acquirement of the rubber stamps that men employ in their so-called
thinking. Thus we have women who launch themselves into party
politics, and fill their heads with a vast mass of useless knowledge
about political tricks, customs, theories and personalities. Thus, too,
we have the woman social reformer, trailing along ridiculously
behind a tatterdemalion posse of male utopians, each with
something to sell. And thus we have the woman who goes in for
advanced wisdom of the sort on draught in women's clubs--in brief,
the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of beliefs and
propositions that are ignorant, unimportant and untrue. Such banal
striving is most prodigally on display in the United States, where
superficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is due to
the relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work less
than any other people in the world, and, above all, to the relatively
greater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have been
emancipated from any compulsion to productive labour without
having acquired any compensatory intellectual or artistic interest or
social duty. The result is that they swarm in the women's clubs, and
waste their time, listening to bad poetry, worse music, and still
worse lectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the
subconscious. It is among such women that one observes the
periodic rages for Bergsonism, the Montessori method, the twilight
sleep and other such follies, so pathetically characteristic of
American culture.



One of the evil effects of this tendency I have hitherto descanted
upon, to wit, the growing disposition of American women to regard
all routine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and