AN ENVIED PRIVILEGE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19719, 19 August 1927, Page 7

AN ENVIED PRIVILEGE.

Time was when women were supposed to envy men their freedom more than anything elre in the world. ~ Let them be free of conventions as men, and happiness would be theirs! Well,, most of the fetters that once shackled feminine development have been struck away. Are wg really so very much happier for the revolution? As happy as we expected to be? ' If the restless pursuit of careerist activities and hectic pleasures constitutes happiness, then the answer is presumably in the affirmative. But if, on the other hand, we women admit that the gratification of worldly ambitions, the successful assertion of our civic and social "rights," or the killing of time in the dance-hall or at the wheel of a car, has left us still unsatisfied, then the answer is that we are not demonstrably nearer to real happiness than in our fettered days. By no stretch of the imagination could one call the modern feminine countenanco a conspicuousiv happy one. The truth is—as it has always been—that our sex is wildly and incurably romantic, and therefore terrifically censorious of actualities both as regards human nature and destiny. vve can " not make allowances for the pressure of human circumstances and the human limitations they reveal. It was a man who gave the world the golden gospel: "To understand all is to forgive all.'' That is where the men score and will alwavs score. Man, in not expecting the impossible, either from life or from poor human nature, has already a good start on the road to happiness. That is the sex privilege we envy him most of all! Men have an infinitely greater capacity for living each day as it comes, without Wearing out their brains and hearts in futile and abortive speculations on human motives and the ulterior designs of Destiny. They are blessed with a material heartiness that enables them to shut out psychological speculation unless they are deliberately engaged thereon in a professional sense. We poor wretched women, in -an amate.ui- role, are at it all the time! Our'trouble is that there are too many question marks in our souls, and not enough ■ full stops. If men could cure us of that eternal feminine complaint, we should be really "emancipated." For they would deliver ns from those psychological miasmas that bar the way to happiness nnmarred bv any arriere pensee, and in the attainment of which ["an strates .. his real "superiority over wofrian.