standard where the sensuality of art is informed by intellect. If,
therefore, they conform more closely to the standard which men are
establishing, they are more than holding their own; they are gaining
ground.
Yet they are still, in numbers and in quality, much inferior to the men.
Anne Estelle Rice alone cannot tilt in the ring against Fergusson,
Gaugin, Matisse, Picasso. And it is not true that they have been
entirely deprived of opportunity. Up to the 'seventies or 'eighties,
woman was certainly very much hampered by public opinion. For some
centuries it had been held that she should paint flowers, but not
bodies; nowadays, dizzily soaring, she has begun to paint cranes and
gasometers. The result of the old attitude was that the work of women
was mainly futile because it was expected to be futile; though painters
were not always gentlemen, female painters seemed to have to be ladies,
but times changed. There came the djibbah, Bernard Shaw, and the
cigarette; women began to flock into Colarossi's and the Slade, into the
minor schools where, I regret to say, the new spirit has yet to blow and
to do away with the interesting practice of the life class where the
male model wears bathing drawers. Woman has had her opportunity, and any
morning on the Boulevard Montparnasse you can see her carrying her
paraphernalia towards the Grande Chaumiere and the other studios. She is
suffering a good deal from the effects of past neglect, but much of that
neglect is so far away that we must ask ourselves why woman has not yet
responded to the more tender attitude of modern days. For she has not
entirely responded; she is still either a little afraid of novelty or
inclined to hug it, to affront the notorious perils of love at first
sight.
I believe that the causes of women's failure in painting are
twofold--manual and mental. Though disinclined to generalize upon the
female temperament, because such generalizations generally lead to the
discovery of a paradox, I am conscious in woman of a quality of
impatience.
While woman will exhibit infinite patience, infinite obstinacy, in the
pursuit of an end, she is often inclined to leap too quickly towards
that end. To use a metaphor, she may spend her whole life in trying to
cut down a tree without taking the preliminary trouble to have her ax
sharpened; she does unwillingly the immense labor on the antique, she
neglects her anatomy, she sacrifices line to color.
This is natural enough, for she has a keen sense of color. As witness
her clothes. When clothes are the work of woman they are generally
beautiful in color; when they are beautiful in line they are generally
by Poiret. For line tends to be pure and cold, and I hope I will shock
nobody when I suggest that purity and coldness are masculine rather than
feminine. Color is the expression of passion, line is the expression of
intellect, or rather of that curious combination of intellect and
passion, of intellect directing passion, and of passion inflaming
intellect, which is art as understood by man. It is to this second group
of causes, those I have called mental, that the inferiority of the
woman painter is traceable. There is a lack of intellect in her work. It
is true that the male painter is often just a painter, and that I can
think of no case to-day which reproduces the engineering capacities of
Leonardo da Vinci, but I refer rather to a general intellectual sweep
than to a specialized capacity. Men do not hold themselves so far aloof
from politics, business and philosophy as do women; too many of the
latter read nothing whatever. For some painters a novel is too much,
while their selection among the contents of the newspaper might be
improved upon by a domestic servant. There is a lack of depth, a lack of
intellectual quality, of that "general" quality which, directed into
other channels, produces the engineer, the business man and the
politician. I do not believe in "artistic capacity", "scientific
capacity", "business capacity"; there is nothing but "capacity" which
takes varying forms, just as there is red hair and black hair, but
always hair. In male painting intellect sometimes stands behind passion;
in female painting the attitude is purely sensuous, and that is not to
be wondered at: from the days of the anthropoid ape to this one we have
developed nothing in woman but the passionate quality; we have taught
her to charm, to smile, and to lie until she thinks she can do nothing
but charm, and believes in her own lies. We have refused her education,
we have made her into a slave. Thus, while many of the male painters are
not intellectuals, they have been able to draw upon the higher average
quality of the male mind, while woman to-day, desirous of so doing, will
find very little to the credit of the account of her sex.
What is the conclusion to be drawn? It is to my mind obvious enough. If
woman is producing inferior work it is because she is still an inferior
creature, but I do not think she will remain one. Her progress during
the last thirty years has been staggering; she has forced herself into
the trades, into professions, into politics; she has produced standard
works; in one or two cases she has been creative in science; and I
believe, therefore, that her intellect is on the up grade, and that her
sex is accumulating those resources which will serve as a background to
the artistic development of her passionate faculty. Woman is about to
gain political power. She will use it to improve the education of her
sex, to broaden its opportunities. She is coming out into the world in
cooeperation and in conflict with man; she will become more
self-conscious, and gain a solidarity of sex upon which will follow
mutual mental stimulation and specialized sex development. For that
reason I believe woman's progress will not be less in the pictorial arts
than in other fields if she develops in herself the fullness of life and
its implications. She will inevitably wage the sex war: she will gain
her artistic deserts after the sex peace.
V
THE DOWNFALL OF THE HOME
There is something the matter with the home. It may be merely the subtle
decay which, in birth beginning and in death persisting, escorts all
things human and perchance divine. It may be decay assisted by the
violence of a time unborn and striving through novelty toward its own
end, or toward an endlessness of change. But, whatever the causes, which
interest little a hasty generation, signs written in brick and mortar
and social custom, in rebellion and in aspiration, are not wanting to
show that the home, so long the center of Anglo-Saxon and American
society, is doomed. And, as is usual in the twentieth century, as has
been usual since the middle of the nineteenth, woman is at the bottom of
the change. It is women who now make revolutions. A hundred years ago it
was men who made revolutions; nowadays they content themselves with
resolutions. So it has been left for woman, more animal, more radical,
more divinely endowed with the faculty of seeing only her own side, to
sap the foundations of what was supposed to be her shelter.
I do not suppose that the household has ever been quite as much of a
shelter for women as the Victorian philosophers said, and possibly
believed; an elementary study of the feminist question will certainly
incline the unprejudiced to see that the home, which has for so long
masqueraded in the guise of woman's friend, has on the whole been her
enemy; that instead of being her protector it has been her oppressor;
that it has not been her fortress, but her jail. Woman has felt in the
home much as a workman might feel if he were given the White House as a
present, told to live in it and keep it clean without help on two
dollars a week. If the home be a precious possession, it may very well
be a possession bought at too high a price--at the price of youth, of
energy, and of enlightenment. The whole attitude of woman toward the
home is one of rebellion--not of all women, of course, for most of them
still accept that, though all that is may not be good, all that is must
be made to do. Resignation, humility, and self-sacrifice have for a
thousand generations been the worst vices of woman, but it is apparent
that at last aggressiveness and selfishness are developing her toward
nobility. She is growing aware that she is a human being, a discovery
which the centuries had not made, and naturally she hates her gilded
cage.
Woman is tired of a home that is too large, where the third floor gets
dirty while she is cleaning the first; of a home that cannot be left
lest it should be burglared; of a home where there is always a slate
wrong, or a broken window, or a shortage of coal. She is tired of being
immolated on the domestic hearth. One of them, neither advanced nor
protesting, gave me a little while ago an account of what she called a
characteristic day. I reproduce it untouched:
THE DAY OF A REALLY NICE ENGLISHWOMAN
8 A.M.--Early tea; rise; no bath. [The husband has the only bath,
and the boiler cannot make another until ten.]
9 A.M.--Breakfast. [The husband takes the only newspaper away to
the office.]
9.30 A.M.--Conversation with the cook: hardness of the butcher's
meat; difficulty because there are only three eatable animals;
degeneration of the butter; grocery and milk problems.
Telephone.--A social engagement is made.
Conversation with the cook resumed: report on a mysterious disease
of the kitchen boiler; report on the oil-man; report on the
plumber.
Correspondence begun and interrupted by the parlor-maid, who
demands a new stock of glass.
Correspondence resumed; interrupted by the parlor-maid's demand for
change with which to pay the cleaner.
Rush up-stairs to show which covers are to go.
Correspondence resumed, and interrupted by the telephone: the
green-grocer states that some of the vegetables she wants cannot be
procured.
Correspondence resumed; interrupted by the nurse, who wishes to
change the baby's milk.
Three telephone calls.
Correspondence resumed, and interrupted by the housemaid, who wants
new brooms.
11 A.M.--The children have gone; the servants are at work.
Therefore:
11-11.15 A.M.--Breathing space.
11.15-11.45 A.M.--Paying bills--electricity, gas, clothes; checking
the weekly books, reading laundry circulars.
12 M.--Goes out. It is probably wet [this being England], so, not
being very well off, she flounders through mud. Interview with the
plumber as to the boiler; shoes for Gladys; glass for the
parlor-maid; brooms for the housemaid; forgets various things she
ought to have done; these worry her during lunch.
1.30 P.M.--Lunch.
2.30 P.M.--Fagged out, lies down, but--
2.45 P.M.--The husband telephones to tell her to go to the library
and get him a book.
3.15 P.M.--Is fitted by the dressmaker. Feels better.
4.30 P.M.--Charming at tea.
5.45 P.M.--Compulsory games with the children.
6.15 P.M.--Ultimatum from the servants: the puppy must be killed
for reasons which cannot be specified in an American magazine.
6.30-6.35 P.M.--Literature, art, music, and science. Then dress for
dinner.
7.30 P.M.--Charming at dinner. Grand fantasia to entertain the male
after a strenuous day in the city. Conversation: golf, business,
cutting remarks about other people, and _no contradicting_.
8.45-9.15 P.M.--Literature, art, music, and science.
Last post: Circulars, bills, invitations to be answered; request
from a brother in India to send jam which can be bought only in a
suburb fourteen miles distant.
10.30 P.M.--Attempted bath, but the plumber has not mended the
boiler, after all.
11 P.M.--Sleep ... up to the beginning of another nice
Englishwoman's day.
She may exaggerate, but I do not think so, for as I write these lines
three stories of a house hang over my head, and I hear culinary noises
below. Being a man, I am supposed to rule all this, but, fortunately,
not to govern it. And I am moved to interest when I reflect that in this
street of sixty houses, that which is going on in my house is probably
multiplied by sixty. I have a vision of those sixty houses, each with
its dining room and drawing-room, its four to eight bedrooms, and its
basement. There are sixty drawing-rooms in this street, and at 11 A.M.
there is not a single human being in them; and at 3 P.M. there is nobody
in the sixty dining rooms, except on Sunday, when a few men are asleep
in them. And I have horrid visions of our sixty kitchens, our sixty
sculleries, our sixty pantries; of our one hundred and fifty servants,
and our sixty cooks (and cooks so hard to get and to bear with when
you've got them!). And I think of all our dinner sets, of the twelve
thousand pieces of crockery which we need in our little street. To think
of twelve thousand articles of crockery is to realize our remoteness
from the monkey. And the nurses, as they pass, fill me with wonder, for
some of them attend one child, some two, while sometimes three children
have two nurses--until I wonder what percentage of nurse is really
required to keep in order an obviously unruly generation.
Complex, enormous, it is not even cheap. Privacy, the purest jewel
humanity can find, seems to be the dearest. This inflated individual
home, it is marvelous how it has survived! Like most human
institutions, it has probably survived because it was there. It has
taken woman's time; it has taken much of her energy, much of her health
and looks. Worst of all, it seems to have taken from her some of the
consideration to which as a human being she was entitled. Let there be
no mistake about that. In spite of proclamations as to the sacredness of
the home and the dignity of labor, the fact remains that the domestic
man, the kind that can hang a picture straight, is generally treated by
male acquaintances with sorrowful tolerance; should he attempt to wash
the baby, he becomes the kind of man about whom the comic songs are
written. (I may seem rather violent, but I once tried to wash a baby.)
So that apparently the dignified occupations of the household are not
deemed dignified by man. This is evident enough, for office-cleaners,
laundresses, step-girls, are never replaced by men. These are the
feminine occupations, the coarse occupations, requiring no special
intelligence.
The truth is that the status of domestic labor is low. An exception is
made in favor of the cook, but only by people who know what cooking is,
which excludes the majority of the world. It is true that of late years
attempts have been made to raise the capacity of the domestic laborer by
inducing her to attend classes on cooking, on child nurture, etc., but,
in the main, in ninety-nine per cent of bourgeois marriages, it is
assumed that any fool can run a house. It matters very little whether a
fool can run a house or not; what does matter from the woman's point of
view is that she is given no credit for efficient household management,
and that is one reason why she has rebelled. It does not matter whether
you are a solicitor, an archbishop, or a burglar, the savor goes out of
your profession if it is not publicly esteemed at its true worth. We
have heard of celebrated impostors, of celebrated politicians, but who
has ever heard of a celebrated housekeeper?
The modern complaint of woman is that the care of the house has divorced
her from growing interests, from literature and, what is more important,
from the newspaper, partly from music, entirely from politics. It is a
purely material question; there are only twenty-four hours in every day,
and there are some things one cannot hustle. One can no more hustle the
English joint than the decrees of the Supreme Court. Moreover, and this
is a collateral fact, an emptiness has formed around woman; while on
the one side she was being tempted by the professions that opened to
her, by the interests ready to her hand, the old demands of less
organized homes were falling away from her. Once upon a time she was a
slave; now she is a half-timer, and the taste of liberty that has come
to her has made her more intolerant of the old laws than she was in the
ancient days of her serfdom. Not much more than seventy years ago it was
still the custom in lower middle-class homes for the woman to sew and
bake and brew. These occupations were relinquished, for the distribution
of labor made it possible to have them better done at a lower cost.
In the 'fifties and the 'sixties the great shops began to grow, stores
to rise of the type of Whiteley and Wanamaker. Woman ceased to be
industrial, and became commercial; her chief occupation was now
shopping, and if she were intelligent and painstaking she could make a
better bargain with Jones, in Queen's Road, than with Smith, in
Portchester Street. But of late years even that has begun to go; the
great stores dominate the retail trade, and now, qualities being equal,
there is hardly anything to pick between universal provider Number 1, at
one end of the town, and Number 2, equally universal, at the other.
Also the stores sell everything; they facilitate purchases; the
housekeeper need not go to ten shops, for at a single one she can buy
cheese, bicycles, and elephants. That is only an indication of the
movement; the time will come, probably within our lifetime, when the
great stores of the towns will have crushed the small traders and turned
them into branch managers; when all the prices will be alike, all the
goods alike; when food will be so graded that it will no longer be worth
the housekeeper's while to try and discover a particularly good
sirloin--instead she will telephone for seven pounds of quality AF,
Number 14,692. Then, having less to do, woman will want to do still
less, and the modern rebellion against house and home will find in her
restlessness a greater impetus.
When did the rebellion begin? Almost, it might be said, it began in the
beginning, and no doubt before the matriarchate period women were
striving toward liberty, only to lose it after having for a while
dominated man. In later years women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, but
more obscure, strove to emancipate themselves from the thralldom of the
household. The aspiration of woman, whether Greek courtesan, French
worldling, or English factory inspector, has always been toward equality
with man, perhaps toward mastery. And man has always stood in her path
to restrict her, to arrest her development for his pleasure, as does
to-day the Japanese to the little tree which he plants in a pot. The
clamor of to-day against the emancipated woman is as old as the rebukes
of St. Paul; Moliere gave it tongue in _Les Femmes Savantes_, when he
made the bourgeois say to his would-be learned wife:
"Former aux bonnes moeurs l'esprit de ses enfants,
Faire aller son menage, avoir l'oeil sur ses gens
Et regler la depense avec economie
Doit etre son etude et sa philosophie."
Man has laid down only three occupations: _kirche_, _kueche_, _kinder_.
Hence the revolt. If man had not so much desired that woman should be
housekeeper and courtesan, she would not so violently have rebelled
against him, for why should one rebel until somebody says, "Thou shalt"!
At the words "Thou shalt", rebellion becomes automatic, and, so long as
woman has virility in her, so will it be. Still, leaving origins alone,
and considering only the last fifty or sixty years of our history, it
might be said that they are divided into three periods:
(_a_) The shiny nose and virtue period.
(_b_) The powder-puff and possible virtue period.
(_c_) The Russian ballet and leopard-skin period.
There are exceptions, qualifications, occasional retrogressions, but,
taking it roughly, that is the history of English womanhood from wax
fruit to Bakst designs. There were crises, such as the early 'eighties,
when bloomers came in and women essayed cigarettes, and felt very
advanced and sick; when they joined Ibsen clubs and took up Bernard
Shaw, and wore eyeglasses and generally tried to be men without
succeeding in being gentlemen. There was another crisis about 1906, when
suffrage put forward in England its first violent claims. That, too, was
abortive in a sense, as is ironically recorded in a comic song popular
at the time:
"Back, back to the office she went:
The secretary was a perfect gent."
But still, in a rough and general way, there has been a continual and
growing discontent with the heavy weight of the household, the
complications of its administration. There has been a drive toward
freedom which has affected even that most conservative of all animals,
the male. There have been conscious rebellions as expressed, for
instance, by Nora who "slammed the door"; by the many girls who decide
to "live their own lives", as life was expounded in the yellow-backs of
the 'nineties; by the growing demand for entry into the professions; for
votes; for admission to the legislatures. There is nothing irrelevant in
this; given that by the nature of her position in society and of the
duties intrusted to her in the household, she was cut off from all other
fields of human activity, it may be said that every attempt that woman
has made to share in any activity that lay beyond her front door has
been revolutionary and directed at the foundations of the English
household system. Whether this has also been the case in America, where
a curious type of woman has been evolved--pampered, selfish,
intelligent, domineering, and wildly pleasure-loving--I cannot tell.
Nor is it my business; like other men, the Americans have the wives they
deserve.
But behind the conscious rebellions are the subtle and, in a way,
infinitely more powerful unconscious rebellions, the dull discontents
of overworked and over-preoccupied women; the weariness, the desire for
pleasure and travel, for change, for time to play and to love, and--what
is more pathetic--for time just to sit and rest. The epitaph of the
charwoman--
"Weep for me not, weep for me never,
I'm going to do nothing, nothing forever--"
embodies pains deep-buried in millions of women's hearts. Most people do
not know that, because women never smile so brightly as when they are
unhappy. Sometimes I suspect that public pronouncements and suffrage
manifestoes have had very much less to do with modern upheavals than
these slumberous protests against the multiplicity of errands and the
intricacies of the kitchen range.
Even man has been affected by the change, has begun to realize that it
is quite impossible to alter custom while leaving custom unaltered,
which, as anybody knows who reads parliamentary debates, is mankind's
dearest desire. Changes in his habits and in his surroundings, such as
the weekend, the servant problem, the restaurant, the hotel; all these
have been separate disruptive factors, have begun to bring about the
downfall of the English household. I do not know that one can assign a
predominant place to any one of these factors; they are each one as the
drop of water that, joined with its fellows, wears away stone. Moreover,
in socio-psychologic investigation it is often found that what appears
to be a cause is an effect, and _vice versa_. For instance, with regard
to restaurant dining, it may be that people frequent restaurants because
the home cooking is bad, and, on the other hand, it may be that home
cooking has become bad because people have neglected it as they found it
easier to go to the restaurant. This attitude of mind must qualify the
conclusion at which I arrive, and it is an attitude which must be
sedulously cultivated by any one who wants to know the truth instead of
wishing merely to have his prejudices confirmed.