• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1940 0

a result of the festering of unused intelligence. Women needed to have the right—and the expectation—to study in groups of like-minded people. For this reason, among others, she had begun her reading group, which would study not only The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre but Mr. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House which had been both admired and reviled. She herself had not thought to see in her lifetime so subtle, so terrible, a dramatic representation of those lies of the soul that reduce a grown woman—an intelligent woman—to a puppet and a doll, jerked about by the strings of a failed concept of duty, in a Home that was truly a Doll’s House. She hoped, if there were actors in the vicinity with the courage to do so, to put on a performance of that controversial work.

Elsie read better than Philip, though she had the same stunted and truncated education. She picked up books at Purchase Hall and tried to make sense of them. She recognised well enough the hunger for something more than housework, of which Marian Oakeshott spoke. She was thinking much faster than usual, and reflected sardonically that those hungry-minded women, those frustrated female thinkers, of whom Marian Oakeshott spoke, would always need her, Elsie, or someone like her, to carry coals and chop meat and mend clothing and do laundry, or they wouldn’t keep alive. Someone in the scullery, carrying out the ashes. And if one got out of the scullery, like a disguised princess in a fairytale, there always had to be another, another scullery-maid, to take her place.

Nevertheless, she would like to get out.

It was perhaps unfortunate that Herbert Methley was the last speaker.

Herbert Methley spoke about sexual freedom, freedom of the body, particularly for women. He did not say that this was what he was speaking about. He said he was going to talk about the Woman of the Future by comparing the imperfect, accidental condition of the Woman of the Present with that of women in uncivilised worlds and in earlier and other civilisations. He spoke of undifferentiated protozoa, constantly breeding and transforming, he spoke of herding animals, warm-flanked cattle, intelligent elephants, whose children were cared for in common. He spoke of earlier civilisations which had valued women more, set them higher than men, made goddesses and lawgivers of them. He talked of Mother Right as an organising force of society, and the powerful human loveliness of the naked ceramic goddesses who had been unearthed in Helen’s Troy and Pasiphae’s Crete. He spoke of Roman matrons and vestal virgins and sacred temple dancers.

He came to modern women, who were, in the world he described, both the victims and the corrupters of men. The symbol of all this was “dress”—such women spoke of “dress,” not of clothing. Women “dressed” at once to stimulate and repel the natural attentions of men. They scented themselves, they besprent themselves with flowers and feathers and furs taken from other living creatures. They submitted to torture from whalebone cages to cramp their bodies into shapes that could show off their “dress” that was the blazon of their separation and servitude. They wore ludicrous shoes that crushed their toes and distorted their stride, not so very far away from the abominable practices of the Chinese footbinders. All this “dress” labelled, invited and repelled, in equal quantity. The women of today were as gaudy as the peacock or the male bird of paradise—gaudy with these male symbols of domination and combativeness—but they lurked like captive lovebirds in the cage of their adornment.

Women should be able to meet and speak as equals to other human beings, of both sexes. They should wear simple but lovely clothing, and there should be no false shame. A woman’s ankle is a lovely thing. It is no scandal to ride a bicycle in a garment which is practical for the purpose, even if that natural part of the body may be seen.

He looked up and across to the back of the hall.

“There is no reason why rational dress should be shapeless, severe or ugly. A young lady with a trim waist, in the future