SEX EQUALITY

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 64, 9 December 1930, Page 5

SEX EQUALITY

HERCULEAN TASK

“Women,” said a young man acquaintance sadly the other day, ‘are like America —trying to create a new tradition.” But, as was pointed out to him forthwith, woman’s task is far more Herculean than that. She is trying to destroy one tradition and replace it with another, writes Henrietta Leslie in ‘the Queen.” . , Till she had achieved this, to talk ot sex equality with men, whose traditions go back into the Dark- Ages, is absurd. When she has achieved it, we shall see a new world and it may well be that men will then talk about establishing equality with women! . , ~ . The war destroyed the tradition that woman was a frail and delicate blossom who could not stand the sight of blood or run a business as well as her husband or her brother. . . With the widening of the professional field to women —now eligible as doctors, barristers, journalists, Royal Academicians, solicitors, chartered accountants, Channel swimmers, editors, Freemasons, chauffeurs, farmers and even aeronautical pilots—many strange anachronisms have been swept away. I have an idea that the Stock Exchange will remain adamant to the last and the Church, cowering behind the mantle of St. Fn ul ’ will have none of female priests. But, with a few rare exceptions, there are no live horses for feminists to Hog. Dead Traditions. For all that, real sex equality cannot be said to exist, for the simple reason that men are still men and women women. The chief traditions, of sex inequality are those of domestic life and the human relations into which sex enters ; and these will die hard. . Although the time is dead when a girl would rather have expired of love than let a man sec that she cared for him until he had asked her, yet even the ultra modern girl of to-day, who shows her legs, rides pillion, smokes, admits there are such things as children betore she is married, and is altogether a brazen hussy—prefers that the first advances should come from her "boy.” Dead, also, is the tradition that a man cannot live on his wife’s money and remain a man —or at least an Englishman —and that until his income exceeds hers, they must not marry. Thousands ot couples nowadays set up house, each contributing to the family pot —he doing his job, she doing hers.

What Every Womau Has. But what is iiot dead, is the innate instinct which every woman has, who cares at all about her husband, to shape the life of the home rouud his work and his career. Her own work, however absorbing, has to fit into his, and her impulse is to make little, rather than much of it, and although he on his side, may bo perfectly conscious of his wife s work, it seems quite impossible for him to as seriously as he would it it were another man’s. ..... He cannot help regarding it, in the depths of his soul, as a hobby be taken up or dropped at wul to suit his arrangements, holidays, evening engagements and so forth, any more than he can prevent himself asking, }Yhen he comes home to dress for dinner. Had an amusing day, dear?” Her Career and His. I am thinking at this moment of a certain couple, the man, a leading author, the woman having most successtuny made her way to the top of the tree in journalism. Her portrait is in every paper, editors clamour for her work. But the only way she can do it is take a room near her home where she can daily repair with her secretary and work till lunch, when she returns to eat the meal with two of her children not yet at SC1 Then she goes-back to her haunt and works again till tea. From tea till dinner she plays with the children or helps them with their homework, and from dinner till daybreak she is her husband s. The room and the. secretary seem to him something of a foible. *He chaffs his wife amiably about it, yet that woman is earning three thousand a year with her pen. “Of course,” she remarks, with a wry little smile, “that doesn’t mean anything to Charlie, because he is earning nine!” Marital Sacrifices.

There is a case.l know of. a married couple, where the husband is delicate and can only work at intervals on and off Here, the wife keeps him ami their three children by doing a man s job. He loves and respects her for it, yet she has often said that the effort to keep womanly and retain the feminine charm which he demands —hair cut in the. latest fashion, nails always nicely manicured, frocks and undies up to date, and the house perfectly run —costs her more elfort than her‘work at the .ofiice. If she were a man, doing this really exacting job, the pursuit of the sec ® na one would never be demanded of her lor a moment. , , . , „ If she came home tired and wanted a quiet evening, theatre tickets would be sacrificed, or a dinner engagement cancelled. Yet she knows because she is a woman, with a woman’s tradition about her, that she dare not demand these marital sacrifices at the risk of losing her claim on her husband’s affections.