even in the smartest. Left alone in a private world of isolation,
intellect does not develop unless it has a private cultivator: a
teacher, a father of intellect, for instance. But the intellect in the
female must not exceed that of the teacher—or the female will be
rebuked and denied. Walt Whitman wrote that a student necessarily disowns and overthrows a teacher; but the female student must always stay smaller than the teacher, always meeker; her intelligence is never supposed to become mastery. Intellect in a woman is always a sign of privilege: she has been raised up above
her kind, usually because of the beneficence of a man who has seen
fit to educate her. The insults to females of intellect are legion: so-
called bluestockings are a laughingstock; women of intellect are
ugly or they would not bother to have ideas; the pleasure of
cultivating the mind is sexual perversion in the female; the works
of literate men are strewn with vicious remarks against intellectual
women. Intellect in a woman is malignant. She is not ennobled by
a fine mind; she is deformed by it.
The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. The
world need not be defined as rivers, mountains, and plains. The
world is anywhere that thought has consequences. In the most abstract philosophy, thought has consequences; philosophy is part of the world, sometimes its own self-contained world. Thinking is
action; so are writing, composing, painting; creative intelligence
can be used in the material world to make products of itself. But
there is more to creative intelligence than what it produces. Creative intelligence is searching intelligence: it demands to know the world, demands its right to consequence. It is not contemplative:
creative intelligence is too ambitious for that; it almost always announces itself. It may commit itself to the pure search for knowledge or truth, but almost always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence. It is not satisfied by recognition of the personality that carries it; it wants respect in its own right, respect for itself. Sometimes this respect can be shown
toward its product. Sometimes, when this intelligence exercises itself in the more ephemeral realm of pure talk or mundane action, respect for creative intelligence must be shown through respect for
the person manifesting it. Women are consistently and system atically denied the respect creative intelligence requires to be sustained: painfully denied it, cruelly denied it, sadistically denied it.
Women are not supposed to have creative intelligence, but when
they do they are supposed to renounce it. If they want the love of
men, without which they are not really women, they had better
not hold on to an intelligence that searches and that is action in the
world; thought that has consequences is inimical to fettered femininity. Creative intelligence is not animal: being fucked and reproducing w ill not satisfy it, ever; and creative intelligence is not decorative— it is never merely ornamental as, for instance, upper-class women however well educated must be. To stay a woman in
the male-supremacist meaning of that word, women must renounce
creative intelligence: not just verbally renounce it, though women
do that all the time, but snuff it out in themselves at worst, keep it
timid and restrained at best. The price for exercising creative intelligence for those born female is unspeakable suffering. “All things on earth have their price, ” wrote Olive Schreiner, “and for truth
we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sym pathy. The road
to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every
step you set your foot down on your heart. ” 11 Truth is the goal of
creative intelligence, whatever its kind and path; tangling with the
world is tangling with the problem of truth. One confronts the
muck of the world, but one’s search is for the truth. The particular
truth or the ultimate character of the truth one finds is not the
