The Mistake About Woman

When GK Chesterton sets out to expose the folly of feminism, he bemoans the loss of The Universalist. He suggests that Man (as in males) must be narrowly focused - The Specialist - because of his duty to work and support a family:

"What makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. ...each has not merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters. The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is outstripped by engineers yet more electrical."

Woman, on the other hand, who has traditionally been The Univeralist - a Jill-of-all-trades, so to speak - in striving to be The Specialist and make her way in the world of business and commerce, is actually reducing her role rather than expanding it. He brilliantly illustrates his point:

"Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one specialty; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs.

The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with fire; about which the strangest modern views seem to have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man's house and that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.

Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten."

So it is with woman. She seeks to be a pencil sharpener instead of a knife...to serve a single purpose instead of a dozen. In seeking "equality" with men, we are choosing monomania and cleverness over comprehensive capacity and wisdom. The tragedy of becoming specialists is that a specialist is required to "give 'his best'; and what a small part of a man 'his best' is! If he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountian pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God."