of literate men are strewn with vicious remarks against intellectual
women. Intellect in a woman is malignant. She is not ennobled by
a fine mind; she is deformed by it.
The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. The
world need not be defined as rivers, mountains, and plains. The
world is anywhere that thought has consequences. In the most abstract philosophy, thought has consequences; philosophy is part of the world, sometimes its own self-contained world. Thinking is
action; so are writing, composing, painting; creative intelligence
can be used in the material world to make products of itself. But
there is more to creative intelligence than what it produces. Creative intelligence is searching intelligence: it demands to know the world, demands its right to consequence. It is not contemplative:
creative intelligence is too ambitious for that; it almost always announces itself. It may commit itself to the pure search for knowledge or truth, but almost always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence. It is not satisfied by recognition of the personality that carries it; it wants respect in its own right, respect for itself. Sometimes this respect can be shown
toward its product. Sometimes, when this intelligence exercises itself in the more ephemeral realm of pure talk or mundane action, respect for creative intelligence must be shown through respect for
the person manifesting it. Women are consistently and system atically denied the respect creative intelligence requires to be sustained: painfully denied it, cruelly denied it, sadistically denied it.
Women are not supposed to have creative intelligence, but when
they do they are supposed to renounce it. If they want the love of
men, without which they are not really women, they had better
not hold on to an intelligence that searches and that is action in the
world; thought that has consequences is inimical to fettered femininity. Creative intelligence is not animal: being fucked and reproducing w ill not satisfy it, ever; and creative intelligence is not decorative— it is never merely ornamental as, for instance, upper-class women however well educated must be. To stay a woman in
the male-supremacist meaning of that word, women must renounce
creative intelligence: not just verbally renounce it, though women
do that all the time, but snuff it out in themselves at worst, keep it
timid and restrained at best. The price for exercising creative intelligence for those born female is unspeakable suffering. “All things on earth have their price, ” wrote Olive Schreiner, “and for truth
we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sym pathy. The road
to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every
step you set your foot down on your heart. ” 11 Truth is the goal of
creative intelligence, whatever its kind and path; tangling with the
world is tangling with the problem of truth. One confronts the
muck of the world, but one’s search is for the truth. The particular
truth or the ultimate character of the truth one finds is not the
issue. The intrusion of an intelligent, creative self into the world to
find the truth is the issue. There is nothing here for women, except
intimidation and contempt. In isolation, in private, a woman may
have pleasure from the exercise of creative intelligence, however
restrained she is in the exercise of it; but that intelligence will have
to be turned against herself because there is no further, complex,
human world in which it can be used and developed. Whatever of
it leaks out will entitle all and sundry to criticize her womanhood,
which is the sole identity available to her; her womanhood is deficient, because her intelligence is virile.
“Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity. . . ” Florence Nightingale asked in 1852, “and a place in society where no one of these three can be exercised? ” 12 When she referred to moral
activity, she did not mean moralism; she meant moral intelligence.
Moralism is the set of rules learned by rote that keeps women
locked in, so that intelligence can never meet the world head on.
Moralism is a defense against experiencing the world. Moralism is
the moral sphere designated to women, who are supposed to learn
the rules of their own proper, circumscribed behavior by rote.
Moral intelligence is active; it can only be developed and refined by
