GREATNESS IN WOMEN

BY MARY AUSTIN

In the recent popular poll for names of greatness, all the categories of greatness as they are recognized among the great seem to have been missed with singular completeness. This was perhaps to be expected in a popular expression in which the great themselves could hardly be invited to participate. There was also to be noticed a curious and informing difference between the lists of the greatest twelve men and similar selections among the names of women. Almost without exception the lists of men were made up from among the names of men admittedly able, and distinguished, by reputation at least, for sustained achievement. But the women's candidates were so generally selected from among the names of those merely prominent, that apparently the only selective principle at work had been the frequency with which those names appeared in the newspapers.

Confirming this impression that American women are without any recognized criterions of superiority in non-feminine achievement, comes the first general election in which the demand for women in public place, which was supposed to be the mainspring of woman suffrage, has had free play, with the result that the only woman in the Senate owes her position to a man's appointment.

Not to know their own prophets is rather a serious predicament for women, who have hoped for the amelioration of social conditions through the interpenetration of the social organism by woman thought. Not to be able to know them is surely culpable. For however much we concede to the inexperience of women in group activity, it remains a fundamental law of human nature that revelation arrives by way of individuals rather than by way of committees. Prophetic inspiration is not to be produced by the accretion of small individual foresights, nor is there any discoverable way of compensating by the high seriousness of collective intention for those flashes of illumination which, from

the souls of the truly great, light up unexpected horizons. America must, if her women are to make a contribution commensurate with the contributions of men, not only produce great women, but also be able to measure and appreciate their greatness in terms of the present hour. It begins to appear to the most hopefully obtuse of feminists that the demand for great place for women gathers little force in the absence of any number of women widely recognized as capable of filling it.

Also it is rather more important for women than for men to know their own greatness, for women, in the nature of their racial experience, have had little incentive to acquire the indispensable faculty for making adherents by which an ideal is made socially coherent.

The only group in which woman has had much experience, the family, is not one to which she has succeeded through any proved fitness. It has been compacted much more by its inner necessities than by any faculty of hers for social correlations, and she has been able to proceed directly to its administration without the expenditure of energy required to bring together and organize unrelated social items. Finally, she has not been required to refer her standards of success in the administration of the family group to any criterions but her own preference. All of this has left her rather at a loss in the selection of leaders who must continually recreate their own groups out of shifting masses, and coördinate them in reference to standards subject to incalculable conditions of change. The man who expects to lead men understands that he must have, first of all, the gift for unifying their desires by making them feel less fragmentary. Now and then there arises a woman, like Frances Willard, endowed with this male faculty; but in all my experience with women I have met but two who could be called natural "spellbinders." At present the ranks of feminism are crowded with slightly bewildered individuals of more than average capacity, unable to proceed toward well conceived political goals because of their lack of the power to coördinate the masses even of their own sex.

It is possible that women, having had less experience in the type of group coördination by which political results are arrived at, are also less susceptible to the types of influence by which

men are politically unified. So, if they can not normally expect their great women to be born with that capacity for social electrification which is so often an overt sign of greatness in men, neither can they expect to recognize their great ones as men do, by the effects they produce. Great women must be sought for, and in order that the search may be successful, some method of knowing and utilizing them when found must be developed.

We are already clear on one point, which is that “greatest women" shall be great as women, and not in any sense imitators of men's quality of greatness. This is a way of saying that they must be, in type, maternal. Woman's genius may take protean forms, but its mode will be almost universally to seek fulfillment in group service rather than in the personal adventure.

Let me not be understood here as merely setting up the traditional compliment of woman's greater altruism. I am speaking of a mode of procedure rather than of moral qualities. So far as this disposition has showed itself, one may count on the fingers of one hand the instances where woman's tendency to group service has served society better, or even as well, as man's genius for personal distinction. What I mean by maternalism in greatness is not so much a question of ethics as of the nature and direction of the feminine drive. To take the field of woman's special "womanly" preeminence, the relief of pain, and conceding the incipience of such conspicuous relief as the field hospital and the Red Cross to women; have they accomplished any more by such measures than the man who discovered the use of chloroform, than Lister and Pasteur and a score of other men working separately, under pressure of ambition, intellectual curiosity or the hope of gain?

Men are often supremely qualified for working with and through the group by ambition, egotism, the will to power. Women are seldom good protagonists within the group; but by virtue of their maternal quality they are more likely to function at their highest only for and on account of the group, with a marked disposition to function more often administratively than constructively. Napoleon, I suppose, is the outstanding male type, enlarging France that he might himself be enlarged as Emperor of it, and Joan of Arc is the type maternal, spending

herself that France might be freed. With men the personal revelation which is the driving wheel of great careers is so interwoven with the male endowment that it is seldom, even for purposes of classification, to be separated from it. With women the revelation not infrequently transcends the feminine qualification. Thus great women are often accused of being masculine in their time even Joan suffered under that stigma-and more often than not find it necessary to forego womanly rewards for the sake of maternal achievement.

In women whose genius is not social, the maternal faculty takes the form of that divine givingness without which one may not become great even as a courtesan.

If you think suddenly of a great actress, for example, you immediately think of some great actor or playwright to the elucidation of whose genius she devoted her own. If she is a great thinker, like Olive Schreiner or Mary Wollstonecraft, you find her thinking for other women. Always this givingness of great women differs from the givingness of men in being centered on the recipient rather than on the act. Eve, when she had secured the apple, found in the end nothing better to do with it than to give it to a man. Women will die for a faith, for a child or a lover. But men think it more important to die well when it is required of them, than to inquire why so much dying.

This disposition to emphasize the objective of greatness rather than its mode characterizes that other universal concomitant of greatness, as it is exemplified in women, the gift of prophecy. True greatness cannot exist only for the hour. In order to serve it must foresee, and in women, here again perhaps because of long training in the maternal capacity, the gift of prophecy tends to run forward to meet a specific occasion. It is men who make large impersonal claims upon the future of the universe, who write all the Utopias and invent the world machine. The prophecies of women are for the abolition of slavery, the prohibition of alcohol, the elimination of war. As for the great artist woman, depend upon it, she will be found in the last summing up more interested, as Sara Bernhardt is, for example, in making her art contributory than in making it exceptional.

But it is not quite enough for greatness that a woman should

be maternal in her quality and prophetic in her modes. She must also be greatly endowed.

It is at this point that the average American feminist fails. She is a poor judge of the personal equipment necessary for a woman who is to adventure successfully in the field of national or world accomplishment. Neither in respect to the work done, nor in the choice of critical substitutes for opinion, is she able in general to justify her preferences on established grounds. The most cursory examination of the lists under discussion showed that the women who made them had made their selection of the "greatest writer" and "greatest actress" with no reference to anything but their own preference. Following up this somewhat disconcerting revelation, an editorial writer in one of the women's magazines instanced six women, every one of whom might have been included among the "twelve greatest", namelessly, described by their achievement only. The guessing among the two million women subscribers as to the identity of the six went far to confirm the earlier suspicion that women in general can not discriminate between a woman who is truly distinguished and one who is merely prominent. There were an astonishing number of letters phrased somewhat like this: "I don't know what she has done, but I am sure So-and-So ought to be in this list.” In part, this failure to identify the qualifications for distinction is the result of inexperience and the narrow range of social contacts among women, but in part, I am afraid, it is one of those inherent indifferences of women by which their past subjugation has been accomplished. Women are shrewdly intuitive about character, but by their apparent incapacity for soundly rating the intellectual endowment, and by their failure to establish criterions which compete successfully with men's criterions for the greatest and the next greatest, they have been obliged to accept leadership where men have found it.

The fact that men have shown themselves willing to follow women wherever greatness in the particular woman has been presented to them in terms with which they are familiar, militates against the old notion that women have been kept from leadership because of man's will to power. The great queens of the world have always been greatly served. Men accepted Joan of