A new field which the woman movement has opened up to woman is the scientific field. For the fact that as early as the Renaissance some Italian women occupied chairs of academic instruction, that in the 17th and 18th centuries some women devoted themselves seriously to classic studies or the exact sciences—all that was only exceptional. And the women who since the beginning of the woman movement have distinguished themselves by great services in science are still exceptional. But in many places, sometimes as assistants of their husbands or of other men, women now perform good scientific work in different lines. Many women are also active in the sphere of invention, without a single woman’s name having been thus far connected with an epoch-making invention.
Especially where constructive ability is necessary, women have as yet not been eminent; they have created neither a philosophical system nor a new religion, neither a great musical work nor a monumental building, neither a classic drama nor an epic. On the other hand, the exact sciences, which would be considered a priori as little adapted to women, for example mathematics, astronomy, and physics, are exactly those in which thus far they have most distinguished themselves. This contains a warning against too precipitate conclusions about the intellectual life of woman. Not until several generations of women—with the same privileges of education as man, with the same encouragement from home and society—have exercised their faculty for discovery and their inventive and creative faculties can we really know whether the present inferiority of woman in this respect is a provision of nature or not; whether her genius was only hampered in its expression or whether, as I believe, it is ordinarily of a different kind from that of man.
In art there are several fields which the woman movement did not need to open for the first time to woman: dramatic art, music, and the dance. Indirectly, however, the woman movement has transformed the position of women occupied in these lines by increasing the respect for all good work of woman and raising the requirements for woman’s education in general. The woman movement has also exercised an immediate influence upon certain artists of the present time. Thus Eleanora Duse said to me that her most cherished desire has been to represent and interpret the new types of women, although the dramatists of to-day have rarely given her the material she desired wherewith to create characters by which she could reveal the soul of the new woman and elevate man’s, as well as woman’s own, ideal of woman.
In the dance, women have been, especially in America, creative in connection with its forms and have been thereby also revelations of the new spiritual life of woman which has found expression in these forms. Great women singers, through Wagner’s operas and ballad-singing, have given voice to the primeval yearning of the woman soul, as that yearning now assumes form in the new woman. And in interpretations at the hands of great pianists or violinists, not one classic musical work failed to furnish similar revelations.
The very finest effects of the woman movement—mere shades of feeling which cannot be enumerated nor discussed—have reached our present time through lines, movement, rhythm, cadence, through the timbre of a voice, the gesture of a hand, the glance of an eye, the tone of a violin. And these effects have been secured without any disturbance of the receptivity by strife over the precedence of woman or of man. In other spheres, susceptibility to the effects of art creations by woman is still often dulled by this strife. In the above named fields, long before the beginning of the woman movement, conscious of its purpose, women without arguments have convinced the world of the complete equality of woman with man. And all these women, conquering through beauty in one form or another, have done more for the woman movement than it has done for them. Certainly the woman movement both directly and indirectly has had its share in opening to women musical as well as other art academies and schools of applied arts, but academies have a doubtful value and the smaller the value, the more gifted the student. The new right has thus become dangerous to the independence of real gifts and, with all possibilities of education thus opened wide, there comes a temptation for fancied talents to pass beyond their bounds. This danger, as far as the plastic arts are concerned, has found more and more its counterpoise in the schools of applied art, by which many women have been directed to the decorative professions, from house and garden architecture to fashion designing and holiday decorations.
But in the field of the applied arts, as well as of the plastic arts and of music, the facility afforded by the modern conditions of training and of public careers has instigated many women, who before had exercised their little talent only for the pleasure of the home or society circles, to exhibit and appear publicly to the detriment both of the home circles and, alas, also of art!
The works of art by women, which humanity could not lose without really becoming poorer, have been created, thus far, neither in the sphere of music nor of plastic art; they all belong to literature. And this sphere the woman movement has not opened to woman; ever since the days of Sappho and of Corinna, women have attained fame as writers.
In letters and memoirs not originally designed for publication, next to that in the field of romance and the novel, occasionally also in the lyric, the feminine character has found thus far its fullest and finest expression. In all these fields women have produced works which have been placed by men, not it is true beside the greatest works of masculine genius in the same domain, yet beside eminent works of men. As intermediary of the works of others, woman has not in our time, as in the period of enlightenment or in the circle of Goethe, her greatest significance through conversations and letters but through the printing-press. The modern woman, however, as essayist and biographer, as translator and collector, is a valuable intermediary of culture. She is also unfortunately a menace to culture, not so much because of the inferior works which she produces, for these, like the similar works of men, soon sink into oblivion. The real danger lies in the fact that women in great multitudes increase the number of those journalists who lack intellectual as well as ethical culture, which should be an imperative condition in that field of work. But this profession is now, on the contrary, the one into which the amateur may most easily force an entrance without special training and without professional reputation. The result is that men and women who lack both can pull down, in their journals, the real work and essential character of serious people, without the remotest conception or the faintest comprehension of either. On the other hand these cliques of coffee-house people crown one another as kings and queens—for a day! The press-breed carries on in leaflets its flirtation as well as its vengeance. The knife which the child of nature thrusts into a rival’s breast is now transformed into the pen with which the reviewer stabs a competitor’s latest work. In a word women now furnish to the Press work, occasionally excellent, frequently mediocre, all too often worthless. Their womanly characteristics make it feasible more frequently for them than for men to adopt more completely the rituals of the temple service of the deity of the Press—the Public. This “womanliness” evinces itself, especially, in the ability “to grip the fleeting moment by its fluttering locks” and also to anticipate when that moment’s locks are false and so the grasp prove profitless.
While hosts of women have turned to journalism, they are seldom found in the fields to which the woman movement should have directed them: in the field of sociological and psychological research. Nearly all significant works upon the normal, the abnormal, the criminal psychic life of children, young people and women have been written by men. They have unfortunately treated the feminine spiritual life in “scientific” works also, in which the author dares speak of “woman” even though he knows nothing of her except what his own happy or unhappy experiences in a mother or sister, wife or sweetheart, have taught him.