Women

Here it must be borne in mind that the great criterion in the old hierarchic world was sanctity, intellect, courage, and, perhaps, birth. Nobody objected in the fourteenth century to a woman bearing twelve children or writing books or achieving sanctity. All true virtues were not less admired in women than in men. Women had, therefore, in the Middle Ages, contrary to general belief, the fundamental human “careers” open to them. Yet ochlocratic society, suspicious of medieval ideals (if not openly hostile to them), sees in a human being primarily a citizen, a voter, and a contributor to the phantasmagory of progress, i.e., a money-maker (and in the political sense a taxpayer).73 These concepts gave rise amongst certain women to that weird craze for “equality” which increases in strength the further to the left their ideology stands. The ultimate logical conclusion is the desire to share in the levée en masse for collective killing in uniforms, and to serve in the army as we have  witnessed it in Finland (the Red woman regiment of Tampere, 1917), under Kerensky, in the USSR, and in Spain. Yet it is depressing to witness the rapid decline of extraordinary achievements of women in Western Civilization after their emancipation.
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Matriarchal cultures are exceptional but certainly not rare amongst primitive races. In most European countries women have been admitted during the past one, two, or even three generations to universities and yet their record is meager because even if properly educated their functional placement in life is usually made on egalitarian principles. Women lack, finally, certain intellectual abilities which men frequently possess. This has nothing to do with inheritance. Every man has a “clever” father and a “suppressed” mother; the girls are in the same boat and it is totally unscientific to believe in anything like “idento-sexual heredity.” The chances to inherit under equal circumstances specific traits from either parent are equal for every child of either sex. Yet the legend of the female handicap by centuries of suppression still goes on.
All this does not imply a female inferiority. But there is a very marked difference between man and woman, and that not alone in the physical and biological sense.

Man is not “superior” to woman but he is primary. There are almost no human institutions, inventions, ideas, formations which have not a male origin. There are many functions which man and woman have in common, there are others still which have greater affinities with one sex than with the other and, finally, there are things which are the exclusive privilege of either man or woman. The reason for the decline of female influence is largely to be found in the disregard of these proclivities, as we have already said before. This should not be  misconstrued in order to support national-socialist views on women. The three K’s for women — Küche, Kinder, Kirche (Cooking, Children, Church) — are part of the unofficial program of the party. Yet this attitude is only seemingly “antidemocratic.” It is superdemocratic in a chronological sense.
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Yet the enthusiasm of some women for democratism lies deeper than all that. It is highly probable that most aspects of democratism have some inner connection with the negative sides of the female character. Snobism,77 the dislike for fixed, philosophical views, the tendency toward anonymity, collectivism, comfortism, geocentrism, and the easy acceptance  of compromises, the efforts to gain material security, the strong anthropocentrism, the advocacy of “gentleman” ideals, and the inclination toward a chronical envy (one of the main factors of communism) all belong in the same category.

It could be argued that normal life is after all nothing but a chain of clever compromises. The man who understands how to live well, the Lebenskünstler as the Germans call him, is nothing but a virtuoso in compromises. The hero and the saint, on the other hand, are “clumsy,” quixotic, and maladroit. They have nothing of the Lebenskünstler and cannot help inflicting upon themselves wound after wound. The virtuoso of life, no less than the bonvivant, is a thoroughly feminine as well as effeminate product.78Women have played a leading role in surprisingly destructive movements—before and after the march of the Dames des Halles to Versailles. It is also probably true that negative traits in the character or the mind of women are far more conspicuous than in men. One need not be a Latin to be more distressed at finding a godless woman than a godless man. A woman is far nearer to the source of life and her detachment from the Creator is something terrifying, bordering on blasphemy.

The horror of death so typical of modern man is probably another feminine aspect of our time.79 “Mediā vitā in morte sumus” is the hymn of a male and hierarchic age. The great thing in the life of the male is death just as love is the keynote of a female life. “Man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man,” says St. Paul. The man finds his final reunion with God through the gate of death, but the woman gets the foreboding of such a reunion in her love to a man. Men also love women as children of God but, while this remains an indirect approach to Him, death always remains the shortest route to the Father. This is also the reason why there is such a deep metaphysical relation between love and death.

Yet death is more than love. Viewed from such a male angle, life should be a terrible duel, an agonía in Unamuno’s sense between God and devil, a struggle in alliance with one group of passions against the other passions. Life in itself is a risk which we have to face bravely; all its horrors have a deeper value — war with all its ordeals, hunger, destruction, death, and the inhuman curse of labor and work.

Yes, the curse of labor. So it is written in the Bible and its truth reechoes in the hearts of most men. The male is by nature lazy and unambitious.  The industrious man is a truly feminine phenomenon. In male cultures men only work in order to live, but in nations where women domineer, men show ambition, zeal for labor, and they frequently work themselves to death firmly believing that they live in order to work.* On account of the fact that ambition is a female characteristic, women are always going to be outraged at the sight of potential energies which are not transformed into kinetic energies. The mobile life is urban and female. Haste is not only unmanly, but — as Ortega has demonstrated it — also the very negation of our immortality. The Middle Ages was a period without haste, it was male and timeless.

The true man is attracted by an adventurous life while woman stands for security, concerned for the safety of her home and her family.80 The desperate craving for safety is always the surest sign of the effemination of a culture or nation. The replacement of Trust in divine Providence by efficient insurance companies is always a danger signal which should not be ignored.

77 “Snobbery is indeed a feminine rather than a masculine vice; it appears to show itself among women in a more positive and rabid form.” — Gideon Clark, Democracy in the Dock.

78 About the “hero” (or saint) in relation to his fellow men, see Hermann Swoboda, Otto Weiningers Tod, Vienna, 1923.

79 “In substituting the love of man for the love of God the humanitarian is working  in a vicious circle, for unless man has in him the equivalent of the love of God he is not lovely. Furthermore, it is important that man should not only love but fear the right things. The question was recently raised in Paris why medical men were tending to usurp the influence that formerly belonged to the clergy. The obvious reply is that men once lived in the fear of God, whereas now they live in the fear of microbes.” — Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership.

80 The pledge of obedience in the marriage ceremony has naturally been abolished by “progressive” Protestant church communities.
Further reference material:

On genius in women:

Sylvia Kopald, “Where Are the Female Geniuses” in Our Changing Morality, ed. by Freda Kirchwey, New York, 1930. See the “Statistics” on p. 107.

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
The Menace of the Herd or
Procrustes at Large