past is gone— where is it now? They’ve used up their being”
(“I Got Two Kids and Another in the O ven, ”
genuine accomplishments, despite the beauty of a story or novel.
But they are not called stupid even when they are ridiculous.
When the ideas of Lawrence cannot be distinguished from the
ideas of Morgan, either both are smart or both are stupid; and
sim ilarly with M ailer and Bryant. Only the women, however, deserve and get our contempt. Are Anita Bryant’s ideas pernicious?
Then so are Norman M ailer’s. Are Marabel Morgan’s ideas side-
slappingly funny? Then so are D. H. Lawrence’s.
A woman must keep her intelligence small and timid to survive.
Or she must hide it altogether or hide it through style. Or she
must go mad like clockwork to pay for it. She w ill try to find the
nice w ay to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike.
Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligence abhors sentim entality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the
cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and
women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman
could not bribe her w ay with smiles through a day. W ild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be
Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lo-
botomized. A ny vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers: but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis and Clark of the female mind. Even restrained intelligence is
restrained not because it is timid, as women must be, but because
it is cautiously weighing impressions and facts that come to it from
an outside that the timid dare not face. A woman must please, and
restrained intelligence does not seek to please; it seeks to know
through discernment. Intelligence is also ambitious: it always
wants more: not more being fucked, not more pregnancy; but more
of a bigger world. A woman cannot be ambitious in her own right
without also being damned.
We take girls and send them to schools. It is good of us, because
girls are not supposed to know anything much, and in many other
societies girls are not sent to school or taught to read and write. In
our society, such a generous one to women, girls are taught some
facts, but not inquiry or the passion of knowing. Girls are taught
in order to make them compliant: intellectual adventurousness is
drained, punished, ridiculed out of girls. We use schools first to
narrow the girl’s scope, her curiosity, then to teach her certain
skills, necessary to the abstract husband. Girls are taught to be
passive in relation to facts. Girls are not seen as the potential originators of ideas or the potential searchers into the human condition.
Good behavior is the intellectual goal of a girl. A girl with intellectual drive is a girl who has to be cut down to size. An intelligent girl is supposed to use that intelligence to find a smarter husband.
Simone de Beauvoir settled on Sartre when she determined that he
was smarter than she was. In a film made when both were old,
toward the end of his life, Sartre asks de Beauvoir, the woman
with whom he has shared an astonishing life of intellectual action
and accomplishment: how does it feel, to have been a literary lady?
Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: “Everyone has an
ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read. ” 5 She is ambitious, but it is
a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants
the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she
