The artist seeks his models from the stately burden-bearing, sun-browned women of Italy; strong creatures, human as well as feminine. The house life, with its shade, its foul air, its overheated steaminess, its innumerable tiring small activities, and its lack of any of those fine full exercises which built the proportions of the Greeks, has not benefited the body of the lady thereof; and in injuring her has injured all mankind, her children.
How of her mind? How has the mental growth of the race been affected by the housing of women? Apply the question to men. Think for a moment of the mental condition of humanity, if men too had each and every one stayed always in the home. The results are easy to picture. No enlargement of industry, only personal hand-to-mouth labour: not a trade, not a craft, not a craftsman on earth; no enlargement of exchange and commerce, only the products of one's own field, if the house-bound were that much free: no market, local, national, or international; no merchant in the world.
No transportation, that at once; _no roads_--why roads if all men stayed at home? No education--even the child must leave home to go to school; no art, save the squaw-art of personal decoration of one's own handmade things. No travel, of course, and so no growth of any human ties, no widespread knowledge, love, and peace. In short, no human life at all--if men, all men, had always stayed at home. Merely the life of a self-maintained family--the very lowest type, the type we find most nearly approached by the remote isolated households of the "poor whites," of the South. Even they have some of the implements and advantages of civilisation, they are not utterly cut off.
The growth of the world has followed the widening lives of men, outside the home. The specialised trade, with its modification of character; the surplus production and every widening range of trade and commerce; the steadily increasing power of distribution, and transportation, with its increased area, ease, and speed; the ensuing increase in travel now so general and continuous; and following that the increase in our knowledge and love of one another; all--all that makes for civilisation, for progress, for the growth of humanity up and on toward the race ideal--takes place outside the home. This is what has been denied to the lady of the house--merely all human life!