s? Or is it a case of woman's flying
to a refuge after man has ousted her from all her old busy pleasures?
Scarcely anything but the dress interest is left to her. Woman--at
least the kind of woman whom one sees at Tango Teas--no longer bakes,
or weaves, or spins, or makes medicines, or even sews as her
grandmothers--or, to be quite accurate, her grandmothers'
grandmothers--did. She has gradually been led to hand over her baking
to the baker, her medicines to the chemist, her weaving and spinning
to the mills. What could Penelope herself do in such circumstances?
Without her loom there would have been nothing for her but to think
out fresh ways of arranging her hair and to disguise herself
endlessly in new draperies which would have led to her being pestered
more than ever by the suitors. Idleness, it does not take a
Sunday-school teacher to see, is the universal dressmaker, and a woman
who is not allowed to work and does not drink and has not even a vote
is driven among the mannequins as surely as if you forced her there by
law. After all, if one has nothing to do, one must do something. One
must put one's virtue into hats and stockings if one is not allowed to
practise it more soberly. It may be, of course, that the mannequin
stage which the women of the comfortable classes have now reached is
really a step towards a more sober dignity. Woman had to be released
from the old servitude of the house--from the predestined making of
beds and sewing of clothes and cooking of dinners--in order to assert
her equal capacities with those of the man who rode to war and cozened
his fellows in the city and sat on committees and stayed out till all
hours. She may not have realised at the time that it was merely an
escape from one drudgery to another--from the drudgery of housework to
the drudgery of pleasure--but she cannot take her brains with her into
a music-hall matinee without realising it now. And she is learning to
hate the one as much as the other. Feminism is woman's great protest
against the drudgery of pleasure. Some of the feminists, it may be
granted, turn it into a claim to share with man all those old
pleasures with which man's eyes have long been yellow and weary. But
the spectacle of the middle-aged male followers of the life of
pleasure in any restaurant or theatre ought to terrify these bold
ladies from maintaining such a demand. The supreme philosophers of
pleasure, from Epicurus to Stevenson, have all had to tur