A GREAT PERIOD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21098, 4 February 1932, Page 3

A GREAT PERIOD.

LOOKING BACKWARD. THE VICTORIAN WOMAN. Happy is the nation which has no history, and happy was the century when women had none. The age, in England at least, when women were happiest was thai ia which they were least before the public eye, their doings and sayings not recorded, criticised, analysed, and blazoned abroad as they are in this year of grace, states an English writer. The Nineteenth Century in its entirety, I with its tentative early days of slow raifiI ing of standards, slow emergence from the ' depths of Georgian stagnation, the vitii bustling, full-blooded, prosperous middle period and the dignified peaceful grandiloquence of its decline, was in all indubitably woman's happiest century. During the preceding centuries women had waited and waned in power and status; their lot until the Middle Ages was too cloistered and remote for tte ladies of noble birth, too hard driven and oppressed for their b ambler sisters. Chatelaine and peasant alike were treated too much as pawns in tbe games of wax or politics. Later came a time when woman had all the equality about which she was to become so vociferous in after years. Side by side with her menfolk sLe worked at business, at diplomacy, she was trusted with complicated legal matters. with the handling of her husband's estates and the up-bringing of his children Bat it may be doubted whether the preoccupation either with material cares or with the more evanescent and mechanical of humanity's pleasures brought to women much true happiness. Under tl»e Hanoverians women were the" first to suffer from the general decadence; the debauchery of the courtier, the sotiishness of -he country gentleman, the poverty of the labourer, all reacted in first and fullest measure on their wives and daughters. How these must have welcomed the advent of a sovereign of their own sex, and as time went on and this young sovereign's personality came to impose itself with firmer and firmer impress on the whole of English life, women governed by a woman, living in a framework formed, however insensibly and indirectly, by feminine ideals, fe'k. themselves at home, at one with the world, at peace, and so found, as every human being must find in tip cessation of useless conflict, happiness

The Nineteenth Century is too long a period and one too full of epoch-making developments to group it into one period; women were happy throughout its span, bat for different reasons at different; times. What one class lost, through the industrial, revolution, another gained in the-higher education : what one section gained in thf! cheapening of production and the consequent sain in variety of food and easier housekeeping, another lost in the gradual stiffening of the social code. Where all women gained throughout the centurv mav be perceived in a study of the novels of the time. Their predominant note is domesticity; it was this tremendous emphasis on the domestic side of life, which bad its initial impulse ixoia the personal tastes and habits of the Queen, that led to a much higher consideration for women, to very much more power being placed in their hands than the average woman of to-day, misled by mere legal disabilities, and by sensational "hard cases," can believe was possible.

The Victorian woman was the dominant factor in the life of the home ; and the home was the dominant factor in the life of the nation. Literature, the arts, politics, all were influenced by the limitations of home, bv its demands, hot always, be it admitted', with the happiest results, but alwavs to the greater kudos of the women. Sense cf Security,

The Browning family, so often cited as a typical example of \ ictorian parental tvranny, were a family deprived of their mother. Incidentally, the women, not only the genius Elizabeth, but her more ordinary sisters, triumphed in the end. Besides power, the Victorian woman knew peace, ttie two ingredients most essential to feminine happiness. Ail women desire power, if it is only the power of the weak over the strong: all women need peace, a sense of security, before they can feel happy.

Look at the country town homes of Miss Yonge: how simply, joyously happy aru her younjr griris and matrons, and she is a realistic, not a romantic, writer. Happy, too. are the. women of Anthony Trollop®: happv the old Indies of Mrs. Ga&keil. Where to-day will you find women in such narrow, uneventful, and often .straightened and sad circumstances, living out

their lives in such genuine happiness? Part of their content rose no doubt from another sift of the Victorian ace. its strong, simple, but sincere piety. If there was Darwin, there was also Keble: Hu:siev was counterbalanced by Arnold, .and, •without entering into any question of abstract. objective truth, there is no doubt that, women's psychological development is best served by the possession of sin unquestioned vital religious faith. The double side to the Victorian age. its simultaneous preoccupation with wide and noble questions and with petty details of convention, its Imperial expansion and its John Bullishness, suited women particular! v well. They argue from the general to the particular, and by their mixture of idealism and practical genius art; equally interested in both.

Above all, the Nineteenth Century was an age of famines. large families generating a large amount of family affect ion. Woman will eternally find her greatest satisfaction in life through her affections, and in the last century they were fax less often denied this. There were fewer lonely women, there were more mothers, more sisters, more aunts, and more cousins. The. isolated. ianhappy. individualised female unit of today, continually fighting against, forces which are all the stronger fer be ; ing partly from within herself, was an unknown quantity. The Nineteenth Century, the age of happy women, knew her not.