Four Essays

The question of the economic status of women provides a forum for certain philosophical differences between Veblen and Gilman, although they share a general taste for liberal progressivism and a general acceptance of the idea of social as well as physical evolution. Their views of women are directly connected to their views of evolution and of the role of work (i.e., productive labor) in society. For Veblen, the decisive factor of society is that it reflects the economic power of the highest class. In such a society, says Veblen, women are fated to struggle for something akin to equality for as long as men dominate the economic area of existence. This explains his differentiating members of the leisure class from what he terms the "inferior class," which "includes slaves and other dependence, and ordinarily also all the women" (3:2). Women of high class are not involved in "industrial occupations" (3:3) because their status as leisure dependents precludes them f

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tially conservative. They didn't look forward, really, to a new collective society based on economic planning and the intelligent use of machines; they were skeptical and afraid of bigness; in their hearts they looked toward the past. Their social ideal, as opposed to their literary ideal, was the more selfdependent, less organized America they had known in their boyhoods. Dos Passos was speaking for almost all of them when, in the last days of his uneasy alliance with the Communists, he described himself as "just an oldfashioned believer in liberty, equality and fraternity" (2:2956). Cowley himself believed in the life of the mind and in the redemptive power of artpainting and sculpture, literature, music. Like many of his fellow exiles, who returned from Europe after the 1920s were over, he became a professional intellectual by becoming a university professor. But Cowley appreciated that American art had come into its own, and that the exiles, who did not themselves effect the change that brought America into art's mainstream, were smart enough to recognize that the change had taken place: "So far as the change was produced by literary efforts, it
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Approximate Word count = 5218
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)

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