WOMAN'S WORLD AND ITS WAYS

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 134, 8 June 1929, Page 15

WOMAN'S WORLD AND ITS WAYS

MODERN WORLD.

THE PASSING OF THE LADY.

WHO INVENTED HER 7

(By JOHN EESKIXE.)

The art of being a gentleman was Invented by the men. The women added some refinements, but the ideal struck its first roots in a masculine world. Man also invented 'the lady. Woman helped, but her co-operation was never complete. lii our day she has beeir less disturbed than man to gee the lady disappear. When we fashion our new kind of gentleman, woman will probably influence the pattern more than she did 100 years ago, while our inherited code of manners was forming; but the new lady, we may be fairly sure, will be invented afresh and una"ided by the imaginative male.

Of course a woman can be admirable without being a lady. Like ijhe man, she might be weak in etiquette, devoid of tact, uncouth of speech, and yet be strong in many essential virtues. Though the ideals of courtesy have their greatest power when they are spiritualised, and though we often identify them with religious aspiration, yet in their origin they refer to certain benefits in this actual world of animal conduct. The lack of these benefits, whenever the lady disappears from society, compels man to invent her once more. Obviously we should feel no compulsion if we withdrew from society, hermit fashion, or if we chose to ignore the flesh, fixing our thoughts on things above. To be a lady a woman would have to practice all the virtues, but man or woman might get on without worldly refinement and yet achieve holiness.

It is well to define gentleman and lady in these humble terms, not only because history makes us think the definition true, but because a mystical view of gentle behaviour would discourage any attempt to improve our manners. If the lady were a miracle she could never have been invented, and we couldn't invent her a second time. But she is really not miraculous at all; she is the natural ideal of the other sex, and for that very reason she is likely to occur even when the other eex is not a gentleman. To put the matter in plainest terms, woman, simply as woman, attracts man. Nature sees to that. But nature has not .provided that woman shall continue attractive to pursuing man after he has overtaken her. In fact, the contrast between his dream of her and the reality with which he suddenly becomes famliar wounds his self-respect; he does not like to admit that nature can entice him by an illusion. His impulse is to cry our for some continued lure in ■woman, to .'justify what he thought he saw; he asks her to behave, even in a life-long familiarity, so that she will seem as alluring, as exquisite, as desirable and as unattainable as she was before he knew she cared for him. Not a coquette, though that would be better than nothing, but a coquette might be heartless, and man craves, under the technique of reticence, a passion as great as his own. In whatever tradition of behaviour and in whatever class of society, the charm that woman has'Jiiad for man can be explained by her willingness to ■dramatise before him his other self, Avhich she has inspired, but which he likes to think is her "own exclusive character.

Many of us regret the departure of all that is ladylike from bur world. Of course the departure is not so wholesale, and in any case we are meditating a new type of lady, but our mood of regret is justified by the liberties ■affected by modern women. If the accomplished lady is to become once more a phenomenon in society, the men, be it humbly suggested, will have to bring her back; if she merely obeys a feminine scheme of propriety she will never be a success. In fact, the splendid lady of a generation or so past has been driven out of existence chiefly through the over zeal of nice women, who thought up a world of deportment independent of man and his adorations —a world in which even the spiritual fruits of sex were ignored. The first rule of this deportment was that woman should be chaperoned to as advanced an age as possible. The impulse to protect young girls from vulgar contacts with life is obviously kind and generous, but frequently the girls are restive, conscious of an infancy unduly prolonged, and sometimes they make the fatal discovery that, protected or not, they have already guessed more About life than the chaperones will ever -experience.

Discipline rarely survives that insight But even if it could survive, it would offend the masculine ideal of woman. To a man, a woman chaperoned is imperfectly or dubiously a lady. She is surrounded by material and physical substitutes for that reverence he would Jike to feel for her. His impulse is a dream of her in another world, but here she is on earth, after all, merely surrounded by a stockade. Evil questions ipoison his mind, as to how much there "will be left to revere when she is once: released from enforced delicacy.

The second rule of feminine deportment, in the old tradition, was that the body should be chaperoned, so to speak —hidden, or better still, ignored. The lady was known by her dress, by the extent to which it covered and obliterated her, and by the way she wore it. A long skirt was more ladylike than & short one. In other words, the lady yvas translated into dry goods. .. Here again the impulse toward modesty commands respect, jet the result of it in experience,was disturbing. There seemed to be something wrong in manners which located virtue outside of you, so that your whole character ■would go if you, lost your clothes. It ■eeemed ignoble to raise the dressmaker to equality with a system of ethics. By such a code, the literal minded people who built up the right sort of wardrobe, might pass, among themselves at least, for gentle spirits.- But the truly gentle spirits, we guessed in our hearts, might Tvalk in Eden with Mother Eve, unclad yet modest, reticent and elusive. The third and worst rule chaperoned the lady's mind. There were a host of things no refined girl should know. We make sad jokes of it, implying that Tv-omen in the old days fotind out about life surreptitiously, but there's plenty of reason to think they did nothing .of the kind. They were trained to be ignorant, and it was man who became surreptitious, making the best of what he probably thought was the order of nature, that a ladylike woman should have the mental equipment of a child. In his djeam, wom&s wjgejj Jβ

experience, he had to say she was wise in her instincts, not being able to locate the wisdom elsewhere. If in .spite of the handicaps of good-breeding, a lady did show intelligence beyond mere common i shrewdness, and with the intelligence, some orderly information about the world ehe was living in, ehe always had the homage of the men who knew a paragon when they saw one.

The ideal which men have nowadays of the lady accepts with equanimity the passing of these various forms of chaperonage. Woman- inspires him with a vision of exquisitiveness—so far nature keeps to her old ways; but he thinks this vision is not incomparable with social freedom, with simplicity and frankness of dreas-, with complete knowledge of man and the world —provided, as in the sixteenth century, that woman remembers to enjoy her liberties with a difference. He still wishes to keep his idealised picture of her, and to believe she is not like himself. Any manners which will satisfy this\craving, will seem to him ladylike.

It wouldn't be hard to imagine a protest from some feminine reader, that the theory of the lady here set forth stresses sex too much, and gives man too much credit for the improvement of woman's behaviour. Those who are trained to be ladies in the school now going out of fashion, will particularly resent the implication that the women themselves have contributed little to this ideal, of which they are, nevertheless, the examples. Yet we can find the evidence around us, in the village or the city where we live, as well as in old books. The women will take out their vanity cases and make facial repairs in the most public rooms, even on the, pavement. Their impulse is to account this openness as sincerity. Man would be happier if they got themselves up in private—happier still if they did not get themselves up at all.

The objection to painting the face is quite without logic. Many a face Is improved by it, and few spoiled. But the masculine unwillingness that the virtues of his lady should be purely external, located in a chaperone or in a dress or in a guaranteed ignorance, becomes a positive prejudice against tampering with the features which indicate the soul. His ideal lady really is what he dreams of; she carries about in her spirit, he likes to believe, that beauty of which her behaviour and her appearance are the index. Her body unclothed would still be modest, and her face unpainted would still show the flush of health and of delicate emotion — ("Star" and A.A.N.S.)