Challenge'to Women

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 147, 24 June 1933, Page 19

Challenge'to Women

"Th© world is not yet a rap better because women have been let loose in it. Our effect • upon its major evils— war, poverty, and what belong to them —is nothing,* our achievement of our independence, nothing." This is how Miss Storm Jameson sums up the position of*,women in the ■modern world, in her most recent book • (states an English writer). Briefly, the famous novelist indicts a materialism which takes for granted not only our slums, our unemployed, our wars, and the perpetual life-destroying inventions of our scientists, but a religion so divorced from the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount that "'if usury, if poverty, if war are ever abolished no part of the credit, will belong to a c_j(irch which has condoned all three. ; "Women," she writes, "have only •added-»to the quantity of human activity, and' little so far to its quality. If it wero true, that women ; have ..no values as natural to them —as women— as their shapes are, we should have to be pleased with the spectacle of women in football shorts, women scribbling for the newspapers, women flying, preaching, quoting shares, and all that. "But it is not true. Women have not naturally the same attitude as men to all that touches breeding, marriage, and destroying life. They have a, mind, an attitude, a gesture of their own. For them to pretend otherwise is a denial ;of life ... it is treaohery and desertion^since tho human destiny is not -complete without the working in it of women thinking, feeling, and acting also in terms of their womanhood." "WAR IS SHAMEFUL." In discussing the recent speech of a certain eminent scientist who described war calmly and dispassionately "as nature's pruning-hook," she passionately protests against the cold-blooded inhumanity of any modern, responsible thinker who is actually able to per- ' suade himself that gardeners cut down their healthiest trees in order to improve tho rest. "No one," she continues, "riot even this Laputan among the scientists, has yet explained in precise language how it strengthens succeeding generations for a million men to be killed and an incalculable number maimed or spoiled. If this country ever gets into another Groat War I shall take every means in my' power to keep my son out of it. I shall tell him -that it is more shameful to volunteer for gas-bombing than to run from it."

- The London Corporation is to consider the erection-of a flower market near Spitalfields, to cost £65,010.