VIGNETTES

Evening Star, Issue 18140, 2 December 1922, Page 8

VIGNETTES

BRITISH AND IRISH FEMINISTS. [Written by Jessie Mackat, for tho .Star.’] In that " harvest of a quiet eye ” which remains garnered when travel days are done, one of the weightiest sheaves tho writer brought home was made up of the impressions gathered of British feminists met this year. Those meetings marked in a personal sense a swing back of Hope’a pendulum towards a balance and stability that had seemed for the Iqat three years to have dropped out of creation. It is not controversial to note impersonally tho complete qnd obvious deleminisarion of international post-war relations, still less is it to note converging factors towards a new feminisation oi policies and activities which cannot indefinitely balance on the alleged fence of post-war psychology, but must coma d.own eventually on the side of reconstruction or of chaos. As a good Australasian and a hopeful Internationalist, one is tempted to outrun the sequence of time and recall at the outset one pleasant day at tho far-famed Lyceum Club in Piccadilly, where every member is a woman of achievement, artistic, philanthropic, administrative, professional, or scientific. After a Hip Van Winkle sort of itinerary in the slumberous hinterland of the United Kingdom, I was being resuscitated by these pre-eminent social revivers, Mies Newcomb and Miss Hodge, who have done so much to weld the best am[ moat constructive in the Britannic States. Presently the full current of feministic discourse, pleasantly .swirling on as this or that cosmopolitan affluent broke into the main stream,. was brought to a pause as a well-preened, well-looking, and attractively-spoken Lyceum member came to hail my hostesses of tho hour. It was Mrs Marguerite Dale, play writer and woman of affairs, from Sydney, on whom the nimbus of a brand-new distinction was descending. Her name had been submitted by the Australian Federation of Women’s Societies to tho Commonwealth Prime Minister as ono of the three Australian delegates to the next League of Nations Assembly. The first news received after my next Rip Van Winkle interlude was that Mrs Dale had been duly appointed to this new position. This is the hind of news that heartens up good Premiers and reformers, and is a memento mori to lazy, levanting husbands and other peripatetic pests. Mrs Dale is one of those approachable people who wear officialism with tho grace of an>.opera cloak, not the monumental utility of a sweeping cap; It was my good fortune to meet her subsequently on club floors, in Maude Hoyden's church, and, most apropos of the hour, at the International “Woman Suffrage Alliance Committee in its May session. There the care for linking Australia and Now Zealand with that great network of relief, protection, and welfare organisation was put to the two Antipodeans invited, and tho the pnviIcgej tho duly of representation at the coming International Alliance Congress in Homo next May held 1 before ns. With one accord we raised our apologia for the far-stranded., hard-worked Aufitra-Zealan-dian woman, and pledged our promise for the future. The Australian women were even then federating to become affiliated with the Alliance; we are still booted and spurred for that brave adventure, and must ride, to purpose this month and nest if wo ore not to bo fudged a laggard dominion. All these devoirs were not incompatible with charming chats on Australian art and letters, snatched in tho intervals of sterner preoccupations. The friendly face of Mrs Dale brightens tho memory of my last day in Britain, and proffers the omen a New Zealand feminist is most desirous to seize to-day.

There are notable faces seen around that committee table, high up in the T.W.S.A. Rooms, Adam street, Adolphl, a stone-throw from our own dominion offices in the Strand. Miss Newcomb brings her mellowed experience and the wonted sunny front of a mighty charity. M-re Trounson, also an ex officio member, being head secretary of the Alliance, is no stranger, having extended tho ready hand of welcome to the wandering New Zealander on the moment of landing, although that was in Now Year weak, when official animation is susnerylcd. and society (with a small “s”) hibernates. Mrs Trounson is tall, quiet-voiced, adequate, with an indefinable touch of the strong, dependable, 'gale-weathered north in face and manner. There is not a chirp from tho remotest bound of woman’s world that she does not hear, and not a cause of woman or humanity goes unfriended at Adam street. Her bright-faced young coadjutor, Mrs Bompas, ia a trusty lieutenant. Among those present are Miss Florence Barry, quiet but alert, and two more of tho younger citizens of tho world, prospective candidates for Parliament, Mrs Margery Corbett Ashby and Miss Rosamond Smith, who already have won the spurs, go past. But in the chair sits the eleot of Scottish femininity, Chrystal Macmillan herself, shapely, portly of presence, roseate, and buxom, an Edinburgh Portia, bred to the law and wed to tho mending of it. Curiously little is heard of Scottish feminists, though uniformly plenty is heard from them on polling day. But all the world has beard of those strong Scottish internationalists, Miss Macmillan and Isold Lady Aberdeen. It a another London scene that rises next to memory, a storied mansion in Gower street, and a etudy-parlor from which one strong, gallant, beneficent hand has been directing, controlling, quickening the march of the women .for half a century. In the chair sits Mrs Garrett Fawcett, erstwhile leader of the non-militant suffrage societies of Britain. One notes the erect figure—short of stature, sflie has still a certain spring of perennial activity, though past the allotted span—one regards the plump, rounded face crowned with grey hair, and remembers that sad, beautiful, triumphant love story of here, wed to a blind man who saw leagues further than tho (Englishmen, of his day, and worked hand in hand with hie young wife for tho uplift of woman and the race. She is speaking now in quick, decisive phrases of tho latest cause to stir her broad sympathies, that of the Zionist women—nay, all women of the New Palestine, bo ithey Arab, Jew, or other. The wind of memory wafts us now 'to Ireland. High up over busy, noisy O’Connell street sits the presiding genius of Irish feminhmm, Mrs Shcdby Ske.ffington, in her old Franchise Office. How, much water has flowed under o’Connell bridge since the'days she and her husband suffered together in Mountjoy in the “ kill • ing times” of the suffrage straggle I Yet here, cairn after uttermost storm, vivid, handsome, ready, resolute, she sits unbroken, alone, working atill for Irish womanhood. Of feminism, strictly speaking, and apart from relief work in famine districts and in the aftermath of war, there is little in Ireland, and little in a sense is needed, for the Irish woman'a battle is won. Ireland is pledged to give with equal hand to son and daughter in tho peace to come. Of Mra Skeffington’a follow suffrage worker, Mrs D cap and, sister of Lord French, and grandest of Ireland's grand old women, I hear much these .days, but am prevented by ill fortune from sight or hearing of this dauntless champion of tho vote and the vote's worth. It was London that saw her put up that memorable fight of hers when, os a passively resisting citizen, she was despoiled of all but a garret, a bed, and a chair; but she has come now “to lay her bones in Ireland,” nob without preliminary militancies of the spirit that batter hardest against tho walls of Jericho. Back in Australian waters, _ clean and clear after the muddied stealings of the East, one feels in the citadel of woman’s world in this Adelaide hotel, which for the moment houses Mrs Rischbieth, the head and driving power of Ariiatralia’s driving society, the Women’s Civic League of Perth. Young, pretty, gracefully gewned, she radiates pleasantness and vivacity. It is my good fortune to meet in her' company also an Australian-born suffragist and educationist, who won fame in that stem old London fight that ended with the first cannon shot of the Great \\ ar. This tall, magnetic young Southerner, with the glowing eyes and rapt speech aLtbfl sisiOMDU. js .YLrilblM.aMorsj

tho brilliant debater that has stood on platforms with orators like Maude Royden. She has now flung herself into far-reaching developments of the Montessori method that atm at no less than a cradjo revolution to fast for ever the foundations of that new order that will not rise on the' shifting sands of present ignorance, false values, and unequal standards. 1 One haa already met in London that! veteran, of many Melbourne fights, Vida| Goldstein, who also was a notable figure® on tho British suffrage floor. A slim,? trim, self-possessed brunette little she speaks quietly, simply, pleasantly,j without a trace of the bovine quality that ran through all her Press and platform, work. Da meet errant first and 1 Inst, she) should have been Australia’s first woman M.P. With what are these women to be allowed to leaven the new internationalism t The dough of the old is sour, heavy, and black on tho coals. Some new kitchoning we must have if the Caucasian cupboard la not to bo swept as bare as, Mother Hubbard’s was. ‘