merits. We, more sophisticated in this matter, joke shamefacedly about
"the bald-headed row," and occasionally burst forth in shrill scandal
over some dinner party where ladies clad in a veil and a bracelet dance
on the table. Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this
degradation found--the female capering and prancing before the male.
It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers. That we, as a
race, present this pitiful spectacle, a natural art wrested to unnatural
ends, a noble art degraded to ignoble ends, has one clear cause.

Architecture, in its own nature, is least affected by that same cause.
The human needs secured by it, are so human, so unescapably human, that
we find less trace of excessive masculinity than in other arts. It meets
our social demands, it expresses in lasting form our social feeling,
up to the highest; and it has been injured not so much by an excess of
masculinity as by a lack of femininity.

The most universal architectural expression is in the home; the home is
essentially a place for the woman and the child; yet the needs of woman
and child are not expressed in our domestic architecture. The home is
built on lines of ancient precedent, mainly as an industrial form; the
kitchen is its working centre rather than the nursery.

Each man wishes his home to preserve and seclude his woman, his little
harem of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest
his ability to maintain her in idleness. The house is the physical
expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world
with a small drab ugliness. A dwelling house is rarely a beautiful
object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural
relations; or grow in larger beauty as our lives develop.

The deadlock for architectural progress, the low level of our general
taste, the everlasting predominance of the commonplace in buildings, is
the natural result of the proprietary family and its expression in this
form.

In sculpture we have a noble art forcing itself into some service
through many limitations. Its check, as far as it comes under this line
of study, has been indicated in our last chapter; the degradation of the
human body, the vicious standards of sex-consciousness enforced under
the name of modesty, the covered ugliness, which we do not recognize,
all this is a deadly injury to free high work in sculpture.

With a nobly equal womanhood, stalwart and a