AROUND THE TEA TABLE

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 233, 2 October 1928, Page 11

AROUND THE TEA TABLE

HATTERS OP GENERAL INTEREST. (By SHIRLEV.) j "Words mean what I choose them to mean," says a character in a Lewi* Carrol story, and he gives instances of their obedience. Is it disrespectful to hint that one honourable member in the House is inclined to this complex when on interrogation he confessed that to him "anti-social" meant criminal ? The trouble is, however, that who have the label fixing as regards citizens may choose to make the word give another kind of obedience. However, this is all of the usual trend to-day. Our language is becoming softer and softer so as to ease our souls, if our actions are otherwise. After a while "antisocial" will sound so bad to us that we will have to be thinking out some still gentler expression with which to push people into segregation. Formerly, we | hanged certain criminals out of consideration with a silk rope. Now we try to ruin them with ca silken word. . . • » • #

"Equality, thou pleasing, dreadful word." I don't think I have got the quotation quite right, but it suffices to show the feelings of many women. at hearing that men and women teachers are possibly now to be equal in salary— presumably this still allows for a difference to the married teacher, a difference so carefully carried out once that for a. time the married woman teacher was paid more than the single girl! This, unless widowhood is presupposed, is not what the most addent feminist would desire. As regards equality in general, there are still benighted persons going about and lilting, "A woman needs less than a man," though I have yet to see the restaurant menu card marked 2/ for the man and 1/6 for the lady. Sometimes a "lady's portion" is sung out by the waitress to the server out behind scenes, but at the pay desk both are equal. Therefore, when the pay desk is one that gives money instead of taking it, let there be equality too. "We are equal in the cradle and equal when they lay us in the grave," said Olive Schreiner long ago somewhat sepulchrally—but since that date our life has been getting quite spotted with justice and equality, and now another spot is to be added. But there is balm in Gilead for those who dissent. . . Marriage exists to lure the petted woman teacher from her stouter pay envelope—and marriage will lure her just as much as ever.

Evidently Sydney housewives have a more exciting time with hawkers than is the case here. Silk lengths and dress prices are being offered at the doors— and at such low prices that the police are beginning to take notice, suspecting thieves' booty. Nothing of this sort in Auckland. One local woman has kept a list of all she has been offered and they range from books about the end of the world to something which infallibly mends broken china—a good mascot, as, since buying it, nothing has broken. Home-made lollies are a good investment. "Yet you are the only person in this street that has bought any,", said the vendor to me,.-and confessed that she had taken only 3/6 that morning, which, however, she seemed to consider not so bad. ITie vegetable hawker, I notice, has not taken to selling potatoes (small, new ones) already peeled, as one shop does, the vegetables covered with water tp preserve the complexion. . .

Some masculine philanthropists are concerned about a venture lately started in the inland-continent to provide seaside holiday homes for bush mothers, who have "never seen the sea." They state that at first it was a real camp— small huts simply got up, with a communal kitchen, where the mothere could each cook the meal in real picnic fashion, only with their elbows in each other's sides and waiting their turn for the fire. the Countrywomen's Associations have, it. seems, got hold of this plan— they are providing the real villains of the piece and are spoiling its rurality and simplicity by building, at considerable cost, an hotel where the mothers, still paying very little, will live in conventional comfort. The poor things, this summer will not be allowed into that roasting communal kitchen at aIL Instead of enjoying their first view of the ocean over a communal frying pan or washing-up basin, they will be obliged to lie about on the sand for enjoyment. They will not be too tired to sport in the waves. All this seems extraordinary, not to say sinful, to a man just because he enjoys, by way of variety, stooping over the campfire. I am afraid I am with the Countrywomen's Associations, and hope their idea will spread to this island.

Period dances and period films are very common. Why. is it that both always ignore the period of the hobble skirt, lasting, off and on, from 1909 till before the war? Cannot some of us remember the four buttons at the side near the hem to be unfastened when one wanted to negotiate a hill? Lately I saw De Morgan's "Somehow," which called for this style in a flash back scene—but an earlier period was substituted. Yet the queer little step a woman had to give in these not distant times, if very fashionably "hobbled" was in its way a scream.