31. The Crowning Victory
IT IS MY sincere hope that nothing I have
here exhibited will be mistaken by the nobility and gentry for
moral indignation. No such feeling, in truth, is in my heart.
Moral judgments, as old Friedrich used to say, are foreign to my
nature. Setting aside the vast herd which shows no definable
character at all, it seems to me that the minority distinguished
by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin is very much
more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess of
virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the average
wine-bibber is a far better fellow than the average
prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than
the average poor drudge, and that the worst white-slave trader of
my acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader. In
the same way I am convinced that the average woman, whatever her
deficiencies, is greatly superior to the average man. The very
ease with which she defies and swindles him in several capital
situations of life is the dearest of proofs of her general
superiority. She did not obtain her present high immunities as a
gift from the gods, but only after a long and often bitter fight,
and in that fight she exhibited forensic and tactical
talents of a truly admirable order. There was no weakness of man
that she did not penetrate and take advantage of. There was no
trick that she did not put to effective use. There was no
device so bold and inordinate that it daunted her.
The latest and greatest fruit of this feminine
talent for combat is the extension of the suffrage, now universal
in the Protestant countries, and even advancing in those of the
Greek and Latin rites. This fruit was garnered, not by an attack en
masse, but by a mere foray. I believe that the majority of
women, for reasons that I shall presently expose, were not eager
for the extension, and regard it as of small value today. They
know that they can get what they want without going to the actual
polls for it; moreover, they are out of sympathy with most of the
brummagem reforms advocated by the professional suffragists, male
and female. The mere statement of the current suffragist
platform, with its long list of quack sure-cures for all the
sorrows of the world, is enough to make them smile sadly. In
particular, they are sceptical of all reforms that depend upon
the mass action of immense numbers of voters, large sections of
whom are wholly devoid of sense. A normal woman, indeed, no more
believes in democracy in the nation than she believes in
democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be a
class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never
coalesce. Nor is she susceptible to the stock sentimentalities
which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very
dramatically in the United States at the national election of
1920, in which late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to
ignominious defeat--the first general election in which all
American women could vote. All the sentimentality of the
situation was on the side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths
of the newly-enfranchised women voters voted against him. He is,
despite his talents for deception, a poor popular psychologist,
and so he made an inept effort to fetch the girls by
tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will remember his bathos about
breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women believe in
broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practically
every woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken
heart. That is to say, she has been vastly disappointed, either
by failing to nab some pretty fellow that her heart was set on,
or, worse, by actually nabbing him, and then discovering him to
be a bounder or an imbecile, or both. Thus walking the world with
broken hearts, women know that the injury is not serious. When he
pulled out the Vox angelica stop and began sobbing
and snuffling and blowing his nose tragically, the learned doctor
simply drove all the women voters into the arms of the Hon.
Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was too stupid to invent any issues
at all, but simply took negative advantage of the distrust
aroused by his opponent.
Once the women of Christendom become at ease in the
use of the ballot, and get rid of the preposterous harridans who
got it for them and who now seek to tell them what to do with it,
they will proceed to a scotching of many of the sentimentalities
which currently corrupt politics. For one thing, I believe that
they will initiate measures against democracy--the worst evil of
the present-day world. When they come to the matter, they will
certainly not ordain the extension of the suffrage to children,
criminals and the insane--in brief, to those even more
inflammable and knavish than the male hinds who have enjoyed it
for so long; they will try to bring about its restriction, bit by
bit, to the small minority that is intelligent, agnostic and
self-possessed--say six women to one man. Thus, out of their
greater instinct for reality, they will make democracy safe for a
democracy.
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his
woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He
is forever embracing delusions, and each new one is worse than
all that have gone before. But where is the delusion that women
cherish--I mean habitually, firmly, passionately? Who will draw
up a list of propositions, held and maintained by them in sober
earnest, that are obviously not true (I allude here, of course,
to genuine women, not to suffragettes and other such
pseudo-males). As for me, I should not like to undertake such a
list. I know of nothing, in fact, that properly belongs to it.
Women, as a class, believe in none of the ludicrous rights,
duties and pious obligations that men are forever gabbling about.
Their superior intelligence is in no way more eloquently
demonstrated than by their ironical view of all such
phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude toward men is one of
aloof disdain, and their habitual attitude toward what men
believe in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is
substantially the same. It takes twice as long to convert a body
of women to some new fallacy as it takes to convert a body of
men, and even then they halt, hesitate and are full of mordant
criticisms. The women of Colorado had been voting for 21 years
before they succumbed to prohibition sufficiently to allow the
man voters of the state to adopt it; their own majority voice was
against it to the end. During the interval the men voters of a
dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking to the
mourners' bench. In California, enfranchised in 1911, the women
rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition was
adopted during the war without their votes--they did not get the
franchise throughout the country until it was in the
Constitution--and it is without their support today. The American
man, despite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very
much afraid of the police, and in all the regions where
prohibition is now actually enforced he makes excuses for his
poltroonish acceptance of it by arguing that it will do him good
in the long run, or that he ought to sacrifice his private
desires to the common weal. But it is almost impossible to find
an American woman of any culture who is in favour of it. One and
all, they are opposed to the turmoil and corruption that it
involves, and resentful of the invasion of liberty underlying it.
Being realists, they have no belief in any program which proposes
to cure the natural swinishness of men by legislation.
Every normal woman believes, and quite accurately, that the
average man is very much like her husband, John, and she knows
very well that John is a weak, silly and knavish fellow, and that
any effort to convert him into an archangel overnight is bound to
come to grief. As for her view of the average creature of her own
sex, it is marked by a cynicism so penetrating and so destructive
that a clear statement of it would shock beyond endurance.
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"In Defense Of Women" by H. L. Mencken, 1922