Towards the "New Woman" on her intellectual side, _Punch_ was decidedly hostile. One could not find a better expression of his views than in the large illustration, "Donna Quixote," in April, 1894. The central figure, wearing pince-nez and waving a latchkey, is formidable rather than repellent. Around her on the floor lie books by Ibsen, Tolstoi and Mona Caird, and in the decorative border (which embodies her visions) she is seen tilting at the dragon of Decorum, and smiting down the triple Cerberus of Mrs. Grundy, "Mamma" and Chaperon. Du Maurier's "Passionate Female Literary Types" in the same year are unlovely to the verge of hideousness, and the legends are frankly satirical. When "Sarah Grand" declared that Man, morally, was "in his infancy" and that "now Woman holds out a strong hand to the Child-man," and insisted on helping him up by "spanking proper principles into him in the nursery," _Punch_ quoted back at her "Ouida's" statement that "the New Woman was an unmitigated bore," and went on:-- [Sidenote: _The New Womanhood_] There is a New Woman, and what do you think? She lives upon nothing but Foolscap and Ink! But, though Foolscap and Ink form the whole of her diet, This nagging New Woman can never be quiet! The ironical protest registered by _Punch_ against ladies who insisted on travelling in smoking carriages and then objected to smoking, only serves to show how far we have travelled in the last thirty years. Another passing phase in the history of sex-antagonism is to be found in the record of the first of many dinners at which only literary ladies were allowed to be present. _Punch_ printed a letter signed "A Daughter of Eve who remembers Adam," who observed that "the Literary Ladies' Dinner of the 1st of June only needed one feature to be absolutely perfect--the presence of Gentlemen." Whether the letter was _bonâ fide_ or not, it probably expressed the view of the majority of those present. The more violent the manifestations of the New Womanhood, the more reactionary became _Punch's_ attitude. His reaction reached a culminating point in 1894, when he painted the following sketch of "A Modern Madame":-- She has aspirations after the impossible, and is herself far from probable; she regards her husband as an unnecessary evil, and her children as disturbances without compensating advantages. She writes more than she reads and seldom scribbles anything. She has no feelings, and yet has a yearning after the intense. She is the antithesis of her grandmother, and has made further development in generations to come quite impossible. She thinks without the thoughts of a male, and yet has lost the comprehension of a female. To sum up, she is hardly up to the standard of a man, and yet has sunk several fathoms below the level of a woman. So again he reverts to his older views on Education _à propos_ of the "Pioneers":--