What Women Talk About

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23405, 22 July 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

What Women Talk About

]y£ADAMI£, how you talk I But will you tell us why your conversation is so far below your oilier accomplishments? writes Walter Buttcrworth in an overseas journal. Though you. have advanced on nil other fronts, even beyond the men, why h ive you fallen back in the art of conversation? The charm of the Victorian lady's conversation was only excelled by the grace of her silence. 'Hie'modern woman has little silence, and her conversation. . .!

We know, because next door to our .oflicc is a beauty salon; it contains a number of hairdriers. Some of these nre always working, emitting noises like motor-cyclcs climbing a tost hill, and 1o make .themselves hoard tho women" beautifiers and their patients have to raiso their voices, thus penetrating a showcase fidl of wrinkle-remover, a wood partition, a cupboard containing unpaid accounts and the office boy's weekly supply of twopenny terrors — and our sensitive male ears I What we havo suffered because hairdriers have to bo bawled into submission! But, after ten years, we certainly know the complote and awful truth about female conversation. Tho snlon draws its patrons from no one class or type. Tho treatments are as diverse as a husband's reasons for being

late; the prices as clastic as washed woollens. Our judgment has not been hastily built on the tittle-tattle of the thin and nervous, the wordy meanderings of tho plump and easy-going. There have been many examples of an apparently superior kind. Frequently wo have met them in the entrance hall and noted their broadbrowed, handsome intellectuality. And yet, tho conversations of ten years have touched only three topics! Think of tho millions of happenings in that time. The strikes, tlio revolutions, tho coronations, tho inventions —it makes your head reel. Yet, out of'that store, three topics! Tho same three, month after month, year aftor year. As a woman, hasn't it ever made you ashamed ? * I say "hasn't" because you must have known tho plight your conversation was in. I related my experiences to one of your sex and sho said: " I'll wager I can guess tho threo topics." "No!" I said, all innocent surprise. "Clothes?" sho asked. " Bight." ' "Men?" " Bight again." " Films?" " Bight every time I' 1