The American woman is the most intelligent woman in the world today?the only one that always knows what she wants, and therefore always gets it. Hasn?t she proved it by making her husband in his role of slave-banker look almost ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world? Not only has she intelligence but a wonderful beauty of line is hers possessed by no other woman of any race at the present time.
And this wonderful intelligence, which makes the society of her equally brilliant sisters of sufficient interest to her without necessarily insisting on the male element protruding in her life, is helping the tendency of the world today to completely equalize the sexes, and the constant battle between them in which we have wasted our best energies in the past will cease.?
Marcel Duchamp, 1915
The Nude-Descending-a-Staircase Man Surveys Us,?
The New York Tribune, September 12, 1915,