visible in
almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do not
understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by book-keeping.
They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are inert and
impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average men's
highest performances, and are easily surpassed by men who, in actual
intelligence, are about as far below them as the Simidae.

This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial
character--which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as
stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility--is
a character that men of the first class share with women of the first,
second and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth,
something unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almost
invariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I have
described. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that women,
as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men as a
class. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the occupations
which bring out such expertness most lavishly--for example, tuning
pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie., matching petty tricks
with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managing
factories--despite the circumstance that the great majority of such
occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them
offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is
no external reason why women shouldn't succeed as operative surgeons;
the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special
demand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women
graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them
to make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women
should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as
managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade,
or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small
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