CONIC SECTION GIRLS.

Evening Star, Issue 7449, 18 February 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

CONIC SECTION GIRLS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —Various are the thoughts man lias penned from time to time about women. One school of theologians enunciated “that he who touches the hand of woman touches that of a scorpion ” (could the author have written such a passage without woman’s existence). Byron, the idol of the fair sex, wrote of them thus: “ I regard them as very pretty, but inferior creatures, who are as little in their place at our tables as they would be in our council chambers. The whole of the present system with regard to the female sex is a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalry of our forefathers. I look on them as grown-up children, but, like a foolish mamma, I am constantly the slave of one of them. The Turks shut up their women and are much happier. Give a woman a looking-glass and burnt almonds and she will be content.” His namesake, Gordon (Australia’s poet) says— Ah! what wouldn’t I give to feel A lady’s hand again. Just now the educational firmament is exercised at the extraordinary success of women in its higher branches. To be of any practical use it should aim at drawing out the faculties, not cramming the individual with abstract matter, which in life’s struggle for existence is found to be of so little use. Woman must decide whether her aim shall be wife and mother, with all the halo of sanctity and love surrounding the magic word “home,” or whether she will compete with man in the worry and strife of outdoor business life. Decide thus, and educate her accordingly. The two systems cannot be well blended together. Chatting with a young lady friend recently, she admitted hard and close study had a decided tendency to destroy the finer and more delicate feelings. Let adversity come to the woman who has been stuffed with quadratic equations and spherical trigonometry, but knowing nothing of patching and mending, and the thousand and one things necessary to

the house, and let it come to the one who does know, which will be the best helpmate to her husband ? The moral to our young men is: Don’t let conic section girls entrap you into proposing. By the way, one notices the absence of this poetry of motion in walking with our growing maidens, and is tempted to respectfully suggest to the Education Board the advisability of “ consulting ” school committees as to importing a few Samoan belles as instructors. Samoan’s, both men and women, are simply arfi-'ts in the artof walking.—lam, etc., Lumpeb. Dunedin, February 11.