THE INTELLIGENCE
OF WOMAN

BY

W. L. GEORGE

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1916
Copyright, 1916,
By W. L. George.
All rights reserved
Published, November, 1916
Norwood Press
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

I

THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN

1

Men have been found to deny woman an intellect; they have credited her with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk. But intellect in its broadest sense, the capacity consecutively to plan and steadfastly to execute, they have often denied her.

The days are not now so dark. Woman has a place in the state, a place under, but still a place. Man has recognized her value without coming to understand her much better, and so we are faced with a paradox: while man accords woman an improved social position, he continues to describe her as illogical, petty, jealous, vain, untruthful, disloyal to her own sex; quite as frequently he charges her with being over-loyal to her own sex: there is no pleasing him. Also he discerns in this unsatisfactory creature extreme unselfishness, purity, capacity for self-sacrifice. It seems that the intelligence of man cannot solve the problem of woman, which is a bad sign in a superior intelligence. The trouble lies in this: man assumes too readily that woman essentially differs from man. Hardly a man has lived who did not so exaggerate. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, agreed to despise women; Napoleon seemed to view them as engines of pleasure; for Shakespeare they may well have embodied a romantic ideal, qualified by sportive wantonness. In Walter Scott, women appear as romance in a cheap edition; Byron in their regard is a beast of prey, Doctor Johnson a pompous brute and a puritanical sensualist. Cervantes mixed in his romantic outlook a sort of suspicious hatred, while Alexandre Dumas thought them born only to lay laurel wreaths and orange blossoms (together with coronets) on the heads of musketeers. All, all—from Thackeray, who never laid his hand upon a woman save in the way of patronage, to Goethe, to Dante, to Montaigne, to Wellington—all harbored this curious idea: in one way or another woman differs from man. And to-day, whether we read Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. George Moore, M. Paul Bourget, or Mr. Hall Caine, we find that there still persists a belief in Byron's lines:—

"What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger
Is woman!"

Almost every man, except the professional Lovelace (and he knows nothing), believes in the mystery of woman. I do not. For men are also mysterious to women; women are quite as puzzled by our stupidity as by our subtlety. I do not believe that there is either a male or a female mystery; there is only the mystery of mankind. There are to-day differences between the male and the female intellect; we have to ask ourselves whether they are absolute or only apparent, or whether they are absolute but removable by education and time, assuming this to be desirable. I believe that these differences are superficial, temporary, traceable to hereditary and local influences. I believe that they will not endure forever, that they will tend to vanish as environment is modified, as old suggestions cease to be made.

This leads us to consider present idiosyncrasies in woman as a sex, her apparently low and apparently high impulses, her exaltations, and, in the light of her achievements, her future. I do not want to generalize hastily. The subject is too complex and too obscure for me to venture so to do, and I would ask my readers to remember throughout this chapter that I am not laying down the law, but trying only to arrive at the greatest possible frequency of truth. This is a short research of tendencies. There are human tendencies, such as belief in a divine spirit, painting pictures, making war, composing songs. Are there any special female tendencies? Given that we glimpse what distinguishes man from the beast, is there anything that distinguishes woman from man? In the small space at my disposal I cannot pretend to deal extensively with the topic. One reason is the difficulty of securing true evidence. Questions addressed to women do not always yield the truth; nor do questions addressed to men; for a desire to please, vanity, modesty, interfere. But the same question addressed to a woman may, according to circumstances, be sincerely answered in four ways,—

1. Truthfully, with a defensive touch, if she is alone with another woman.

2. With intent to cause male rivalry if she is with two men.

3. With false modesty and seductive evasiveness if she is with one man and one woman.

4. With a clear intention to repel or attract if she is with a man alone.

And there are variations of these four cases! A man investigating woman's points of view often finds the response more emotional than intellectual. Owing to the system under which we live, where man is a valuable prey, woman has contracted the habit of trying to attract. Even aggressive insolence on her part may conceal the desire to attract by exasperating. These notes must, therefore, be taken only as hints, and the reader may be interested to know that they are based on the observation of sixty-five women, subdivided as follows: Intimate acquaintance, five; adequate acquaintance, nineteen; slight acquaintance, forty-one; married, thirty-nine; status uncertain, eight; celibate, eighteen. Ages, seventeen to sixty-eight (average age, about thirty-five).

2

It is most difficult to deduce the quality of woman's intellect from her conduct, because her impulses are frequently obscured by her policy. The physical circumstances of her life predispose her to an interest in sex more dominant than is the case with man. As intellect flies out through the window when emotion comes in at the door, this is a source of complications. The intervention of love is a difficulty, for love, though blind, is unfortunately not dumb, and habitually uses speech for the concealment of truth. It does this with the best of intentions, and the best of intentions generally yield the worst of results. It should be said that sheer intellect is very seldom displayed by man. Intellect is the ideal skeleton of a man's mental power. It may be defined as an aspiration toward material advantage, absolute truth, or achievement, combined with a capacity for taking steps toward successful achievement or attaining truth. From this point of view such men as Napoleon, Machiavelli, Epictetus, Leo XIII, Bismarck, Voltaire, Anatole France, are typical intellectuals. They are not perfect: all, so far as we can tell, are tainted with moral feeling or emotion,—a frailty which probably explains why there has never been a British or American intellectual of the first rank. Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Cromwell, all alike suffered grievously from good intentions. The British and American mind has long been honeycombed with moral impulse, at any rate since the Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Intellect, as I conceive it, is seeing life sanely and seeing it whole, without much pity, without love; seeing life as separate from man, whose pains and delights are only phenomena; seeing love as a reaction to certain stimuli.

In this sense it can probably be said that no woman has ever been an intellectual. A few may have pretensions, as, for instance, "Vernon Lee," Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Wharton, perhaps Mrs. Hetty Green. I do not know, for these women can be judged only by their works. The greatest women in history—Catherine of Russia, Joan of Arc, Sappho, Queen Elizabeth—appear to have been swayed largely by their passions, physical or religious. I do not suppose that this will always be the case. For reasons which I shall indicate further on in this chapter, I believe that woman's intellect will tend toward approximation with that of man. But meanwhile it would be futile not to recognize that there exist to-day between man and woman some sharp intellectual divergences.

One of the sharpest lies in woman's logical faculty. This may be due to her education (which is seldom mathematical or scientific); it may proceed from a habit of mind; it may be the result of a secular withdrawal from responsibilities other than domestic. Whatever the cause, it must be acknowledged that, with certain trained exceptions, woman has not of logic the same conception as man. I have devoted particular care to this issue, and have collected a number of cases where the feminine conception of logic clashes with that of man. Here are a few transcribed from my notebook:

Case 33

My remark: "Most people practice a religion because they are too cowardly to face the idea of annihilation."

Case 33: "I don't see that they are any more cowardly than you. It doesn't matter whether you have a faith or not, it will be all the same in the end."

The reader will observe that Case 33 evades the original proposition; in her reply she ignores the set question, namely why people practice a religion.

Case 17

Votes for Women, of January 22, 1915, prints a parallel, presumably drawn by a woman, between two police-court cases. In the first a man, charged with having struck his wife, is discharged because his wife intercedes for him. In the second a woman, charged with theft, is sent to prison in spite of her husband's plea. The writer appears to think that these cases are parallel; the difference of treatment of the two offenders offends her logic. From a masculine point of view two points differentiate the cases:

In the first case the person who may be sent to prison is the bread-winner; in the second case it is the housekeeper, which is inconvenient but less serious.

In the first case the person who intercedes, the wife, is the one who has suffered; in the second case the person who intercedes, the husband, has not suffered injury. The person who has suffered injury is the one who lost the goods.

Case 51

This case is peculiar as it consists in frequent confusion of words. The woman here instanced referred to a very ugly man as looking Semitic. She was corrected and asked whether she did not mean simian, that is, like a monkey. She said, "Yes," but that Semitic meant looking like a monkey. When confronted with the dictionary, she was compelled to acknowledge that the two words were not the same, but persisted in calling the man Semitic, and seriously explained this by asserting that Jews look like monkeys.

Case 51, in another conversation, referred to a man who had left the Church of England for the Church of Rome as a "pervert." She was asked whether she did not mean "convert."

She said, "No, because to become a Roman Catholic is the act of a pervert."

As I thought that this might come from religious animus, I asked whether a Roman Catholic who entered a Protestant church was also a pervert.

Case 51 replied, "Yes."

Case 51 therefore assumes that any change from an original state is abnormal. The application to the charge of bad logic consists in this further test:

I asked Case 51 whether a man originally brought up in Conservative views would be a pervert if he became a Liberal.

Case 51 replied, "No."

On another occasion Case 51 referred to exaggerated praise showered upon a popular hero, and said that the newspapers were "belittling" him.

I pointed out that they were doing the very contrary; that indeed they were exaggerating his prowess.

Confronted with the dictionary, and the meaning of "belittle", which is "to cheapen with intent", she insisted that "belittling" was the correct word because "the result of this exaggerated praise was to make the man smaller in her own mind."[1]

Case 63

In the course of a discussion on the war in which Case 63 has given vent to moral and religious views, she remarks, "Thou shalt not kill."

I: "Then do you accept war?"

Case 63: "War ought to be done away with."

I (attempting to get a straight answer): "Do you accept war?"

Case 63: "One must defend one's self."

Upon this follows a long argument in which I attempt to prove to Case 63 that one defends, not one's self but the nation. When in difficulties she repeats, "One must defend one's self."

She refuses to face the fact that if nobody offered any resistance, nobody would be killed; she completely confuses the defense of self against a burglar with that of a nation against an invader. Finally she assumes that the defense of one's country is legitimate, and yet insists on maintaining with the Bible that one may not kill!

Case 33

Case 33: "Why didn't America interfere with regard to German atrocities in Belgium?"

I: "Why should she?"

Case 33: "America did protest when her trade was menaced."

I: "Yes. America wanted to protect her interests, but does it follow that she should protest against atrocities which do not menace her interests?"

Case 33: "But her interests are menaced. Look at the trade complications; they've all come out of that."

Case 33 has confused trade interests with moral duty; she has confused two issues: atrocities against neutrals and destruction of American property. When I tell her this, she states that there is a connection: that if America had protested against atrocities, the war would have proceeded on better lines because the Germans would have been frightened.

I: "How would this have affected the trade question?"

Case 33 does not explain but draws me into a morass of moral indignation because America protested against trade interference and not against atrocities. She finally says America had no right to do the one without the other, which logically is chaos. She also demands to be told what was the use of America's signing the Geneva Convention and the Hague Convention. She ignores the fact that these conventions do not bind anybody to fight in their defense but merely to observe their provisions. I would add that Case 33 is a well-educated woman, independent in views, and with a bias toward social questions.

Naturally, where there is a question of love, feminine logic reaches the zenith of topsy-turvy-dom. Here is a dialogue which took place in my presence.

Case 8

Case 8, who was about to be married, attacked a man who had had a pronounced flirtation with her because he suddenly announced that he was engaged.

Case 8: "How can you be so mean?"

The man: "But I don't understand. You're going to be married. What objection can you have to my getting engaged?"

Case 8: "It's quite different." Nothing could move Case 8 from that point of view.[2]

I do not contend that bad logic is the monopoly of woman, for man is also disposed to believe what he chooses in matters such as politics, wars, and so forth, and then to try to prove it. Englishmen as well as Englishwomen find victory in the capture of a German trench, insignificance in the loss of a British trench; man, as well as woman, is quite capable of saying that it always rains when the Republicans are in power, should he happen to be a Democrat; man also is capable of tracing to a dinner with twelve guests the breaking of a leg, while forgetting the scores of occasions on which he dined in a restaurant with twelve other people and suffered no harm. Man is capable of every unreasonable deduction, but he is more inclined to justify himself by close reasoning. In matters of argument, man is like the Italian brigand who robs the friar, then confesses and asks him for absolution; woman is the burglar unrepentant. This may be due to woman as a rule having few guiding principles or intellectual criteria. She often holds so many moral principles that intellectual argument with her irritates the crisper male mind. But she finds it difficult to retain a grasp upon a central idea, to clear away the side issues which obscure it. She can seldom carry an idea to its logical conclusion, passing from term to term; somewhere there is a solution of continuity. For this reason arguments with women, which have begun with the latest musical play, easily pass on, from its alleged artistic merit, to its costumes, their scantiness, their undesirable scantiness, the need for inspection, inspectors of theaters, and, little by little, other inspectors, until one gets to mining inspectors and possibly to mining in general. The reader will observe that these ideas are fairly well linked. All that happens is that the woman, tiring of the central argument, has pursued each side issue as it offered itself. This comes from a lack of concentration which indisposes a woman to penetrate deeply into a subject; she is not used to concentration, she does not like it. It might lead her to disagreeable discoveries.

It is for this reason—because she needs to defend purely emotional positions against man, who uses intellectual weapons—that woman is so much more easily than man attracted by new religions and new philosophies—by Christian Science, by Higher Thought, by Theosophy, by Eucken, by Bergson. Those religions are no longer spiritual; they have an intellectual basis; they are not ideal religions like Christianity and Mohammedanism and the like, which frankly ask you to make an act of faith; what they do is to attempt to seduce the alleged soul through the intellect. That is exactly what the aspiring woman demands: emotional satisfaction and intellectual concession. Particularly in America, one discovers her intellectual fog in the continual use of such words as mental, elemental, cosmic, universality, social harmony, essential cosmos, and other similar ornaments of the modern logomachy.

Case 16

Case 16 told me that my mind did not "functionalize" properly. And gave me as an authority for the statement Aristotle, before whom, of course, I bow.

A singular and suggestive fact is that woman generally displays pitiless logic when she is dealing with things that she knows well. An expert housekeeper is the type, and there are no lapses in her argument with a tradesman. It is a platitude to mention the business capacity of the Frenchwoman, and many women are expert in the investment of money, in the administration of detail, in hospital management, in the rotation of servants' holidays (which, in large households, is most complex). It would appear that woman is unconcentrated and inconsequent only where she has not been properly educated, and this has a profound bearing on her future development. There is a growing class, of which Mrs. Fawcett, Mrs. Havelock Ellis, the Countess of Warwick, Miss Jane Addams, are typical, who have bent their minds upon intellectual problems; women like Miss Emma Goldman; like Miss Mary McArthur, whose grasp of industrial questions is as good as any man's. They differ profoundly from the average feminine literary artist, who is almost invariably unable to write of anything except love. I can think of only one modern exception,—Miss Amber Reeves; among her seniors, Mrs. Humphry Ward is the most notable exception, but not quite notable enough.

This tendency is, I believe, entirely due to woman having always been divorced from business and politics, to her having been until recently encouraged to delight in small material possessions, while discouraged from focusing on anything non-material except religion, and from considering general ideas. Particularly as regards general ideas woman has lived in a bad atmosphere. The French king who said to his queen, "Madam, we have taken you to give us children and not to give us advice," was blowing a chill breath upon the tender shoot of woman's intelligence. Neither he nor other men wished women to conceive general ideas: women became incapable of conceiving or understanding them. Thence sprang generalization, the tendency in woman to make sweeping statements, such as "All men are deceivers," or "Men can do what they like in the world," or "Men cannot feel as women do." It is not that they dislike general questions, but that they have been thrust back from general questions, so that they cannot hold them. Here is a case:

Case 2

With the object of entertaining an elderly lady, who is an invalid, I explain, in response to her own request, the case that Germany makes for having declared war. She asks one or two questions, and then suddenly interrupts me to ask what I have been doing with myself lately in the evenings.

This is a case of interest in the particular as opposed to the general. It is an instance of what I want to show,—that woman drifts toward the particular because she has been driven away from the general. To concentrate too long upon the general is to her merely fatiguing. Doubtless because of this, many middle-aged women become exceedingly dull to men. So long as they are young all is well, for few men care what folly issues from rosy lips. But once the lips are no longer rosy, then man fails to find the companion he needs, because companionship, as differentiated from love, can rest only on mental sympathy. Middle-aged man is often dull too; while the middle-aged woman may concern herself overmuch with the indigestion of her pet dog, the middle-aged man is often unduly moved by his own indigestion. But, broadly speaking, a greater percentage of middle-aged and elderly men than of such women are interested in political and philosophical questions.

These men are often dull for another reason: they are more conventional. The reader may differ from me, but I believe that woman is much less conventional than man. She does all the conventional things and attacks other women savagely for breaches of convention. But you will generally find that where a man may with impunity break a convention he will not do so, while, if secrecy is guaranteed, a woman will please herself first and repent only if necessary. It follows that a man is conventional because he respects convention; woman conventional because she is afraid of what may happen if she does not obey convention. I submit that this shows a greater degree of conventionality in man. The typical Englishman of the world, wrecked on a desert island, would get into his evening clothes as long as his shirts lasted; I do not think his wife, alone in such circumstances, would wear a low-cut dress to take her meal of cocoanuts, even if her frock did up in front.

It is this unconventionality that precipitates woman into the so-called new movements in art or philosophy. She reacts against what is, seeking a new freedom; even if she is only seeking a new excitement, a new color, a new god, unconsciously she seeks a more liberal atmosphere, while man is nearly always contented with the atmosphere that is. When he rebels, his tendency is to destroy the old sanctuary, hers to build a new sanctuary. That is a form of idealism,—not a very high idealism, for woman seldom strains toward the impossible. In literature I cannot call to mind that woman has ever conceived a Utopia such as those imagined by Bellamy, Samuel Butler, William Morris, and H. G. Wells. The only woman who voiced ideas of this kind was Mary Wollstonecraft, and her views were hardly utopian. Nothings, such as Utopias, have been always too airy for woman. The heroes in the novels she has written, until recently and with one or two exceptions,—such as some of the heroes of George Eliot,—are either stagey or sweet. Mr. Rochester is stagey, Grandcourt is stagey, while the hero of "Under Two Flags" is merely Turkish Delight.

3

A quality which singularly contrasts with woman's vague idealism is the accuracy she displays in business. This is due to her being fundamentally inaccurate. It is not the accurate people who are always accurate; it is the inaccurate people on their guard.[3] Woman's interest in the particular predisposes her to the exact, for accuracy may be defined as a continuous interest in the particular. I suspect that it indicates a probability that by education, and especially encouragement, woman may develop a far higher degree of concentration than she has hitherto done. In her way stands a fatal facility, that of grasping ideas before they are half-expressed. It is a quality of imagination, natural rather than induced. Any schoolteacher will confirm the statement that in a mixed class, aged eleven to twelve, the essays of the girls are better than those of the boys. This is not so in a mixed university. I suspect that this latter is quite as much due to the academic judgment, which does not recognize imagination, as to the fact that in the later years of their lives the energies of girls are diverted from intellectual concentration (and also expression) toward the artistic and the social. This untrained concentration produces a certain superficiality and an impetuousness which harmonize with the intrusion of side issues,—to which I have referred,—and with the burgeoning of side issues on the general idea.

Nowhere is this better shown than in the postscript habit. Men do not, as a rule, use postscripts, and it is significant that artists and persons inclined toward the arts are much more given to postscripts than other kinds of men. One might almost say that women correspond by postscript; some of them put the subject of the letter in the postscript, as the scorpion keeps his poison in his tail. I have before me letters from Case 58, with two postscripts, and one extraordinary letter from Case 11, with four postscripts and a sentence written outside the envelope. This is the apogee of superficiality. The writers have run on, seduced by irrelevance, and have not been able to stop to consider in all its bearings the subject of the letter. Each postscript represents a development or qualification, which must indicate the waste by bad education of what may be a very good mind.

I would say in passing that we should not attach undue importance to woman's physical disabilities. It is true that woman is more conscious of her body than is man. So long as he is fed, sufficiently busy, in good general health, he is normal. But woman is far more often in an unbalanced physical condition. There is a great deal to be said for the Hindu philosophical point of view, that the body needs to be just so satisfied as to become imperceptible to the consciousness, as opposed to the point of view of the Christian ascetics, who unfortunately carried their ideas so far that they ended by thinking more of their hair shirt than of Him for whose sake they wore it. In this sense woman is intellectually handicapped because her body obtrudes itself upon her. It is a subject of brooding and agitation. I suspect that this is largely remediable, for I am not convinced that it is woman's peculiar physical conditions that occasionally warp her intellect; it is equally possible that a warped intellect produces unsatisfactory physical conditions. Therefore, if, as I firmly believe that we can, we develop this intellect, profound changes may with time appear in these physical conditions.

4

The further qualification of woman's intellect is in her moral attitude. I would ask the reader to divest himself of the idea that "moral" refers only to matters of sex. Morality is the rule of conduct of each human being in his relations with other human beings, and this covers all relations. Because in some senses the morality of woman is not the morality of man, we are not entitled to say with Pope that

"Woman's at best a contradiction still."

She is a contradiction. Man is a contradiction, apparently of a different kind, and that is all. Thence spring misunderstandings and sometimes dislike, as between people of different nations. I do not want to labor the point, but I would suggest that in a very minor degree the apparent difference between man and woman may be paralleled by the apparent difference between the Italian and the Swede, who, within two generations, produce very similar American children. But man, who generalizes quite as wildly as woman when he does not understand, is determined to emphasize the difference in every relation of life. For instance, it is commonly said that woman cannot keep her promise. This seems to me entirely untrue; given that as a rule woman's intellect is not sufficiently educated to enable her to find a good reason for breaking her promise, it is much more difficult for her to do so. For we are all moral creatures, and if a man must steal the crown jewels, he is happier if he can discover a high motive for so doing. Man has a definite advantage where a loophole has to be found, and I have known few women capable of standing up in argument against a trained lawyer who has acquired the usual dexterity in misrepresentation.

In love and marriage, particularly, woman will keep plighted troth more closely than man; there is no male equivalent of jilt, but the male does jilt on peculiar lines; while a woman who knows that her youth, her beauty are going must bring things to a head by jilting, the male is never in a hurry, for his attractions wane so very slowly. Why should he jilt the woman,—make a stir? So he just goes on. In due course she tires and releases him, when he goes to another woman. That is jilting by inches, and as regards faithfulness a pledged woman is more difficult to win away than a pledged man. (To be just, it should be said that unfaithfulness is in the eyes of most men a small matter, in the eyes of most women a serious matter.) A pledged woman will remain faithful long after love has flown; the promise is a mystic bond; none but a tall flame can hide the ashes of the dead love. And so, when Shakespeare asserts,—

"Frailty, thy name is woman,"

he is delivering one of the hasty judgments that abound in his solemn romanticism.

This applies in realms divorced from love,—in questions of money, such as debts or bets. Women do run up milliners' bills, but men boast of never paying their tailors. And if sometimes women do not discharge the lost bet, it is largely because a tradition of protection and patronage has laid down that women need not pay their bets. Besides, women usually pay their losses, while several men have not yet discharged their debts of honor to me. It is a matter of honesty, and I think the criminal returns for the United States would produce the same evidence as those for England and Wales. In 1913 there were tried at Assizes for offences against property 1616 men and 122 women. The records of Quarter Sessions and of the courts of Summary Jurisdiction yield the same result, an enormous majority of male offenders,—though there be more women than men in England and Wales! And yet, in the face of such official figures, of the evidence of every employer, man cherishes a belief in woman's dishonesty! One reason, no doubt, is that woman's emotional nature leads her, when she is criminal, to criminality of an aggravated kind. She then justifies Pope's misogynist lines:

"O woman, woman! When to ill thy mind
Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend."

Most men, however, have abandoned the case against woman's dishonesty and confine themselves to describing her as a liar, forgetting that they generally dislike the truth when it comes from a woman's lips, and always when it reflects upon their own conduct. For centuries man has asked that woman should flatter, but also that she should tell the truth: such a confusion of demands leads the impartial mind to the conclusion that vanity cannot be a monopoly of the female. But it is quite true that woman does not always cherish truth so well as man. The desire for truth is intellectual, not emotional. Truth is a cold bed-fellow, as might be expected of one who rose from a well. And among women cases of disinterested lying are not uncommon. Here is Case 16:

An elderly woman talked at length about not having received insurance papers, and made a great disturbance. It later appeared that she had not insured. On another occasion she informed the household that her son-in-law had been cabled to from South Africa to come and visit his dying mother. It was proved that no cable had been sent.

I have a number of cases of this kind, but this is the most curious. I suspect that this sort of lying is traceable to a need for romance and drama in a colorless life. It springs from the wish to create a romantic atmosphere round one's self and to increase one's personal importance. Because men hold out hands less greedy toward drama and romance they are less afflicted, but they do not entirely escape, and we have all observed the new importance of the man whose brother has been photographed in a newspaper or, better still, killed in a railway accident. If he has been burned in a theater, the grief of his male relatives is subtly tinged with excited delight. Romance, the wage of lies, is woman's compensation for a dull life.

5

Vanity is as old as the mammoth. Romantic lying, obviously connected with vanity, is justly alleged to be developed in woman. No doubt woman's chief desire has been to appear beautiful, and it is quite open to question whether the leaves that clothed our earliest ancestress were gathered in a spirit of modesty rather than in response to a desire for adornment.

But it should not be too readily assumed that vanity is purely a feminine characteristic. It is a human characteristic, and the favor of any male savage can be bought at the price of a necklace of beads or of an admiral's cocked hat. The modern man is modish too, as much as he dares. At Newport as at Brighton the dandy is supreme. It would be inaccurate, however, to limit vanity to clothes. Vanity is more subtle, and I would ask the reader which of the three principal motives that animate man—love, ambition, and gold lust—is the strongest. The desire to shine in the eyes of one's fellows has produced much in art and political service; it has produced much that is foolish and ignoble. It has led to political competition, to a wild race for ill-remunerated offices, governorships, memberships of Parliament. Representatives of the people often wish to serve the people; they also like to be marked out as the people's men. There are no limits to masculine desire for honors; seldom in England does a man refuse a peerage; Frenchmen are martyrs to their love of ribbons, and not a year passes without a scandal because an official has been bribed to obtain the Légion d'Honneur for somebody, or, funnier still, because an adventurer has blacked his face, set up in a small flat, impersonated a negro potentate, and distributed for value received grand crosses of fantastic kingdoms. Even democratic Americans have been known to seek titled husbands for their daughters, and a few have become Papal barons or counts.

Male vanity differs from female, but both are vanity. The two sexes even share that curious form of vanity which in man consists in his calling himself a "plain man", bragging of having come to New York without shoes and with a dime in his pocket; which, in woman, consists in neglecting her appearance. Both sexes convey more or less: "I am what I am, a humble person ... but quite good enough." The arrogance of humility is simply repulsive.

Ideas such as the foregoing may proceed from a certain simplicity. Woman is much less complex than the poets believe. For instance, many men hold that woman's lack of self-consciousness, as exemplified by disturbances in shops, has its roots in some intricate reasoning process. One must not be carried away: the truth is that woman, having so long been dependent upon man, has an exaggerated idea of the importance of small sums. Man has earned money; woman has been taught only to save it. Thus she has been poor, and poverty has caused her to shrink from expenditure; often she has become mean and, paradoxically enough, she has at the same time become extravagant. Poverty has taught her to respect the penny, while it has taught her nothing about the pound. If woman finds it quite easy to spend one tenth of the household income on dress, and even more,[4] it is because her education makes it as difficult for her to conceive a thousand dollars as it is for a man to conceive a million. It is merely a question of familiarity with money.

Besides, foolish economy and reckless expenditure are indications of an elementary quality. In that sense woman is still something of a savage. She is still less civilized than man, largely because she has not been educated. This may be a very good thing, and it certainly is an agreeable one from the masculine point of view. Whether we consider woman's attitude to the law, to social service, or to war, it is the same thing. In most cases she is lawless; she will obey the law because she is afraid of it, but she will not respect it. For her it is always sic volo, sic jubeo. I suspect that if she had had a share in making the law she would not have been like this, for she would have become aware of the relation between law and life. Roughly she tends to look upon the law as tyrannous if she does not like it, as protective if she does like it. Probably there is little relation between her own moral impulse, which is generous, and the law, which is only just. (That is, just in intention.) This is qualified by the moral spirit in woman, which increasingly leads her to the view that certain things should be done and others not be done. But even then it is likely that at heart woman does not respect the law; she may respect what it represents,—strength,—but not what it implies,—equity. She is infinitely more rebellious than man, and where she has power she inflames the world in protest. I do not refer to the militant suffragists, but to woman's general attitude. For instance, when it is proposed to compel women to insure their servants, to pay employer's compensation for accident, to restrict married women's control of their property, to establish laws regulating the social evil, we find female opposition very violent. I do not mean material opposition, although that does occur, but mental hostility. Woman surrenders because she must, man because he ought to.

That is an attitude of barbarism. It is a changing attitude; the ranks of social service have, during the last half-century, been disproportionately swollen by woman. Our most active worker in the causes of factory inspection, child protection, anti-sweating, is to-day woman. Woman is emerging swiftly from the barbarous state in which she was long maintained. She will change yet more,—and further on in this chapter I will attempt to show how,—but to-day it must be granted that there runs in her veins much vigorous barbarian blood. Her attitude to war is significant. During the past months I have met many women who were inflamed by the idea of blood; so long as they were not losing relatives or friends themselves, they tended to look upon the war as the most exciting serial they had ever read. Heat and heroism, what could be more romantic? Every woman to whom I told this said it was untrue, but in no country have the women's unions struck against war; the suffragettes have organized, not only hospitals, but kitchens, recreation rooms, canteens for the use of soldiers; many have clamored to be allowed to make shells; some, especially in Russia, have carried rifles. In England, thirteen thousand women volunteered to make war material; women filled the German factories. Of course, I recognize that this is partly economic: women must live in wartime even at the price of men's lives, and I am aware that a great many women have done all they could to arrest the spread of war. In England many have prevented their men from volunteering; in America, I am told, women have been solid against war with Germany. But let the reader not be deceived. A subtle point arises which is often ignored. If women went to war instead of men, their attitude might be different. Consider, indeed, these two paragraphs, fictitious descriptions of a battlefield:—

"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young men, with torn bodies, their faces pale in the moonlight. The rays lit up the face of one that lay near, made a glitter upon his little golden moustache."

"Before the trenches lay heaped hundreds of young girls. The moonlight streamed upon their torn bodies and their fair skins. The rays fell upon one that lay near, drawing a glow from the masses of her golden hair."

Let the masculine reader honestly read these two paragraphs (which I do not put forward as literature). The first will pain him; the second will hurt him more. That men should be slaughtered—how hateful! That girls should be slaughtered—it is unbearable. Here, I submit, is part of woman's opposition to war, of the exaggerated idea people have of her humanitarian attitude. I will not press the point that as a savage she may like blood better than man; I will confine myself to suggesting that a large portion of her opposition to war comes out of a sexual consciousness; it seems horrible to her that young men should be killed, just as horrible as my paragraph on the dead girls may seem to the male reader.

Some men have seen women as barbarous and dangerous only, have based their attitude upon the words of Thomas Otway: "She betrayed the Capitol, lost Mark Antony to the world, laid old Troy in ashes." This is absurd; if man cannot resist the temptation of woman, he can surely claim no greater nobility. Mark Antony "lost" Cleopatra by wretched suicide as much as she "lost" him. If because of Helen old Troy was laid in ashes, at least another woman, guiltless Andromache, paid the price. To represent woman so, to suggest that there were only two people in Eden, Adam and the Serpent, is as ridiculous as making a woman into a goddess. It is the hope of the future that woman shall be realized as neither diabolical nor divine, but as merely human.

6

We must recognize that the emotional quality in woman is not a characteristic of sex; it is merely the exaggeration of a human characteristic. For instance, it is currently said that women make trouble on committees. They do; I have sat with women on committees and will do it again as seldom as possible: their frequent inability to understand an obvious syllogism, their passion for side issues, their generalizations, and their particularism whenever emotion is aroused, make committee work very difficult. But every committee has its male member who cannot escape from his egotism or from his own conversation. What woman does man does, only he does it less. The difference is one of degree, not of quality.

Where the emotionalism of women grows more pronounced is in matters of religion and love. There is a vague correspondence between her attitude to the one and to the other, in outwardly Christian countries, I mean. She often finds in religion a curious philter, both a sedative and a stimulant. Religion is often for women an allotrope of romance; blind as an earthworm she seeks the stars, and it is curious that religion should make so powerful an appeal to woman, considering how she has been treated by the faiths. The Moslem faith has made of her a toy and a reward; the Jewish, a submissive beast of burden; the Christian, a danger, a vessel of impurity. I mean the actual faiths, not their original theory; one must take a faith as one finds it, not as it is supposed to be, and in the case of woman the Christian religion is but little in accord with the view of Him who forgave the woman taken in adultery. The Christian religion has done everything it could to heap ignominy upon woman: head-coverings in church, practical tolerance of male infidelity, kingly repudiation of queens, compulsory child-bearing, and a multiplicity of other injustices. The Proverbs and the Bible in general are filled with strictures on "a brawling woman", "a contentious woman"; when man is referred to, mankind is really implied. Yet woman has kissed the religious rods. One might think that indeed she was seduced and held only by cruelty and contempt. She is now, in a measure, turning against the faiths, but still she clings to them more closely than man because she is more capable of making an act of faith, of believing that which she knows to be impossible.

The appeal of religion to woman is the appeal of self-surrender,—that is, ostensibly. In the case of love it is the same appeal, ostensibly; though I suspect that intuition has told many a woman who gave herself to a lover or to a god that she was absorbing more than she gave: in love using the man for nature whom she represents, in faith performing a pantheistic prodigy, the enclosing of Nirvana within her own bosom.

But speculation as to the impulse of sex in relation to religion, in Greece, in Egypt, in Latin countries, would draw me too far. I can record only that to all appearances a portion of the religious instinct of woman is derived from the love instinct, which many believe to be woman's first and only motive. It is significant that among the sixty-five cases upon which this article is based there are several deeply religious single women, while not one of the married women shows signs of more than conventional devotion. I incline to believe that woman is firstly animal, secondly, intellectual; while man appears to be occasionally animal and primarily intellectual.

Observe indeed the varying age at which paternal and maternal instincts manifest themselves. A woman's passion for her child generally awakes at birth, and there are many cases where an unfortunate girl, intending to murder her child, as soon as it is born discovers that she loves it. On the other hand, a great many men are indifferent to their children in infancy and are drawn to them only as they develop intellectual quality. This is just the time when woman drifts from them. Qualified by civilized custom, the attitude of woman toward her child is very much that of the cat toward her kitten; as soon as the kitten is a few weeks old, the mother neglects it. A few months later she will not know it. Her part is played. So it is not uncommon to find a woman who has been enthralled by her baby giving it over entirely to hired help: the baby is growing intellectualized; it needs her no more except as a kindly but calm critic. And frequently at that time the father begins to intervene, to control the education, to prepare for the future. Whether in the mental field this means much more than the difference in temperament between red hair and black hair (if that means anything), I do not know; but it is singular that so often the mother should drift away from her child just at the moment when the father thinks of teaching it to ride and shoot and tell the truth. Possibly by that time her critical work is done.

Indicative of the influence of the emotions is the peculiar intensification of love in moments of crisis, such as war, revolution, or accident. Men do not escape this any more than women: the German atrocities, for instance, largely proceed from extreme excitement. But men have but slender bonds to break, being nearly all ready to take their pleasure where they can, while women are more fastidious. Woman needs a more highly charged atmosphere, the whips of fear or grief, the intoxication of glory. When these are given her, her emotions more readily break down her reserves; and it is not remarkable that in times of war there should be an increase in illegitimate births as well as an increase in marriages. Woman's intellect under those pressures gives way. A number of the marriages contracted by British soldiers about to leave for the front are simple manifestations of hysteria.

As for caprice, it has long been regarded as woman's privilege, part of her charm. Man was the hunter, and his prey must run. Only he is annoyed when it runs too fast. He is ever asking woman to charm him by elusiveness and then complaining because she eludes him. There is hardly a man who would not to-day echo Sir Walter Scott's familiar lines,—

"O Woman! in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made."

It is not woman's fault. The poetry of the world is filled with the words "to win" and "to woo"; one cannot win or woo one who does not baffle; one can only take her, and men are not satisfied to do only that. Man loves sincerity until he finds it; he can live neither with it nor without it; this is true most notably in the lists of love. He is for falsehood, for affectation, lest the prize should too easily be won. Both sexes are equally guilty, if guilt there be.

More true is it that many women lie and curvet as a policy because they believe thus best to manage men. They generally believe that they can manage men. They look upon them as "poor dears." They honestly believe that the "poor dears" cannot cook, or run houses, or trim hats, ignoring the fact that the "poor dears" do these things better than anybody, in kitchens, in hotels, and in hat shops. Especially they believe that they can outwit them in the game of love. This curious idea is due to woman's consciousness of having been sought after in the past and told that she did not seek man but was sought by him. Centuries of thraldom and centuries of flattery have caused her to believe this—the poor dear!

In ordinary times, when no world-movements stimulate, the chief exasperation of woman resides in jealousy. It differs from male jealousy, for the male is generally possessive, the female competitive. I suspect that Euripides was generalizing rashly when he said that woman is woman's natural ally. She is too sex-conscious for that, and many of us have observed the annoyance of a mother when her son weds. Competition is always violent, so much so that woman is generally mocking or angry if a man praises ever so slightly another woman. If she is young and able to make a claim on all men, she tends to be still more virulent because her claim is on all men. This is partly due to the marriage market and its restrictions, but it is also partly natural. No doubt because it is natural, woman attempts to conceal that jealousy, nature being generally considered ignoble by the civilized world. In this respect we must accept that an assumption of coldness is considered a means of enticing man. It may well be that, where woman does not exhibit jealousy, she is with masterly skill suggesting to the man a problem: why is she not jealous? On which follows the desire to make her jealous, and entanglement.

Because of these powerful preoccupations, when woman adopts a career she has hitherto frequently allowed herself to be diverted therefrom by love. Up to the end of the nineteenth century it was very common for a woman to abandon the stage, the concert platform, and so forth, when she married. A change has come about, and there is a growing tendency in women, whether or not at the expense of love I do not know, to retain their occupations when they marry. But the tendency of woman still is to revert to the instinctive function. In days to come, when we have developed the individual and broken up the socialized society in which we live, when the home has been swept away and the family destroyed, I do not believe that this factor will operate so powerfully. In the way of change stand the remnants of woman's slavish habit. No longer a slave, she tends to follow, to submit, to adjust her conduct to the wish of man, and it is significant that a powerful man is seldom henpecked. The henpecked deserve to be henpecked, and I would point out that there is no intention in these notes to attempt to substitute henpecked husbands for cockpecked wives. The tendency is all the other way, for woman tends to mould herself to man.

A number of cases lie before me:

Case 61 married a barrister. Before her marriage she lived in a commercial atmosphere; after marriage she grew violently legal in her conversation. Her husband developed a passion for motoring; so did Case 61. Observe that during a previous attachment to a doctor, Case 61 had manifested a growing interest in medicine.

Case 18 comes from a hunting family, married a literary man, and within a few years has ceased to take any exercise and mixes exclusively with literary people.

Case 38, on becoming engaged to a member of the Indian Civil Service, became a sedulous student of Indian literature and religion. On her husband's appointment to a European post, her interest did not diminish. She has paid a lengthy visit to India.

There are compensating cases among men: I have two. In one case a soldier who married a literary woman has turned into a scholar. In the other a commercial man, who married a popular actress, has been completely absorbed by the theater, and is now writing successful plays.

It would appear from these rather disjointed notes that the emotional quality in woman is more or less at war with her intellectual aims. Indeed it is sometimes suggested that where woman appears, narrowness follows; that books by women are mostly confined to love, are not cosmic in feeling. This is generally true, for reasons which I hope to indicate a little farther on; but it is not true that books where women are the chief characters are narrow. Such novels as Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Une Vie, Tess of the D'Urbervilles make that point obvious. As a rule, books about men, touching as they do, not only upon love, but upon art, politics, business, are more powerful than books about women. But one should not forget that books written round women are mostly written by women. As women are far less powerful in literature than men, we must not conclude that books about women are naturally lesser than books about men. The greatest books about women have been written by men. But few men are sufficiently unprejudiced to grasp women; only a genius can do so, and that is why few books about women exist that deserve the epithet great. It remains to be seen whether an increased understanding of the affairs of the world will develop among women a literary power which, together with the world, will embrace herself.

7

In the attempt to indicate what the future may reserve for woman, it is important to consider what she has done, because she has achieved much in the face of conservatism, of male egotism, of male jealousy, of poverty, of ignorance, and of prejudice. These chains are weaker to-day, and the goodwill that shall not die will break them yet; but many women, a few of whose names follow, gave while enslaved an idea of woman's quality. Examine indeed this short list:[5]

Painting: Angelica Kauffmann, Madame Vigée le Brun, Rosa Bonheur.

Music and drama: Rachel, Siddons, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Teresa Carreño, Sadayacco.

Literature: George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Madame de Staël, Madame de Sévigné, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Browning. More recent, Mrs. Alice Meynell, Miss May Sinclair, "Lucas Malet," Mrs. Edith Wharton, "Vernon Lee."

Social service and politics: Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Miss Jane Addams, Madame Montessori, Mrs. Fawcett, Mrs. Ennis Richmond, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Havelock Ellis, Mrs. Sidney Webb, Miss Clementina Black, Josephine Butler, Mrs. Pankhurst, Elizabeth Fry. Observe the curious case of Mrs. Hetty Green, financier.

This list could be enormously increased, and, as it is, it is a random list, omitting women of distinction and including women of lesser distinction. But still it contains no unknown names, and, though I do not pretend that it compares with a similar list of men, it is an indication. I am anxious that the reader should not think that I want to compare Angelica Kauffmann with Leonardo, or Jane Austen with Shakespeare. In every walk of life since history began there have been a score of men of talent for every woman of talent, and there has never been a female genius. That should not impress us: genius is an accident; it may be a disease. It may be that mankind has produced only two or three geniuses, and that one or two women in days to come may redress the balance, and it may be that several women have been mute inglorious Miltons. We do not know. But in the matter of talent, notably in the arts, I submit that woman can be hopeful, particularly because most of the names I give are those of women of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was better for woman than the eighteenth, the eighteenth better than the seventeenth: what could be more significant? In the arts I feel that woman has never had her opportunity. She has been hailed as an executive artist, actress, singer, pianist; but as a creator, novelist, poet, painter, she has been steadfastly discounted,—told that what she did was very pretty, until she grew unable to do anything but the pretty-pretty. She has grown up in an atmosphere of patronage and roses, deferential, subservient. She has persistently been told that certain subjects were "not fit for nice young ladies"; she has been shut away from the expression of life.

Here is a typical masculine attitude, that of Mr. George Moore, in A Modern Lover. Mr. George Moore, who seems to know a great deal about females but less about women, causes in this book Harding, the novelist, who generally expresses him, to criticize George Sand, George Eliot, and Rosa Bonheur: "If they have created anything new, how is it that their art is exactly like our own? I defy any one to say that George Eliot's novels are a woman's writing, or that The Horse Fair was not painted by a man. I defy you to show me a trace of feminality in anything they ever did; that is the point I raise. I say that women as yet have not been able to transfuse into art a trace of their sex; in other words, unable to assume a point of view of their own, they have adopted ours."

This is cool! I have read a great deal of Mr. George Moore's art criticism: when it deals with the work of a man he never seeks the masculine touch. He judges a man's work as art; he will not judge a woman's work as art. He starts from the assumption that man's art is art, while woman's art is—well, woman's art. That is the sort of thing which has discouraged woman; that is the atmosphere of tolerance and good-conduct prizes which she has breathed, and that is the stifling stupidity through which she is breaking. She will break through, for I believe that she loves the arts better than does man. She is better ground for the development of a great artist, for she approaches art with sympathy, while the great bulk of men approach it with fear and dislike, shrinking from the idea that it may disturb their self-complacency. The prejudice goes so far that, while women are attracted to artists as lovers, men are generally afraid of women who practice the arts, or they dislike them. It is not a question of sex; it is a question of art. All that is part of sexual heredity, of which I must say a few words.

But, before doing so, let me waste a few lines on the male conception of love, which has influenced woman because love is still her chief business. To this day, though it dies slowly, the male attitude is still the attitude to a toy. It is the attitude of Nietzsche when saying, "Man is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior." This idea is so prevalent that Great Britain, in its alleged struggle against Nietzschean ideas, is making abundant use of the Nietzschean point of view. No wonder, for the idea runs not only through men but through Englishmen: "woman is the reward of war,"—that is a prevalent idea, notably among men who make war in the neighborhood of waste-paper baskets. It has been exemplified by the British war propaganda in every newspaper and in every music hall, begging women to refuse to be seen with a man unless he is in khaki. It has had government recognition in the shape of recruiting posters, asking women "whether their best boy is in khaki." It has been popularly formulated on picture postcards touchingly inscribed, "No gun, no girl."

All that—woman as the prize (a theory repudiated in the case of Belgian atrocities)—is an idea deeply rooted in man. In the eighteen-sixties the customary proposal was, "Will you be mine?" Very faintly signs are showing that men will yet say, "May I be yours?" It will take time, for the possessive, the dominating instinct in man, is still strong; and long may it live, for that is the vigor of the race. Only we do not want that instinct to carry man away, any more than we want a well-bred horse to clench its teeth upon the bit and bolt.

We want to do everything we can to get rid of what may be called the creed of the man of the world, which is suggested as repulsively as anywhere in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Departmental Ditties:

"My Son, if a maiden deny thee and scufflingly bid thee give o'er,
Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward—get out! She has been there before.
They are pecked on the ear and the chin and the nose who are lacking in lore.
"Pleasant the snaffle of Courtship, improving the manners and carriage;
But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thornbit of Marriage.
Blister we not for bursati? So when the heart is vext,
The pain of one maiden's refusal is drowned in the pain of the next."

There is a great deal of this sort of thing in Molière, in Thackeray, in Casanova. The old idea of woman eluding and lying; of woman stigmatized if she has "been there before", while man may brag of having "been there before" as often as possible; of man lovelacing for his credit's sake and woman adventuring at her peril.

8

I submit that each man and woman has two heredities: one the ordinary heredity from two parents and their forbears, the other more complex and purely mental—the tradition of sex. Heredity through sex may be defined as the resultant of consecutive environments. I mean that a woman, for instance, is considerably influenced by the ideas and attitudes of her mother, grandmothers, and all female ascendants. They had a tradition, and it is the basis of her outlook. Any boy born in a slum can, as he grows educated, realize that the world lies before him; literature and history soon show him that many as lowly as he have risen to fame, as artists, scientists, statesmen; he may even dream of becoming a king, like Bonaparte. To the boy nothing is impossible; if he is brave, there is nothing he may not tear from the world. He knows it, and it strengthens him; it gives him confidence. What his fathers did, he may do; the male sexual heredity is a proud heritage, and only yesterday a man said to me, "Thank God, I am a man." Contrast with this the corresponding type of heredity in woman. Woman carries in her the slave tradition of her maternal forbears, of people who never did anything because they were never allowed to; who were told that they could do nothing but please, until they at last believed it, until by believing they lost the power of action; who were never taught, and because uneducated were ashamed; who were never helped to understand the work of the world, political, financial, scientific, and, therefore, grew to believe that such realms were not for them. I need not labor the comparison: obviously any woman, inspired by centuries of dependence, instinctively feels that, while everything is open to man, very little is open to her. She comes into the arena with a leaden sword; in most cases she hardly has energy to struggle.

A little while ago, when Britain was floating a large war loan, one woman told me that she could not understand its terms. We went into them together, and she found that she understood perfectly. She was surprised. She had always assumed that she did not understand finance, and the assumption had kept her down, prevented her from understanding it. Likewise, and until they try, many women think they cannot read maps and time-tables.

With that heredity environment has coalesced, and I think no one will deny that a continuous suggestion of helplessness and mental inferiority must affect woman. It means most during youth, when one is easily snubbed, when one looks up to one's elders. By the time one has found out one's elders, it is generally too late; the imprint is made, and woman, looking upon herself as inferior, hands on to her daughters the old slavery that was in her forbears' blood. To me this seems foolish, and during the past thirty or forty years a great many have come to think so too; they have shown it by opening wide to woman the doors of colleges, many occupations and professions. Many are to-day impatient because woman has not done enough, has not justified this new freedom. I think they are unjust; they do not understand that a generation of training and of relative liberty is not enough to undo evils neolithic in origin. All that we are doing to-day by opening gates to women is to counter-influence the old tradition, to implant in the woman of to-morrow the new faith that nothing is beyond her powers. It lies with the woman of to-day to make that faith so strong as to move mountains. I think she will succeed, for I doubt whether any mental power is inherent in sex. There are differences of degree, differences of quality; but I suspect that they are mainly due to sexual heredity, to environment, to suggestion, and that indeed, if I may trench upon biology, human creatures are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.

The evolution of woman toward mental assimilation with man, though particularly swift in the past half-century, has been steady since the Renaissance. Roughly, one might say that the woman of the year 1450 had no education at all; in this she was more like man than she ever was later, for the knights could not read, and learning existed only among the priests. The time had not yet come for the learned nobleman; Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Surrey, the Euphuists, had not yet dispelled the mediæval fogs, and few among the laymen, save Cheke and Ascham, had any learning at all. In those days woman sang songs and brought up babies. Two hundred and fifty years later the well-to-do woman had become somebody; she could even read, though she mainly read tales such as The Miraculous Love of Prince Alzamore. She was growing significant in the backstairs of politics. Sometimes she took a bath. Round about 1850 she turned into the "perfect lady" who kept an album bound in morocco leather. She wrote verses that embodied yearnings. Often she had a Turkish parlor, and usually as many babies as she could. But already the Brontës and George Eliot had come to knock at the door; Miss Braddon was promising to be, if not a glory, at least a power, and before twenty years were out, John Stuart Mill was to lead the first suffragettes to the House of Commons.

To-day it is another picture: woman in every trade except those in which she intends to be; woman demanding and using political power; woman governing her own property; woman senior to man in the civil service. She has not yet her charter, and still suffers much from the tradition of inferiority, from her lack of confidence in herself. But many women are all ambition, and within the last year two young women novelists have convinced me that the thing they most desire is to be great in their art. Whether they will succeed does not matter much; what does matter is that they should harbor such a wish. Whether woman's physical disabilities, her present bias toward unduly moral and inadequately intellectual judgments, will forever hamper her, I do not know; but I do not think so. Whether the influence of woman, more inherently lawless, more anarchic than man, will result in the breaking down of conventions and the despising of the law, I do not know either. But if the world is to be remoulded, I think it much more likely to be remoulded by woman than by man, simply because that as a sex he is in power, and the people who are in power never want to alter anything.

Woman's rebellion is everywhere indicated: her brilliance, her failings, her unreasonableness, all these are excellent signs of her revolt. She is even revolting against her own beauty; often she neglects her clothes, her hair, her complexion, her teeth. This is a pity, but it must not be taken too seriously: men on active service grow beards, and woman in her emancipation campaign is still too busy to think of the art of charming. I suspect that as time passes and she suffers less intolerably from a sense of injustice, she will revert to the old graces. The art of charming was a response to convention; and of late years unconventionality, a great deal of which is ridiculous, has grown much more among women than among men. That is not wonderful, for there were so many things woman might not do. Almost any movement would bring her up against a barrier; that is why it seems that she does nothing in the world except break barriers. How genuine woman's rebellion is, no man can say. It may be that woman's impulse toward male occupations and rights is only a reaction against the growing difficulty of gaining a mate, children, and a home. But I very much more believe that woman is straining toward a new order, that the swift evolution of her mind is leading her to contest more and more violently the assumption that there are ineradicable differences between the male and the female mind. As she grows more capable of grasping at education, she will become more worthy of it; her intellect will harden, tend to resemble that of man; and so, having escaped from the emptiness of the past into the special fields which have been conceded her, she will make for broader fields, fields so vast that they will embrace the world.

II

FEMINIST INTENTIONS

1

The Feminist propaganda—which should not be confounded with the Suffrage agitation—rests upon a revolutionary biological principle. Substantially, the Feminists argue that there are no men and that there are no women; there are only sexual majorities. To put the matter less obscurely, the Feminists base themselves on Weininger's theory, according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the female principle in man. It follows that they recognize no masculine or feminine "spheres", and that they propose to identify absolutely the conditions of the sexes.

Now there are two kinds of people who labor under illusions as regards the Feminist movement, its opponents and its supporters: both sides tend to limit the area of its influence; in few cases does either realize the movement as revolutionary. The methods are to have revolutionary results, are destined to be revolutionary; as a convinced but cautious Feminist, I do not think it honest or advisable to conceal this fact. I have myself been charged by a very well-known English author (whose name I may not give, as the charge was contained in a private letter) with having "let the cat out of the bag" in my little book, Woman and To-morrow. Well, I do not think it right that the cat should be kept in the bag. Feminists should not want to triumph by fraud. As promoters of a sex war, they should not hesitate to declare it, and I have little sympathy with the pretenses of those who contend that one may alter everything while leaving everything unaltered.

An essential difference between "Feminism" and "Suffragism" is that the Suffrage is but part of the greater propaganda; while Suffragism desires to remove an inequality, Feminism purports to alter radically the mental attitudes of men and women. The sexes are to be induced to recognize each other's status, and to bring this recognition to such a point that equality will not even be challenged. Thus Feminists are interested rather in ideas than in facts; if, for instance, they wish to make accessible to women the profession of barrister, it is not because they wish women to practice as barristers, but because they want men to view without surprise the fact that women may be barristers. And they have no use for knightliness and chivalry.

Therein lies the mental revolution: while the Suffragists are content to attain immediate ends, the Feminists are aiming at ultimate ends. They contend that it is unhealthy for the race that man should not recognize woman as his equal; that this makes him intolerant, brutal, selfish, and sentimentally insincere. They believe likewise that the race suffers because women do not look upon men as their peers; that this makes them servile, untruthful, deceitful, narrow, and in every sense inferior. More particularly concerned with women, it is naturally upon them and their problems that they are bringing their first attention to bear.

The word "inferior" at once arouses comment, for here the Feminist often distinguishes himself from the Suffragist. He frequently accepts woman's present inferiority, but he believes this inferiority to be transient, not permanent. He considers that by removing the handicaps imposed upon women, they will be able to win an adequate proportion of races. His case against the treatment of women covers every form of human relation: the arts, the home, the trades, and marriage. In every one of these directions he proposes to make revolutionary changes.

The question of the arts need not long detain us. It is perfectly clear that woman has had in the past neither the necessary artistic training, nor the necessary atmosphere of encouragement; that families have been reluctant to spend money on their daughter's music, her painting, her literary education, with the lavishness demanded of them by their son's professional or business career. Feminists believe that when men and women have been leveled, this state of things will cease to prevail.

In the trades, English Feminists resent the fact that women are excluded from the law, generally speaking, the ministry, the higher ranks of business and of the Civil Service and so forth, and practically from hospital appointments; also that women are paid low wages for work similar to that of men.

They complain too that the home demands of woman too great an expenditure of energy, too much time, too much labor; that the concentration of her mind upon the continual purchasing and cooking of food, on cleaning, on the care of the child, is unnecessarily developed; they doubt if the home can be maintained as it is if woman is to develop as a free personality.

With marriage, lastly, they are perhaps most concerned. Though they are not in the main prepared to advocate free union, they are emphatically arrayed against modern marriage, which they look upon as slave union. The somewhat ridiculous modifications of the marriage service introduced by a few couples in America and by one in England, in which the word "obey" was deleted from the bride's pledge, can be taken as indicative of the Feminist attitude. Their grievances against the home, against the treatment of women in the trades, are closely connected with the marriage question, for they believe that the desire of man to have a housekeeper, of woman to have a protector, deeply influence the complexion of unions which they would base exclusively upon love, and it follows that they do not accept as effective marriage any union where the attitudes of love do not exist. For them who favor absolute equality, partnership, sharing of responsibilities and privileges, modern marriage represents a condition of sex-slavery into which woman is frequently compelled to enter because she needs to live, and in which she must often remain, however abominable the conditions under which the union is maintained, because man, master of the purse, is master of the woman.

Generally, then, the Feminists are in opposition to most of the world institutions. For them the universe is based upon the subjection of woman: subjection by law, and subjection by convention. Before considering what modifications the Feminists wish to introduce into the social system, a few words must be said as to this distinction between convention and the law.

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Convention, which is nothing but petrified habit, has lain upon woman perhaps more heavily than any law, for the law can be eluded with comparative ease, and she who eludes it may very well become a heroine, merely because we are mostly anarchists and dislike the law. Every man is in himself a minority, and is opposed to the law because the law is the expression of the will of the majority, that is to say, the will of the vulgar, of the norm. But convention is far more subtle: it is the result of the common agreement of wills. Therefore, as it is a product of unanimity, the penalties which follow on the infractions of its behests are terrible; she who infringes it becomes, not a heroine, but an outcast. The law is, then, nothing by the side of etiquette.

Hence Feminist propaganda. While the Suffragists wish to alter the law, the Feminists wish to alter also the conventions. It may not be too much to say that they would almost be content with existing laws if they could change the point of view of man, make him take for granted that women may smoke, or ride astride, or fight; cease to be surprised because Madame Dieulafoy chooses to wear trousers; briefly, renounce the subjective fetich of sex. Still, as they realize that states become more socialistic every day, they realize also that through the law only can they hope to change manners. The mental revolution which they intend to effect must therefore be prefaced by a legal revolution.

The first Feminist intention is economic,—proceeds on two lines:

1. They intend to open every occupation to women.

2. They intend to level the wages of women and men.

As regards the first point, they are not as a rule unreasonable. If they demand that women should practice the law as they do in France, preach the Gospel as they do in the United States of America, bear arms, as in Dahomey, it is not because they attach any great value to these occupations, but because they consider that any limitation put upon woman's activities is intrinsically degrading; so keenly do they feel this, that some serious Feminists took part some years ago in the controversy on, "Are there female angels?"

The second point is more important. It is a well-established fact that women are paid less than men for the same work: for instance, in England, women begin at wages which are less than those of men as teachers, post-office and other civil servants. The Feminists are not prepared to agree that this condition is due to some inherent inferiority of woman: in their view her inferiority is transitory, is due to her inferior position. One Feminist, C. Gascoigne Hartley, in The Truth About Women, outlines a bold hypothesis: "What, then, is the real cause of the lowness of remuneration offered to women for work when compared with men? Thousands of women and girls receive wages that are insufficient to support life. They do not die, they live; but how? The answer is plain. Woman possesses a marketable value attached to her personality which man has not got. The woman's sex is a saleable thing." Briefly, if a woman works less well than a man, less fast, less continuously, it is because she is inadequately rewarded. They reverse the common position that woman is not well paid because woman is not competent, basing themselves on the parallel that liberty alone fits men for liberty. They argue that woman is not competent because she is not well paid; consequently, those Feminists who are inclined toward Radicalism in politics demand a minimum wage in all trades, which shall be the same for women and men.

The economic change will be brought about by revolutionary methods, by sex strikes and sex wars. The gaining of the vote is, in the Feminist's view, nothing but an affair of outposts. Conscious propagandists do not intend to allow the female vote to be split as it might recently have been between Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft. They intend to use the vote to make women vote as women, and not as citizens; that is to say, they propose to sell the female vote en bloc to the party that bids highest for it in the economic field. To the party that will, as a preliminary, pledge itself to level male and female wages in government employ, will be given the Feminist vote; and if no party will bid, then it is the Feminist intention to run special candidates for all offices, to split the male parties, and to involve them in consecutive disasters such as the one which befell the Republican party in the last presidential election in the United States.

Side by side with this purely political action, Feminists intend to use industrial strikes in exactly the same manner as do the Syndicalist railwaymen, miners, and postmen of Europe; well aware that they have captured a number of trades, such as millinery, domestic service, restaurant attendance, and so forth, and large portions of other trades, such as cotton-spinning in Lancashire, they propose to use as a basis the vote and the political education that follows thereon, to induce women to group themselves in women's trade-unions, by means of which they will hold up trades, and when they are strong enough, hold up society itself.

I enunciate these views with full sympathy, which can hardly be refused when one realizes that the sweated trades are almost entirely in the hands of women,—laundry, box-making, toys, artificial flowers, and the like. The fact that the underpaid trades are women's trades, and that the British Government has been compelled to institute wage-boards to bring up women's pay from four cents an hour to the imposing figure of six cents, and the recent white-slavery investigations in America, are evidence enough that public opinion should hesitate before blaming any industrial steps women may choose to take. For it should not be forgotten that woman risks more than comfort and health, and that the underpayment of her sex often forces her to degradation.

Conscious of the temporary inferiority of woman, an inferiority traceable to centuries of neglect and belittling patronage, the Feminists propose to increase woman's power by making her fitter for power. They are well aware that the enormous majority of women receive but an inferior education, that in their own homes, especially in the South of England, they are not encouraged to read the newspaper (which I believe to be a more powerful instrument of intellectual development than the average serious book), and that any attempt on their part to acquire more information, to attend lectures, to join debating clubs, tends to lower their "charm value" in the eyes of men. That point of view they are determined to alter in the male. They propose to kill the prejudice by the hom[oe]opathic method: that is to say, to educate woman more because man thinks she is already too educated. Briefly, to kill poison by more poison. For this purpose they intend to throw open education of all grades to women as well as to men, to remove such differences as exist in England, where a woman cannot obtain an Oxford or Cambridge degree. They propose to raise the school age of both sexes, and to not less than sixteen. The object of this, so far as women are concerned, is to prevent the exploitation of little girls of fourteen, notably as domestic servants.

Some Feminists favor co-education, on the plea that it enables the sexes to understand each other, and these build principally on the success of American schools. A more violent section, however, desires to place the education of girls entirely in the hands of women, partly because they wish to enhance the sex war, and partly because they consider that continual intercourse between the sexes tends to deprive ultimate love of its mystery and its charm. But both sections fully agree that the broadest possible education must be given to every woman, so as to fit her for contest with every man.

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So much, then, for the mental revolution and its eventual effects on the position of women in the arts, the trades, and the schools. In the industrial section, especially, we have already had an indication of the main line of the Feminist attitude, a claim to a right to choose. This right is indeed the only one for which the Feminists are struggling, and they struggle for those obscure reasons which lie at the root of our wish to live and to perpetuate the race. It is no wonder, then, that the Feminists should have designs upon the most fundamental of human institutions, marriage and motherhood.

In the main, Feminists are opposed to indissoluble Christian marriage. Some satisfaction has been given to them in a great many states by the extension of divorce facilities, but they are not content with piecemeal reform such as has been carried out in the United States, for they realize quite well that divorce cuts both ways, and that it is not satisfactory for a wife to be married in one state, and divorced under a slack law in another. Indeed I believe that one of the first Feminist demands in America would be for a federal marriage law.

But alterations in the law are minor points by the side of the emotional revolution that is to be engineered. Roughly speaking, we have to-day reasonable men and instinctive women. Such notably was Ibsen's view: "Woman cannot escape her primitive emotions." But he thought she should control these inevitables so far as possible: "As soon as woman no longer dominates her passions, she fails to achieve her objects."[6] The distinction between reason and instinct, however, is not so wide as it seems; for reason is merely the conscious use of observation, while instinct is the unconscious use of the same faculty; but as the trend of Feminism is to make woman self-conscious and sex-conscious, the Feminists can be said broadly to be warring against instinct, and on the side of reason. They look upon instinct as indicative of a low mentality. For instance, the horse is less instinctive than the zebra, and a curious instance of this was yielded by certain horses in the South African war, which were unable to crop the grass because they had always eaten from mangers. Civilization, we may say, had caused the horses to degenerate, but nobody will contend that the horse is not more intelligent than the zebra, more capable of love, even of thought. Briefly, the horse approximates more closely to a reasonable being than does the instinctive wild beast.

The Feminists therefore propose, by training woman's reason, to place her beyond the scope of mere emotion and mere prejudice, to enable her to judge, to select a mate for herself and a father for her children,—a double and necessary process.

There is a flavor of eugenics about these ideas: the right to choose means that women wish to be placed in such a position that, being economically independent to the extent of having equal opportunities, they will not be compelled to sell themselves in marriage as they now very often do. I do not refer to entirely loveless marriages, for these are not very common in Anglo-Saxon states, but to marriages dictated by the desire of woman to escape the authority of her parents, and to gain the dignity of a wife, the possession of a home and of money to spend. In the Feminist view, these are bad unions because love does not play the major part in them, and often plays hardly any part at all. The Feminists believe that the educated woman, informed on the subject of sex-relations, able to earn her own living, to maintain a political argument, will not fall an easy prey to the offer held out to her by a man who will be her master, because he will have bought her on a truck system.

Under Feminist rule, women will be able to select, because they will be able to sweep out of their minds the monetary consideration; therefore they will love better, and unless they love, they will not marry at all. It is therefore probable that they will raise the standard of masculine attractiveness by demanding physical and mental beauty in those whom they choose; that they will apply personal eugenics. The men whom they do not choose will find themselves in exactly the same position as the old maids of modern times: that is to say, these men, if they are unwed, will be unwed because they have chosen to remain so, or because they were not sought in marriage. The eugenic characteristic appears, in that women will no longer consent to accept as husbands the old, the vicious, the unpleasant. They will tend to choose the finest of the species, and those likely to improve the race. As the Feminist revolution implies a social revolution, notably "proper work for proper pay", it follows that marriage will be easy, and that those women who wish to mate will not be compelled to wait indefinitely for the consummation of their loves. Incidentally, also, the Feminists point out that their proposals hold forth to men a far greater chance of happiness than they have had hitherto, for they will be sure that the women who select them do so because they love them, and not because they need to be supported.

This does not mean that Feminism is entirely a creed of reason; indeed a number of militant Feminists who collected round the English paper, The Freewoman, have as an article of their faith that one of the chief natural needs of woman and society is not less passion, but more. If they wish to raise women's wages, to give them security, education, opportunity, it is because they want to place them beyond material temptations, to make them independent of a protector, so that nothing may stand in the way of the passionate development of their faculties. To this effect, of course, they propose to introduce profound changes in the conception of marriage itself.

Without committing themselves to free union, the Feminists wish to loosen the marriage tie, and they might not be averse to making marriage less easy, to raising, for instance, the marriage age for both sexes; but as they are well aware that, in the present state of human passions, impediments to marriage would lead merely to an increase in irregular alliances, they lay no stress upon that point. Moreover, as they are not prepared to admit that any moral damage ensues when woman contracts more than one alliance in the course of her life,—which view is accepted very largely in the United States, and in all countries with regard to widows,—they incline rather to repair the effects of bad marriages, than to prevent their occurrence.

Plainly speaking, the Feminists desire simpler divorce. They are to a certain extent ready to surround divorce with safeguards, so as to prevent the young from rushing into matrimony; indeed they might "steep up" the law of the "Divorce States." On the other hand, they would introduce new causes for divorce where they do not already exist, and they would make them the same for women and men. For instance, in Great Britain a divorce can be granted to a man on account of the infidelity of his wife, while it can be granted to a woman only if to infidelity the husband adds cruelty or desertion. Such a difference the Feminists would sweep away, and they would probably add to the existing causes certain others, such as infectious and incurable diseases, chronic drunkenness, insanity, habitual cruelty, and lengthy desertion. It should be observed that the campaign is thus as favorable to men as it is to women, for many men who have now no relief would gain it under the new laws. As Feminism is international, the programme of course includes the introduction of divorce where it does not exist,—in Austria, Spain, South American states, and so forth.

What exact form the new divorce laws would take, I cannot at present say, for Feminism is as evolutionary as it is revolutionary, and Feminists are prepared to accept transitory measures of reform. Thus, in the existing circumstances, they would accept a partial extension of divorce facilities, subject to an adequate provision for all children. In the ultimate condition, to which I refer later on, this might not be necessary, but as a temporary expedient, Feminists desire to protect woman while she is developing from the chattel condition to the free-woman condition. Until she is fit for her new liberty, it is necessary that she should be enabled to use this liberty without paying too heavy a price therefor. Indeed this clash between the transitory and the ultimate is one of the difficulties of Feminism. The rebels must accept situations such as the financial responsibility of man, while they struggle to make woman financially independent of man, and it is for this reason that different proposals appear in the works of Ellen Key, Rosa Mayreder, Charlotte Gilman, Olive Schreiner, and others, but these divergences need not trouble us, for Feminism is an inspiration rather than a gospel, and if it lays down a programme, it is a temporary programme.

Personally, I am inclined to believe that the ultimate aim of Feminism with regard to marriage is the practical suppression of marriage and the institution of free alliance. It may be that thus only can woman develop her own personality, but society itself must so greatly alter, do so very much more than equalize wages and provide work for all, that these ultimate ends seem very distant. They lie beyond the decease of Capitalism itself, for they imply a change in the nature of the human being which is not impossible when we consider that man has changed a great deal since the Stone Age, but is still inconceivably radical.

Ultimate ends of Feminism will be attained only when socialization shall have been so complete that the human being will no longer require the law, but will be able to obey some obscure but noble categorical imperative; when men and women can associate voluntarily, without thrall of the State, for the production and enjoyment of the goods of life. How this will be achieved, by what propaganda, by what struggles and by what battles, is difficult to say; but in common with many Feminists I incline to place a good deal of reliance on the ennobling of the nature of the male. That there is a sex war, and will be a sex war, I do not deny, but the entry of women into the modern world of art and business shows that an immense enlightenment has come over the male, that he no longer wishes to crush as much as he did, and therefore that he is loving better and more sanely. Therein lies a profound lesson: if men do not make war upon women, women will not make war upon men. I have spoken of sex war, but it takes two sides to make a war, and I do not see that in the event of conflict the Feminists can alone be guilty.

One feature manifests itself, and that is a change of attitude in woman with regard to the child. Indications in modern novels and modern conversation are not wanting to show that a type of woman is arising who believes in a new kind of matriarchate, that is to say, in a state of society where man will not figure in the life of woman except as the father of her child. Two cases have come to my knowledge where English women have been prepared to contract alliances with men with whom they did not intend to pass their lives,—this because they desired a child. They consider that the child is the expression of the feminine personality, while after the child's birth, the husband becomes a mere excrescence. They believe that the "Wife" should die in childbirth, and the "Mother" rise from her ashes. There is nothing utopian about this point of view, if we agree that Feminists can so rearrange society as to provide every woman with an independent living; and I do not say that this is the prevalent view. It is merely one view, and I do not believe it will be carried to the extreme, for the association of human beings in couples appears to respond to some deep need; still, it should be taken into account as an indication of sex revolt.

That part of the programme belongs to the ultimates. Among the transitory ideas, that is, the ideas which are to fit Feminism into the modern State, are the endowment of motherhood and the lien on wages. The Feminists do not commit themselves to a view on the broad social question whether it is desirable to encourage or discourage births. Taking births as they happen, they lay down that a woman being incapacitated from work for a period of weeks or months while she is giving birth to a child, her liberty can be secured only if the fact of the birth gives her a call upon the State. Failing this, she must have a male protector in whose favor she must abdicate her rights because he is her protector. As man is not handicapped in his work by becoming a father, they propose to remove the disability that lies upon woman by supplying her with the means of livelihood for a period surrounding the birth, of not less than six weeks, which some place at three months. There is nothing wild in this scheme, for the British Insurance Act (1912) gives a maternity endowment of seven dollars and fifty cents whether a mother be married or single. The justice of the proposal may be doubted by some, but I do not think its expediency will be questioned. On mere grounds of humanity, it is barbarous to compel a woman to labor while she is with child; on social grounds it is not advantageous for the race to allow her to do so: premature births, child-murder, child-neglect by working mothers, all these facts point to the social value of the endowment.

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The last of the transitory measures is the lien on wages. In the present state of things, women who work in the home depend for money on husbands or fathers. The fact of having to ask is, in the Feminists' view, a degradation. They suggest that the housekeeper should be entitled to a proportion of the man's income or salary, and one of them, Mrs. M. H. Wood, picturesquely illustrates her case by saying that she hopes to do away with "pocket-searching" while the man is asleep. Mrs. Wood's ideas certainly deserve sympathy; though many men pay their wives a great deal more than they are worth and are shamefully exploited—a common modern position—it is also quite true that many others expect their wives to run their household on inadequate allowances, and to come to them for clothes or pleasure in a manner which establishes the man as a pasha. When women have grown economically independent, no lien on wages will be required, but meanwhile it is interesting to observe that there has recently been formed in England a society called "The Home-makers' Trade Union", one of whose specific objects is, "To insist as a right on a proper proportion of men's earnings being paid to wives for the support of the home."

Generally speaking, then, it is clear that women are greatly concerned with the race, for all these demands—support of the mother, support of the child, rights of the household—are definitely directed toward the benevolent control by the woman of her home and her child. I have alluded above to these Feminist intentions: they affect the immediate conditions as well as the ultimate.

Among the ultimates is a logical consequence of the right of woman to be represented by women. So long as Parliamentary Government endures, or any form of authority endures, the Feminists will demand a share in this authority. It has been the custom during the Suffrage campaign to pretend that women demand merely the vote. The object of this is to avoid frightening the men, and it may well be that a number of Suffragists honestly believe that they are asking for no more than the vote, while a few, who confess that they want more, add that it is not advisable to say so; they are afraid to "let the cat out of the bag", but they will not rest until all Parliaments, all Cabinets, all Boards are open to women, until the Presidential chair is as accessible to them as is the English throne. Already in Norway women have entered the National Assembly: they propose to do so everywhere. They will not hesitate to claim women's votes for women candidates until they have secured the representation which they think is their right, that is, one half.

These are the bases, roughly outlined, on which can be established a lasting peace.

I do not want to exaggerate the difficulties and perils which are bound up in this revolutionary movement, but it is abundantly clear that it presupposes profound changes in the nature of women and of men. While man will be asked for more liberalism and be expected to develop his sense of justice (which has too long lain at the mercy of his erratic and sentimental generosity), woman will have to modify her outlook. She is now too often vain, untruthful, disloyal, avaricious, vampiric; briefly she has the characteristics of the slave. She will have to slough off these characteristics while she is becoming free, she will have to justify by her mental ascent the increase in her power. Feminists are not blind to this, and that is why they lay such stress upon education and propaganda.

One of the most profound changes will, I think, appear in sex relations. The "New Woman", as we know her to-day, a woman who is not so new as the woman who will be born of her, is a very unpleasant product; armed with a little knowledge, she tends to be dogmatic in her views and offensive in argument. She tends to hate men, and to look upon Feminism as a revenge; she adopts mannish ways, tends to shout, to contradict, to flout principles because they are principles; also she affects a contempt for marriage which is the natural result of her hatred of man. The New Woman has not the support of the saner Feminists. Says Ellen Key, in The Woman Movement, "These cerebral, amaternal women must obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the domestic life, with its limited but intensive exercise of power, meagre beside the feeling of power which they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate women of the world, as talented professionals. But they have not the right to falsify life values in their own favor so that they themselves shall represent the highest form of life, the 'human personality', in comparison with which the 'instinctive feminine' signifies a lower stage of development, a poorer type of life." If this were the ultimate type, very few men would be found in the Feminist camp, for the coming of the New Woman would mean the death of love. If the death of love had to be the price of woman's emancipation, I, for one, would support the institution of the zenana and the repression of woman by brute force; but I do not think we need be anxious.

If the New Woman is so aggressive, it is because she must be aggressive if she is to win her battle. We cannot expect people who are laboring under a sense of intolerable injury to set politely about the righting of that injury: when woman has entered her kingdom she will no longer have to resort to political nagging; her true nature will affirm itself for the first time, for it is difficult to believe that it has been able to affirm itself under the entirely artificial conditions of androcracy. Already some women to whom a profession or mental eminence has given exceptional freedom show us in society that women can be free and yet be sweet. Indeed they almost demonstrate the Feminist contention that women must be free before they are sweet, for are not these women—of whom all of us can name a few—the noblest and most desirable of their kind? The New Woman is like a freshly painted railing: whoever touches it will stain his hands, but the railing will dry in time.

There is one type of woman, however, whom I venture to call "Old Woman", who is probably a bitterer foe of Feminism than any man, and that is the super-feminine type, the woman for whom nothing exists except her sex, who has no interests except the decking of her body and the quest of men. This woman, who once dominated her own species, still represents the majority of her sex. It is still true that the majority of women are concerned with little save the fashions, novels, plays, and vaudeville turns. These women want to have "a good time" and want nothing more; they are ready to prey upon men by flattering them; they encourage their own weakness, which they call "charm", and generally aim at being pampered slaves, because, from their point of view, it pays better than being working partners. Evidence of this is to be found in women's shops, in the continual change in fashions, each of which is a signal to the male, and in the continual increase in the sums spent on adornment: it is not uncommon for a rich woman to spend five hundred dollars on a frock; two hundred and fifty dollars has been given for a hat; and twenty-five thousand dollars for a set of furs.

As Miss Beatrice Tina very well says, "Woman is woman's worst enemy", though she is not referring to this type. So long as woman maintains this attitude, compels men to forget her soul in the contemplation of her body, so long will she remain a slave, for this preoccupation goes further than clothes.

In a book recently published,[7] an account is given of the late Empress of Austria, who was evidently one of the lowest of the slave type. It is noteworthy that she had no love for her children because their coming had impaired her beauty. Now I do not suggest that Feminists are arrayed against the care of the body; far from it, for the campaign has many associates among those who support physical culture, the fresh-air movement, ancient costume revival, and the like; but Feminists are well aware that concentration on adornment diverts woman from the development of her brain and her soul, and enhances in her the characteristics of the harem favorite. One tentative suggestion is being made, and that is a uniform for women. The interested parties point out that men practically wear uniform, that there is hardly any change from year to year in their costume, and that any undue adornment of the male is looked upon as bad form. Thus, while few men can with impunity spend more than five hundred dollars a year on their clothes, many women do not consider themselves happy unless they can dispose of anything between five and twenty times that amount. This, while involving the household in difficulties, lowers the status of woman by lowering her mentality.

Feminists do not ask for sumptuary laws, having very little respect for the law, but for a new vision, which is this: Man, intellectually developed, decks himself in no finery, because it is not essential to his success; woman must likewise abandon frippery if she is to have energy enough to reach his plane. They propose to attain their object by the force of their example, and I have received several letters on the subject, which show that the idea of fixing the fashions is not entirely wild, for fashion consists after all in wearing what everybody wears, and if an influential movement is started to maintain the costume of women on a very simple basis, it may very well prevail and kill much of their purely imitative vanity by showing them that undue devotion to self-adornment is very much worse than immoral: in other words, that it is in bad taste.

Incidentally the Feminists believe that the downfall of many women is procured by the offer of fine clothes. They hope, therefore, to derive some side-profits from the simplification of woman's dress.

The question also arises as to whether woman can become intellectually independent, whether she does not naturally depend upon the opinion of man. It is suggested that not even rich women are actually independent, that women place marriage above their art, their work; but I do not think this is a very solid objection, for the vaunted independence of men is not so very common; they currently take many of their opinions from their reading in newspapers and books, and must often subordinate their views and their conduct to the will of their employer. The main answer to this suggestion is that we must not consider woman as she was, but woman "as she is becoming", as a creature of infinite potentialities, as virgin ground.

It may be petitio principii to say that, as woman has produced so much that is fine, she would have produced very much more if she had not been hampered by law and custom, derided by the male, but bad logic is often good sense. This should commend itself to men who are no longer willing to support the idea that women are inherently inferior to them, but who are willing to give them an opportunity to develop in every field of human activity. Thus and thus only, if man will readjust his views, expel vir and enthrone homo, can woman cease to appear before him as a rival and a foe, realize herself in her natural and predestined role, that of partner and mate.[8]

III

UNIFORMS FOR WOMEN

1

The change which has come over politics reflects closely enough the change which has come about in the direction of man's desire. In times of peace, diplomacy and the affairs of kings have given place to wages and the housing of the poor; that which was serious has become pompous; that which was of no account now stands in the foreground. And so it is not absurd to suggest that one of those things which once made jests for the comic paper and the Victorian paterfamilias has, little by little, with the spread of wealth, become a problem of the day, a problem profound and menacing, full of intimations of social decay, not far remote in its reactions from the spread of a disease.

That problem is the problem of women's dress, or rather it is the problem of the fashions in women's dress. Women have never been content merely to clothe themselves, nor, for the matter of that, until very recently, have men; but men have grown a new sanity, while women, if we read aright the signs of the times, have grown naught save a new insanity. We have come to a point where, for a great number of women, the fashions have become the motive power of life, and where, for almost every woman, they have acquired great importance. Women classify each other according to their clothes; they have corrupted the drama into a showroom; they have completely ruined the more expensive parts of the opera house; they have invaded the newspapers in myriad paragraphs, in fashion-pages, and do not spare even the august columns of the most dignified papers. This preoccupation does not exist among men. We have had our dandies and we still have our "nuts" and dudes; but it never served a man very well to be a dandy or a beau, and most of us to-day suspect that if the "nut" were broken, he would be found to contain no kernel.

Men have escaped the fashions and therewith they have spared themselves much loss of energy and money. For it is not only the fashions that matter: it is the cost of women's clothes, the intrinsic cost; it is their continual changes for no reason, changes which sometimes produce, and sometimes destroy, beauty; sometimes promote comfort, and often cause torture. But always by their drafts upon its wealth, women lead humanity nearer to poverty, envy, discontent, frivolity, starvation, prostitution,—to general social degradation. Nothing can mitigate these evils until woman is induced to view clothing as does the modern man, until, namely, she decides to wear a uniform.

2

The costliness of women's clothes would not be so serious if the fashions did not change at so bewildering a speed. We have come to a point where women have not time to wear out their clothes, flimsy though they be; where we ought to welcome the adulteration of silk and wool; where we ought to hope that every material may get shoddier and more worthless, so that the new model may have a chance to justify its short life by the badness of the stuff. To-day women will quite openly say, "I won't buy that. I couldn't wear it out." They actually want to wear out their clothes! The causes of this are obvious enough. We are told that there are "rings" in Paris, London, and Vienna which decree every few months that the clothes of yesterday have become a social stigma; this is true, but much truer is the view that women are in the grasp of a new hysteria; that, lacking the old occupations of brewing, baking, child-rearing, spinning, they are desperately looking for something to do. They have found it: they are undoing the social system.

It was not always so. It is true that all through history, even in biblical times, moralists and preachers inveighed against the gewgaws that woman loves. They cried out before they were hurt; if he were alive to-day, Bossuet might, for the first time, fail to find words.

To the old curse of cost we have added change, as any student of costume will confirm; for in past ages the clothing of women did not change very rapidly. There is hardly any difference between the costume of 1755 and that which Queen Marie Leszczynska wore ten years later; in Greece, between B.C. 500 and 400, the Ionic chiton and himation varied but little; the Doric chiton did not vary at all; the variations in the over-mantle were not considerable. Any examination of early sculpture, of Attic vases, or of terra cottas, will show that this is true. The ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court, together with their royal mistress, wore the same kind of clothes through their adult years. Their clothes were sometimes costly, but when bought they were bought, and until worn out were not discarded. And our grandmothers had that famous black-silk dress, so sturdy that it stood up by itself, very like a Victorian virtue; it lasted a lifetime, sometimes became an heirloom.

There was no question then of fashion following on fashion at a whirling pace. Women were clothed, sometimes beautifully, sometimes hideously, but at any rate they scrapped their gowns only when they were worn out; now they scrap them as soon as they have been worn. The results of this I deal with further on, but here already I can suggest these results by quoting a few facts. Before me lies one of Messrs. Barker's advertisements; it seems that there are reception gowns, restaurant gowns; that there are coats for the races, and coats for the car, wraps for one thing, and wraps for another—and the advertisement adds that these are the "latest novelties" for "the coming season", and that all this is "for the spring." And then there is an advertisement of Messrs. Tudor Brothers, who have gowns for Ascot, and—this is quite true—gowns for Alexandra Day.

I have looked in vain for gowns for July 23, for gowns to be worn between a quarter past eleven and half-past twelve in the morning, and for special mourning gowns for a cousin's stepfather. Some occasions are shamefully disregarded. They are not disregarded by everybody; at least I presume that the lady quoted by Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson in her lecture in March, who possessed one hundred and ten nightdresses, could cope with any eventuality; there is also the lady, mentioned to me by a friend who made some American investigations for me, who possesses one hundred and fifty pairs of slippers. There is, too, the Bon Marché in Paris, where, out of a staff of six thousand to seven thousand, are employed fifteen hundred dressmakers, and where there is a special workroom for the creation of models.

As all these people must find something to do, they create, unless they merely steal from the dead; but one thing they always do, and that is destroy yesterday. Out of their activities comes a continual stream of new colors and new combinations of colors, of high heels and low heels, gilt heels and jeweled heels; they give us the spat that is to keep out the wet and then the spat that does not keep out the eye. Before me lies a picture of a spat made of lace; another of a skirt slit so high as to reveal a jeweled garter. That is creation, and I suppose I shall be told that that is art. It is art sometimes, and very beautiful, but beauty does not make it live; in fact beauty causes the creation to die more swiftly, because the more appealing it is, the more it is worn: as soon as it is worn by the many, the furious craving for distinction sweeps down upon it and slays it. There are several mad women in the St. Anne asylum in Paris whose peculiar disease is that they cannot retain the same idea for more than a few seconds; they ring the changes on a few hundreds of ideas. Properly governed, their inspirations might be valuable in Grafton Street.

I do not think the end is near; indeed, fashions will be more extreme to-morrow than they are to-day. The continual growth of wealth, and the difficulty of spending it when it clots in a few hands, will make for a greater desire to spend more, more quickly, more continually, and in wilder and wilder forms. The women are to-day having individual orgies; to-morrow will come the saturnalia.

3

There is a clear difference between the cost of women's clothes and of men's. It is absolutely impossible to dress a woman of the comfortable classes for the same amount per annum that will serve her husband well. I must quote a few figures taken from Boston, New York, and London.

Boston.—Persons considered: those having $4500 to $7500 a year.

Average price of a suit (coat and skirt), $40 ready to wear; made by a dressmaker of slight pretensions, $125 to $225.

Afternoon dresses, ready to wear, $125 to $225.

Evening dresses, absolute minimum, $50; fashionable frocks, $200 to $350.

On an income of $7500 a woman's hat will cost $25; variation, $20 to $45; hats easily attain $125.

Veils attain $5. Opera cloaks in stores, $90 to $250. Dressmakers charge $450 to $600.

New York.—Winter street dress, $225.

Skunk muff and stole, $200.

Hats for the year, at least $250 to $300.

Footwear, $250 per annum.

I am informed that a lady in active society can "manage with care" on $2500, but really needs $4500 to $5000.

A "moderate" wardrobe allows for "extremely simple" gowns costing $125 each; the lady in question requires at least six new evening dresses and six remodeled, per annum. She wore an average set of furs, price $1500.

London.—Debenham & Freebody blouse, $10.

Ponting's Leghorn hat, $8. Gorringe straws, $12 to $14.

I am informed that where the household income is $3500 to $7500 a year the ordinary prices are as follows:

Coats and skirts, $50 to $75.

Evening dresses, $75 to $120.

Hats, $7.50 to $20.

Silk stockings are cheap at $1.50, and veils at $1.50.

Now these are all moderate figures and will shock nobody, but if they are compared with the prices paid by men, they are, without any question of fashion, outrageous. I believe they are high because it is men and not women who pay, because the dressmaker trades on man's sex-enslavement. But I am concerned just now less with causes than with facts, and would rather ask how the modest $100 evening gown compares with the man's $63 dress suit (by a good tailor). How does the $63 coat and skirt compare with a man's lounge suit, price $36 by anybody save Poole, and by him only $52.50? No man has, I believe, paid more than $9 for a silk hat, while his wife pays at least $20. The point is not worth laboring, it is obvious; while every man knows that a "good cut" does not account for the discrepancy, as he too pays, but pays moderately, for the art of a good tailor. And, mark you, apart from cost, men's clothes last indefinitely, while women's, if they have the misfortune to last, must be given away.

The prices I have quoted are moderate prices, and I cannot resist the temptation to give some others which are not unusual. I am informed that $400 can easily be charged for an afternoon dress, $1000 for an evening dress, $200 for a coat and skirt; that it is quite easy to spend $5000 a year on underclothes and $250 on an aigrette. I observe a Maison Lewis Ascot hat, price $477. Yantorny will not make a shoe under $60; a pair of his shoes made of feathers is priced by him at $2400.

As for totals: I have private information of an expenditure of $30,000 a year on dress; one of $70,000 is reported to me from America. I have seen a bill for dress and lingerie alone, incurred at one shop, for $35,000 in twelve months.

4

It might be thought that this ghastly picture speaks for itself, but evidently it does not, as hardly anybody takes any notice of the question. I will venture to draw attention to the results of what is happening, ignoring the abnormal figures, because I wish to reason from what happens all the time rather than from what happens now and then, to figure the position in which the world finds itself because women do not hesitate to spend upon their clothes a full ten per cent of the household income. This figure is correct: such inquiries as I have been able to make among women of my acquaintance prove it. Out of a joint income of $12,500 a year one woman spends $1350 a year on clothes; another, out of $5750 a year, last year $655; a third, out of $8000 a year $700, but she is a "dowdy."

In households of moderate means, where a certain social status is kept up, where, for instance, a woman takes $500 a year out of $5000, while her husband dresses well on $200, when all expenses have been paid, there is money for little else; fixed charges, children, service, taxes, swallow up the rest. There is hardly anything left for books, barely for a circulating library; there is very little for the theater and for games; holidays are taken in hideous lodgings at the seaside because a comfortable bungalow costs too much. The money that should have provided the most important thing in human life, namely pleasure, is on the woman's back.

In the lower classes the case is, in a way, still worse. I do not mean workmen's wives, for any old rag will serve the slaves,—but their daughters! Recently a coroner's inquest in Soho showed that a girl had practically starved herself to death to buy fine clothes, and it is not an isolated case. For the last eight years I have been investigating the condition of workwomen, and, so far as typists, manicurists, and tea-shop girls are concerned, I assert that their main object in leaving the homes where they are kept is to have money for smart clothes; they flood the labor market at blackleg prices, to buy finery and for no other reason. They go further: while making the necessary inquiries for my novel, A Bed of Roses, I scheduled the cases of about forty London prostitutes. In about twenty-five per cent of the cases the original cause, direct or contributory, was a desire for luxury which took the form of fine clothes. Now these women tell one what they think one would like to hear, and, where they scent sympathy, as much as possible attribute their fall to man's deceit. But acumen develops in the investigator; the figure of twenty-five per cent is correct or may even be an underestimate.

The conclusion is that from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand women now on the streets of London have been brought there by a desire for self-adornment. Meanwhile there is no labor available for the poor consumer, because the energy of the dressmaker is diverted toward the rich; while Miss So-and-So is paid $4000 a year to design hats, the workwoman wears a man's cap rescued from the refuse heap.

I shall be told that the rich are not responsible for the luxurious desires of the poor; but that is evidently nonsense: the rich themselves are not innocent of prostitution. I have had reported the case of a well-paid Russian dancer whose dress bills are paid by two financiers; that of a French actress who calmly states that she needs three lovers, one for her hats, one for her lingerie, and one for her gowns; and a close inquiry into the "bridge losses" which occasionally provoke the fall of rich men's daughters will show that these are dressmakers' bills. All this is not without its effect upon the poor. The girl of the lower classes, hypnotized by fashion plates, compelled to witness at the doors of fashionable churches, in the street, at the music halls, and even at the picture palaces, the continuous streaming past of the fashion pageant, develops an intolerable desire for finery. You may say that she is wrong, that she should practice self-denial, but this is not an age of self-denial; luxury is in the air, we despair of happiness and take to pleasure, we feel the future life too far ahead, we want to enjoy. It is natural enough, especially for girls who are young and who feel unfairly outclassed by richer women who are neither as young nor as beautiful; but still it is base. If baseness is to go, the lesson must come from the top; if there is to be self-denial, then que messieurs les assassins commencent! Until the rich woman realizes that her example is her responsibility it will be fair to say that the Albemarle Street $500 gown has its consequence in a prostitute on the Tottenham Court Road.

The rich woman herself does not escape scot free. It is obvious that the woman chiefly occupied with thoughts of dress develops a peculiar kind of frivolity, that she becomes unfit to think of art, the public interest, perhaps of love. She is the worst social product, a parasite, and she is not even always beautiful. Sometimes she is insane: the investigations of Doctor Bernard Holz and of Doctor Rudolf Foerster connect the mania for fashion with paranoia, and have elicited extraordinary facts, such as the collection of clothes by insane women, and such as cases of pyromania which coincided with a craze for dress.

It is, indeed, quite possible that some women might go mad if they permanently felt themselves less well-dressed than their fellows; and that is the crux of the fashion idea. Woman does not desire to be beautifully dressed: she desires to be more beautifully dressed than her fellows. She wishes to insult and humiliate her sisters, and, as modern clothes are costly, she does not hesitate to give full play to human cruelty, to use all the resources of the rich husband on whom she preys to satisfy her pride and to apply her arrogant ingenuity to the torture of her sisters. And I said, "She wants to be more beautiful." Is that quite right? Partly, though what woman mainly seeks is not to be beautiful but to be fashionable; the words have become synonymous. Yet the fashions are not always beautiful; sometimes they are hideous, break every line of the body, make it awkward, hamper its movements. If women truly wanted to be beautiful they would not follow the fashions: our little dark, sloe-eyed women would dress rather like the Japanese, and our big, ox-eyed beauties would appear as Greeks; but no, Juno, Carmen, and Dante's Beatrice, all together and all in turn, don first the crinoline and then the hobble skirt.

Nor do they want to attract men. They think they do but they do not, for they know perfectly well that few men realize what they wear, that all they observe is "something blue" or an effect they call "very doggy"; they know also that men do not wed the dangerous smart, but the modest; that men fear the implication that smart women are unvirtuous, and that they certainly fear their dressmakers' bills. Nor is it even true that women want many new clothes so as to be clean: if that were true, men in their well-worn suits could not be touched with a pitchfork. The truth is that changes in fashion are a habit and a hysteria, an advertisement, an insult offered by wealth to poverty, a degradation of women's qualities which carries its own penalty in the form of growing mental baseness.

5

Well, what shall we do? Women must wear a uniform. Strictly, they already do wear a uniform, for what is a fashion but a uniform? Some years ago when musquash coats (and cheaper velveteen) were "in", and hats were very small, there were in London scores of thousands of young women so exactly alike that considerable confusion was caused at tube stations and such other places where lovers meet; this simplifies the problem of choosing the new uniform. Let it not be thought that I wish women to dress in sackcloth, though they will certainly dress in sackcloth if ever sackcloth comes in; I do not care what they wear, provided they do not continually alter its form, and provided it is not too dear. The way in which old and young, tall and short, fat and thin, force themselves into the same color and the same shape is sheer socialism; I merely want to carry the uniform idea a little further, to make it a permanent uniform.

We already have uniforms for women, apart from the fashions, uniforms which never change: those of the nurse, the nun, the parlor-maid, the tea-girl. We have national costumes, Dutch, Swiss, Irish, Japanese, Italian; we have drill suits and sports dresses. And they are not ugly. All these uniformed women have as good a chance of marriage as any others, and her ladyship gains as many proposals on the golf links as at night on the terrace. I would suggest that women should have two or three uniforms of a kind to be decided, which would never change, and, I repeat, they need not be ugly uniforms.

Men's uniforms are not ugly; I would any day exchange my lounge suit for the uniform of a guardsman—if I might wear it. In this "if" is the essence of the whole idea, the whole practicability of it. Men wear uniform, that is to say lounge suits in certain circumstances, morning coats in others, evening clothes in yet others. They never vary. We are told that they vary. Tailors show new suitings, the papers print articles about men's fashions, and perhaps a button is added or a lapel is lengthened, and that is all. Nobody cares. Men follow no fashions so far as the fable of men's fashions is true; they dare not do so, because to do so serves them ill in society. A man who dares to break through the uniform idea of his sex is generally dubbed a "bounder"; if he is one of the very young, fancy-socked, extreme-collared kind, people smile and say, "It'll wear off with time." And women, who tolerate the dandies at tea-time, love the others.

The uniform would have to be brought in by a group of leaders of fashion determined to abolish fashion. I could sketch a dozen uniforms, but women would make a great to-do, forgetting that most fashions are created by men, so I will confine myself to timid suggestions.

1. For general outdoor wear the coat and skirt is the best, together with a blouse. Lace and insertion should be abandoned, and I feel that the skirt is too long for walking; sometimes it is certainly too tight to enable a woman to get into an omnibus or railway carriage gracefully. Probable price, complete, $50.

2. For summer wear, a plain blouse and skirt; not the atrocious blouse ending at the belt, but the beautiful tunic-blouse that falls over the hips. Both blouse and skirt would need to be made of a permanently fixed, plain, and uni-colored material. Total cost, $25.

3. If the skirt were shortened, leggings, gaiters, and stockings would have to be standardized; the shoe buckle, being too costly, would disappear.

4. A fixed type of hat, without feathers or aigrettes, made in straw and trimmed with flowers; produced in scores of thousands, it ought not to cost more than $2.50.

5. A fixed type of evening gown, price $24 or $32, without any lace or trimmings, sequins, paillettes; without overlays of flimsies of any kind; no voile, no chiffon, no tulle, no muslin, but a stuff of good quality, hanging in straight folds. Jewelry to be banned.

6. The afternoon dress should be completely suppressed; it responds to no need.

7. The total annual cost would be about $150.

I shall be asked whether this can be done. I think it can. Recently the Queen of Italy created a vogue for coral ornaments among the Roman ladies so as to restore their livelihood to the fishermen of Torre del Greco. That points the way; we do not need sumptuary laws, though, in times to come, when capitalism is nothing but a historical incident, we may have passed through such laws into a fuller freedom. It is enough to decree that any variation from the new standard is bad form. Human beings will break all laws, but they shrink if you tell them that they are infringing the rules of etiquette. There are many men to-day who would like to wear satin and velvet: they dare not because it is bad form. If, therefore, a permanent clothing scheme were established by strong patrons, if it were agreeable to the eye, which is easy to arrange, I believe that fashions could be fixed because it would be known that a woman who went beyond the uniform must either be disreputable or suffer from bad taste.

6

I shall be told that I am warring against art. That is not true: some fashions are beautiful, some are hideous. Who would to-day wear the crinoline? Who would wear the gigot sleeve? They are ugly—but, stay! Are they? Will they not be worn in an adapted form some time within the next generation? They will, because fashions are not works of art; they are only fashions. Women do not adapt the fashions to themselves, they adapt themselves to the fashions, and it is a current joke that even woman's anatomy is adjusted to suit the clothes of the day.

Doubtless I shall be challenged on this, and told that woman's individuality expresses itself in her clothes. That again is not true; the girl with a face like a Madonna will wear a ballet skirt if it comes in, and if she has to "adapt" the ballet skirt to the Madonna idea I should like to know how it is going to be done. Indeed the one thing woman avoids doing is expressing her individuality; she wants what Oscar Wilde called "the holy calm of feeling perfectly dressed", that is, like everybody else, and a little more expensively.

It may be retorted, however, that uniform is not cheap. That again is untrue. When a uniform is standardized, turned out in quantities and never varied, it can be made very cheaply. Men's clothing, which is not fully standardized, is such that no man need spend more than $250 a year. That is the condition I want for women. Of course it will make unemployed, and our sympathy will be invoked for dressmakers thrown out of work: that is the old argument against railways on behalf of coaches, against the mule-jenny, against every engine of human progress, and it is sheer barbarism. Labor redistributes itself; money wasted on women's clothes will be used in other trades which will reabsorb the labor and make it useful instead of sterile.

An apparently more powerful argument is that uniform would deprive women of their individuality: it cannot be much of an individuality that depends upon a frock, and I am reduced to wonder whether some women lose their personality once their frock is taken off. Still, there is a little force in the argument, for it seems to lead to the conclusion that beautiful women will enjoy undue advantage when dressed as are the ill-favored. But this is not a true conclusion; it is not even true to say that one cannot be distinctive in uniform, as anybody will realize who compares a smart soldier with an untidy one. I have myself worn a soldier's coat and know what care may make of it. Nor do I believe that the beautiful would win; by winning is meant winning men, but we know perfectly well that it is not body which wins men: it wins them only to lose them after a while. It is something else which wins men: individuality, wit, gaiety, cleverness, or cleverness clever enough to appear foolish. And we men who wear uniform, does not our individuality manage to attract? It does; and indeed I go further: I assert that fashions smother individuality because they are tyrannical and much more obtrusive than uniforms. Woman's charms are to-day dwarfed because men are dazzled and misled by the meretricious paraphernalia which clothe woman; the true charms have to struggle for life. I want to give them full play, to enable men to choose better and more sanely, no longer the empty odalisque but the woman whose personality is such that it can dominate her uniform. That will be a true race and a finer than the game of sex-temptation which women think they are playing.

It may be said that uniform will do away with class distinctions, that one will no longer be able to tell a lady from one who is not. That is not true. What one will no longer be able to tell is a rich woman from a poor one; and who is to complain of that? Surely it will not be men, for it is not true, I repeat, that men admire extravagant clothes; nor are they tempted by them; nor do women dress to tempt them: at any rate, the seduction of Adam was not compassed in that way.

Besides, women give away their own case: if their clothes were intended to attract men, then surely married women would cease to follow the fashions unless, which I am reluctant to conclude, they still desire to pursue after marriage their nefarious, heart-breaking career.

The last suggestion is that women would not wear the uniform. Not follow a fashion? This has never happened before.

I adhere therefore to my general view that if woman is to be diverted from the path that leads straight toward a greater degradation of her faculties; if household budgets are to be relieved so as to leave money for pleasure and for culture; if true beauty is to take the place of tinsel, feathers, frills, ruffles, poudre de riz; if middle-class women are to cease to live in bitterness because they cannot keep up with the rich; if the daughters of the poor are no longer to be stimulated and corrupted by example into poverty and prostitution, it will be necessary for the few who lead the many to realize that simplicity, modesty, moderation, and grace are the only things which will enable women to gain for themselves, and for men, peace and satisfaction out of a civilization every day more hectic.

IV

WOMAN AND THE PAINT POT

It is in a shrinking spirit that I venture to suggest that woman has so far entirely failed to affirm her capacity in the pictorial arts, for I address myself to an audience which contains many sculptors and pictorial artists, an audience of serious and enthusiastic people to whom art matters as much and perhaps more than life. But it is of no use maintaining illusions; woman has exhibited, and is exhibiting, very great artistic capacities in the histrionic art, in dancing, in executive music, and in literature. There is, therefore, no case for those who argue that woman has no artistic capacity. She has. I select but a few out of the many when I quote the actresses, Siddons, Rachel, La Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry; the dancers, La Duncan, Pavlova, Genée; the literary women, the Brontës, Madame de Staël, George Eliot, Sappho, Christina Rossetti; among the more modern, May Sinclair and Lucas Malet.

At first sight, however, it is curious that I should be able to quote no composers and no dramatists; it is impossible to take Guy d'Hardelot and Theresa del Riego seriously. And the women dramatists, taken as a whole, hardly exist. This would go to show that there is some strength in the contention that woman is purely executive and uncreative; but this cannot be true, for the list of writers I have given, which is very far from being exhaustive, and which is being augmented every day by promising girl writers, shows that woman has creative capacity, creative in the sense that she can evolve character and scene, and treat relations in that way which can be described as art. If, therefore, there have been no women painters of note, it cannot be because woman has no creative capacity. It may be suggested that those women who have creative capacity turn to literature, but that is a very rash assumption. For creative men turn to any one of the half-dozen forms of art, and are not monopolized by literature; there is no reason, mental or physical, why the female genius should be capable of traveling only along one line. The problem is a problem of direction, a problem of medium.

My potential opponents will probably deny that there have been, and are, no women painters. They will quote the names of Angelica Kaufmann, of Vigée-Lebrun, of Rosa Bonheur, of Berthe Morisot, of Elizabeth Butler; the more modern will mention Ella Bedford, Lucy Kemp-Welch; the most modern will put forward Anne Estelle Rice; and one or two may shyly whisper Maude Goodman. But, honestly, does this amount to anything? I do not suppose that Lady Elizabeth Butler's "Inkermann" or "Floreat Etona" will outlive the works of Detaille or of Meissonier, however doubtful be the value of these men; the fame of Angelica Kaufmann, though enhanced by the patronage of kings, has not been perpetuated by Bartolozzi, in spite of that etcher's inflated reputation. Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" hangs in the National Gallery, and another of her works in the Luxembourg, but merits which balance those of Landseer are not enough; and Berthe Morisot walked, it is true, in the footprints of Manet, but did her feet fill them? The truth of the matter is that there has not been a woman Velasquez, a woman Rembrandt.

Now, as some of my readers may know, I do not make a habit of belittling woman and her work. My writings show that I am one of the most extreme feminists of the day, and I am well aware that woman must not be judged upon her past, that it is perhaps not enough to judge her on her present position, and that imagination, the only spirit with which criticism should be informed if it is to have any creative value, should take note of the potentialities of woman. But still, though we may write off much of the past and flout the record of insult and outrage which is the history of woman under the government of man, we cannot entirely ignore the present: the present may not be the father of the future, but it is certainly one of its ancestors. We have to-day a number of women who paint—the great majority, such as Mrs. Von Glehn, Ella Bedford, Lucy Kemp-Welch, and others who are hung a little higher over the line, are rendering Nature and persons with inspired and photographic zeal; others, such as Anne Estelle Rice, Jessie Dismorr, Georges Banks, are inclined to "fling their paint pot into the faces of the public." Some do not abhor Herkomer, others are banded with Matisse; but though to be Herkomer may not be supreme, and though to be Matisse may perhaps be insane, it must regretfully be conceded that the heights of the Royal Academy and of Parnassus (or whatever the painter's mountain may be) are not haunted by the woman painter. Without being carried away by the author of "Bubbles", I am not inclined to be carried away by Maude Goodman and the splendours of "Taller Than Mother." Lucy Kemp-Welch's New Forest ponies are ponies, but I do not suppose that they will be trotting in the next century; they do not balance even the work of Furse.

Let me not be reproached because I use the low standard of the Royal Academy, for if woman has a case at all she must prove herself on all planes; it is as important that she should equal the second-rate people as that she should shine among the first-rate. I do not look for a time to come when woman will be superior to man, but to a time, quite remote enough for my speculations, when she will be his equal, when she will be able to keep up with all his activities. Curiously enough, the advanced female painters are not so inferior to the advanced men painters as are the stereotyped women to their masculine rivals. There is excellence in the work of Anne Estelle Rice and Georges Banks, though they perhaps do not equal Fergusson; but they are less remote from him in spirit and realization than are the lesser women from the lesser men. That is a fact of immense importance, for it is evident that nothing is so hopeful as this reduction in the inferiority of female painting. It may be that masculine painting is decaying, which would facilitate woman's victory, but I do not think so; modern masculine painting has never been so vigorous, so inspired by an idea since the great religious uprush of the Primitives.

Women are striving to conform not to a lower but to a higher standard, a 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 Chaumière 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 coöperation 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; Molière gave it tongue in Les Femmes Savantes, when he made the bourgeois say to his would-be learned wife:

"Former aux bonnes m[oe]urs l'esprit de ses enfants,
Faire aller son ménage, avoir l'[oe]il sur ses gens
Et régler la dépense avec économie
Doit être son étude et sa philosophie."

Man has laid down only three occupations: kirche, küche, 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.