CITIZEN WOMAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 279, 24 November 1928, Page 4 (Supplement)

CITIZEN WOMAN.

HER PLACE IN THE COMMUNITY.

(By ALICE AT. KENNY.) Recently, all over this fair ■ land Citizen Woman has been parking the perambulator on the pavement outside the polling booth in the charge of her husband or an elder child and going in to record her vote. Not so very, long ago this familiar scene would have provoked bitter comment and sarcasm, or at least a facetious cartoon from the ranks of those who opposed any alteration in woman's status.

But what a blessing the improved political status has been to women. There lies the root of the matter. It)

I is not so much the direct effect of women on politics' as the effect of real citizenship on women that has been so important. New rights and responsibilities have forced on a class condemned to more passivity than was good for them a development in knowledge and initiative that has been of immense benefit to them, and through them good for the

How strange the old fears and furies, iie old battle cries seem now. One fear, lie most groundless one imaginable, was hat women could and would wield a

block vote in vital. matters of national policy and ruin and enervate the State. Sex solidarity and sex warfare are the most incomprehensible phantoms, for the interest's and the happiness of the sexes are so completely bound up with each other.' .

I can remember, a long time ago, with what earnestness and anger Walter Besant, the novelist, condemned women who followed any occupation than that of wife, or mother, or were not concerned in some way with ministering to man. '. Business women or women students seemed monstrous and unnatural to him; he proved conclusively that the only happiness for a woman . was in the shelter of a home, in loying obedience to some man. It appeared to him quite incontrovertible. He was incapable of realising the complete happiness a woman feels in throwing herself* into skilled work for which she has an aptitude, and the elation girl athletes feel in the vigour, and the rigour, of the game.

Even H. G. Wells not so long ago slid

into error about the latter class of female. He announced that women' did not really care for strenuous games; they were only to be found on golf links and such places because men were there.

Even now there are some stragglers from the old host 3of reaction, who apparently have learned no lesson, from the hard years of-the war when competent women afforded help in .so many industries.

J. H. Curie warns women if they will throw themselves into the arena.and become grim-faced officials instead of sweet, feminine women, men will no longer love them and nothing can make up to them for the loss of man's affection.

How can a man approaching the latter end of life, and, one would suppose, instructed by world-wide wanderings, utter such solemn nonsense. As if anything could induce man to cease loving woman, not even scientific attainments, or a taste for riding motor cycles, or sitting on commissions, can do it, any more than woman could cease to love man, or mothers cease to love babies.

All the wisdom and skill that any individual can acquire is an advantage to the whole race. We go forward together. The races whose women are-enslaved are the backward ones. A small, but significant improvement for women of to-day is the freedom, and I would add the beauty of their apparel.

It is an old saying that what hampers the body hampers the mind, so if the converse is true, a glance at any tennis lawn should give the philosophically minded great hope for the mental freedom and activity of our girls and women.