The Evening Star WEDNESDAY JANUARY 25, 1933. THE SUPERMAN.

Evening Star, Issue 21319, 25 January 1933, Page 6

The Evening Star WEDNESDAY JANUARY 25, 1933. THE SUPERMAN.

A point which must have been noted about the series of plays now running in our city is that they are all, or almost all of them, great plays for women, in th© sens© that they magnify women. Shaw has been always a great admirer—it might he said that, despite his irreverent character, he has had always a wholesome awe—of women’s potentialities and parts. In ‘ Man and Superman,’ the woman is Superman. Lady Cicely Waynflete, in ‘ Captain Brassbound’s Conversion,’ and Saint Joan are largely the same person, despite the immense difference of the circumstances and th© atmosphere in which they move. They are both the “ woman who gets there,” by cajolery, by virtue, by resolution, the first to a desert Alsatia where no woman could be supposed to be safe for a moment, the second from her obscure homo in Domremy to a king’s court, which she rules. In his respect for women Euripides, who gives us the ‘Medea,’ was an earlier Shaw. His heroines are human, of mixed virtues and passions, when it was the fashion of his age, as afterwards of the earlier Victorian age, to make them conventional dolls. Ho was concerned to impress, again and again, the woman’s point of view, even when, as in the case of Medoa,

the woman was a barbarian and a foreigner who had l been unjustly treated by Greeks. In Shakespeare’s tragedy again it is Lady Macbeth who dominates the action from first to last, and keeps her husband’s courage to the sticking point after she has launched him on a career of ambition and crime. The moral of the two plays produced in this generation might be that of a musical comedy which is later than either, ‘ You Can’t Keep a Good Girl Down,’ while the older dramas place an equal emphasis on the difficulties of repression of a bad one. It is easy to understand why Dame Sybil Thorndike should revel in them all. But is .woman in reality so much of a, superman? Not necessarily and not often, it must b© concluded, if a study of statistics of men’s and women’s achievements which a writer in a leading review has been at pains to make can provide a judgment. Mr A. Wyatt Til by was led to his subject when he happened to notice that in a list of one thousand of the leading figures in European history and civilisation, ancient and modern, 985 were men and only 15 were women—66 to one. It seemed to him worth while to search further to see if these proportions were confirmed, and he found that, in a rough manner, they were. An examination of the first 500 names indexed under the letter “ B ” in ‘ W'ho’s Who ’ revealed 484 of men and sixteen of women, and an analysis of the letter “M ” gave a like result. ‘ Who’s W r hos ’ of other countries showed a similar disproportion, except for America, where the prominent women numbered on© in seven. Of 522 distinguished persons treated consecutively in the ' Dictionary of National Biography ’ one in thirty-two was a woman, and he was not convinced that the proportion has really increased in recent times. So far as there was divergence between his first and later lists, it was explained to him by the fact that the celebrities of all time and of all Europe were more stringently selected. “ Tho higher the intellectual quality of the list the lower the proportion of women.” Further explorations showed that it was in religion and in government—the last an unexpected sphere, since the obstacles to success in it must have been greatest—that women have most excelled. Out of 207 saints and martyrs in a Christian calendar for January 171 were men and thirty-six women—one in six. At the same time, very few women have been theologians —possibly because the priesthood is still a male monopoly. There is no great female historian or dramatist, though there are historical diarists yielding nothing to men. Two or three women novelists have reached the highest peaks, but only one poetess, few painters, and hardly any musicians. Mr Tilby does not believe that the mental processes of women differ fundamentally from those of men. “.The essentials of masculine and feminine thought are very similar, and tho doctrine that men think rationally and women intuitively seems to me sheer nonsense, as misleading as the persistent superstition that tho lower animals act from instinct and the human animals from intelligence. Women are as rational in their judgments as men— perhaps that is not saying very much—at least on issues which, they understand, but they often have to argue from a smaller base of practical knowledge.” Biologically he is convinced that there is no necessary superiority of one sex over the other. The list of women who have excelled as rulers and administrators is most impressive. Three causes are suggested why they have not done better in the arts. They are: (1) Circumstances, in the sense of unfavourable social or economic environment; (2) they may not have thought it worth while to excel; (3) they may have lacked the capacity to do so. Which of these has been tho greatest retarding influence he is unable to decide. It will be seen that the examiner ignores another influence which must have kept a great many women in the background—their absorption in pushing men. To that another playwright has done full justice—Sir James Barrie, in ‘ What Every Woman Knows.’