THE LATCHKEY GIRL.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVII, Issue 1728, 21 September 1922, Page 3

THE LATCHKEY GIRL.

Never in the history of the world have such startling changes been effected in so brief a period as we have witnessed in our social life since 1914 and more particularly during the past four years. In the removal of the conventions which tradition had built up around women—removal by the ardours and endurances of the war, which women were perforce called upon to shareis to be found the real origin of this vast reorganisation of society. Fifteen years ago when a girl "came out" into the London social world she did so under the strict and definite chaperonage of her mother, or some older married woman. Her opportunities of meeting and talking to the young men of her world were only such as heavily chaperoned dances or tennis parties afforded. To-day, with the conventions concerning the correct behaviour of young women vanished, most of them into the thinnest air, we are faced by a world in which the "dancing partner" reigns supreme and the chaperone is as extinct as the dodo.

Girls of 18 and 19 go about London entirely alone, with a complete independence which would have seemed scandalous to their .predecessors of two or three generations ago. They play games with their men friends, going off by motor car for a long day's golf or tennis with as much freedom and disregard of convention as another man.

To dine or lunch at a restaurant alone with a young man, once the scarlet sin against propriety, is to the modern debutante a perfectly ordinary proceeding. When she goes to a dance she takes her "dancing partner" with her; they dance together for the entire evening, and he brings her home in the small hours of the morning. The present-day treeedoin in social relationships is frequently deplored by "die-hards" of a former generation, who contend that the modern young women with "their pals" and their "dancing partners," their independence and their latchkeys, have loßt something of that elusive "x" quality of feminine charm.

There is, however, no real reason to assume that, because it is now possible for a girl to dance the whole evening with the same partner, modern social life is necessarily an abandoned and decadent affair. The, removal of tiresome and outworn 'conventions was inevitable, and the age of "dancing partners" and latchkey-owning young women is a renaissance rather than the "decline and fall of society," which the pessimists of another generation declare it to be.