MEN, WOMEN AND FLAMES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 193, 16 August 1941, Page 15

MEN, WOMEN AND FLAMES

THERE can never have been c time in human history wher men and women stood as leve as they do now. It took one wai to Procure a sex emancipation which both reason and riot had been demanding in vain. E2^ y °*.Power to serve and tr 1 fn thi «& Uah l y> writes Ivor Browr in the "Manchester Guardian." All the would-be clever anri amusing maxims about the ladle" th f notation diction': hv t* Q i ght of blazm S air raid or 7™ ton?- grey challenge of the shape of things to come What a deal of wasted ingenuity tf e i° the building of sentenced C man^ egm Wlth the word a«5 ec J? gnition . of the steadv, serene and dominating woman has been SLM- ! han was commonly supposed. Dickens filled his novels witn mentally undeveloped voune K en of a clinging kind and eviSJ y i rega I ded these nonentities as a, , J L nd even charming specimens of humanity. One thinks of his world as one in Jwtn* w °4 man V s expected to be r>™' ,e without desiring to be free. Protection was her due. productivity '^^ du , ty - Yet Di ckens could paint. l£l,i£ u * an >' apparent sense of contradiction, the figure of Miss Abbev ?«m e, S o n' th ?. landlady of The SixJolly Fellowship Porters. Dockside Landlady * T T . he , P i )rtcrs - as readers of "Our Mutual Friend" will remember, was a d , OC^ sl T de j avern the roughest part of London, frequented by such ugly customers as Rogue Rid'erhood anri others who scoured London'-. HYZL for , Y' hat dubious flotsam it might yield. Here dwelt Miss Potterson, givinr laws to the brutish sodality which met in her bar parlour. 'An unwomanly task, but handled with character, for the sanctions behind that discipline were certainlv not. those of physical force. Miss Potterson was accepted as a landlady, just as Victoria was accented as a queen SPr? en sbe asked, as she alwavs OKI. for good behaviour she always ■Miss Potterson. the ale-wife (or rather, ale-spinster), who was sometnmg of a schoolma'am, is an enduring type. Her kind is constantly to be found serving out a bitter discipline along with the mild aie What seems so strange to us is her appearance, without comm the Dickensian world or sheltered darlings. Yet the histc-v of feminine freedom has been a strange chronicle of inconsistencies of ebb and flow in permissible opportunities. The women of Shakespeare s comedies have far more intellectual liberty and, accordingly far more intellectual power than those of Dickens' novels. If Portia had no political rights and had to masquerade as a man in order to practise the law, she moved in a society, as did the other Renaissance heroines. where a woman was often a man's superior in wit and his equal in opportunity to prove it. In that society sexual love could be a gay and comradely mood as well as an intense and yearning one. Shakespeare's world recognised equality in essentials, not, of course in war and in politics, but in the enjoyment of wit, beauty, and the graces of life. But none of Dickens' lovers seems able to achieve the natural ease of gay and comradely relations. The man supports. The woman depends. Even if she is "a brave little woman,' economically self-sufficient, she becomes a dinger and a yearner when love looks in at the window. A Victorian consort was by no means a comrade. Out of our present sufferings will come, presumably, further sex reform. What is left of the old injustices and grievances will be swept aside. Equal pay for equal work will be taken for granted and not conceded as a favour. In the towns there may for a while be recourse to an emphasised femininity as a natural reaction

from the uniforms and overalls and wartime's flat-heeled disdain of gadabout elegance. Salesmanship will oe applied to restoring the Charmer as man's consolation and his spur. B . ut , it , RComs unlikely that that sort of femininity will really predominate again. Whatever the arts of the draper, there will be little money for nonsense. That sexual passion mav once more be the tender one. recovering something of its old romanticism and expressing itself less matter-of-tactly, is certainly possible. For, after so much of ugliness, the rediscovery of beauty may be so urgent a process as to re-crcrfe the sense of awe which had \iH tiered and vanished from our won U The excess of that awe lit sex relations created the odious rhawkishness of Dickensian love-making But there should be room again for that mood of delicate wonder which gave us our poetry of love as well a£ L- L or . tne sturdy comradeship which gives us its prose and common sense.