WOMEN'S GRIEVANCES.

Evening Post, Volume L, Issue 36, 10 August 1895, Page 2 (Supplement)

WOMEN'S GRIEVANCES.

« Writing in the Twentieth Century, Mrs. Georgina Kingecote thus sets out some of the " grievances " for which women have to thank conventionality and prejudices rather than the law. — "Why should a woman lead a virtuous life and then ally herself with a man who has not? Why should a woman be expected (unless very rich) to be a household drudge, and to put up with squalling babies, while the husband amuses himself? Why should a man be allowed to dine out alone and the woman be supposed to sit at home, and the man be allowed to grumble if the woman dines out alone and leaves him behind ? Why should the man hardly wear any mourning and the wife go into black for months for his relatives, whom she probably dislikes ? Why should no privacy, either of bed or sitting-room, be provided for a woman, while invariably the most comfortable room in the house is set aside for the man's smoking-room or study ? Why should a man's word be law in his own house more than the woman's in hers ? Why, if the wife is ill, can the husband go out all day and nobody call him a brute ; but if be is ill, and his wife does not attend upon him hand and foot, she is considered heartless and frivolous ? Now, all these things are entirely the fault of women, and are the result of their own want of eiprit de corps, and, if I may say so, of their want of moral pluck. It is extraordinary that the women who wish to have seats in Parliament, and who have pluck to appear in men's clothes on bicycles, smoke cigarettes, and discuss the most extraordinary things with men, have not the pluck to discuss these matters with their sons and daughters ; and now we come to the strange fact that these energetic women who wish to add to all the physical fatigues of womanhood tho mental weariness and strain of man's sphere, have by them the very channel by which all these forms are obtainable. So many persons travel miles to buy a field with much worse soil than the one they already possess and which extends under their own window, but which is leftunploughed, unplanted, and unwatered. Their daughters, perhaps, are not half so amusing as risqui conversations beginning with law and ending with love with other women's husbands or young unmarried men, but their cultivation is remunerative, and by it women can attain all they desire."