Modern woman

“ We have here six modern women belonging to five nationalities, three of whom are authoresses, and the other three—mathematician, actress, and artist, portrayed and criticised by one who is herself a modern woman and an authoress. ”

“ She will realize the mission of woman's body and the holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall dance the freedom of woman. ”

“ If that is true, shall we not then expect a future more largely influenced by women to have more of the hard, matter-of-fact quality, the splendid realism characteristic of woman "when she is herself"? ”

“ This is a digression, but, it came from contemplating the singular beauty of one woman's soul, among the tarnished multitude of victims to that social levity and those superficial virtues that society honors, and with which our modern fashionable women persuade themselves they are doing marvels in the world of good. ”

“ Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future; the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early Italian, than all women of past centuries—the highest intelligence in the freest body! ”

“ There is a great difficulty in writing of the women of the first ten years of the twentieth century. This is to be the Woman’s Century. In it she is to awake from her long sleep and come into her kingdom ”

“ She makes every allowance for human nature, [Pg 81] every concession to the necessities of temperament, every recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and waiting and suffering for.
She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social and economic evolution. ”

“ Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer, woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor—in these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of tomorrow. ”

“ But the Modern Woman desires most ardently to enter those spheres of mental and technical activity, undeterred by any disheartening doubts of her fitness for letters or government, of her capacity for organizing or originating. She points triumphantly for confirmation of her sex’s endowments to the lives and works of the George Eliots, the Harriet Martineaus, the Elizabeth Frys, the Angelica Kauffmanns, or the women of the French political salons ”

“ Why did her sex lose these privileges so liberally accorded to men, in the “land of the free” and the early nineteenth century?
We too have our stars—our women who think, [Pg xxiii] our women who know, our women who do; we too have our special distinctions—our triumphs in new fields in which we have had no rivals. But I have touched only a single phase of modern life. There are too many fresh and difficult problems to be disposed of in an essay. Then we can hardly hear the message of the age for the din of the voices. It is true enough that the old ideals are disappearing. ”

“ Neither you, Number 4, nor Number 5, the radiant, able-bodied spinster, haughtily unconcerned about love and lovers, need fear any detriment to your souls or to your social progress as a consequence of doing some one or two things well, and of refusing to sacrifice your self-respect to the urgency of cheap substitutes for refinement and elegance. Certainly, thoroughness and delicacy of thought and sentiment are essential to the modern woman who would be socially effective in the best sense. ”

“ It has specially affected the middle classes, who have been thereby enabled to enter with perfect freedom into the world of letters, to follow professional and business careers—in a word, to carve out for themselves an independent course. A new conception has arisen of what is woman’s place in society. ”

“ I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical capacity—a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor how to play! ”

“ She then expressed the modern ideal as that of devotion to the same essentials but different in expression. "Woman is not called to a new kingdom but to a larger occupancy of that which has been hers from the beginning. ”

“ It is an attitude which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for inspiration—and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form to fix it." ”

“ On the other hand, in all countries with a modern, democratic outlook, where woman’s influence is in the ascendant, and where men are inclined to a pronounced romanticism of thought, there is no quality, no jewel of human virtue, too priceless for woman to be thought worthy of it. ”

“ Who like her was created to receive the knowledge whereby a woman is first revealed to herself, and is developed into the being who is earth’s ruler,—the great mother, on whose lap man reposes, and from whence he goes forth into the world? ”

“ The discussion of sex differences and of the social problems which spring therefrom shows not only wide and deep personal acquaintance with modern men and women, but a singular freedom from some of the squeamishness of thought and feeling which hampers most discussion ... ”

“ But meantime the special interests of women have been sadly confused because of the larger changes in which all human relations have been involved in this time of readjustment. Instead of talking of unquiet women to-day, we should talk of an unquiet world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ten women whom I have chosen are representative: they give the quality of the woman's movement of today. Charlotte Perkins Gilman—Jane Addams—Emmeline Pankhurst—Olive Schreiner—Isadora Duncan—Beatrice Webb—Emma Goldman—Margaret Dreier Robins—Ellen Key: surely in these women, [see also the chapter "Freewomen and Dora Marsden."] if anywhere, is to be found the soul of modern feminism! ”

“ It is not enough that they should be what their mothers were—they must be more. The spirit of the times calls on women for a higher order of character and life. Will they heed the call? Will they emancipate themselves from the fetters of custom and fashion, and come up, a glorious company, to the possession of a vigorous, virtuous, noble womanhood, that shall shed new light upon the world and point the way to a divine life?
Woman's influence is the chief anchor of society, and this influence is purifying the world, and the work she has already accomplished will last forever. ”

“ She stands now at the gateway of this new era of American civilization. In her hands must be moulded the strength, the wit, the statesmanship, the morality, all the psychic force, the social and economic intercourse of that era. To be alive at such an epoch is a privilege, to be a woman then is sublime. ”

“ There is this comfort for the old-fashioned commonplace people among us, at any rate, that whatever “evolution” of woman there may have been in the nineteenth century, she remains in all essentials very much what she used to be. ”

“ But the fact remains that it was largely through the inspired vision, which looked past the entanglements of sense into the pure heart and transparent soul of an idealized womanhood, that the long-enduring sex came into its intellectual kingdom. To the old ties of interest, passion, and habit, were added those of the intellect and spirit. In this new contact of intelligences society had its birth, women took their rightful places, and the world found a new regenerating force. ”

“ The social life of the eighteenth century reads like a page of our own, with its whirl of conversazioni, its talks on science, its experiments in chemistry, physiology, psychology, its mania for discussing literature, art, and philosophy. The literary salons had blossomed into great centers of intellectual brilliancy, of which all this life was the natural pendant. It was the fashion then, as now, for women to concern themselves with affairs of state; to talk of the rights of man, though they had less to say than we have about the rights of woman ”

“ With these serious questions I do not attempt to deal any further than to picture, to the best of my ability in a limited space, the position of women in the great ages of the past, and the personality, aspirations, and achievements of a few of their most famous representatives, so far as this is possible after the lapse of centuries. From a multiplicity of facts which point their own moral, each one of us may draw his or her special lessons.
It is quite true that the woman of to-day is putting her intellect to new uses ”

“ But see what (in order to make itself effective) it has had to throw over at each stage of its advance—things to which beautiful names have been given, things which were assumed all through the Victorian era to be essential to womanliness, and to be so engrained in the woman's nature, that without them womanliness itself must perish. ”

“ Then the conflict shall be ended and the intellectual growth of woman be revealed, the heightener, enricher, purifier of that emotional development which is the essence of ideal womanhood—an essence thrilling as deeply and tenderly the hearts of the humble followers in her footsteps as it thrilled the hearts of that greatest of woman poets, who sang:
What art can a woman be good at? ”

“ It suffices here to say that what really signifies to the woman of to-day is to expand in her own natural proportions, to maintain her own individuality without the loss of her essential charm, to temper strength of soul with tenderness, to strive for achievement instead of the passing honors of the hour, to preserve the fine and dignified quality of an enlarged and perfected womanhood. ”

“ The favourite theory of our nature and destiny, and the one on which the current unsystem of feminine education is principally based, is that "a true woman" should be a harmonious melange of everything in general and nothing in particular. ”

“ It would seem as if the task before these two dauntless women were almost endless, for every letter must be read and carefully noted, every newspaper clipping gleaned—and these alone would make volumes—old diaries perused, and the whole digested and woven into the fabric of facts which not only go to make the story of one woman, but the history of the great progressive movement of women during the past fifty years. ”

“ A careful study of those times reveals, beneath the surface of the life most conspicuous for its brilliancy and its vices, a type of womanhood as strong and heroic as we find in primitive days, with the added wisdom, culture, and helpfulness which had grown out of the freer development of the intellect. ”

“ Let us look in this new direction, the direction of the future, because it is there that this possible future entrance of women into the arts becomes important. We stand in the first rush of a new movement. It is the day of experiments. The extraordinary enthusiasm now sweeping through womanhood reveals behind its immediate fevered expression a great power of emotional and spiritual initiative. Wide and radically sweeping are the changes in woman's social outlook. ”

“ And these are the qualities which they must cultivate if the feminine personality is to grow. This does not result because women devote themselves to study, be it ever so thorough, or to social tasks, be they ever so responsible. Both further the development of woman's personality in the measure only in which her own investigations, her own choice, make her means of culture and her work an organic part of herself. To develop woman's personality from within—that is the great woman question. To free woman from conventionality—that is the great aim of the emancipation of woman. ”

“ 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 [Pg 88] women of the world, as talented professionals. ”

“ But the past we have, with its achievements and its lessons. We find that women, with all their restrictions and in spite of denunciations from men which seem incredible, have long ago touched their highest mark in poetry, in wisdom, in administration, in learning, and in social power. In the great ages of the flowering of the human intellect, a rare few have always stood on the heights, beacon-stars which sent out their rays to distant centuries. As the world has advanced they have increased in number more than in altitude ”

“ Every good quality, every virtue which we regard as distinctively feminine, will, under conditions of greater freedom, develop more freely, like plants brought out into the light from a cellar in which they languished, dwarfed and blanched, without sun or air. The woman is strong in almost every woman ”

“ Already some women to whom a profession or mental eminence has given exceptional freedom [Pg 89] 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. ”

“ The process of growth, from being gradual and imperceptible, becomes violent and conscious.
There can be little doubt that what is called the “Woman’s Movement,” with its disintegrating influences on social opinion and practice, is bringing vast and momentous changes in women’s attitude towards the universe and towards themselves. A great motive and an enlarging ideal, a quickening of the woman’s spirit, a stirring dream of a new order—these are what we have gained. ”