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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 Chaumiere and the other studios. She is suffering a good deal from the effects of past neglect, but much of that neglect is so far away that we must ask ourselves why woman has not yet responded to the more tender attitude of modern days. For she has not entirely responded; she is still either a little afraid of novelty or inclined to hug it, to affront the notorious perils of love at first sight.

I believe that the causes of women’s failure in painting are twofold–manual and mental. Though disinclined to generalize upon the female temperament, because such generalizations generally lead to the discovery of a paradox, I am conscious in woman of a quality of impatience.

While woman will exhibit infinite patience, infinite obstinacy, in the pursuit of an end, she is often inclined to leap too quickly towards that end. To use a metaphor, she may spend her whole life in trying to cut down a tree without taking the preliminary trouble to have her ax sharpened; she does unwillingly the immense labor on the antique, she neglects her anatomy, she sacrifices line to color.