world to women; and women are deprived of that real world. The
male always intervenes between her and it.
Some w ill grant that women might have a particular kind of intelligence—essentially small, picky, good with details, bad with ideas. Some w ill grant— in fact, insist— that women know more of
“the Good, ” that women are more cognizant of decency or kindness: this keeps intelligence small and tamed. Some will grant that there have been women of genius: after the woman of genius is
dead. The greatest writers in the English language have been
women: George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. T hey were
sublime; and they were, all of them, shadows of what they might
have been. But the fact that they existed does not change the categorical perception that women are basically stupid: not capable of intelligence without the exercise of which the world as a whole is
impoverished. Women are stupid and men are smart; men have a
right to the world and women do not. A lost man is a lost intelligence; a lost woman is a lost (name the function) mother, housekeeper, sexual thing. Classes of men have been lost, have been thrown aw ay; there have always been mourners and fighters who
refused to accept the loss. There is no mourning for the lost intel
ligence of women because there is no conviction that such intelligence was real and was destroyed. Intelligence is, in fact, seen as a function of masculinity, and women are despised when they refuse
to be lost.
Women have stupid ideas that do not deserve to be called ideas.
Marabel Morgan writes an awful, silly, terrible book in which she
claims that women must exist for their husbands, do sex and be sex
for their husbands. * D. H. Lawrence writes vile and stupid essays
in which he says the same thing basically with many references to
the divine phallus; t but D. H. Lawrence is smart. Anita Bryant
* See
Or: “In the beginning, sex started in the garden. The first man was all
alone. The days were long, the nights were longer. He had no cook, no
nurse, no lover. God saw that man was lonely and in need of a partner, so
He gave him a woman, the best present any man could receive”
intercourse to be the ultimate satisfaction, both partners need a personal
relationship with their God. When this is so their union is sacred and
beautiful, and mysteriously the two blend perfectly into one”
t For instance: “Christianity brought marriage into the world: marriage as
we know it.. . . Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is marriage. It is true freedom because it is a true fulfillment for man,
woman, and children”
she rushes to mad lengths about votes, or welfare, or sports, or business:
she is marvellous, out-manning the man.. . . Suddenly it all falls out of
relation to her basic henny self, and she realises she has lost her life. The
lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every
female, has been denied her: she never had it.. . . Nothingness! ”
