WOMANHOOD'S IDEALS

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20087, 17 November 1930, Page 4

WOMANHOOD'S IDEALS

LECTURES BY DR. AND MRS ARUNDALE. A candid exposition o" the ideals of niothorhood in woman and the necessity for a universal acceptance of thoso ideals was conveyed iu lectures given by Dr. G. S. Arundale and Mrs Kukmini Arundale iti tlis Art Gallery on Saturday evening. Thero -was insufficient accommodation for the hundreds oj people who attended. '•'There is no country i;i tho world where the spirit o! 1 true womanhood is more splendid thar. in India,'' said Dr. .Arundale, who has lived for many yean in the East, and whose wife is an Indian of high caste. "You who live in the West hear distorted views and receive distorted presentations of Indian womanhood as it is to-day. "It s-?ems that all the ills from which the world suffers are in no small way due to tho fact that women are forgetting that motherhood is tho great power that fructifies nl) life, the source of all courage, the dispeller of all despair, an.i, above thing?, the Abode of creative rest. Women sometimes forgot, too, the glorious gift of love which motherhood gave them, that motherhood which was the heart of all love. Was not God the mother as well as the father (. all things? Woman symbolised the eternal —men worked in terms of time. The greatest priesthood in the world wa? the natural one of women, and this priesthood, upon the proper exercise of which depended the welfare of the world, women were in danger of forgetting. Mrs Arundale appealed to women to e-ercise the ideal of mother-love, not oniy as mothers physically, but spiritually in overy-day life. "Whatever political or social power a woman may have," she said, "she can always exercise the great influence of motherhood on the lives of the people." In all civilisations and in all times motherhood had given her that influe ;ce. The speaker, referring to woman's fight for emancipation in recent years, pointed out that what women called their freedom was merely equality with men, when men had vot to realise what true freedom was. To copy was not to gain freedom; ideals and inspirations were needed. "There should be equality," Mtb Arundale asserted, "but equality in spiritual things, not in trivialities. A new idea of what woman is to do with this freedom is needed, a more beautiful purpose to which these new quali ties in women can be put. Women today are not expressing as they should the ideal, divine and beautiful, of motherhood." It was also necessary that men should learn to understand this true ideal of motherhood, which needed a man's reverence for true happiness. The danger of the exploitation of s:y was also referred to, the r- J'.'- cr pointing out that an understa ndb'S ot sex ;V6 a natural part of our lives was necessary first on the .part of woman. A woman would not be so much of a plaything if she did not allow herself to be one.