FUTURE OF WOMEN.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 14, 18 January 1910, Page 9

FUTURE OF WOMEN.

_» - . NEW AND OLD TYPES. The changes that are taking place in the character of woman and her attitude towards man formed the subject of an address delivered by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the dramatist, at the dinner of the Society of Women Journalists at the Walaorf Hotel, London, on 27th November. Woman, like all other animals, he said, constantly changed *in response to her environment'; and a certain environment always produced a type exactly fitted to it. In Morocco last spring he caught glimpses of the women in the harem of a native potentate — dusky, fattish faces, stealthily and mischievously peering and grinning from behind the blinds ; ignorant, animal, sly, childish, inane, prematurely old. , Granted the environment, that was the type of womanhood produced. "It is a commonplace to say," Mr. Jones proceeded, " thai our new civilisation, that wholly new civilisation inaugurated only a generation or two ago by railways and electricity, is fast producing a different type of" man and woman from anything the world has ever known. If we ask in what chief particular the attitude of woman towards man is changing, I think the reply would be that she is becoming more and more the intellectual comrade of man. " In the theatre women are necessarily our companions and comrades. *n journalism and in other intellectual professions women are every day more and more showing themselves our successful competitors and staunch and welcome comrades. In fiction they are proving themselves our equals in matter — superiors in number. Doubtless, in this particular art, the art of fiction, they have always been our superiors, though their talent has genei-ally been exercised rather in the practical concerns of life than in writing novels. SOME DISAPPEARING TYPES.* Some of the disappearing types of women might be regretted. ' Jane Austen's women, Dickens s Dora and Agiies, Thackeray's Amelia, George Eliot's Mrs. Poyser, and their counterparts in real life were passing away. One type that specially won his admiration was the type of Portia, the wife of Brutus. He hoped nature would sit tight and keep on producing Portias. " How far our swiftly changing environment may change our type of English womanhood we can hardly pretend to guess. In what direction I think we may roughly guess. " I am prepared to allow that, granted woman could be placed in the exact conditions, granted we could govern and enforce those conditions, and granted an unlimited length of time — I~am prepared to allow she might be developed into a creature as far superior to man as is that female spider who, when the poor male spider comes timidly up to her to make love to her, if she doesn't like the look of him eats him up there and then. I say such a development of woman is conceivable. But I am glad I shall not live to see it.