Among the most resented attitudes to which women have been reduced by
our androcentric culture, is that of passive spectator to the male
performance. The whole feminist movement, in fact, is energized by
our resistance to that rôle, and our determination to participate
in constructive movement by contact. It is disconcerting then, to
discover, after the removal of the political bar, that in everything
but the personal accomplishment we are still in a state of practical
nullity toward our national culture, owing to our never having learned,
as women, the business of being audience. All that we have learned,
it now appears, is the art of sitting still in more or less becoming
attitudes.
It is a humiliating admission for so confirmed a feminist as myself to
make, but a survey of what is actually transacting among the organized
and federated groups of women from whom creative social reaction might
have been expected, shows them, in respect to literature, art, and
education, very much in the state of those conscientious attendants at
concerts who have to wait until the conductor turns around to know when
to applaud the orchestra. Any public performer who is clever enough
to make the applausive gesture at suitable intervals can be sure of a
sufficient feminine claque to keep him circulating in the Big Time of
platform attention without any particular deserts.
Consider in this connection, the fate of recent European candidates
for the American claque as they have enfiladed across our lecture
field. Whenever they have been of sufficient prominence to attract
mixed audiences of men and women, those who had nothing to say found
themselves swiftly and emphatically curtailed in their opportunities of
saying it. Few laurels of alien growth have ever sprouted vigorously
enough in the atmosphere of self-conscious democracy, to conceal the
want of pertinence in the wearer of them. But when the lecturer is of
the type whose access to the American pocketbook is chiefly by way of
the stereotyped women’s organizations, the shadow of a leaf upon his
brow--less, the mere poise of that brow as if it wore the wreath--is
enough to insure his thrift campaign against frost. After a few months
of circulation among women’s club audiences he will be in a position
to command the top price from the New York magazines for telling the
American public the low opinion he has formed of its native culture.
Not that I would deny to, say, W. L. George, such confirmation of his
estimate of the inferior intelligence of women as he derives from
those who can be brought together to hear him express it. What I am
here to affirm is that neither the ease with which American women
can be intellectually imposed upon, nor their failure to function
creatively as audience to our bourgeoning literature and art, is to be
taken as indicative of any lack of capacity critically to appreciate,
or individually to produce their share of it. It has to do with the
general inexperience of women in collective reaction, and is about as
indicative as the movements of a waltzing horse of what could normally
be expected.
Let me illustrate from the women’s magazines, which are theoretically
created in response to what the editors, assisted by the advertisers,
really know of what women want. Actually, in addition to their function
as trade journals, which they admirably fill, women’s magazines
represent what the men editors think it desirable for women to read,
modified by the erroneous conviction of advertisers that the spread
of advanced ideas among women lessens the consumption of bottled
mincemeat, colored insert breakfast food, and full-page flour. There
was “The Ladies’ Home Journal” which, under Mr. Bok, built up an
unprecedented standard of magazine popularity. At the same time it
failed to retard in the slightest degree the successful development of
all the ideas it opposed,--suffrage, women’s clubs, family limitation
and the like,--which went on progressively among the very women on
whose living room tables the “Journal” was periodically displayed.
It is this curious lack of causality between what women unprotestingly
take in, and what they can be counted on to do, that inhibits the free
expression of woman-mindedness in our literature and art. There is no
more sequential relation between what they listen to and what they
think, than there is between their morals and the things they can be
induced to sit through in the moving picture houses.
The photodrama provides us with one of the most illuminating side
lights on the failure of women to function representatively as
audience, in their neglect of the quality of “form” in cultural
expression. The criterions of women are interior. What was meant,
what was subjectively felt by the protagonists, determines for them
the affectuality of the action. High ground for this interior standard
being established by convention, an audience of women can not only
be made to accept, but can be induced to applaud offenses against
essential decency. Let it be clearly understood that the boudoir scene
is an incident in a proper honeymoon, and details which every man in
the audience knows were introduced with libidinous intent, will “get
by” with the women. On the same general level this is true of books. In
the second rank of popular magazines, one feels certain, we are saved
from a great deal of potential indecency only by the circumstance of
their being read largely by men.
I have lectured many times before women audiences, on the social
significance of literature, and I have made a habit of setting down
immediately afterward the significant questions asked with the result
that, turning them over just now, I find not one indicative of the
desire, or the sense of obligation on the part of the reader, to enter
into the creative struggle. What they do seem to want is suggestions
for obtaining creative _results_ for themselves, or items by which they
may participate effectively in the _talk_ about creative work. Or they
will be satisfied with mere entertainment.
Much of this detachment is, I suspect, the residue of woman’s century
old habit of thinking of books, magazines, plays, and painting as the
sort of thing Daddy brings home from his hunting, toward which she has
conceived her duty to be an uncritical disposition to make the best of
what is offered. Thus there is always a tendency on the part of women
to measure art by the ensuing fatness of their personal reactions,
rather than by the social significance of the creative act; to be
appreciative of the artist as a man rather than as a representative of
the tribe of mankind. It may be that the slight touch of the exotic
attaching to the foreign poet and novelist, which favors this feminine
attitude of superior detachment from the sweat of achieving, has
something to do with their preferential hearing. For the rest we have
no evidence that Xantippe thought any more highly of the “Dialogues”
than Carol Kennicott thought of the symposium at the drug store.
If it were not for the circumstance that few women’s clubs can be
induced to pay to women artists the terms and attention that are
conceded to men, the track to effective participation might be beaten
out for them by women who have already trodden it for themselves. No
doubt much of the collective ineffectiveness of women in this field
is due to their never having acquired free movement of themselves as
impersonal, unemphasized items of society.
An incident of constant recurrence in the life of every woman who
has attained a reasonable literary expression of herself, is to be
importuned by other women to write about this, to protest against that,
or to write more often on matters concerning which it is her consuming
desire to be permitted to write. When she responds with an impatient,
“For heaven’s sake, if you like my stuff, don’t waste time telling me,
tell the editor!” the most usual retort is a startled, “But he wouldn’t
pay any attention to me, I’m no critic.” This is something more than
an excessive estimate of the part critics play in the establishment
of literary reputations. It is both evidence and result of woman’s
inexperience in functioning as a particle of the democratic whole.
Accustomed immemorially to presenting herself as an individual issue,
as maiden, wife, mother, at the lowest as female, she tends still to
approach the cultural poll in some specialized capacity. It is news
to her that as paying member of the audience she has acquired both
privilege and obligation in respect to the quality of the performance.
Some day it will come to her, together with the horrid thought that she
has been excluded this long time from cultural effectiveness, not by
man’s wish to exclude her, but because she has never learned the game.
It must be failure of method. Nobody could accuse the women’s clubs of
any failure of intention to do their whole duty by the literature of
their native land. Have they not every one of them a book committee,
and the habit of inviting visiting celebrities to sit on the platform
whole afternoons at the price of saying a few words at the end of
the regular program? Has not every author in America had one or more
letters stating that the writer’s club has assigned that particular
author to her for author’s day, and she has never read any of his
works; will he not kindly send her a review of his life and works to
read? Do not thousands of dollars pass annually by way of their lecture
committees to the pockets of authors of whom nobody can say with
certainty where, in the scheme of American values, they belong?
It would be unfair to attribute the failure of one of the most
remarkable organizations ever created in any society, to produce an
appreciable effect on our literature, to the four million women of the
finer strain who make up its membership. Is not the whole situation
a reflection of our common national disposition to regard all art as
a performance, some kind of “show”? Whereas the artist himself knows
it is a way of life, of which the book or the picture is the evidence
rather than the object of pursuit. It is not likely that men, just as
men, would do any better. But because women have rather definitely
assumed the rôle of patrons of culture, because they have made a
stagger at fulfilling it, they must come in for a certain amount of
question. It is women who have already accepted the responsibility for
social conditions in which mature men and women divide themselves, for
purposes of culture, according to sex. So when we wish to talk about
organized effort to produce a representative culture, we have nothing
else to talk about but the women’s clubs.
European observers are disposed to credit this state of things to
a want of sex power in our women; that is, to a feebleness in the
whole delicate complex of vital responses which women make to men.
It is interesting to note that Sinclair Lewis, whether deliberately
or by one of those divine accidents to which the sincere artist
is liable, related these two impotencies in the heroine of “Main
Street”. But such an explanation proceeds primarily from the old view
that men produce and women appreciate; a state of things which our
whole American experiment is organized to deny. The most we can say
of American women is that they have rejected the traditional mode of
response to intellectual creativeness, without having taught themselves
any more efficacious measures.
What women have to learn to be audience to, is not the book after it
is written, nor the personality of the author who writes it, but the
process by which a really vital book gets itself produced out of our
communal experience. What they must assist at is not the adumbration
of praise for work that is done, so much as the selection and emphasis
of social conditions that have power over a book while it is doing. In
this connection an Author’s League as much interested in what of the
author is going into the book, as in what is coming back to him in the
way of royalties, might be helpful.
It is a realization of the need of women to rehearse the rôle of
audience in the collective key, that has led to the organization
of the Women’s News Service, by which, through the medium of their
local press, women will be enabled to practice, along lines already
familiar, the rapid intake and response indispensable to their success
as coefficients of a democratic culture. But the Women’s News Service
aims only at establishing this rapport about what women are doing.
What is needed is a realization that in the indigenous literature of
America, there already exists a competent news service about life as it
is living. The true approach to it from women is neither as women nor
as critics, but as participators in the collective experience, of which
the particular mode of poetry or fiction is the individual expression.
Such an approach is neither instinctive in women, nor part of their
social inheritance. It cannot, however, be assumed that men sitting
together as an organized body to hear any available author read from
or talk about his work, will produce any sort of result which will be
found competent to support a creditable national literature, and to be
of constructive value in the great age of American literature, must
begin to be operative shortly. Otherwise it might be suspected that the
rôle to which men assigned women, of sitting still and saying nothing
except what is pleasant, is the one to which they are intrinsically
best adapted.
_Burton Rascoe_
Burton Rascoe, I suppose, is one of the most nervous men who ever
lived. He is never still. He talks in stammering rushes. He moves about
the room as he talks. He is slender, sleek, with high cheek bones,
prominent lips, and eyes that are intense, and arresting. As violent
in his opinions as in his person, he is a critic and a colyumist who
is constantly provoking his public to disagreement and comment. In
other words, he is an excellent journalist. He was born in Sulton,
Kentucky. His family moved when he was quite young, however, to
Shawnee, Oklahoma, where he lived until the time when he went to the
University of Chicago. His first writing was done for a Shawnee paper.
Later, he was literary critic for the Chicago “Tribune”. In New York,
his “Bookman’s Day Book” for the New York “Tribune” caused a sensation
by its rather breathless revealments. His first book, which has been
years in preparation, is to be a collection of his critical essays. A
voracious reader, a student of French, a young gentleman of violent
opinions, he is always stimulating and often annoying.