The Intelligence of Woman — Text and Context

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In Category - Ethics

Authors: George, Walter Lionel, 1882-1926 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2010 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Women -- Social and moral questions Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 55,191

Reading time 240 min

Text sections 6

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #32479

W. L. George's 1916 essay collection dissects the domestic routines, spatial arrangements, and social expectations that shape women's lives, using detailed schedules and house-by-house inventories to argue against the notion of female mystery.

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There was no question then of fashion following on fashion at a whirling pace. Women were clothed, sometimes beautifully, sometimes hideously, but at any rate they scrapped their gowns only when they were worn out; now they scrap them as soon as they have been worn. The results of this I deal with further on, but here already I can suggest these results by quoting a few facts. Before me lies one of Messrs. Barker's advertisements; it seems that there are reception gowns, restaurant gowns; that there are coats for the races, and coats for the car, wraps for one thing, and wraps for another--and the advertisement adds that these are the "latest novelties" for "the coming season", and that all this is "for the spring." And then there is an advertisement of Messrs. Tudor Brothers, who have gowns for Ascot, and--this is quite true--gowns for Alexandra Day.

I have looked in vain for gowns for July 23, for gowns to be worn between a quarter past eleven and half-past twelve in the morning, and for special mourning gowns for a cousin's stepfather. Some occasions are shamefully disregarded. They are not disregarded by everybody; at least I presume that the lady quoted by Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson in her lecture in March, who possessed one hundred and ten nightdresses, could cope with any eventuality; there is also the lady, mentioned to me by a friend who made some American investigations for me, who possesses one hundred and fifty pairs of slippers. There is, too, the _Bon Marche_ in Paris, where, out of a staff of six thousand to seven thousand, are employed fifteen hundred dressmakers, and where there is a special workroom for the creation of models.

As all these people must find something to do, they create, unless they merely steal from the dead; but one thing they always do, and that is destroy yesterday. Out of their activities comes a continual stream of new colors and new combinations of colors, of high heels and low heels, gilt heels and jeweled heels; they give us the spat that is to keep out the wet and then the spat that does not keep out the eye. Before me lies a picture of a spat made of lace; another of a skirt slit so high as to reveal a jeweled garter. That is creation, and I suppose I shall be told that that is art. It is art sometimes, and very beautiful, but beauty does not make it live; in fact beauty causes the creation to die more swiftly, because the more appealing it is, the more it is worn: as soon as it is worn by the many, the furious craving for distinction sweeps down upon it and slays it. There are several mad women in the St. Anne asylum in Paris whose peculiar disease is that they cannot retain the same idea for more than a few seconds; they ring the changes on a few hundreds of ideas. Properly governed, their inspirations might be valuable in Grafton Street.

I do not think the end is near; indeed, fashions will be more extreme to-morrow than they are to-day. The continual growth of wealth, and the difficulty of spending it when it clots in a few hands, will make for a greater desire to spend more, more quickly, more continually, and in wilder and wilder forms. The women are to-day having individual orgies; to-morrow will come the saturnalia.

There is a clear difference between the cost of women's clothes and of men's. It is absolutely impossible to dress a woman of the comfortable classes for the same amount per annum that will serve her husband well. I must quote a few figures taken from Boston, New York, and London.

_Boston._--Persons considered: those having $4500 to $7500 a year.

Average price of a suit (coat and skirt), $40 ready to wear; made by a dressmaker of slight pretensions, $125 to $225.

Afternoon dresses, ready to wear, $125 to $225.

Evening dresses, absolute minimum, $50; fashionable frocks, $200 to $350.

On an income of $7500 a woman's hat will cost $25; variation, $20 to $45; hats easily attain $125.

Veils attain $5. Opera cloaks in stores, $90 to $250. Dressmakers charge $450 to $600.

_New York._--Winter street dress, $225.

Skunk muff and stole, $200.

Hats for the year, at least $250 to $300.

Footwear, $250 per annum.

I am informed that a lady in active society can "manage with care" on $2500, but really needs $4500 to $5000.

A "moderate" wardrobe allows for "extremely simple" gowns costing $125 each; the lady in question requires at least six new evening dresses and six remodeled, per annum. She wore an average set of furs, price $1500.

_London._--Debenham & Freebody blouse, $10.

Ponting's Leghorn hat, $8. Gorringe straws, $12 to $14.

I am informed that where the household income is $3500 to $7500 a year the ordinary prices are as follows:

Coats and skirts, $50 to $75.

Evening dresses, $75 to $120.

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W. L. George opens The Intelligence of Woman by flatly rejecting the idea that women are inherently mysterious. He catalogs male thinkers—Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Byron, Thackeray—who insisted on female difference, then counters with a structural observation: men are equally puzzling to women. The book’s argument rests not on abstract theory but on the concrete texture of a middle-class Englishwoman’s day. George reproduces a minute-by-minute schedule from 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., punctuated by interruptions from nurses, housemaids, plumbers, and the husband’s telephone call for a library book. This schedule becomes a recurring device, grounding his critique in the physical and temporal architecture of the home.

The Schedule as Evidence

George’s most striking structural choice is the extended timetable of a typical day. He itemizes domestic labor: changing the baby’s milk, paying electricity bills, interviewing the plumber, fetching a book for her husband. The schedule is deliberately banal, yet it accumulates into a damning portrait of fragmentation. Between 6:30 and 6:35 p.m., he sarcastically allots five minutes for “literature, art, music, and science.” The repetition of this phrase later in the evening underscores how little time remains for intellectual life. George does not claim this schedule is universal—he writes “she may exaggerate, but I do not think so”—but he uses it as a measurable baseline. The schedule is not a metaphor; it is a ledger of hours lost to errands, servants, and compulsory charm.

The Street of Sixty Houses

From the individual schedule, George zooms out to a panoramic view of his own street. He multiplies the single household by sixty, imagining sixty drawing-rooms empty at 11 a.m., sixty dining rooms empty at 3 p.m., and the staggering material apparatus: twelve thousand pieces of crockery, one hundred fifty servants, sixty cooks. This arithmetic is deliberately absurd, yet it makes a precise point about inefficiency. The street becomes a diagram of wasted space and labor. George’s vision is not sentimental; he calls the inflated individual home “complex, enormous, it is not even cheap.” The repetition of “sixty” functions as a rhetorical hammer, turning a single house into a systemic pattern. The reader is invited to see the domestic sphere not as a private haven but as a costly, repetitive machine.

Recurring Interruptions and the Fragmented Day

Throughout the excerpts, interruptions structure the narrative. The schedule is broken by the nurse, the housemaid, the telephone, the plumber. George uses the word “interrupted” twice in quick succession: “Correspondence resumed; interrupted by the nurse… Correspondence resumed, and interrupted by the housemaid.” This staccato rhythm mirrors the woman’s experience of never completing a task. Later, the husband’s telephone call at 2:45 p.m. disrupts her rest. Even the act of writing this book is framed by domestic noise: “three stories of a house hang over my head, and I hear culinary noises below.” The author positions himself as a man who is “supposed to rule all this, but, fortunately, not to govern it.” The interruptions are not merely anecdotal; they are the book’s argument made visible in time.

The Domestic Man as Comic Figure

George extends his critique to the social status of domestic labor. He observes that a man who can “hang a picture straight” is treated with “sorrowful tolerance” by male acquaintances, and a man who washes the baby becomes the subject of comic songs. This observation ties the devaluation of housework to gender roles. The home, he argues, has taken women’s time, energy, health, and “some of the consideration to which as a human being she was entitled.” The phrasing is careful: he does not say the home is evil, but that its current form is wasteful and demeaning. The comic-song reference is a specific cultural touchstone, grounding the argument in early twentieth-century popular attitudes. George’s tone here is wry, not indignant, which makes the point land more sharply.

George’s method is cumulative: a single schedule, multiplied by sixty houses, reveals a system. Readers should attend to the way he moves between the intimate and the statistical, the comic and the precise. The book does not offer a program for reform; instead, it asks that the reader see the home as a structure that can be measured, questioned, and perhaps redesigned. The intelligence of woman, George implies, is not a mystery—it is simply occupied.

Years among the shelves taught me that even a ledger of household schedules, like W. L. George’s The Intelligence of Woman, hums with the same quiet mystery it denies—the daily pattern wearing grooves toward meaning. I find that echo in The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2) — A Closer Reading, where thought itself becomes a house you slowly inhabit, room by room, without ever locking the doors.