WOMEN A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 123, 26 May 1928, Page 8

WOMEN A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

We look back with amazement and pity at the women of IS2S, it is said, but we look with admiration also, for it is out of their dreaming and strn ing that our freedom has come. So writes "A Modern Girl" in the London "Daily News," who says that women are standing untrammelled ou the threshold of 1928. a year that will probably bring to Englishwomen, with an increased franchise, even more freedom than they have now. A hundred years ago. it is recalled, the ladies of the laud sat in stifling idleness. There were no professions open to "them, we are reminded, and if they were so unfortunately placed that they must earn their own .living.or starve they could only hope for employment as a "companion" or as a governess. \V*e are then offered this picture of "poor Miss IS2S," which shows a startling contrast between tile young ladies of that day and those of to*dav: Look at her standing there in her stuffv. thick clothing, her hideous frilled 'pelisse' with its puffed sleeves, her face hidden Vv an ungainly flapping bonnet "as large as an umbrella." She has been grounded like Amelia Sedley in the principles of religion and morality. Her head is stuffed with -dangnall's questions, her fingers are sore with working 'samplers,' her body is stiff with that strange cult known as "deportment.' She is just, sixteen years of age and ready to 'come out' to a life of social and domestic inanition When, she dances it is to pace soberly through the measures of a minuet or- the quadrilles, for she has not yet been introduced to the 'sprightly polka' or the glamorous waltz. Little wonder that she breaks the monotony of her davs bv occasional fits of hysterics or a graceful" swoon "She had her vanities, poor dear—her looks were one of her few interests. She was as frightened of corpulence as is her modern sister Rosy, fresh cheeks were considered common and she deprived herself of adequate food for' fear of growing fat and 'material.' A pale and tired gentility was her creed. She moved of necessity in a small and cireumseribad circle travelling no further than her feet or the slow, lumbering coach would take-her, for the revolution of port had hardly begun, and railways were not yet familiar." - .

Of all the changes the swiftly-moving hundred years past has brought about, none °is more dramatic, thinks "A Modern Girl," than the improvement in the status of women. Not onlv their own destinies, we are told, but the destinies 'of nations, "lie in the hands that a little while ago were pale and weak with idleness."