FEMININE LOYALTIES.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3128, 31 July 1922, Page 8

FEMININE LOYALTIES.

(By Margaret Gordon.) Like all great dramas, Mr Galsworthy's “Loyalties” stimulates on© s thought to explore the hy-paths lead out of the wide road of bumai sentiment over which play wU- - And wandering through the labyrinth ( >f life one finds oneself involved in otiiei loyalties beskles those of race and of class. Sex has also it® loyalties, reihaipe they are most potent of all. How often have we had 1 the reproach levelled at ns in the past that women were devoid of that confidence rn each other of which the male sex had a monopoly. Men, we were told, always “stick together.” but women-never “I would rather,” a woman of tho world once said to me. “trust a secret to the worst of men than to. the best of women !” There was feminine disloyalty in a nutshell! That was in the days before women became human being*—before- they had anything of their own to be loyal to • before thev were free to choose then own work ‘'and to live their own lives. Tes, it was true then that women were more apt to betray each other than to “sf’ck together” in any dispute or difficulty. 1 confess it with shame. Rut to-day we have changed all that. i assert it with joy. . , Of course, women still exist vatu little sense of sex-loyalty, just as l there are men whore hand is against every other man. But every day there aie fewer such, for the feeling of sisterhood between women of all classes and eoodiLons grows every day stronger. The war, in bringing duke s daughter and cook’s daughter together m the common cause, did much to break down that o’d distrust—that old fear ol woman for woman which seems to have haunted our graudiuotlieus. Thie eatinggle for life hap done the rest.. It has taught women that if they don t “hang together they may hang separately. But this new sentiment of sisterhood should not, and need not, entail any feeling of antagonism towards men as men. Nature can, I believe, be trusted to look after that, for among the increasing numbers of women who are forced to work for their living, love, marriage and motherhood remain to mo*t of them an eternal hope. Only as the years pass in strenuous loneliness the hone fades into a dream —the saddest. of all dreams which we call the might-have-been. How much wiser and better than becoming a sour old maul is it to find an outlet then for. one’s sympathy in friendship with .one’s own sex. in fighting its battles in promoting that belief in womanhood upon which the future of women depends! In that sense feminine “loyalties” are really rather like Christian virtues, for thev include faith, hope and charity —“and the greatest of these is charity” still!