art are the tonsorial, the sartorial, and
all those specialized adorners of the body commonly known as "beauty
doctors."

Here, as in other cases, the greatest artists are men. The greatest
milliners, the greatest dressmakers and tailors, the greatest
hairdressers, and the masters and designers in all our decorative
toilettes and accessories, are men. Women, in this as in so many
other lines, consume rather than produce. They carry the major part
of personal decoration today; but the decorator is the man. In the
decoration of objects, woman, as the originator of primitive industry,
originated also the primitive arts; and in the pottery, basketry,
leatherwork, needlework, weaving, with all beadwork, dyeing and
embroideries of ancient peoples we see the work of the woman decorator.
Much of this is strong and beautiful, but its time is long past. The art
which is part of industry, natural, simple, spontaneous, making beauty
in every object of use, adding pleasure to labor and to life, is not Art
with a large A, the Art which requires Artists, among whom are so few
women of note.

Art as a profession, and the Artist as a professional, came later; and
by that time women had left the freedom and power of the matriarchate
and become slaves in varying degree. The women who were idle pets in
harems, or the women who worked hard as servants, were alike cut off
from the joy of making things. Where constructive work remained to them,
art remained, in its early decorative form. Men, in the proprietary
family, restricting the natural industry of women to personal service,
cut off their art with their industry, and by so much impoverished the
world.

There is no more conspicuously pathetic proof of the aborted development
of women than this commonplace--their lack of a civilized art sense. Not
only in the childish and savage display upon their bodies, but in the
pitiful products they hang upon the walls of the home, is seen the
arrest in normal growth.

After ages of culture, in which men have developed Architecture,
Sculpture, Painting, Music and the Drama, we find women in their
primitive environment making flowers of wax, and hair, and worsted;
doing mottoes of perforated cardboard, making crazy quilts and mats and
"tidies"--as if they lived in a long past age, or belonged to a lower
race.

This, as part of the general injury to women dating from the beginning
of our androcentric culture, reacts heavily upon the world at lar