I WISH I WERE A MAN.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3148, 18 December 1922, Page 7

I WISH I WERE A MAN.

(By a Mere Woman)

Ninon de l'Enelos, that pearl of perennial beauty, once said that the possession of a "man's 1 soul in a woman's body had made her life a tragedy. Now here is Miss Grace Ellison, who knows tho inside of a Turkish harem as well as the inside of an Englishwoman's! home, saying the same thing in an interesting little book which she calls "The Disadvantages of Being a Woman."

How many modern women, I wonder, will in their heart of hearts agree with her? Thousands —perhaps millions —of whom I am on«. .

Ever since my tree-climbing childhood, when I found myself the only girl, alternately snubbed and petted by a herd of brothers, I've cursed the unkind fate that afflicted me with the feminine sex. There were no dolls in my nursery, nor any of the ribbons and laces for which girls usually long. I only wanted to be able to do what my brothers did as well as they did it. And I never succeeded —just because I was a girl. Later on in the struggle for life I've always, it seems to me, .suffered from tho same disadvantage. If I'd been a man the work I've done would, I am convinced, have been easier to get and easier to do. Of course, the womanly woman, who wouldn't change places with any man ever created, finds the remedy for all this in marriage. But among the one-and-a-half million surplus women for whom no husbands exist in this realm there must be like mo who feel that fate has, in making them women, loaded tho dice against them. I agree with'Miss l Ellison when she says that "provision for the future is woman's real problem," and it is l all the more acute because "at present there is no sphere open to her in which the returns are substantial enough to allow for saving." But I part company with her when she traces 1 the plight of the professional spinster to "our speed in settling the woman's question." To have given woman .the vote' without im r posing "a period of novitiate" upon tho feminine elector is, she declares, "no less than a crime." ) What, one may ask, has been settled by thci enfranchisement of woman? Nothing at all. The vote is not an end, but an opportunity which women can only learn to use well by using it. It is the first step towards l establishing such equal conditions as will gradually reduce the "disadvantages" of which Miss Ellison complains, and which are at the bottom of the regret so many women feel that they were not born into this man's world- —men. ' Nor do I think thpt Miss Ellison's solution of the problem fa the best or even a desirable one. Let the nurse, like the teacher, be honored and paid as public servants by all means, but the endowment of the professional spinster by the State which she: proposes is neither practical politics nor common sense.

No —the cure for 1 "th© disadvantages of being a woman" is to remove them, and they arc fast disappearing. Every day some woman forces a new door into the citadel formerly manned by men. Now the task before l us is- to prove our fitness in spite of our sex. And in time we will.