her with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk. But intellect in its broadest sense, the capacity consecutively to plan and steadfastly to execute, they have often denied her. The days are not now so dark. Woman has a place in the state, a place under, but still a place. Man has recognized her value without coming to understand her much better, and so we are faced with a paradox: while man accords woman an improved social position, he continues to describe her as illogical, petty, jealous, vain, untruthful, disloyal to her own sex; quite as frequently he charges her with being over-loyal to her own sex: there is no pleasing him. Also he discerns in this unsatisfactory creature extreme unselfishness, purity, capacity for self-sacrifice. It seems that the intelligence of man cannot solve the problem of woman, which is a bad sign in a superior intelligence. The trouble lies in this: man assumes too readily that woman essentially differs from man. Hardly a man has lived who did not so exaggerate. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, agreed to despise women; Napoleon seemed to view them as engines of pleasure; for Shakespeare they may well have embodied a romantic ideal, qualified by sportive wantonness. In Walter Scott, women appear as romance in a cheap edition; Byron in their regard is a beast of prey, Doctor Johnson a pompous brute and a puritanical sensualist. Cervantes mixed in his romantic outlook a sort of suspicious hatred, while Alexandre Dumas thought them born only to lay laurel wreaths and orange blossoms (together with coronets) on the heads of musketeers. All, all--from Thackeray, who never laid his hand upon a woman save in the way of patronage, to Goethe, to Dante, to Montaigne, to