MAINLY FOR WOMEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 July 1930, Page 3

MAINLY FOR WOMEN

ITEMS OF INTEREST

(Notes by

Marjorie)

WOMEN ARi£ CRUEL.

AN AUTHOR’S INDICTMENT.

That women are by nature cruel is the thesis of A. Corbett Smith, a

British author and lecturer, who has asserted that it is widely in evidence not only in group form (he cites their cries for a knockout at prize-fights) but in the individual, both spinster and married woman, says the “New York Times.”

Adducing other examples, Mr Smith recalls, in an article in the London “Daily Chronicle,” that the play, ‘‘Beau Geste,” recently performed at His Majesty’s Theatre in London, con. tained a harrowing crucifixion scene. “Responsible critics . protested strongly and there was talk of cutting the scene,” he said. “The box office manager expressed his astonishment at the large number of women who, before they would book their seats, demanded his assurance that the scene was retained.

“Again, it is hardly necessary to affirm that it is women, seven-eighths of tire reading public, who support the publication and large sales of certain lurid war books of the day. There are few men who can stomach the obscenities, the blood and the filth with which these, and other volumes arc saturated. ‘Or,'to take another angle, the harshness and moral the part of many women overseers and managers toward girl Employees ingreat business and trading firms.has latterly become proverbial. Even more significant is the domineering behaviour of certain women managers to the junior male employees. For here is a new opportunity in our social history.

“Now, these casual examples, with a hundred more like them, are not just symptoms of the present age. O’’, rather, they are only accentuated, because history repeats itself. We face a psychological condition of womanhood which is but educed and intensified by existing social conditions. “For it is not disputed, least of all by women,'that, compared with man. woman is both largely inured and insensitive to pain and suffering, and also is more prone to the infliction of cruelty, mental and physical. This, even upon those whom they Iqye. “Upon the first count, we remember tha± the life of every woman -is largely compounded of suffering, while any house surgeon of a great hospital will testify to the stoicism of women under a major or minor operation. And what man could ever face the intensive duties of a hospital nurse?

“Upon the second count, the history of specific ages and people is packed with examples of the more intense, the more refined cruelty of women. One recalls the women Terrorists of the French Revolution, who ‘revolted even their male colleagues by their barbarity’; the patrician women of Rome during the first and second centuries A.D.; the w’omen of many native races. East and West, to whom is especially given the. task of torturing prisoners: —

“When you’re wounded and lie on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women cqpie out to cut up what remains,” as Rudyard Kipling sings.

“Whenever the balance of the sexes has swung toward the dominance of woman and the degeneration of man, woman instinctively and inevitably tends to assume and to exaggerate the normally accepted attributes of man “She has become impatient of his apparent failure, and so she comes increasingly to despise liiiii. Hence her desire to wound. But, with her impulsive outlook, she makes the cardinal mistake of regarding crublty, mental or physical, as an attribute of strength instead of weakness. “Justified or not, this outlook by women is perhaps the most deplorable of all phases of our social life today. It ruins the home, it tends to dislocate .business and voluntary so : cial effort, and it kebps men in constant antagonism, leading them to retaliate in kind, wheh they should be seeking and winning sympathy, encouragement, and comradeship from woman, the shcet-anchoi* of their hopes and aspirations. “But no society is static. It must advance or regress. The omens today are good. There are many suggestions of a steady swing-back to a happy femininity. Woman’s imagined dominance of the moment is a myth. It is built upon self-delusion. To-mor-row she will awaken, the balance will adjust itself, and, in the words of Pope:—

“If • she rules him, never shows she , rilles, Charms by accepting, by submitting, sways.”

NO NEW DANCES. • I Hundreds of dances, says a. London writer, are on the fixture lists of the new season, but no new dance. This season we shall have the inflexible quartet of waltz, fox-trot, quickstep, and tango. They wear amazing well, and nobody now expects to see anything else on the programme. The question is: “Why do they wear well, and why cannot we import some' of these high-resistance qualities into fresh danco compositions?” Now the frame of a. ballroom dance is not capable of infinite expansion. A point arises at which permutations and combinations of steps beyond those already stipulated would send one partner flying off at a tangent into tho band.

This upsets Rule 3 of ballroom etiquette. You will often see couples at tempting to put more into a dance than it will contain. For example, they will engage in those curious herringbone steps that set up crabline vibrations right along the line of dance, like the falling flat of the wooden soldiers. Wo of the less turbulent feet, however, can leap to the iambics of a less ribald metre. To describe the perfect arcs of a waltz is an achievement even for a professional. All turning movements are difficult, owing to the precipital pauses and balancing operations en route. Those deep curves falling intimately into tho contour of v. waltz are the most romantic thing in tho ballroom, and to talk of a new waltz 13 preposterous. Similarly the straight glide of the foxtrot cutting through the rhythm like a blade is particularly English. These two dances are the outlines of romance and character in ballroom terms. We do not want new dances just now. We want to rediscover the old.

A MODEL NURSERY.

THE CHILD OF 1960.

•Lucky the small person who is destined to come into the world 30 years hence and inhabit one of Mrs. St. Aubyn’s ultra modern nurseries, says a London writer. This noted child expert created a tremendous amount of interest recently with the 1960 model - nursery, which, in collaboration with Mr. Claude Atkinson, she exhibited at the Rleal Homes Exhibition at Olympia. It would be as different, she said, as the present nursery is from the late nineteenth century edition of one. She foresaw a speeding-up of life in genera! and a decrease in playing space, so put her thinking cap on accord ingly. First necessity in a town nursery, said this visionary, will be a ' sliding roof. With the aggravation of the servant problem, fewer mothers will be able to take the children into the parks, so the nursery—a top-floor room —must let in God’s good air and sunlight. And then, if you please, attached to this model nursery will be a small gymnasium and bathroom; Mrs. St. Aubyn says this will be a natural logical outcome of lhe emphasis laid at present on tooth-brush drill, hygiene, and physical culture. Next, for labour-saving, the rooms will be circular and without corners and kept scrupulously clean by suction floor-cleaners concealed in the skirting boards.

Artistically designed sun-day lamps will keep the room at an even temperature, and there will be heaps more fresh air in the form of special wall ventilators.

Fantastic and extravagantly impossible this may sound, she points out, b ufe no mord so than a bathroom or so per house would have 30 years ago. It will probably be taken just as a matter of course.

No crude or jarring colour note must offend the child’s taste in this nursery. Colours will all be soft and shaded. Chairs will be specially designed and adapted in height as the children grow. (There will probably, too, bo a special television chair, where the child may sit back and watch and listen to the doings of small people in other parts of the world. Perhaps Mrs. St. Aubyn’s piece de resistance w r ill be the “administrative chair,” designed to save mother’s and Nannie’s energy. Every nursery will be incomplete without it. Large and well upholstered, it will have tucked away in the arm, and at one side, drawers for books or needlework, and so on, and at the other electric buttons controlling the sliding roof, the suction floor sweeper, and other working gadgets. A leg slide will slip in and out so that the administrator may rest. Was ever the consideration of the elder’s energy brought to such a line art?

And the food problem! Listen to this! No more lost vitamins. The edibles —perfectly cooked —will be propelled .on a beautiful circular', shining, electrically-heated food trolley, and to the dishes will be attached thermometers by which the nurse will be able to tell the exact temperature and amount of nourishment in the food. So increasingly important is becoming the study of the child’s needs, reasons Mrs. St. Aubyn, that all the scientific, aesthetic, psychological, and educational knowledge of the day will be used thirty years hence to create children’s furniture and rooms as visualised by her.

GOLDEN GLOVES. . Fashionable women of .Paris, in a spate of eccentric ideas to produce the bizarre, have evolved the latest fad of costly gloves to match their coloured finger nails, writes an overseas correspondent. The vogue of bright red nails has gone. The woman of fashion td-day polishes her nails green, gold, yellow, or other colour to suit her whim.

Some of them have indulged in colour schemes on the nails, each finger being painted with several colours, such as the Tricolour, red, white and blue. Gloves should now match the finger tips. At a. society function recently, a prominent countess appeared with golden finger nails and a pair of goldcoloured gloves. Those were put up for auction in aid of charity, and they were found to be of woven fine gold mesh. Glove manufacturers are inundated with orders for gloves of silver or gold threads. The cheapest of these ccsts £5O a. pair, while huge prices have been paid for gloves made from finely woven platinum threads.

Fashion experts predict that the new glove vogue will last among the ultra smart, since there is little danger of the mode becoming “vulgarised'’ or popular owing to tho cost. Glove makers say that they are receiving many orders from the very exclusive fashion, houses in New York and London.