“From man’s effeminate slackness it begins,
(Said the Angel) who should better hold his place.”
If a writer were always able to put down on canvas his earlier and more enthusiastic impressions, he might draw a pretty picture of the Australian woman. She should be the crown and glory of every Southern landscape; she should have the dawn in her eyes, and the sun upon her hair. In a street along which the heat waves were dancing with a joyous and unrestrained fervour; in a ball-room which echoed and re-echoed to rhythms of music; on a lawn that was decked with hundreds of sun-shades and fringed with myriads of garden flowers; by the shade of trees, on the brink of rivers, in the starlight of conservatories, on the slopes of undulating plains, whenever and wherever the scene wanted a touch of life to add to its romantic interest, she would be the subtle something imparting to the new and matter-of-fact continent a tinge of the colour of dreams. She should be all this and more, if one could put the clock back to the days before the fiery sword of experience laid bare the garden of imagination; if one could, by dint of any mental, metaphysical, or chemical process, gather up and refurnish the snows of a year ago.
On a subject of this kind it is easy to adopt one or other of two contrasted veins: either the idealistic vein of that thin-spun romanticist, Mr Richard le Gallienne, or the critical vein of that earnest searcher after paradox, Mr Crosland. Is the Australian girl to be idealised? She would hardly thank you. Is she to be satirised? She would thank you less. Is the truth to be told about her? She would meet you with Pilate’s question, and ask you to say where it is to be found. Of all tasks, that of idealising is the least profitable, and in some respects, the most dangerous. You are liable to suffer in your own estimation and in hers, by finding at some later stage that you have idealised the Australian woman for the qualities of which she possesses least, and for which she has no kind of sympathy. She prides herself on her modernity, and on her knowledge of the world. She boasts—and it is her most frequent boast, though it is quite unjustified—that she is not sentimental. She declares that she wishes only to know the truth; and the truth, despite what Mr le Gallienne and Mr Crosland may write to the contrary, it should be the business of every conscientious chronicler to tell.
It is necessary to say something about the position of women in the social and public life of Australia. It is a position in many respects enviable. In this country, be it understood, we have shaken ourselves free of sex prejudices. It is undeniable that there are a certain number of rich but respectable people who would fain rescue the public life of the continent from the threatening danger of a feminine invasion. These individuals for the most part occupy seats in a Legislative Council, and own warehouses in Flinders Lane, and run wool stores along Circular Quay: but they do not represent public opinion. There are only enough of them to fill one or two Houses of Parliament. Being in a hopeless minority, they may be left, for purposes of the present discussion, on one side.
The public sense of the community is represented by the man about town, and this man, in theory, at any rate, is free of sex prejudices. He is much more free of them than is the average Englishman or the typical European—if there is such a type—or the male biped of the yellow, or brown, or any coloured variety. He is on a level with the progressive American; even, so far as the question of the franchise is concerned, ahead of him. He does not deny the fairness of admitting women to the learned professions. He is seldom willing to stand up and assert, with the blatant unwisdom that is the heritage of past centuries, that they are mentally or otherwise unfitted to exercise a vote at elections. Liberty, equality, freedom for both sexes, are ideals that he can understand. In theory he is an emancipator, a reformer. Such prejudices as he possesses do not take the shape of definite views and opinions; they are the unconscious relics of custom working down through the ages. Theoretically he believes in woman’s advancement; but practically he has no desire to see his bride-elect, or any one of his feminine relations, declaiming politics from a platform, or laying down the law to judges, or teaching logic to a school of metaphysicians. He is in no danger of becoming infatuated with the women who do these things; but neither would he be any party to an arbitrary edict forbidding that they should be done.
It goes without saying that the feminine type most sought after in this country, or in other countries, is the picturesquely foolish type. As it happens, the Australian woman is by no means foolish; on the contrary, she is unusually clever. Nothing comes amiss to her; there is no part that she could not play if called upon to do so. With the unusual gift of perception that is part of her mental equipment, she understands always what rôle is calculated to make her most attractive in the eyes of the world. She knows that the average man, despite his occasional glimmerings of reason and of intelligence, is rendered uneasy by too much cleverness in a woman, just as a mediocre piano player is alarmed by the display of virtuosity in a rival. For various reasons, the average woman finds it still to her interest to placate the average man. She sets to work accordingly. In the great game of make-believe she has no equals. She is full of quaint and illogical surprises. For dissimulation she has the prettiest art imaginable. She will always plume herself—more especially in those moments of confidence that are shared with you and the stars—on the precise qualities that are not hers. If she happens to be a brilliant University student, she will talk mainly of her performances with a sewing-machine. If she is a high-class musician, and has no literary faculty whatever, she will talk, not of her interpretations of Brahms and Chopin, but of some journalistic composition that a mendacious editor thought fit to praise. If she is ignorant of the difference between a flat-iron and a rolling-pin, she will tell you of an imaginary confection of hers that excited the raptures of a fictitious gathering of gourmands. If she is intensely practical she will play very dexterously for your amusement on a sentimental string. The artistic sense in her is not dulled by a prosaic adherence to facts. She is anything but what she seems.
It is something more than a coincidence that both the churches and the theatres in Australia should be mainly supported by women. Both institutions go beyond the region of commonplace realities; both appeal to the finer sense—the sense of something that is not prosaic. It is melancholy to think what might happen to ecclesiastical institutions in Australia if women did not go to church. It is interesting to reflect that there are more stage-struck girls in the community than in any other of the same size on earth. Those who cannot act behind the footlights, act at home and in the houses of their neighbours. They carry into the walks of everyday life the histrionic faculty, without which grace is a thing unknown, and unadorned human nature is painfully crude and severe. The man is seldom an adept in these matters. As a rule he has no skill at concealing his deficiencies. He flounders badly amid uncongenial surroundings. The Australian girl, on the other hand, will adapt herself with great readiness to any set of circumstances, will look happy when she is feeling exasperated, will smile cordially on women she detests, will listen with charming and intelligent sympathy to monologues on subjects for which she cares not at all, will be intensely Bohemian or rigidly conservative just as she thinks is required.
There are certain types that have latterly been attracting attention, and one of these is the political woman. With her natural talent for experimenting the Australian woman has paid some attention to politics, and she has found the pastime moderately interesting, so long as nothing more intrinsically important has been to hand.
There are two recognised kinds of political women on the continent. One of these, and by far the more numerous, is the dilettante, the feminine dabbler. She has a pretty, graceful way of deprecating too much knowledge of her subject. She rarely comes into prominence except at election times. She is convinced that Smith is a better man for the country than Jones, but she is far from pretending to know what Smith’s views are on the fiscal question, whether he is a single taxer, a preferential trader, or a person of secret anarchical tendencies. If you ask her why she supports Smith she will probably tell you that she dislikes Jones. She is an expert and resourceful canvasser; like the pallida mors of the Roman poet she knocks impartially at the huts of the poor and the mansions of the rich. She goes to the poll if a conveyance is handy, or if it is not too far to walk, and she wins, or helps to win, many elections.