A NEW TRIUMPH FOR WOMEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 171, 22 July 1930, Page 6

A NEW TRIUMPH FOR WOMEN.

By winning the King's Prize with a score of 280 Miss Marjorie Foster has added another laurel to women's achievements in realms of sport formerly monopolised by men. When the National Rifle Association was founded in 1860-to encourage marksmanship it was not taken very seriously by the professional soldier. It gained something in reputation when a move Avas made in 1890 from Wimbledon to Bisley, and the Princess of Wales fired the first shot at .the June meeting in that year. Just after the Great War "Punch" had a picture of an officer, who had fought in the war, looking round at the trophies won by a volunteer of the old school, who remarks to his friend from the trenches: "Of course, there has been no serious shooting since 1914." Conditions in actual warfare are not as conducive to accurate shooting as they are at Bisley, but good marksmanship will always tell, and the National Rifle Association has done a wonderful work in encouraging it. We are constantly being assured that in the next war everybody will have to take a part. It will be literally a Avar of nations. Already France has made preparation for conscripting everybody and everything in the event of war, and thus we might have a rifle brigade of women and bombing 'planes manned (if that is the right word) by no ( ted girl flyers. There remain very few fields now for women to conquer. Men still hold a certain supremacy in football, cricket and rowing, but it is doubtful how long they will continue to do so. We may see a Donna Bradman defying all the wiles of Test match bowlers at Lords, and girl bowlers capturing the best wickets as easily as many women now bowl their husbands out when they return late with the plausible excuse that they have been detained at the office on business. In scholarship and in athletics, as well as in the cropping of the hair and general attire, women are becoming more and more like unto men, and the lyric poetry of the future will no longer sing of Julia's' silks, but will transfer its admiration to her rough tweeds and her close-cropped hair under a beret. —W.M.