Autograph letter signed (‘G. Bernard Shaw’) to Georgia Pearl Foster, 29 Fitzroy Square, London, W., 27 August 1895

George Bernard Shaw (1865-1950)
Autograph letter signed (‘G. Bernard Shaw’) to Georgia Pearl Foster, 29 Fitzroy Square, London, W., 27 August 1895
Three pages, 132 x 210mm, bifolium. Provenance: Christie's, 23 November 1994, lot 35.

‘I therefore am strongly of the opinion that the undomestic woman, when she has once secured her position by escaping from domestic servitude as men escape from unskilled labour: that is, by mastering a trade or profession, can maintain her own individuality to the full extent of her own strength...with infinitely less difficulty than the domestic woman’. An insightful letter focusing on Shaw’s views on the emancipation of women, in response to Foster’s previous letter expressing her admiration of his long essay on aspects of Ibsenism. Shaw, in response to this letter, ‘You call yourself an undomestic woman; but I suggest to you that a lack of aptitude for household management is too negative a qualification to take an effective stand upon’. Women in the professions or business, he continues, delegate their domestic duties, but a woman's valuable domestic services are unrecognised and unrewarded by her husband, and she lacks all self-belief; this being the chief obstacle to emancipation. Concluding, he is quick to remind Foster of her responsibilities ‘you will have to fight so much as for that of the domestic woman from whose ill paid, ill organised, ill recognised, and consequently ill executed industry you, as an undomestic woman, will presumably emancipate yourself’, before implying that a second edition of Quintessence is being considered.

Georgia Pearl Foster, a young actress in New York, was writing in response to having read Shaw’s 150 page essay, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, published in 1891, two years after he had seen the first London performance of A Doll’s House. The second edition of the essay as he mentions, was intended to be an extension of the chapter ‘The Womanly Woman’, in which he discusses the ideal woman in a male-dominated society and urges her emancipation from the traditional concept of her duties.