The Children's Book

were meant to help her with. Frank smiled. He said the world would be a better place if more women took an active interest in these matters.

Elsie said “It makes me see how ignorant I am. It makes me see I don’t know enough and don’t think enough.” Her tone was resentful.

Herbert Methley behind her said “Oh, but you will know enough and think enough. I am so glad you took up my suggestion. I am very happy to see you—and looking so well,” he said, smiling in the direction of the belt and shoes. “I am speaking after Mrs. Oakeshott, this afternoon,” he said. “I shall be interested to know what you think.”

Elsie had been wondering whether to ask Frank Mallett about the pantry—not now, but some time. It weighed on her. But Frank had slid away to greet other women, smiling courteously. Herbert Methley said

“You will enjoy what Mrs. Oakeshott has to say. You may even be persuaded to come to some of her evening classes on the drama. I’m sure she would be delighted to see you.”

He was looking directly at the red belt. Elsie was embarrassed, and wanted to slap Pomona for crowding her, for stopping her thinking clearly. She wished Pomona would just go away. Pomona, however, said blandly that she too would be interested in literature classes.

•  •  •

After luncheon, in what is always the dead time for speakers, when digestion takes place, Marian Oakeshott spoke of women’s education. She was handsome and golden: her hat had English meadow flowers on brown linen, her pale coffee-brown linen dress was trimmed with creamy lace. She had a pointed belt not unlike Elsie’s, and a row of little bright silk flowers round the neck of her dress. Her voice was warm and rich. The talk was a series of simple tales, which moved Elsie. The tale of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who with consummate persistence and courtesy became a doctor by attending lectures, and surgical demonstrations, from which everyone sought to exclude her. Two years ago this pertinacious lady had been elected President of the East Anglian branch of that very British Medical Association which at first had debated whether women could pursue rigorous medical studies.

She spoke of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the doctor’s sister, and leader of the women’s suffrage movement, who had worked tirelessly, not only for the vote, but for the cause of women’s higher education in Cambridge. Mrs. Fawcett had had the honour and delight of seeing her daughter, Philippa, studying mathematics at Cambridge, placed above the senior Wrangler.

Elsie did not know what a wrangler was, and could not imagine Cambridge. She was astonished by the resentment this aroused in her. At just that point Mrs. Oakeshott began to tell stories of women—real and imaginary—who, to use the Christian parable Mrs. Methley had so efficaciously quoted, had buried their talents in the ground. It is not easy for a woman to study. If a family cannot send all its children to grammar schools, it will send the sons, and keep back the daughters to wield the mangle, the needle and the poker, to make the Home comfortable for the boys to study. “Duty” is a word that only too often acts like restraining magic, to make a woman deny an important part of herself—and thus, only too often, to deceive and disappoint her husband, by her triviality, her inability to meet his mind. They were not to think that many women were not defeated. Much fashionable nervous illness was, she was convinced, 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 as much as now, must be expected to take pleasure in a pretty belt. There is no necessary connection between rational behaviour and ancient, prudish Puritanism. We should remember that a woman is a woman, not a sofa, or a cake.”