Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism

by Floyd Dell

Miss Isadora Duncan stands as representative of the renaissance in dancing. She has brought back to us the antique beauty of an art of which we have had only relics and memento in classic sculpture and decoration. She has made us despise the frigid artifice of the ballet, and taught us that in the natural movements of the body are contained the highest possibilities of choregraphic beauty. It has been to many of us one of the finest experiences of our lives to see, for the first time, the marble maiden of the Grecian urn come to life in her, and all the leaf-fringed legends of Arcady drift before our enamored eyes. She has touched our lives with the magic of immemorial loveliness.

But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist and Isadora Duncan as a dancer, to divorce them by any such categories, is to do them both an injustice. For they are sister workers in the woman's movement. They have each shown the way to a new freedom of the body and the soul.

The woman's movement is a product of the evolutionary science of the nineteenth century. Women's rebellions there have been before, utopian visions there have been, which have contributed no little to the modern movement by the force of their tradition and ever-living spirit. No Joan of Arc has led men to victory, no Lady Godiva has sacrificed her modesty—nay, even, no courtesan has taught a feeble king how to rule his country—without feeding the flame of feminine aspiration. But it is modern science which, by giving us a new view of the body, its functions, its needs, its claim upon the world, has laid the basis for a successful feminist movement. When the true history of this movement is written it will contain more about Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman, perhaps, than about Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. In any case, it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta of feminism.

The eye—that is to say—is guarantor for the safety of art in a future régime under the dominance of women; and the ear for poetry. These have their functions and their needs, and the woman of the future will not deny them.

It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the earth. It was the hand (marvelous instrument, coaxing out of the directing will an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible the human brain, and all the vistas of reason and imagination by which our little lives gain their peculiar grandeur.

And this hand, if it be a woman's in the present day, is doomed to the smallest activities. "Our spinning wheels are all broken ...Our hoes and grindstones passed from us long ago.... Year by year, day by day, there is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of women's domestic labors to contract itself." Even the training of her child is taken away from the mother by the "mighty and inexorable demands of modern civilization." That condition is to her intolerable; and it is on behalf of women's empty hands that she makes her demand: "that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Woman."

And what of Miss Duncan—what is her part in the woman's movement? In her book on "The Dance" she tells a story: "A woman once asked me why I dance with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe in the religion of the beauty of the human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I do not,' and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.' 'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in the evolution of man.' At this said I, 'My task is at an end. I refer you to my most revered teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel—' 'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel—' At this point I could think of nothing more to say. So you see that, to convince people, I am of little value and ought not to speak."

But rather to dance! Yet it is good to find so explicit a statement of the idea which she nobly expresses in her dancing. For, as the hand is the symbol of that constructive exertion of the body which we call work, so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive exertion of the body which we call play. Isadora Duncan would emancipate the one as Olive Schreiner would emancipate the other—to new activities and new delights.

And if such work is not a thing for itself only, but a gateway to a new world, so is such play not a thing for itself only. "It is not only a question of true art," writes Miss Duncan, "it is a question of race, of the development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to the original strength and the natural movements of woman's body. It is a question of the development of perfect mothers and the birth of healthy and beautiful children." Here we have an inspiriting expression of the idea which through the poems of Walt Whitman and the writings of various moderns, has renovated the modern soul and made us see, without any obscene blurring by Puritan spectacles, the goodness of the whole body. This is as much a part of the woman's movement as the demand for a vote (or, rather, it is more central and essential a part); and only by realizing this is it possible to understand that movement.

The body is no longer to be separated in the thought of women from the soul: "The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to a nation, but to all humanity. She will dance, not in the form of nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in its greatest and purest expression. 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.