The Menace of the 'Sixties
Sus,—Congratulations to Simon Raven on his Second Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment (December 31), However, Latin is hardly an answer to the problem (Wells and Dickens, like Shakespeare, had little of it), and education has little effect on basic womanhood. A woman may be a high-school teacher and still read her horoscope with bated breath. The Other Half have been claim- ing since Mary Wollstonecraft and before that 'education' would achieve for them, by intellectual, professional or artistic merit, equal eminence with the male sex. However, look at the position as it stands today. In the professional world, women achieve status on the same basis as they do in beauty competitions. The only two women to have attained high posts in this and the preceding Parliaments have both been described as the red-headed glamour girls of their parties: the handful of women in the highest business posts are all young and good-look- ing. Has anyone ever heard of a great woman mathematician? A great woman composer? A great woman painter? Of women writers, Dorothy Parker said: 'As artists they're rot.'
One of the few women novelists not to have gone down to an unmarked grave said: 'I write of love and money. What else is there to write about?' That's all they write about, because that's all they think about Hence women can only write from featherbedded positions (the one expression will have to do for both angles). A woman can only write (as everyone knows) with £500 a year and a Room of One's Own. This means £2,000 a year and a Flat of Someone Else's, in modern terms. The pro- vider is usually that recipient of the contemporary scribess's worst bile—a husband. Talk about biting the hand that capitalises you!
The basic weaknesses of the female sex (which all the feminists in creation will not eradicate) are not a question of brain, as Simon Raven supposes, but of soul. The seat of the male soul is probably the pituitary gland. A simple study of generative physi- ology will reveal that the female pituitary gland is mainly given over to directing the complications of the oestrus cycle. What does it do after the oestrus cycle is over? Shrivels up and dies, presumably.
But let us not be thought guilty of lack of charity: let us from the magnanimity of our male hearts wish all of them an affluent and romantic (or erotic, as the case may be) New Year, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Muri Spa-hark, Denise Robins, Ed O'Brien, Barb'ra Cartland, Pamla Johnson, Penny Moremer, Old Auntie Brige Brophy and all, Old Auntie Brige Brophy and all!
A. D. MAC DOUGALL
67 Royal Military Avenue. Folkestone
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