Interlude

From “Reminiscences,” No. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Woman’s Tribune, 21 June 1890, 170

When I see so many of our American women struggling to be artists, who cannot make a good loaf of bread, nor a palatable cup of coffee, I think of what Theodore Parker once said when art was a craze in Boston. "The fine arts do not interest me," said Theodore Parker, "so much as the coarse arts, which feed, clothe, house and comfort a people. I should rather be a great man as Franklin, than a Michael Angelo—nay, if I had a son I should rather see him a mechanic, who organized use like the late George Stephenson, in England, than a great painter like Rubens, who only copied beauty. In short, I take more interest in a cattle show, and feel more sympathy with the Pope's bull than his bul-lum. Men talk to me about the absence of art in America. You remember the stuff that Margaret Fuller used to twaddle forth upon that theme, and what transcendental nonsense got delivered from gawky girls and long-haired young men. I tell them we have cattle-shows and mechanics' fairs, and plows and harrows, and sawmills, sewing-machines and reaping-machines, threshing-machines, and planning machines. There is not a saw-mill in Rome. I doubt if there is one in the Pontifical States."

A page from Caroline Sturgis's sketchbook of the 1850s, after her marriage to William Aspinwall Tappan and move to Lenox, Massachusetts. This quick sketch mimics Renaissance style and represents a mythological female figure.

By permission of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives.