Esther & Stencil

[Michael Bailey]

 alice wellintown  wrote:

> utilizing her intuition, protected the society from man-caused
> disaster. In his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) and Education
> of Henry Adams (1905), \ Adams established woman, particularly the
> European woman of the twelfth century, as a symbol of natural force and
> instinct.


does (should) a feminist automatically bristle at being praised in such terms?

I mean, ok, it was a different time frame, and feminist readers today
should be expected to put on their
Adams-appreciator hats and refrain from criticism on those grounds
when discussing the merits of all other aspects of Mr Adams's work,
right?

but when it comes to that specific aspect, the notion of "feminine
intuition" as a thing one can count on encountering in a woman's
thought process
and one which is substantially different from logic...

a) is this unique to Adams (I suspect not)?
b) has the propagation of this meme slowed up with the advent of
feminism? (I think so)
c) is there anything replacing it in popular or scholarly thought?

there's an Asimov story where the hero gives credit to "feminine
intuition" for his lady friend solving some problem (the location of a
star or something)
and the narrator notes, something like, "actually, she had done
exhaustive research and proceeded using logic to find the answer"...


oh, and,
d) is there any trace of this in V. - I guess already asked and
answered, as the V. ladies are 20th century types and in the
decky-dance are estranged from the intuition...

In my rather limited experience, women's thought processes are
different, and palpably superior (although I'm not into that whole
competitive, hierarchical thing, of course)