Medford mail tribune., December 18, 1960, Image 45

I 72
ssrst i J '- -' i i 4 1 sr.i--rir'i i
Where Are the
Women Geniuses?
This famed author could find
none; then she remembered the story of
Jane Addams and her search ended
By KATHLEEN NORRIS
Jane Addams spent most of her 75 years championing children's rights and world peace.
For 50 years, Kathleen Norris has been a best
selling novelist and popular short-story writer.
She has written some 70 novels, including "The
Venables," "Shadow Marriage," and "Miss Harriet
Townsend," and is widely respected at an inter
preter of modern womrni and her emergence as a
force in American lie since World War I.
Some years ago, a distinguished biologist, Al
bert Wiggam, who had written a popular book
called, "The Fruit of the Family Tree," challenged
his readers with the question, "Where are the
women geniuses?"
The mere asking of this question answered itself
as far as the scientist was concerned, but the editor
of a magazine asked me to write what I could in
reply. I set about it with enthusiasm but imme
diately the astonishing and humiliating truth stood
forth in incontrovertible clarity.
There are no women geniuses.
In science, medicine, architecture, business, and,
above all, in the absorbing fascination of the arts
of war, women's names are conspicuously absent
But in the fine arts the great treasures of our
libraries, galleries, opera houses surely there I
would find women.
I had to abandon the search, however. Through
all the years, the laurels for music, art, letters
have never gone to women. Men have found no
feminine name to place beside those of Shake
speare, Goethe, Michelangelo, Dante, Bach. No,
nor to rank with Chaucer, Tolstoi, Vermeer,
Browning, Wagner, Chopin, da Vinci.
No women geniuses, then. But why?
And then suddenly there dawned upon me a
great light, a light that perhaps had been too close,
too long accepted to be seen with everyday vision.
And, with Alice, I could rub my eyes and burst
out, "Why, you're nothing but a pack of cards!"
You are only copyists, after all, you men of
genius. You watch, you study, and after hours of
agony you capture glimpses of man's heart and
soul, and inspire the naked canvas, the dead words
of dead men, the lifeless clay and insensate strings
and keys of great instruments with glorious life.
Your model is not life but of life; and your
achievement that perfect representation of life that
makes us give you our highest praise which inevi
tably must include the word, "lifelike."
But nobody ever looked at even the best
behaved of American nurseries at the supper-bath
hour with the admiring observation: "Don't the
children seem lifelike!" They are life, and more
they are the incomparable products of the finest
of all the arts. They, are the masterpieces of
women, living, growing, essential. To turn from
them to muddle about with mere plaster and ink
and catgut is a secondary prospect indeed!
Woman's masterpieces have always had a differ
ent quality. None of the happy women who will
emerge from the kitchen this evening, bearing
the family meal, would even -turn aside at the
great news that the "Mona Lisa" was being shown
at that very moment at the high school. Her
masterpiece is right there, at the dining-room
table. No woman in the world would exchange the
power called "relief that lies in her two hands,
for the copy of life that is called "art."
It was for Jane Addams to raise this work of
women to the pitch of geniuses, to join that com
pany of great women who have brought sanity and
comfort to a suffering world. This is the Jane Ad
dams whose centennial we celebrate this year.
With the supreme simplicity and dedication of a
medieval saint, she rose to challenge entrenched
poverty, suffering, sin; and-time will not weaken
her influence nor hinder the work that she began.
Like you and me, she might easily have turned
away from the slums, the filth, the crime of the
crowded streets. She might have told her sickened
soul that whatever effort any one woman could
make to lessen the suffering all about her would
be but one pitiful drop in a very ocean of these
blighted, embittered, darkened lives. If she did, she
crushed back hesitation, fear, doubt, and perhaps
faced the enormity of the situation with the little
phrase that becomes one of my vivid memories:
"Yes. I see. Well, what we must do is . . ."
What she did do, we all know; it will forever be
a part of America's story. She found a dilapidated
old mansion, and without money of her own, with
out influential friends, it was bought, rehabilitated,
turned into a clearing house for the miseries all
about it. And, as Hull House, it was to become
famous throughout the nation and to bring a thousand-thousand
masterpieces to completion.
The forlorn babies of the slums found themselves
out in the sunshine, under the trees, and on the wide
lawns of Chicago's first playground for children.
The first children's court was established because of
Jane Addams' championship of child offenders. Her
voice spoke out against child labor in factories, and
the laws were changed; and her advocacy of equal
suffrage spurred women into politics.
And finally, she directed her most powerful
l crusade of all against the stupidity, cruelty,
and waste of war. She formed the greatest of the
women's peace organizations, the Women's Inter
national League for Peace and Freedom.
The League was formed in Europe; it was when
she brought it to America that I first met her. She
was neither beautiful nor young; hers was an un
obtrusive, settled, matronly figure. But by this
time she had gained an international power; by
this time she was not refused honor, consideration,
help. There was something in the level, steady
look of her beautiful eyes, something in the quiet
authority of her voice, that so greatly affected one.
Every inch of her said strength, goodness, faith.
She was to receive many honors before she died
in her 75th year. She was to leave thousands of
other women to face, as she had faced, problems
of misunderstanding, powerlessness, and the
weakness of their numbers in joining battle with
the great evil called war. Thousands of them have
followed their leader to a different world, thou
sands fight on today, and other thousands will take
up their work in days to come. And high above
them will always stand the memory of the woman
of genius who lighted the flame: Jane Addams.
COVER:
The youngsters in Victor Mays' drawing
are not playing hide-and-seek. But feeling
very much in the Christmas spirit, they've
laden a pine tree with fruit and vegeta
bles for their flock. of forest friends.
Family
Weekly
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