inefficiency of a woman at the business of what is called keeping
house--a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities.
As I have argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for
mastering these technicalities than men; the enterprise always costs
them more effort, and they are never able to reinforce mere diligent
application with that obtuse enthusiasm which men commonly bring
to their tawdry and childish concerns. But in addition to their
natural incapacity, there is a reluctance based upon a deficiency in
incentive, and deficiency in incentive is due to the maudlin
sentimentality with which men regard marriage. In this
sentimentality lie the germs of most of the evils which beset the
institution in Christendom, and particularly in the United States,
where sentiment is always carried to inordinate lengths. Having
abandoned the mediaeval concept of woman as temptress the men
of the Nordic race have revived the correlative mediaeval concept of
woman as angel and to bolster up that character they have create for
her a vast and growing mass of immunities culminating of late years
in the astounding doctrine that, under the contract of marriage, all
the duties lie upon the man and all the privileges appertain to the
woman. In part this doctrine has been established by the intellectual
enterprise and audacity of woman. Bit by bit, playing upon
masculine stupidity, sentimentality and lack of strategical sense, they
have formulated it, developed it, and entrenched it in custom and
law. But in other part it is the plain product of the donkeyish vanity
which makes almost every man view the practical incapacity of his
wife as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and
consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate
indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in
which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress
without portfolio, entirely discharged from every unpleasant labour