HOCKEY AND WOMEN.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2714, 23 June 1925, Page 4

HOCKEY AND WOMEN.

A GAME THAT HAS HELPED THE SEX. With decent rejoicings women have just been celebrating the game of hockey. They have reason (declares the “Dally Telegraph”). No other game has done so much for the liberty and equality of their sex. This We write well aware that to praisp any game in print is to make the votaries of others furiously protestant. No opinion whatever is here expressed as to which is the best game in general or which game is best for girls. We record the fact that as a team game for girls and women it is hockey first and the rest nowhere. Against that decision of the schools and the generation who now are the mothers of school girls there is no appeal. When we consider the difference in stature, vigour, and esprit de corps between this generation and those who were trained in the days before girls’ schools had hockey teams, we shall agree that women do well to celebrate their discovery of the game. Even the games mistress would not give hockey all the credit for the change in the atmosphere of girls’ schools and in the activities of women. There are other factors. But consider how much healthier those schools in which Charlotte Bronte suffered would have been with a hockey field and you will not be inclined to limit narrowly the benefits of a cult of physical fitness among girls, of an interest in the technique of a good game, and of the point of honour taught in playing for a side. The devil’s advocate has been heard to produce sad stories of the ill-effects of hockey, and, indeed, of any strenuous game on adolescent girls, and it is possible that he may have been telling the truth. Sonic girls, we can believe, have suffered from playing too hard, as some lads have weakened their hearts by rowing, and other been killed on the football field. We do not, therefore, argue that football must be forbidden and no boy should row. We accept the overwhelming evidence that rowing and football and hockey are for the greatest good of the greatest number. That the modern girl has reason to bo gfateful for the 30 years of feminine hockey, the fruits whereof she enjoys, there is no sort of doubt. Those pessimists who fear that the cult of games is destroying the eternal feminine may find some balm in the speeches at the hookey festival, for most of them, we are Informed, “compared the present dress with the past.” That is, indeed, a large and delightful subject. In the brave but shy old days teams were not allowed to play in “gym-tunics,” those garments which curtail the already curtailed skirt, but had to wear a garment falling to the ground. The modern Amazons were told of Victorian players “in long blue serge skirts, ■white blouses, and balloon sleeves and straw hats fixed on with long pins,” and, we fear, thought less than ever of their mothers and grandmothers. But we depreciate partial antiquarian researches'. If the girl of the period Is to hear about her progenitors’ awful youth the men must not be spared. To tell of the flowing skirts and balloon sleeves in which the women of 1895 played hockey is not fair unless it, bo added that a little earlier men were playing Rugger not only in whiskers, but in what we call “plus fours.” There is extant a picture of an Oxford Soccer team of the ’seventties, in which trousers, and baggy trousers at that, are the rule. Women were not so far behind, not so much worse off than men, as they sometimes Imagine. But what their future may be wo dare not predict, whether in games or la the clothes for games.