NEXT CHANGE AT YOUR LIBRARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 94, 10 April 1941, Page 44

NEXT CHANGE AT YOUR LIBRARY

"What men, in their egotism, constantly mistake for deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitute the chief mental equipment of the average male." HE above is a typical quotation from a book that abounds in quotable pithicisms-H. L. Mencken’s In Defence of Women. It was quite by accident that I pounced upon it in a friend’s house and brought it home with me. Since then I’ve been carrying it round in my handbag and giggling over its clever nonsense in tramcars. Have you been brought up to regard yourself as a creature of emotion rather than reason? Have you a lurking never-to-be-expressed belief that women are intellectually less stable than men? Do you accept the flattering unction that woman’s soul is finer-grained than man’s, that she is the repository for the culture and the ethical progress of the race? If you do you're a victim of your own propaganda, Mr. Mencken maintains. Ideas of this kind are so much eyewash, ladled out to men by women through the ages, so that men might underestimate the strength of their natural enemy and be lured into contacts with them to man’s eternal misery.

Women are not emotionalists, he says, but stern cold realists. Their apparent sensibility is assumed to cloak a ruthless intelligence, signs of which would disconcert their destined victims. They are also, he adds, completely unethical, as is obvious from the tactics they use in their so-called love affairs. But their disregard of ethics is a further sign of their clear. sighted intelligence, since the ethical scruples which dog a man are the outcome of a decadent and undiscriminating sentimentality. Once you have read this book you will be a different woman. That mixture of contempt and pity with which you regarded your menfolk you will now find is logically justified. And when your heart next leaps up in the old familiar way you will have the satisfaction of knowing that it is not female emotionalism getting the better of you, but merely the response of a well-regulated organ to the*stimuJus of a remorseless intellect. Sez he!

M.

I.