Art and Handcraft in the Woman's Building
of the World's Columbian Exposition

44 ART AND HANDICRAFT industry that we value the rare works of art and handicraft gathered in our building. Nowhere in the Exposition can we find so complete a history of the industries of the human race as in the W onian s Building-; beginning- with women’s work in savagery (a very wonderful collection of which is to be seen in the Scientific Room) and ending with a modern woman’s idea of that primitive woman as shown by Mrs. MacMonnies in her decoration. We thus see in one department the tools of the savage woman, and in another the representation of their use. Judging by her handicraft, the primitive woman worked earnestly and well. With here and there a few brilliant exceptions, the work of modern women in the higher fields of art has been less earnest, less thorough, than the work of these savage women. The religions of the Orient, which teach that man only is capable of civilization, and have made woman man’s slave, are partly responsible for the long- period of triviality in women’s work. The savage woman is a dignified figure. On her falls the burden of weaving- and basket-making, of sowing and reaping, of feeding and clothing her family. The legacy she lias left us is infinitely precious and touching. Orientalism is responsible for the idea that woman is the inferior of man, and when I hear women lightly professing a belief in Buddhism, I always feel like reminding them that one of the fundamental ideas of that religion is that the female principle in the universe is the principle of evil. To-day Christianity lias SKETCH FOR WINDOW. Mrs.. J. B. Weston. United States. only just begun, after nineteen hundred years, to overcome this paralyzing- idea of the inferiority of our sex. Fifteen years ago, nay ten yeais ago, I might almost say five, the women artists of Europe and of America, while showing a great deal of talent, betrayed a lack of power, conscience, and persistence in their work. It had the qualities of imagination, of sweetness, of romance, and of color, but it lacked the sterner qualities of technique which only the severest study, the most scrupulous patience, the quality which I can perhaps best designate as the artistic conscience, can give. The