IN A TURKISH BATH

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 15

IN A TURKISH BATH

THROWING ASIDE CONVENTION.

There is no place on earth where one can find out what women really thing as well as in a Turkish bath (writes Rebecca West in the "Royal Magazine 1'). Tha women who go there are, for the most part, the women who are in daily life, inclined to be conversational humbugs; the wives of business and professional men making anything from a thousand a year upwards, who are outside any political or intellectual movement, and who are fairly obedient to social conventions. While they are in a Turkish bath they are freed from many of the ordinary female obligations. They are, for one thing, absolved from the necessity of being attractive; indeed, they cannot possibly be attractive iri a Turkish bath. In the Turkish bath, among the steam and the towels, that compulsion goes, and several other ones, too. These women's husbands can't follow them there. A certain set of attitudes, therefore, are abandoned. Their servants can's follow them there, either, so another set of attitudes goes. They become, so.to speak, bachelors. They don't, as a rule, carry these domestic pre-occupations about with them in their conversations. Contrary to legend, they rarely talk of servants, and they speak of their husbands very infrequently. Their most constant topic, and one which is evidently much in their minds, and which makes their whole outlook hopeful and exultant, is the lengthening of women's lives; that is one of the most conspicuous differences between this age and the past. They are constantly saying, "I am 30, and I really do not feel much different from when I was 20." "I am 40, but I don't feel old, and I don't believe I look old." Or "I am 50, and I played tennis all yesterday afternoon, and I don't feel a bit the worse for it." They are not babbling when they say these things; they are celebrating an actual expansion of the term of human life. In the past an English novelist could write seriously, "She was past her first youth; she was 21," and Augusta Evans Wilson, the American Marie Corelli of 50 years ago, could describe an actress of unusual fascination as "an extraordinary woman; although she was 28 she could still excite the passions of men." And this was not, originally, merely a convention. It was not only that the world made up its mind that it served the purposes of society best if women grew staid and faded at an early age; it was a factor that they really did.