continue to show themselves until the end of time. As woman
gradually becomes convinced, not only of the possibility of
economic independence, but also of its value, she will probably lose
her present overmastering desire for marriage, and address herself to
meeting men in free economic competition. That is to say, she will
address herself to acquiring that practical competence, that high
talent for puerile and chiefly mechanical expertness, which now sets
man ahead of her in the labour market of the world. To do this she
will have to sacrifice some of her present intelligence; it is
impossible to imagine a genuinely intelligent human being becoming
a competent trial lawyer, or buttonhole worker, or newspaper
sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house painter. Women, to get upon
all fours with men in such stupid occupations, will have to commit
spiritual suicide, which is probably much further than they will ever
actually go. Thus a shade of their present superiority to men
will always remain, and with it a shade of their relative inefficiency,
and so marriage will remain attractive to them, or at all events to
most of them, and its overthrow will be prevented. To abolish it
entirely, as certain fevered reformers propose, would be as difficult
as to abolish the precession of the equinoxes.


At the present time women vacillate somewhat absurdly between
two schemes of life, the old and the new. On the one hand, their
economic independence is still full of conditions, and on the other
hand they are in revolt against the immemorial conventions. The
result is a general unrest, with many symptoms of extravagant and
unintelligent revolt. One of those symptoms is the appearance of
intellectual striving in women--not a striving, alas, toward the
genuine pearls and rubies of the mind, but one merely toward the