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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.

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]

[5] I associate the arts with intellectual quality. (See “Woman and the Paintpot.”) Broadly, I believe that all achievements, artistic or otherwise, proceed from intellect.

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

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

Literature: George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Madame de Stael, Madame de Sevigne, 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.