Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER: There once was a young, aspiring writer who sent some of her work to the poet laureate of England. And he wrote her back that the daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind. And in proportion, as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else.

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. Fortunately, the woman did not take his advice. Her name was Charlotte Bronte and she went on to write Jane Eyre, although she first published her books under the name Currer Bell so that she could publish them at all.

Why have there been no great women artists, writers, and composers or have there been no great women artists, writers, and composers? The answer to the second question is yes, there have been some. But the fact that the question is asked at all is part of the reason why the first question is asked so often and answered so badly.

10 years ago, it was discovered that the famous painting of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes painted in 1800 by Jacques-Louis David was not painted by David at all but by Constance Marie Charpentier who had worked in his studio. No great women painters. Fanny Hensel was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn and it is believed by many now that her compositions were published under his name, that some of the famous songs of Mendelssohn are in reality the songs of Hensel because it would have been scandalous and impossible for her to bring them out under her own name. No great women composers. Virginia Woolf once wrote that she thought that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

The story of women's creativity involves these threads. One, that women were deprived of the education and encouragement and opportunity that one needs to be an artist. And two, that even when women succeeded in their art, they were forced to do so in secret or they were ignored and disparaged in public. It's a story told most vividly by those women we know as the most creative.

Sappho was a Greek poet and composer who worked 600 years before the birth of Christ. Lady Murasaki was a Japanese novelist who lived at about the year 1000. In the 15th century, Marjorie Kempe wrote the first autobiography in the English language by a man or a woman. Yet, it was not until the 1700s that a literary tradition of women began. Why was that?

Virginia Woolf suggests that when a woman was liable as she was in the 15th century to be beaten and flung around the room if she did not marry the man of her parents choice, the spiritual atmosphere was not favorable to the production of works of art.

Art is an expression and an assertion of self and individuality, and women had no self that belonged to them at all, literally. They were, in fact, the property of their fathers and their husbands as late as the Middle Ages and there were as good as chattel afterwards because they had no income or property of their own, they had no chance to live independently of men, except perhaps in a convent. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a nun who lived and wrote poetry in 17th century Mexico.

When women stopped being chattel and body, they often remained chattel in spirit, or at least they were bound to obey the wishes of their fathers and their husbands. The first obvious obstacle in the way of women's creativity was the belief, up until much of the 19th century, that it was a waste of time and even inappropriate to give them much or any education. It was believed that they lacked the intellect to handle it. That learning in a woman was unflattering and even disadvantageous, and anyway, they had no practical use for it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, almost all of them learn with reluctance to read and write but very readily apply themselves to the use of their needles. Ben Jonson wrote satiric plays ridiculing women as intellectuals. And one gentleman of a past century said he thought women ought to appear to think well of books rather than speak well of them.

In colonial America, a Connecticut town voted not to waste money in the education of girls. In the middle of the 19th century in this country, women were not even admitted to public high schools. And those who did pursue arts like music and painting did so to be decorative. They were hardly expected or allowed to give the hours the art needed to be done well.

Most of women's earlier writing is in the form of letters and diaries because these writings had some personal purpose. And that made them innocent of the arrogance of writing for publication. Anne Finch, who was the Countess of Winchelsea, wrote in the 19th century of the difficulty that one had being a woman and a poet. This is what she said in her poem.

Alas, a woman that attempts the pen such an intruder on the rights of men. Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed. The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. They tell us we mistake our sex and way. Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play are the accomplishments we should desire.

To read, to write, or read or think, or to inquire what cloud our beauty and exhaust our time and interrupt the conquests of our prime whilst the dull manage of a servile house is held by some our utmost art and use. That written in the 1600s. She hid her work from others at court. And years after she began writing, she published a book of her poems anonymously.

Also, in the 17th century, there was Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. She wrote poetry, plays essays, biography, autobiography, and philosophical and scientific papers. She thanked her husband for allowing her to publish and said, it was a favor few husbands grant to their wives.

She was well known in her day yet now students learn only about her husband, Charles Lamb. She was called mad for her efforts. One woman wrote in a letter, sure, the poor woman is a little distracted. She could never be so ridiculous else as to venture writing books, and in verse to.

Most women, of course, who were not in the aristocracy and even those of the middle class hardly found conditions auspicious for creativity. They lacked education and the opportunity to be economically independent. They married young and had many children. They were bound by social and legal conventions that made their husbands wills law and their own aspirations unimportant.

Virginia Woolf wrote, where one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen.

Those women who did excel, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Sand, did so by escaping the normal life of the woman of their times. Only Sand had children, and she left the husband her parents had forced her to marry. Only two of the others married.

The Brontes, Austen, and Eliot were the daughters of ministers and they received an education because they were included in the classes that their fathers taught. And they wrote their works secretly, using men's names to avoid censure and to secure publication. Jane Austen's nephew wrote later that she was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party.

Harriet Martineau was another British writer. She traveled and wrote about the American South. She was quite happy when her family lost its fortune. She wrote, I who had been obliged to write before breakfast or in some private way had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way for we had lost our gentility. Many male intellectuals of the time hardly encouraged the participation of women in intellectual life.

Byron wrote that women ought to mind home and be well fed and clothed but not mixed in society. He said the only books they should read were those about religion or cooking. Tennyson wrote a poem about a princess who sought to set up a university for women but ended up recognizing her folly and marrying the prince. There's no way to guess how many women sacrificed their art on those altars of femininity. Stendhal once said that all the geniuses who are born women are lost to the public good.

Women who were painters or sculptors or composers had all the problems of writers and more. At least for writers, the cost of paper and pen was cheap. But artists needed to attend classes and buy materials. Composers had to have lessons and expensive instruments. They needed commissions so they could afford to write their works. They needed directors of orchestras or concert artists who were willing to play them.

Up until the 19th century, most painters and sculptors were the sons of artists or in a few cases, their daughters. Most training was by apprenticeship and attendance at art academies, and women largely were excluded. Certainly, a young woman would hardly be allowed to travel to another city to study with a master, even if the man would accept her.

Until the development of abstract painting and sculpture in the 20th century, artists created the likenesses of the human body. There were landscapes and still lifes, but the major works of art were of people, both individually and in paintings of historic themes. In order to be even looked at as a great artist, those were the kinds of things one had to paint or sculpt. And one of the chief ways, the most important way, to train artists for that craft was through life drawing, first, from the nude male and later from the nude female model.

Until the 20th century, women were almost always excluded from life drawing classes. In 1886, Painter Thomas Eakins gave a lecture on anatomy to women students at the Pennsylvania Academy. He removed the loincloth from the male model and he was fired. A photograph taken at that time shows women students at the Academy painting from another nude model, which was considered permissible. It was a cow.

Up until 1893, women were not allowed in life drawing classes given at the Royal Academy in London. And when they were admitted, the model had to be draped. It was, of course, perfectly all right for a women models to be totally nude for the benefit of male art students and artists.

There were some great women artists nonetheless. Although, we'll never know how many because we're just now discovering the works of women which in the past were attributed to men. Marietta Tintoretto painted a portrait of Marco de Visconti and grandson in 1570. And for centuries, the author of the work was given as her father, Jacopo. Some art historians believe that dealers passed off her works as her father's so that they could get more money for them.

Judith Leyster painted the Jolly Torpor in 1629 when she was only 19 years old. For several hundred years, it was called a Frans Hals. It now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Tintoretto and Hals are two of the master painters of Western civilization. Will Marietta Tintoretto and Judith Leyster now be called master painters as well?

Sabina Von Steinbach was a 13th century sculptor and daughter of Edwin Von Steinbach. Her father died in the midst of his work on the Strasbourg Cathedral and she finished it. Many critics say that her work surpasses his in originality, feeling, and aesthetic value. A nun named Ende painted many of the illuminations in the Beatus Apocalypse of Genoa, which is called one of the supreme masterpieces of the 10th century and on the level of accomplishment of the great masters.

Elaine de Kooning said that over 20 years ago, she did research for an article about women artists and discovered many turning up in the studios of Renaissance masters. She said she began to be suspicious about any painting of a woman with a book or a drawing pad or a letter in her lap, which were the self-portrait poses. The Charpentier painting, which had been called one of David's masterpieces, is of a young woman with a drawing pad. You can see that painting on the cover of ARTNews for January 1971, which is a special issue that also includes some of the other works that I've mentioned.

Even when women won recognition as artists, they face difficulties that limited their art. Rosa Bonheur the French painter sometimes found it necessary to wear men's clothes. She wrote, my trousers have been my greatest protectors. Many times I have congratulated myself for having dared to break with traditions which would have forced me to abstain from certain kinds of work due to the obligation to drag my skirts everywhere. Women did not wear skirts in the 19th century.

One French painter, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, reported how she solved another problem. She wrote, with regard to the gentlemen, as soon as I realized they wished to make eyes at me, I painted them with their eyes averted which prevents the sitter from looking at the painter. At the least movement of their pupils in my direction, I would say, I'm doing the eyes.

Some women who were artists did the analog of their sisters who were diarists and letter writers. They created art and quilts and needlepoint because those were the accepted province of women and their works are just now beginning to get recognition.

In music too, women have been ignored or disparaged. Until recently, music was commissioned chiefly for religious or state purposes. The measure of the church's attitude toward women in music can be seen in the fact that women were admitted to Protestant choirs only 300 years ago. And for centuries in the church, young boys were castrated so that choirs could have their higher voices. If such drastic measures were taken to avoid using women even as singers, imagine how much opportunity they had as composers or musicians.

People did not compose in a Garrett the way they could write or paint there. Until recent times, they were church organists or choir directors or they directed orchestras. Bach wrote a cantata every week for his church choir. Haydn wrote pieces to perform for the Esterházys.

Wagner had an opera company. List was a virtuoso concert performer. All of them lived public lives that would have been impossible for women who were expected to confine their efforts to drawing room recitals for the entertainments of friends.

Any music women wrote was likely to go unpublished and unplayed. And those who did excel were beaten back by custom and opinion. Lili Boulanger won the Prix de Rome in 1918 in a contest based on anonymous entries. But when it was discovered she was a woman, she was disqualified and the prize was given to someone else. How convenient it was for men not to have to suffer the competition of women?

So women who were composers turned to other forms of musical art. Pauline Viardot Garcia, who was a principal soprano in Rossini's operas, also wrote at least one of her own in the 1830s. And another composer, Anna Magdalena, did what so many artists have done when they found their own careers blocked. She married one, Johann Bach.

Film Director Sidney Lumet once told me that many women, many creative women he knows, have to spend so much of their time battling on a social level that they use up energy and talent for a fight that has nothing to do with their work. And it is that last measure of concentration and power and singleness of purpose that is the difference between greatness and ordinary achievement.

Today, women who are artists face the same obstacles they have faced historically, although in a lesser degree. There is outright discrimination that limits the ability to make a living at their work. Women are about 75% of the undergraduates of American art schools and only 2% of the instructors. Galleries often refuse to exhibit women or they set quotas on their work. After protests by feminist groups, the Whitney Museum in New York raised the number of women in its annual exhibition from 4.5% to 25%.

The chief way composers support themselves today is as professors or composers in residence at universities and conservatories, and there too they face the traditional discrimination. The director of the Electronic Music Studio at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore wrote that the head of the Main teacher placement agency for college music in the United States told her that when a school lists a composition vacancy, it usually specifies a man for the job and rejects a woman if she is suggested.

Today, women are especially active in composing electronic music because they don't have to rely on convincing conductors to play their pieces. They put together sounds on tape and that tape exists in the same way a manuscript or a painting does. Yet, they can expect the customary sexual putdowns.

Composer Betsy Jolas says that a few years ago, she wrote a piece for viola and brass instruments which made a little more noise than was customary in her music and she was told that she had tried to be virile. The status of women in symphony orchestras has just begun to change. It was all right for little girls to learn chopsticks. Incidentally, a woman named Euphemia Allen wrote chopsticks.

But Toby Saks, one of the four members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, says that 10 or 15 years ago women didn't try out for orchestra positions because they were told they couldn't get anywhere.

And last year, Zubin Meta, the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was picketed after he said publicly, I just don't think women should be in an orchestra. They become men. Men treat them as equals. They even change their pants in front of them. I think it's terrible, he said. Until recently, the only woman tolerated in an orchestra was the harpist because of course, men could not play such a feminine instrument.

In literature, women still face male critics who call them women writers and women poets, sometimes poetesses or authoresses, not finding it necessary to apply sexual appellations to men who write. Novelist Hortense Calisher wrote in her autobiography that she had to confront the attitude that literature in America is a manly sport in which I am not expected to compete. She says that novelists C. P. Snow once told her that women often stop writing once they are sexually satisfied.

Biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote that people do what society looks for them to do. The Quaker meeting house has existed for centuries but it has produced no Bach and no B minor mass. Music was not desired by the Quakers. It was frowned on. Poetry, fiction, playwriting have been expected from women only recently as history counts time.

She recalled that in 1941 when she was writing Yankee from Olympus, the famed biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, her husband was away in the Navy. Her mother-in-law told her how fortunate, dear, that you have this hobby of writing to occupy you while your husband is away. During that time, she was under a great deal of social and family pressure to stop her research and her writing and join her husband in Honolulu.

The conflict over what was supposed to be her duty and what was her art caused her to develop stomach aches and back pains but she stayed where she was and continued her work. Incidentally, the executors of the Holmes estate denied her access to his letters on the grounds that she could not possibly be qualified to write his biography.

As a result, her research took several years longer than it would have. How much stronger and resourceful and determined she had to be than a male writer who did not face such obstacles or such prejudice? It's hard to know whether the physical difficulties women faced or the psychological obstacles were more crucial.

Today, women can choose not to spend their lives as housewives and when they can support themselves in their arts. Creative women who've been the most successful still are caught by the fear that they will lose their femininity and be deprived of love if they are competitive with men.

Anais Nin wrote in her diary, I did not want a rival man. I must protect them, not outshine them. Creation and femininity seemed incompatible. The aggressive act of creation. Not aggressive, her analyst, a woman told her, active.

Anais Nin said, I have a horror of the masculine career woman. To create seemed to me such an assertion of the strongest part of me that I would no longer be able to give all those I love the feeling of their being stronger and they would love me less. Women continue to face psychological obstacles in a culture that judges us by our social and marital status rather than our professional success and that makes men feel less manly if they're not more successful in their careers than their wives or their girlfriends.

Doris Lessing in the Golden Notebook wrote an extraordinary account of the conflict between creativity and personal relationships that exists in the life of an artist who is also a woman. One of the pages of the notebook includes this outline of a story still to be written. A woman artist, painter, writer, doesn't matter which, lives alone but her whole life is oriented around an absent man for whom she is waiting. Her flat too big, for instance.

Her mind is filled with the shapes of the man who will enter her life. Meanwhile, she ceases to paint or write. Yet in her mind, she is still an artist. Finally a man enters her life, some kind of artist but one who has not yet crystallized as one. Her personality as an artist goes into his. He feeds off it, works from it as if she were a dynamo that fed energy into him. Finally, he emerges a real artist, fulfilled. The artist in her is dead.

Women who are artists or musicians or writers tell again and again of the conflicts that are caused by their relationships with men. Wives and mothers feel guilty and end up subordinating their art to what society tells them is the higher feminine destiny. Women find themselves distracted and consumed by lovers while men seem so much more able to compartmentalize and detach their emotions and devote themselves primarily to their art, which is after all the expression of their masculine drive for creativity and achievement, while the expression of our drive is to have a husband and have children, so they tell us.

And for many who do marry and have children, they are the same time and energy-consuming duties that women have always had, the same lack of time and privacy and a room of one's own that Virginia Woolf declared was necessary for anyone to create. The same insistence by husbands that their needs are primary. Zelda Fitzgerald made her husband furious when she wrote a novel using experiences from their life. He said they had to be reserved for his own works.

There have always been a few women with the genius to overcome all of these barriers. In this century, there are increasing numbers of them. Yet even 50 years ago, Edna Saint Vincent Millay could be moved to write this sonnet.

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word. Give back my book and take my kiss instead. Was it my enemy or my friend I heard? What a big book for such a little head. Come, I will show you now my newest hat. And you may watch me purse my mouth and princ.

I never again shall tell you what I think. I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly. You will not catch me reading any more. I shall be called a wife to pattern by. And some day when you knock and push the door, some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy, I shall be gone. And you may whistle for me. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]