Woman in Modern Society | Page 6

they sometimes
excel, but a Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints
herself and her child, and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a
vestal virgin, she drapes a veil over her own head and transfers her
features to the canvas. Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal

and abstract to attract much attention from women at present. Even a
sculptor like Mrs. Bessie Potter Vonnoh finds her truest theme in
statuettes of mothers with their children about them.
During the past few years psychologists have paid great attention to
secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities
of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the
same source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the
shy, retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of
maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late
forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also,
must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be
interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying
youth is naturally disliked as a sexual perversion.
Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop
certain hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become
emotional and unbalanced. Losing a sense of large significances, they
become overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of
feeling they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and
movements.
Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments
become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless.
Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in
the subjective as in the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves;
man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman
particularizes; man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks
more than he feels, woman feels more than she thinks. For new
spiritual birth, as for physical birth, men and women must supplement
each other.
To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a
young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of
preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that,
for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to
romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and
motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she
should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered
training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is, like
the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and her

greatest service only when working in loving association with the man
of her choice.

II
Woman's Heritage
So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the
problems of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify
oneself in taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented
in a popular manner. And yet it takes little argument to show that what
we shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we
are rests back on what we have been. In anything we try to think or feel
or do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the
original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has received.
For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought and feeling
which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical
instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps
to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it. With
the making easy of mental operations through repetition, and with the
formation of associations based on our choices, it may be truly said that
we become whatever we habitually think and feel and do.
Every choice we make is thus literally built into our character and
becomes a part of ourselves. After that, the old choice will help
determine the new, and we shall find ourselves being directed by all of
our past choices, and even by the choices of our ancestors. Since, then,
all our earlier selves are continued in us and make us what we are, we
are simply studying ourselves when we study the history of our
ancestors. If we would go forward, we must first look backward; for we
must rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves.
But history is not merely the story of the past. To relate that, would
take as long as it took to live it, and the result would be but weariness
of spirit. History, to be significant, must select the events with which it
will deal; it must arrange these in series that are in accord with the
constitution of things; and then it must use the generalizations it
reaches to interpret the present, and even to forecast the future. It is