The Intelligence of Woman

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.