Part 12
In the early 'nineties there was a penny weekly paper called _Woman_, of a mildly "feministic" type, which took for its motto "Forward, but not too fast." There was no reason to suspect its founders of deliberately choosing two adjectives, each of which bore an ambiguous meaning; taken in their literal sense they aptly epitomize the spirit of Feminism in the early years of a phase which began with "emancipation novels" and ended in a resort to physical force. Yet even at the outset the more sober representatives of the movement were being forced into the background to make way for the more strident spokeswomen of the doctrine of equal rights. The prim spinster and the apostles of culture were replaced by the women who were frankly "out" to shock public opinion and flout decorum, who rode bicycles in knickerbockers and wrote "problem" novels. The "New Woman," so constantly referred to in these years, had many variations--athletic, literary, worldly, but was always bent on "self-expression." The fashionable type was caricatured in _Dodo_; the rebellious daughter was glorified in Grant Allen's story, now only remembered in its title--_The Woman who Did_. Ibsen was very much in the air, and his remark that the modern daughter felt the need for "a mild kind of _Wanderjahr_" impelled _Punch_ to discourse on "Rosamund and the _Wanderjahr_" (a good deal "after" Miss Edgeworth's story of _Rosamund and the Purple Jar_). His views are non-committal but apparently unsympathetic. On the other hand, he welcomed somewhat prematurely the admission of women to the Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society, recognized their skill and endurance as Alpine climbers, applauded their adoption of the calling of gardeners, hailed the appearance of a Women's Eight on the Thames--coached, it should be added, by a distinguished member of his staff--and duly chronicled the first inter-'Varsity Women's hockey match in 1894. The first illustration of a woman bicycling in knickerbockers occurs in the same year. Under the heading "The 'Arden-ing Process," Orlando addresses his companion: "Tired, Rosalind?" and she replies with quite unfeminine brevity: "Pneumatically." No attempt is made to represent the new garb as unbecoming, as in the days of "Bloomerism," but rather the reverse.
[Illustration: THE 'ARDEN-ING PROCESS
ORLANDO: "Tired, Rosalind?"
ROSALIND: "Pneumatically."]
Towards the "New Woman" on her intellectual side, _Punch_ was decidedly hostile. One could not find a better expression of his views than in the large illustration, "Donna Quixote," in April, 1894. The central figure, wearing pince-nez and waving a latchkey, is formidable rather than repellent. Around her on the floor lie books by Ibsen, Tolstoi and Mona Caird, and in the decorative border (which embodies her visions) she is seen tilting at the dragon of Decorum, and smiting down the triple Cerberus of Mrs. Grundy, "Mamma" and Chaperon. Du Maurier's "Passionate Female Literary Types" in the same year are unlovely to the verge of hideousness, and the legends are frankly satirical. When "Sarah Grand" declared that Man, morally, was "in his infancy" and that "now Woman holds out a strong hand to the Child-man," and insisted on helping him up by "spanking proper principles into him in the nursery," _Punch_ quoted back at her "Ouida's" statement that "the New Woman was an unmitigated bore," and went on:--
[Sidenote: _The New Womanhood_]
There is a New Woman, and what do you think? She lives upon nothing but Foolscap and Ink! But, though Foolscap and Ink form the whole of her diet, This nagging New Woman can never be quiet!
The ironical protest registered by _Punch_ against ladies who insisted on travelling in smoking carriages and then objected to smoking, only serves to show how far we have travelled in the last thirty years. Another passing phase in the history of sex-antagonism is to be found in the record of the first of many dinners at which only literary ladies were allowed to be present. _Punch_ printed a letter signed "A Daughter of Eve who remembers Adam," who observed that "the Literary Ladies' Dinner of the 1st of June only needed one feature to be absolutely perfect--the presence of Gentlemen." Whether the letter was _bonâ fide_ or not, it probably expressed the view of the majority of those present. The more violent the manifestations of the New Womanhood, the more reactionary became _Punch's_ attitude. His reaction reached a culminating point in 1894, when he painted the following sketch of "A Modern Madame":--
She has aspirations after the impossible, and is herself far from probable; she regards her husband as an unnecessary evil, and her children as disturbances without compensating advantages.
She writes more than she reads and seldom scribbles anything.
She has no feelings, and yet has a yearning after the intense.
She is the antithesis of her grandmother, and has made further development in generations to come quite impossible.
She thinks without the thoughts of a male, and yet has lost the comprehension of a female.
To sum up, she is hardly up to the standard of a man, and yet has sunk several fathoms below the level of a woman.
So again he reverts to his older views on Education _à propos_ of the "Pioneers":--
Ah, learn whate'er you will, yet spare our hearts A home-grown, feminine Baboo of Arts. Believe it, envious maids, the men you spurn Think little of the honours that they earn. Too well they're taught in common sense's rules To dwell upon their triumphs in the Schools, And chiefly prize the Baccalaureate fur Because, in love's young days, it pleases Her. But you, in purpose tyrannously strong, Get, in each effort, your perspective wrong. Learn all you wish to learn, exult in learning, For Hymen's torch keep midnight oil a-burning, Bulge your fair foreheads with those threatening bumps, Ungraceful as an intellectual mumps, Be blatant, rude, self-conscious as you can, Be all you feign--and imitate--in Man, Spurn all the fine traditions of the past, Be New or nothing--what's the gain at last?
You know as much, with hard-eyed, harsh-voiced joy, As the shock-headed, shambling fifth-form boy; Adding, what his sound mind would never please, An Asiatic hunger for degrees. True learning's that alone whereon are based Clear insight, reason, sympathy, and taste. Not relic-worshipping of bones long dry, Not giving puppet-life to x and y, And walking haughtily a fair world through Because some girls can't do the sums you do. Still less, the little, little world of cliques, Where Mutual Admiration dons the breeks, And then proceeds kind tolerant man to flout-- A petulant, unresented Barring-out.
Meanwhile our faith looks on, devoid of fear, Facing the hatchet of the Pioneer. Still will the storm, in Nature's potent plan, Be temper'd to the shorn, or bearded, man. Your sex will still be perfect in its place, With voice of melody and soul of grace. Pose, lecture, worry, copy as you will, Man will be man, and woman woman still!
[Sidenote: _The Real New Woman_]
By way of reducing the "misanthropic" attitude of some of the "New Women" to absurdity, _Punch_ reported a probably apocryphal dialogue between two men: "I say, old man, is it true that your wife has been asked to resign at the Omphale Club?" "Well, yes; you see, the Committee found out that she'd been guilty of ungentlemanly conduct." But what exasperated _Punch_ most of all was the decadent preciosity of the irregulars who espoused the cause of the New Womanhood. One need only mention "The Woman who Wouldn't Do," illustrated _à la_ Beardsley, where "Yellow Book" morality is burlesqued in the phrase "marriage is a degrading system, nurtured under the purple hangings of the tents of iniquity." These moods of disgust seldom lasted long. _Punch_ was no wholesale hater of modernity, and in his verses on "The Real New Woman" frankly admitted that there was much in her to admire. One notes a change of ideal in the absence of any mention of her cooking qualifications; and in the admission that "she's splendid at seeing a joke," _Punch_ acknowledges a great advance on the buxom but humourless damsels of Leech. The first mention of a Ladies' Football Club in 1895 brings home to us the fact that what passed for prejudice in 1895 with enthusiastic advocates of sex equality has been confirmed by the judgment of those best qualified to judge down to 1921.
_Punch's_ epigram on woman's "Asiatic hunger for degrees" represents a passing mood rather than his general attitude to the demand. "The lady students of the Universities," wrote _The Times_ on March 13, 1896, "have received a cruel series of rebuffs in the last few days. On Tuesday week the Congregation of the University of Oxford refused to admit them to the B.A. degree. On Tuesday last it followed up this blow by rejecting all the resolutions proposed as alternatives. Yesterday the Cambridge Senate inflicted the unkindest cut of all by practically imitating the ungallant example of Oxford." Yet, instead of exulting over their defeat, _Punch_ was decidedly sympathetic in his cartoon of Minerva, with her owl in a cage, met at the gates of the Oxford Schools by a corpulent bespectacled Don, who observes, "Very sorry, Miss Minerva, but perhaps you are not aware that this is a monastic establishment." One notes a certain inconsistency in _Punch's_ condemning women for their disregard of the fine art of gastronomy, preferring "a tray on a rickety side-table" or the haphazard arrangements of a picnic to regularity and comfort at meals, and almost in the same breath rebuking them for flouting the sweet domesticities of home and indulging in extravagant pleasures in public. Another interesting sign of the times is recorded a couple of years later in "The Modern Woman's _Vade Mecum_"--showing a reaction against the old notion that the blue stocking must be above any regard for appearances. Here the governing idea is that cleverness need not be divorced from fascination; that fine heads should be covered with pretty toques; that pince-nez are more becoming than spectacles; and that literary women should not neglect fashion journals or sacrifice toilet to intellect. The allusion in the same year (1898) to a Women's Club consisting exclusively of women who would not marry because they could not find husbands intellectual enough to suit them, was probably an exaggeration. But there were Feminist stalwarts who virtually expressed that view; just as there were enthusiasts of "mixed hockey," then beginning to come into fashion, who may not have been entirely uninfluenced by a matrimonial motive.
The proposal to allow women to hold municipal office, included in the Local Government Bill, was vetoed in 1899, but not before _Punch_ had issued a pictorial forecast of a procession, headed by the Right Worshipful the Lady Mayor, with female mace-bearer, sword-bearer, Town Clerk and "she-rives." The Cecil family have been of late years active in support of the Woman Suffrage Movement, but Lord Salisbury was no feminist. In 1899 Colonel Denny introduced a Bill making the provision of seats for shop assistants compulsory. _Punch_ describes how this modest measure was "turned down" in the Lords on the initiative of the Prime Minister, who scented in the concession possibilities of a revolt of domestic servants. In 1900 the "New Woman," i.e. the heroine of the "Woman who Did" type, is described as moribund if not defunct. The fashion of knickerbockers went out with the century. Women chauffeurs, however, make their appearance in 1900, and the correct designation for them is discussed. But for a couple of years women's claims and pretensions were largely submerged by the War. There was a strange product much in evidence at the Mount Nelson Hotel, Cape Town, but Punch overlooked the vagaries which were admirably satirized in a once famous Limerick:--
There was a young lady of Berwick, Whose conduct was highly hysteric. She followed the guns And distributed buns To the men who were down with enteric.
[Sidenote: _The Housewife's Burden_]
The Club movement was spreading rapidly, and the founding of the "Ladies' Army and Navy Club" in 1902 prompts a burlesque on the qualifications insisted on for membership in the Ladies' Athenæum, Conservative, Travellers' and Bachelors' Clubs. _Punch_ again sounds the plea for the revival of domesticity in the "Prayer of a Lady Principal" addressed to Oxford Women Students, with apologies to Mr. Kipling:--
Take up the housewife's burden-- All ye whose schools are done, Who let your foolish fancy dwell On thoughts of coming fun. Put _Games for Girls_ upon the shelf With Jowett, Jebb, and Gow; Be Mrs. Beeton's Homely Hints Your _vade mecum_ now.
Take up the housewife's burden-- No lofty rule of queens, But long and sordid service-- The slave to ways and means. Have done with flighty folly! Throw off your infant past! 'Tis yours to cope with butcher's bills, To make the mutton last.
Take up the housewife's burden-- The truceless wars of peace; Go, humour whimsy housemaids, And wait your cook's caprice. And when your hopes are highest (When both ends nearly meet), Your lord's untimely lavishness Shall all your thrift defeat.
Take up the housewife's burden-- Ye shall not shun the call; Nor cry too loud on Culture, When darns and dusting pall. Go, face the test of wifehood-- To wield the adoring rod, And treat a Man as merely Half baby and half god.
The then fashionable alternative is ironically extolled in an irreverent parody of Kingsley's lines, as adapted for a Young Lady's album:--
Be smart, dear girl, and let who will be other; Break from the fold, not stick there like a lamb; So shall your lot, as maid and wife and mother, Be one Grand Slam.
An article by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick in the _Cornhill_, on English and Teuton domestic ideals, served _Punch_ in 1904 as the text for a ballad comparing the thrifty German _Hausfrau_ with the extravagant English wife. The infatuated writer sums up entirely in favour of the dainty, decorative Dolly as against the patient, industrious, but dowdy Grisel. Yet in the same year _Punch_ was much exercised with the inevitable decline of chivalry:--
Doubtless the better sort would gladly nourish Those notions which occur in Arthur's tale; Doubtless Romance might still contrive to flourish, Changing its knightly for its Daily Mail, If Woman would but give our modern gallants A livelier chance to ventilate their talents.
Men ride abroad in rubbered automobiles, Naked of armour, bar the nauseous smell, Not bound on any ransom save to owe bills Contracted by some errant damosel, So that in Carlton's Halls, superbly gowned, She may adorn their Dinner-table Round:
But here their service ends. They fain would wrestle With horrid dragons or a heathen crew; Ride _ventre à terre_ to help the weaker vessel, Behaving just as Lancelot used to do; Only you cannot keep it up much longer When once the weaker sex becomes the stronger.
[Sidenote: _Matrons and Militants_]
An equally interesting feature of the times was what might be alternatively called the Revolt or the Apotheosis of Middle Age. Perhaps the first mention of what threatened to be an unfair competition of the matron with the maid is to be found in the verses in 1896, where we read of the modern woman:--
If married and mother she yet plays her part, With six charming children she still must look "smart," For, judging by facts, what Society likes Is a maid who is bold, and a matron who bikes.
Golf and dancing, however, were the great opportunities of the young middle-aged women who refused to retire to the shelf as in early Victorian days. In 1904 _Punch_ printed a story about golf, in which a maiden aunt "scores" overwhelmingly and turns out to be a champion player, to the confounding of her nephew and niece, a _dénoûment_ beyond imagination's widest stretch twenty years earlier.
With 1905 we plunge into the new phase of the Suffrage question. At the outset _Punch_ was decidedly sympathetic. Note, for example, the cartoon in which a beery working man--a "qualified voter"--addresses a well-dressed, refined-looking woman: "Ah, you may pay rates an' taxes, and you may 'ave responserbilities an' all; but when it comes to _votin'_, you must leave it to _us men_!" In a brief year _Punch_ was thoroughly estranged by the methods of the militants and their harrying of Ministers. His "Sensible Woman" retorts on her "Shrieking Sister": "_You_ help our cause? Why, you're its worst enemy." Raids on the House of Commons and scenes in the Lobbies and the Ladies' Gallery drove him in the Epilogue to 1906 to take a new line. Since in the course of the Crusade women had descended to man's brutal level, put off their dignity and womanliness, and become "the complete elector"--"why, then, Madam, when you get the franchise, as you will eventually, I shall say to myself--_Serve 'em right_." The name "suffragette" had been coined, and came to stay for about fifteen years, at any rate; _Punch_ tried his hand at a new variant--"the Insuffrabelles." It was still possible to laugh at a movement which intermittently ministered to mirth; as, for example, when a New York correspondent of a London paper wrote as follows:--
"In the course of a sympathetic discussion on the good work done for the cause by the Suffragettes in London at a meeting of a woman's society for political study, Mrs. Cory, a prominent advocate of female equality, gave a definition of a Utopian dream which woman must not rest until she has realized. 'Knowing as I do our ideals,' said Mrs. Cory, 'confident as I am that we shall attain them, I fix my gaze upon the brightening future, hopefully awaiting the time when a woman on trial for her life will be defended by a female lawyer, convicted by a female jury' (the natural result, we presume), 'sentenced by a female judge, consoled by a female chaplain, and executed by a female executioner. Then, and not till then, will she have attained her proper place in the world.'"
_Punch_, with commendable reticence, contents himself with observing, "nothing, however, was said as to which world." In 1907 we encounter a picture describing the embarrassment of an unfortunate man invited to tea at a ladies' club by a lady who had forgotten that the afternoon was consecrated to a "Down with Men" Meeting. In "Cross-examining a Suffragist" _Punch_ dexterously manoeuvres a witness into the admissions (1) that nothing could cause Miss Pankhurst greater suffering than to stay idly at home while other women were demonstrating and going cheerfully to martyrdom; (2) that the greater the suffering, the greater the proof of faith in the Cause. Whereupon his Lordship then delivered judgment as follows:--
That Miss Pankhurst and her family should show their faith in the cause by suffering in the way suggested by _Mr. Punch_. That they should stay quietly at home for a while--keep out of the newspapers--arrange no demonstrations--go to no prison; seeing that this would be a much truer and more effective martyrdom than anything they had done as yet.
[Sidenote: _Argument and Ridicule_]
[Illustration: THE SPLIT
BUDDING SUFFRAGETTE: "I say, Pussy" (with intensity), "are you a Peth or a Pank?"]
"And," continued his Lordship, waxing eloquent, "if time hangs heavy on their hands----
"Are there no beggars at the gate, Nor any poor about the lands? Oh! teach the orphan boy to read, Or teach the orphan girl to sew, Pray Heaven for a Woman's heart, And let the Woman's Suffrage go."
From argument _Punch_ turned to burlesque in his imaginary forecast "The Fight for Childhood Suffrage in 1927." One cannot blame him for making capital out of a misprint in which the various suffrage societies were credited with "tactics that differ, but whose aims lead to the same _gaol_." But argument and ridicule were powerless to influence the extremists. The moderates did not always disavow the methods of lawlessness. A highly respected and elderly peeress actually advocated the withdrawal of all subscriptions to charitable objects until women should be given the vote. A steady _crescendo_ in violence marks the progress of the campaign in 1908. "How long," asks _Punch à propos_ of "domiciliary" visits and raids, "are our Cabinet Ministers to be made the sport of clamorous women? Cattle-driving in Ireland, deplorable as a form of popular pastime, is a trifle compared with this new sport of Cabinet Minister-hunting?" This new sport, however, was only in its infancy. Meanwhile the merry game of martyrdom went on. One day, so ran the recital of her prison experiences given by a released Suffragette, "we organized a grand lark. We all agreed to roar like hungry animals at dinner-time. We made a fearful noise." After this, remarks the sardonic _Punch_, "we hope we shall hear no more of women being devoid of a sense of humour." But even at this early stage of the campaign _Punch_ seems to have realized that, apart from the merits of the case, the victory would rest with the side which made itself the greater public nuisance until its wish was granted. Mr. Asquith is shown in the summer of 1908 with a Suffragette playing the Beggar-maid to his Cophetua, and saying, "'This beggar-maid shall be my Queen'--that is, if there's a general feeling in the country to that effect." A couple of weeks later Mr. Haldane, "thinking Territorially" as he watches a procession of Suffragettes, enviously observes, "If I could only get the _men_ to come forward like this!" On the whole, _Punch_ jibes impartially and genially at Suffragists and anti-Suffragists alike. There is an ominous reference in the summer of 1908 to the remark of a stone-thrower: "It will be bombs next time," but pictorially, at any rate, _Punch_ was inclined to make light of the persecution of Ministers and M.P.s.
[Sidenote: _The Coming of the "Flapper"_]
In a cartoon at the end of the year, by an inversion of the classical legend, "Persea" (the anti-Suffragist League) is shown coming to the rescue of Mr. Asquith as "Andromedus," while the spirit of Milton is invoked in a mock-heroic sonnet, after Wordsworth:--
England hath need of thee: she is a den Of roaring lions--women _versus_ men.
[Illustration: KING COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID
THE KING (Mr. Asquith): "'This beggar-maid shall be my Queen'--that is, if there's a general feeling in the country to that effect."]
To 1908 also belongs _Punch's_ recognition of the advent of the Flapper, whose intrusions and insubordinations are happily hit off in "The New Autocrat":--
Ere hockey had shown her what sport meant, Ere yet she grew giddy and pert, She doted on dolls and deportment, And only came down for dessert: Her sisters would apprehend no sting From one so exceedingly green, Nor jibbed at the casual toasting Of bashful fifteen.
Her tastes were not always considered; She seldom got more than her share; And parents, whenever the kid erred, Brought suitable pressure to bear! But gone is the rule of the hoar head; Old age is dismissed with a grunt; And youth's irrepressible forehead Has come to the front!
O wormwood and gall to our women! O torture far worse than the rack, To find that the smartest of trim men Are off on a different tack: For both at the helm and the prow, too, There lolls an unspeakable chit, And Thirty now learns she must bow to Fourteen and a bit!
Her locks are confined by a ribbon; Her language is open and free; She talks like a parrot, she's glib on The problems that petrify me; Her phrases are novel; to-day, what I marvel at most are the queer Little statements she clinches with "Eh, what!" Tacked on to "Old dear!"
Though chaperons tell her where minxes Are certain to go when they die, A sequence of eloquent winks is Her sole and sufficient reply; Though dowagers, itching to slap her, Would send her in tears to her bed, The simply ineffable Flapper Goes smiling instead!