WOMEN WHO MAY NOT SMOKE.

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 22 July 1935, Page 4

WOMEN WHO MAY NOT SMOKE.

The professorial board of Auckland University has decreed that women students may not smoke in their own common-room. We recently read that the students were up in arms about, this restriction of their liberty. The usual arguments were advanced in support of the ease for the

students: it was-pointed' out that in other universities the women students smoked, that it did nobody any harm, and that even if it did it would be no business of the professors’ anyway—and so on. But the professorial board has remained adamant and has intimated that the subject is now closed. While they will sympathise with the students, some men will have a sneaking admiration for this professorial board. Of course its views on the subject of smoking by women are antediluvian —but how few men there are left who have the courage to be antediluvian on the question of Women’s Rights! Most men, realising that it is too late to do anything about the advancement of feminism, weakly stand aside and allow affairs to run their course. Others there are who even help forward the trend. But the Auckland University professorial board is composed of men who know their own minds on this subject. They are fighting a losing battle of course; even now the women students are planning a revival of their campaign for next year, after the election of a new board executive; and the history of the last few years teaches that the women are bound to win in the end. But the professorial board is making a place for itself in the story of the evolution of modern civilisation. The feminists of the future may dismiss the board with a contemptuous reference ,to “a last surviving group of reactionaries who, as late as 1935, still believed that women’s place was in the home.” But there will still be a few men left who will (in .secret) raise their hats to the memory of the heroic band which fought the overwhelming tide of feminism to the last ditch.