GIRLS OF TO-DAY

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2339, 8 January 1926, Page 4

GIRLS OF TO-DAY

. INTERESTING ACCOUNT. “Here is a Girton pioneer, now 84 who really knew the penalties of being a woman in Victorian days; and she does not sigh for ‘an imaginary past which,’ as she says, ‘never existed.’ Her flue humoured and equable discussion of the girls of today, is a model of tolerance —and understanding,” says the Evening News introducing this article by Dame Lumsden.

Before that fateful August of 1914 women were already iq a transition state, and new conditions were gradually, though with discouraging slowness, shaping themselves. Do the Early Victorian times, then seem regrettable now, the days when women submitted with apparent In-, difference to be classed with children and lunatics; to have no voice in the government, national or local, under which they had to live; to be excluded from the great national centres of education, the universities, deeply indebted as these were to the generosity of women in the past; and, In theory at least, often amusingly contradicted in practice, to play an altogether subordinate part in life do these times really seem worth regretting now?

Work, Not Ease. Or, looking yet farther back, shall we regret the days of Jane Austen, when Mr Darcy was divided between admiration of Elizabeth Bennet's brilliant complexion and disapproval of her having walked three miles alone? Or, in education, is Miss Pinkerton's assurance to Amelia Sedley’s friends to be our model that “in music ,in dancing, in orthography, and in every variety of embroidery and needlework she will be found to have realised their fondest wishes.”

No, assuredly, the world has moved since then. Our Elizabeth Benneta will walk ten miles and more unhampered by the muddy skirts which so shocked Miss Bingley. And our schools are undoubtedly giving to our girls a sound and thorough education preparing them, not for a life of sheltered and unwholesome ease, but for one of active interests and practical work.

True, we may not welcome some of th<* new developments. Women and girls have not escaped—how could they?—the now Influences so powerful now everywhere, and perhaps especially so In our own country. We

live in a world of feverish rush. l ( 'u more true now than In Matthew Am old’s days are his lines:— But, we rush from poie to pole, And glance ,and nod and bustle by And never once possess our soul Before we die. Is it, then strange that the modern girl should be a departure ft-om old models and a problem to some of us The unanimous verdict of the eldet women who know them as they realh are, and the educational training ol which they are partialis at any rate the products, pronounces the- girls and young of our own day to be sound in heart and head and full of promise for the future. Absolutely Sound Lines. We can at any rate fearlessly assert that in our girls’ schools —I mean of course, in schools of the modern type—moral and intellectual training is given on absolutely sound lines. In the discipline or schools the girls themselves bear a part—the old system of distrust, the watching and spying by unhappy governesses, has given place to trust and honour on both sides. Sound learning has put mere accomplishments—once all in all for girls—into their fitting place and the old dull crocodile walk, still remembered only too well by older women, has been ousted in the playgrounds by games which give health and vigour of body and invaluable character training, teaching endurance and courage and self-sacrifice in a worthy cause—all, in fact, that we ,mean by “playing the game’’ for the game’s sake. So trained in our schools our young women for the most part go on to our universities, or it may very possibly be to some of the many technical colleges springing up now on all sides and there they learn all sorts ol useful arts, cooking, laundry, dressmaking, gardening, poultry-keeping thus following the ideals of a much older time when the lady of the house like the “virtuous woman” of the Proverbs, was expected to be skilled enough to conduct all the labours of house arid farm and garden. Surely an encouraging sign of the times. Moreover, Is there no gain to the whole community, as well as to the individual student, through the opening of university and college life to women? There surely is.

There Surely is a Gain. When they go out into a difficult ■world they may make mistakes (after all, are the young men of modern daya faultless?) but certain it is that whether as teachers, or as social workers, or in business or In political life, or in the most important task oi all and the one which will come most readily to their hands, home-making their value to the nation will more ana more prove to be above price. No, do not let us regret an Imaginary past which never really existed. "The careful and undeviating use of the backboard,” recommended by Miss Pinkerton, and the crocodile - walks produced only crooked spines and feeble health. Miss Cobbe, were she still among us, would not need, to deplore “the little health of ladles.”

The mistake which grumblers make is to imagine that the gracious and charming womanhood of past times, which they justly praise, was the fruit of unnatural repressions and limitations—in truth, of a disft’fist of Nature. What they praise was in reality just Nature, expelled with a pitchfork of custom and convention and fashion, but always returning, al ways reasserting itself in spite of adverse influences. Nature will not fall us now anv more than she failed even the artifi cial eighteenth century. Lady JanGrey, lover of Plato, was the child of an earlier time before the unlucky theory that there should be a special ised education for girls different from that for boys had spoiled the girls’ chances of sound learning. And Nature, we may be sure will send forth into a perhaps tmworthy future, women just as gracious and charming as—

“Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother. Learned and fair and good.”