George Bernard Shaw On "Woman"
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edited 8/19/11
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A scion of a genteel Irish Protestant family, Shaw at the age of twenty went to London to become a writer. Following two decades of extremely hard times, he became England’s leading man of letters, a Nobel laureate and the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare. Alternately respected and reviled, Shaw
became one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial intellectuals who
expressed himself with both frankness and wit on all subjects.
Much of Shaw’s success can be attributed to the two women in his life--his mother and his wife. “I made a man of myself-- at my mother’s expense,” he said, for it was his mother who helped him to become a writer. Shaw was forty before he
even contemplated marriage, but once he took the step, he and his wealthy wife
lived together for forty-five years in a harmonious and mutually supportive
union.
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George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) -- Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, critic and controversial intellectual
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You
sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanishness, just as you
have to answer a fool The ideal
woman is a man, though women lie low and let that secret keep itself. It is a
great advantage to women to be regarded as a race apart, an advantage, which,
as usual, they abuse unscrupulously.
Women
are supposed to have no political power; but clever women put stupid husbands
into parliament and into ministerial offices quite easily. The
whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins, and pitfalls for the capture of
men by women. Except
when the death of a man’s wife occurs at such a time that he has to pay a
stranger to discharge her household and parental duties until he goes back to the cheaper plan of marrying
again, it is very hard to convince him that his wife is a
productive worker. Home
is the girl ‘s prison and the woman’s workhouse. The
Chinese tame fowl by clipping their wings, and women by deforming their feet. A
petticoat around the ankles serves equally well. The
one point upon which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the
existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to be
the servant of a man. Give
women the vote and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors
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