SOMETHING IS HAPPENING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20762, 3 January 1931, Page 6 (Supplement)

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING

FEMININE TRANSFORMATION. Woman is the most sensitive weathervane and wind-gauge in the world, and in her own unfathomable way she always behaves as the herald and harbinger of coming change in the climate of tho mind. If we could read aright the anemometer of her moods we might be able to foresee and foretell the soft and subtle beginnings of a new point of view in tho mass of mankind, writes James Douglas in a London paper. Something is happening in the mysterious realm of femininity which puzzles the watcher who studies its caprices and whims. It is worth our while to explore the meaning of the strange fever and ferment, now no longer vague and nebulous, which is transforming and transfiguring the wholo feminine landscape. As I stood in the royal enclosure at Ascot recently, I saw in a fiash that woman had after long vacillations and hesitations deliberately crossed her Hubicon. The glittering kaleidoscope of fashion was violently shaken into a vehemently fresh pattern. The hardheaded, hard-faced hoyden, offspring of iron war and iron peace, suddenly translated herself into a shy and demure sylph, with downcast eyes, veiled face, and vanished knees. Modesty broke loose in a riot of concealment and camouflage. The abandoned petticoat fluttered and- billowed once more on the green lawns. Flounces

and furbelows restored the long-lost mystery of youth. Minerva threw away her crash-helmet and hid her eyes under a vast, canopy of diaphanous head-gear. Aphrodite clothed her arms to , the shoulder with seductive gloves. Her voice was still strident, and her stride was still gladiatorial. She was in the rude throes of her dress rehearsal, missing her cues, mixing her periods, clumsy in her raw coyness, rough in her adopted reticence. We gaped at the masquerade, applauding the rare one who achieved the art of natural simplicity, smiling at the bunglers whose gait was gawky, whose mouths were gashes, whose eyelashes were inky. And when the thunderstorm deluged the masqueraders, all the Victorian ghosts laughed ghostly laughter at sylphs who had never learned the nice conduct of voluminous skirts assailed by wind and rain and mire. Thousands of clutching hands betrayed the panic of anachronism. But there is more in the Ascot comedy than a vagary of milliner and modist. The gods of fashion are not tyrants. They are interpreters. They possess instincts and intuitions which are inscrutably infallible. They have prepared the wardrobe for the womanly woman, not because they wish woman to be womanly again, but because they divine the secret desire of woman to be womanly after a decade of mannishness. They have laid their

wise fingers on the pulse of womanhood. They have diagnosed an alteration in the attitude of woman to man and of man to woman. Woman herself hardly yet knows what is happening to her, but she is aware that she is being changed by her deep and secret knowledge of the masculine mind. I think she is unconsciously tired of being despised and dethroned. She has played the sedulous ape till she is disheartened and disgusted by her artificial role.

And now in a herd she is rushing back into her discarded mystery, hastily running up all the old barriers, weaving the old wiles, and practising the old enchantments. We .are only at the beginning of the process, but it will not be slow. The return to womanhood will rapidly permeate and pervade all classes. Soon shall we see long hair as well as long skirts. Soon shall we hear low voices as well as the rustle of low hems.