"OUR PATRICIAN WOMEN."

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 148, 22 June 1918, Page 19

"OUR PATRICIAN WOMEN."

Removing our gas mask after reading the society column of a local newspaper and the " editorials describing how the world is to be made safe for democracy, we take a deep. breath (says the San Francisco "Argonaut") and thank God for our patrician women, as we understand they wish to be called. It seems that upon" them is laid the whole burden and heat of the war. It is their fevered enthusiasms that make the struggle possible. But for them we should be forced into a separate peace. If they were to relax their pose for a single moment, to lessen their pursuit of the costumer, the photographer, and the reporter, we should go down at once to defeat and perhaps to disgrace. "It is the woman of leisure," we are told, "who has planned the details of the busy marts where have been gleaned the dollars which ' have kept revolving the busy programme which promises comfort and necessity, pleasure and recreation, to the men who have sworn their allegiance to the flag and the country." Was there ever such devotion ■since history began to be written. We must erect statues to these women after the war. In the meantime they will put their pictures into the newspapers for lis. They will do it early and often. They will not allow us to forget them. But we are glad to see that these labours will not be carried to excess. Tlie bow must not be bent too far or it will break. Nature, overstrained, will take her revenge, and even the finest valour must be adapted to the limitations of the body. And so we are told that "if it be that these women are to keep sane and have courage to go forward with the magnificent task which they have set themselves, with all the seriousness and all the strivings they must occasionally take their play and go back to the simple things with all thought of the world's tragedies wiped away." And so, with these astatic preliminaries, we are informed that Mrs .Tones got nut her motor and invited half a dozen friends, carefully named, for a little trip into the couEt.-y, and for "a dainty menu, served -1 fresco," which in the language of common people means that they had something to eat out of doors. And now turning to an English newspaper we find that a large number of society women whose names are never given are working in the loading sheds of the munition works, where t#_y are not only in imminent danger of death, but where skin and hair are turned a bright and permanent yellow by the lyddite that they must handle. They must also strip to the skin and put on a costume that contains no trace of metal, ot even a pin.