force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once 

the door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as 

every one knows, the number of women actually practising these trades 

and professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any 

distinction in competition with men. 

4. Why Women Fail 

The cause thereof, as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in 

the same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the same 

impatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same disqualification 

for mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in the 

higher varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom of 

Christendom, are especially their own, women seldom show any of that 

elaborately conventionalized and half automatic proficiency which is the 

pride and boast of most men. It is a commonplace of observation, indeed, 

that a housewife who actually knows how to cook, or who can make her 

own clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the most casual 

glance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the elements 

of morals, learning and hygiene--it is a platitude that such a woman is 

very rare indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not usually 

esteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly true in the 

United States, where the position of women is higher than in any other 

civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old assumption of their 

intellectual inferiority has been most successfully challenged. The 

American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the defective 

technic of the American housewife. The guest who respects his 

oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared 

victuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and 

resigns himself to it as he might resign himself to being shaved by a 

paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and freedom 

to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher level 

of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the first 

importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or 

a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger 

dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for 

the skill that is wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely no 

mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is