The female condition, illustrated in letter and example

It is the local custom for women, when they see a man walking toward them, to move to the side, kneel, and wait on their knees until he approaches. He greets them, and in response to this they inquire whether there is anything they can do for him. If he answers 'Nothing', they wait until he passes, and only then rise and go on their way. Similar scenes were repeated later, as I sat with Cuthbert on a bench in front of his house: passing women came up to us, knelt, and silently waited. Sometimes my host, busy talking, failed to notice them. They would continue to wait, motionless, until he finally greeted them and wished them farewell, at which point they would get up and walk away.

It is possible that there are in the world a few women worthy of being listened to by a serious man; but, in general, is it from women that he ought to take counsel, and is there no way of honoring their sex without abasing our own?

The man can be audacious, such is his vocation; someone has to declare. But every woman without chasteness is guilty and depraved, because she tramples on a sentiment natural to her sex. {...} Even if it could be denied that a special sentiment of chasteness was natural to women, would it be any the less true that in society their lot ought to be a domestic and retired life, and that they ought to be raised in principles appropriate to it? If the timidity, chasteness and modesty which are proper to them are social inventions, it is in society's interest that women acquire these qualities; they must be cultivated in women, and any woman who disdains them offends good morals.

Women, in general, do not like any art, know nothing about any, and have no genius. They can succeed in little works which require only quick wit, taste, grace, and sometimes even a bit of philosophy and reasoning. They can acquire science, erudition, talents, and everything that is acquired by dint of work. But that celestial flame which warms and sets fire to the soul, that genius which consumes and devours, that burning eloquence, those sublime transports which carry their raptures to the depths of hearts, will always lack in the writing of women; their works are all cold and pretty as they are; they may contain as much wit as you please, never a soul; they are a hundred times more sensible than passionate. They do not know how to describe nor to feel even love.

Reasoning, says Schopenhauer, is of feminine nature: it can give only after it has received.

But, most likely, after the war the ladies will go back to their clattering cipherdom.(Chapter Five, A specimen American myth)

Most of (State Department officials, Washington politicians) are sissies--another product of momism into which I did not bother to go because I thought you knew about it already--and in American statecraft, where you need desperately a man of iron, you often get a nance.

It's on the subject of women, though, that Wylie gets himself into the most trouble. In one of the many footnotes to the 1954 edition, he insists that "since I love women more than most men, I believe I love them more deeply and knowingly," but the evidence on the printed page is almost entirely to the contrary. He writes about "the unrealness and infantile unreasonableness of most wives," and a couple of pages later goes right over the top: ". . . the child wife, the infantile personality, the woman who cannot reason logically, the bridge fiend, the golf fiend, the mother of all the atrocities we call 'spoiled children,' the middle-aged, hair-faced clubwoman who destroys everything she touches, the murderess, the habitual divorcee, the weeper, the weak sister, the rubbery sex experimentist, the quarreler, the woman forever displeased, the nagger, the female miser, and so on and so on and so on, to the outermost lengths of the puerile, rusting, raging creature we know as mom and sis."

Picking it up again after four decades, I remembered little about it except (of course) mom and a general atmosphere of splenetic outrage. As it turned out, "Generation of Vipers" did not come through a second reading in very good shape. The spectacle of someone making an absolute fool of himself is always enjoyable, so watching Wylie put himself through these ridiculous paces was amusing, but "Generation of Vipers" is warmed-over H.L. Mencken with only occasional hints of Mencken's wit or perspicacity. Along the way Wylie says a few smart things, but give a chimpanzee 100,000 words and one or two of them are likely, against all odds, to make a bit of sense. Mostly the book is high-octane twaddle, fun to read but incapable of withstanding close scrutiny.

WALLACE: But, what I'm after... you say there's not such a thing as a man alone, or a woman alone, what I'm after is this: it seems to me that Simone de Beauvoir says, in a sense, much the same thing that you say in your chapter on Momism, and yet she says it with so much more sympathy. You say that you... that you like women, that you love women.

WYLIE: Yeah. I do.

WALLACE: You have sympathy for women, and yet you go after effect, she goes after cause. She tries to find out why, why women are as she says, mutilated by marriage.

WYLIE: Well, I don't believe they are. I believe that what mutilates them, in her sense, is the great... is a parable ageless misunderstanding, since the evolution of man from animals, cultures have pended before they had knowledge of their real anatomy, the real physiology, the real nature of human beings, through the medical and the scientific knowledge that we have. They just assumed from the distance an event between the sexes and the strength of man, that women were inferior. And they've been treated that way ever since. And indeed, our whole... our whole culture assumes that in many senses.

WALLACE: Well then, maybe women are just fighting back with what means are at their disposal...

WYLIE: Well, sure they're fighting back.

WALLACE: Well, then, why don't you say that, and say it with some sympathy, instead of calling them hammerhead sharks, and talk about their stupid veracity, and taking such...

WYLIE: Well, I do sometimes. But I think when you've got an outrageous woman, who fights in a way against which you have no defense, and a great many American women do. Now, just the other day, I had asked for a bill in a hotel, and it was on a little ledge, and I was writing a check, and a woman threw her pocketbook on top of -- a middle-aged woman -- on top of my check, and my bill, and knocked the pen out of my hand, and said, "Please give me my bill." Well, against those women. And any woman that behaves that way, I feel, entitled to act as outrageously as I did as a writer.

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of "Mother Love" as unmanly and redefine what used to be called "uplifting encouragement" as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality and content themselves with being, in the self-deprecating words of so many 1960s homemakers, "just a housewife."

Stay-at-home mothers were often portrayed as an even bigger menace to society than career women. In 1942, in his best-selling "Generation of Vipers," Philip Wylie coined the term "momism" to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.

Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fiber of America on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army as unfit during World War II were the product of overly protective mothers.

When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc., including lots of girls. I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me.
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up, that is, if you go over each time the same amount you go up a row, you make a straight line. A deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect." Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart, etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was! It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.
I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equal and capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.----Richard Feynman, The pleasure of finding things out

4. The dessicated-laboratory-female

She is the bitter, hostile, bossy and unimaginative female counterpart of the Cold Fish. Usually a technician, she rarely gets past the B.Sc., or at most, the M. Sc. degree, but she may be a Ph.D., less commonly an M.D. In any event, she assumes dominant position in her own group, has very little understanding of human frailties among her subordinates and almost invariably falls in love with her immediate boss. She may be very useful in performing exacting, dull jobs herself and in enforcing discipline upon others, but tends to create more tension and dissatisfaction than the results warrant. Some women make excellent scientists, but this type never does.

The day is not very far distant, Dibdin asserts, when females will begin to have as high a relish for Large Paper copies as their male rivals. That day has not come yet, nor is it, as they say, in the offing. Women are not collectors, nor are they lovers of aught save love and what pertains to it. They are notable readers, as I have confessed apart, but {...} it's only rarely that women have any affection for the books which delight them {...}, and I find few such references to book-love among their writings as that of Sara P. Paton, who loves, modestly at a distance, by proxy, as it were, some favourite author, whose sweet fancies, glowing thoughts, etc. have winged your lonely hours; then you may close the book, and lean your cheek against the cover, not out of love of the book, but because it recalls the face of a dear friend, or the adorable soul of the author.

Women bibliophiles! exclaims Octave Uzanne, I know not two words which screech more when they find themselves together. He cannot imagine a union more hypocritical, or one which smacks more of divorce, for with rare exceptions, the woman and bibliophily live on antipodes, no profound and intimate sympathy exists between them and books: no passion of epidermis or spirit. A woman in a library is a woman out of her frame. She brings grace, smiles, perfumes, and suchlike charms, which soften the austerity of a library with exquisite sweetness; but beware, she is no more to be trusted than a domestic monkey.

{Then follows long confused and repetitively self-contradictory discussion explaining why the evidence of women book collectors and readers proves nothing--if he claims women don't/can't do A, then that's that; any evidence to the contrary is bluntly countered by, basically, denying those women are... women.}

It was also a tradition of the Royal Hetaerae and the Cours d'Amour to respect art and letters, so that an elegant case of desirable books in the boudoir became a symbol of intelligence. In the end, it was their stewards and librarians who chose and cared for the books and their bindings, and it is to these anonymous but true lovers of books, therefore, that we should bring our homage and address our researches.

{This theme of someone other--invariably male--behind the "putative" woman bibliophile and her collection is one of the constantly revisited. No woman would like books or reading if some man didn't mentor her, and insofar women care for books at all it's for the sake of some man etc.}

II. WOMEN ARE JEALOUS OF BOOKS

{...}That all women oppose books in this way none would contend, for some few have been known to fall under the spell of bibliophily; and there are others, and they are of the more knowing sort, who are apt in the use of feminine witchery to lure their men from over-indulgence in the forbidden fruit of the book-shelves. {...} But women in themselves {...} make a Hell for bibliophiles. That they oppose books, miscall, rail, and revile, bear them deadly hate and malice, is well known. {...} But surely {this jealousy} is more outrageous in women by reason of the weakness of their sex and the readiness with which they persuade themselves of neglect.

{Oodles more quotations from woman-hating book nerds in history}

III. BOOK-LOVE CONTRA MATRIMONY

{...}

The sum of it all is that, as {Uzanne} advises, women harbour a general hatred of books, understanding as little how to appreciate them as a pet monkey a work of art. I am well aware that there will be many of the more gallant sort of men who will combat this opinion, as Eugene Field, who knew a wife who shared her husband's bibliophily, and I could myself beat up some few exceptions to it, but they would be so interlarded with provisos and psychological gimcracks that I shall let them go, for it would be as easy to teach a cow to dance as even the average intelligent woman to love books as a man does. At the same time I would make it clear that I see no defect in this, but rather a difference. Book-love is as masculine (though not as common) as growing a beard.

...whatever I have said about their bibliophily, women, when they are so disposed, can read as valiantly as men.

(...) The biases result in barriers for women in politics, business and work, as well as the stripping away of their rights and human rights violations, said the researchers. Despite women being more educated and skilled than ever before, there was a 39% salary gap with men, they added. (...)

Gender bias is a pervasive problem worldwide. The Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) quantifies biases against women, capturing people’s attitudes on women’s roles along four key dimensions: political, educational, economic and physical integrity. The index, covering 85 percent of the global population, reveals that close to 9 out of 10 men and women hold fundamental biases against women. Nearly half the world’s people believe that men make better political leaders than women do, and two of five people believe that men make better business executives than women do. Gender biases are pronounced in both low and high Human Development Index (HDI) countries. These biases hold across regions, income, level of development and cultures—making them a global issue.