TRUE WOMANHOOD

Evening Star, Issue 19779, 1 February 1928, Page 10

TRUE WOMANHOOD

In the old days people imagined that the two sexes were like two different layers in a ribbon jelly, and that there was a constant danger that they would run and melt into each other, and that at any moment women might become unwomanly and men unmanly. Now, if that happened it would indeed be a calamity. Obviously the world _ must come to an end if women lost their liking for producing and rearing children, or if men lost their liking lor cultivating the resources' of the earth and supporting those children. But people were wildly wrong in what they thought likely to bring about this calamity so far us women were concerned. They used to maintain that a good hard education would do it, although a woman who is going to adopt the characteristically womanly career of a wife and mother needs just the same mental foundation that a man needs for any characteristically male career—namely, a lively sense of cause and effect. Any system of education which strengthens her womanhood, however little it may refer on the surface to babies; and any system which weakens it weakens her womanhood, however much it may encourage her to concentrate on her sex. A woman who has been brought up to spend her time and her energies on obviously uneccssary activities, such ns embroidery or painting on china, will probably have such a loose sense of the construction of reality on the universe that she will think it not of much real importance whether she feeds her child regularly or gives it enough sunlight and fresh air. But a woman who is reading for Greats or working on the chemistry of high explosives, though she seems to have strayed far into the masculine field, will probably acquire just that sense that in this life one can’t dodge consequences which will make her pedantically careful on fhese points. The china painter is therefore less effectively womanly than the chemist, even if she spends her whole lit© in reveries concerning marriage.— Bkrkcca T\ est, in the ‘Woman’s Journal.’