my nature does not lend itself to the meekness required of a wife in our society. I could not endure a man who would let himself be ruled by me, and I would not endure a man who tried to rule me.

I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)

It is absolutely fascinating to see how far educated, intelligent, self-proclaimed feminist women end up submitting to the authority of psychotic and mediocre men. It is as if these highly evolved women struggled intellectually with machismo but, in their daily life, end up submitting to a man. Women who have been beaten, even raped, forgive their attackers. One must ask whether they do not love them because of their brutality.

Cases of men submitting to women exist, but are far more rare. What is extraordinary is that many of these submissive women who allow their lives to be degraded are economically independent and have no need of a man. The explanation of female submission by violence or economic dependence (as in traditional societies) does not hold water, since mistreated women today could easily take off. One explanation could be that women tolerate loneliness less well than men, and that they end, even after a free and emancipated youth, by needing a guardian — even if a disagreeable and hateful one. One often gets the impression that the idea of freedom is less important for women than the fear of loneliness.

Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.

Not a very sensible thing to do, I admit, to fall for someone who is not of your kind, someone who will only complicate your life, disrupt your routine and mess with your sense of stability and rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.

Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives.

If I had married a woman intelligent enough to guide me, to rule me without my feeling that I was ruled, I should have taken good care of my money, I should have had children, and I should not be, as now I am, alone in the world and possessing nothing.

I don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough to fight her own battles,

In general men are very thoughtless creatures. Single-minded, rather. That is what life demands they should be, I think. You only have to take the example of primitive man as hunter and breadwinner. Life demands that he should be singleminded, and nature compensates him by giving him a supreme self-confidence in his ability as a hunter. All his thought is directed towards that end, and at the end is food for himself and his family, and protection for them all. His wife, on the other hand, depends on him for food and protection, but can't actually share his self-confidence from the inside where it matters. Oh - she can believe in him through the sort of vicarious self-confidence something like love can bring, but nature demands that she keeps alert for any slightest sign of failure in the man, because she depends on him for life and livelihood.
"And so, Mr Canning, your so-called intuitive woman takes to watching and interpreting every shadow of expression on her man's face. If he's losing confidence, her training in observation detects it as surely as a wart on the end of his nose, and so she bolsters him up, praises him, pushes him, you see, into regaining confidence - and all for the most selfish reasons as you see - and off he goes with his chest out thinking what a fine fellow he is. He might even pause to consider how understanding his wife was, and no doubt he'd then shake his head in mystification and tell his neighbour that woman's instinct was a thing to marvel at.
"But then the talent itself has its roots in anxiety, hasn't it? Just as a man's single-mindedness has its roots in hunger.

What any woman saw in some particular man was beyond the comprehension of the average intelligent male. It just was so. A woman who could be intelligent about everything else in the world could be a complete fool when it came to some particular man.

You say that if a woman resolves not to marry till she finds herself addressed to by a man of strict virtue, she must be for ever single. If this be true, what wicked creatures are men! What a dreadful abuse of passions, given them for the noblest purposes, are they guilty of!

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

Repeat 'impossible men': not merely rustic,
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, and always have behaved).

Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.

Has God's supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.

… it is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors — that the master is lesser than the slave.