AN EXPLODED MYTH

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6804, 7 January 1929, Page 11

AN EXPLODED MYTH

Wo talk a great deal about the freedom of the modern girl, but it seems as if this is becoming a very overworked, not to say fallacious, phrase. We assume that tho modern .young woman does things which her grandmother never dreamed of doing, but wo assume rather too rashly. The Dowager Lady Raglan has just published a book, “Memories of Threo Reigns.” in which many Victorian myths are cheerfully exploded. Lady Raglan does not think that the modern girl is any more independent than her mother or her grandmother wore. Lady Raglan and her friends played tennis and cricket with an enthusiasm which has not been beaten in tho twentieth century. They rode well, they gambled at cards, they were allowed to go to picnics and country excursions with young men—and never a chaperon iu slight—they played practical jokes and led entirely free and easy lives. The book is most interesting, witty, and amusing, and should do a great deal toward breaking through the veil of genteel illusion which has incomprehensibly been allowed to shroud the Victorian era for so long. And if we arc looking for independent gestures on the part of women, can we, in the twentieth century, find anything to equal the exploit of Mrs. John AdarasActon, who died at the age of 80? Her husband was a sculptor, and she herself was an authoress. For 30 year her I home was a meeting-place for Victorian celebrities. Queen Victoria used to visit the studio, and so did everyone else of any consequence in the artistic and intellectual world. In 1887 Mrs. Adams-Acton decided to walk to Scotland, not alone, but accompanied by her family of six young children, plus two nursemaids, She started, from her home in St. John’s Wood, and the procession of- children, headed by their redoubtable mother, must have been been most imposing. The youngest child was only a year old, but his youth did not excuse him from the journey. Ho was pushed in a perambulator by or.e of tho nursemaids, who had to devote herself to this occupation for no less than seven weeks.