Feminine Reactions

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23489, 28 October 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

Feminine Reactions

Woman's Logic Asks At A.R.P.

By BART SUTHERLAND

IN funny story realms there is a lady, who, when told that her ■first-aid exam, had been postponed, -exclaimed : "What a nuisance having to remember it all for another week 1" I have been to an Air Raid Precaution class, and the story, I find, is not so very farfetched ; for in reality many of us are apt to forget information when, in an emergency, our brains should give almost automatic response. But what else can you expect with gases called chlorovinyl dichlorarsine and ethyliodoacetatc, to say nothing of many more just as bad 1 ? There are, of course, always my two little books to fall back on; they bear the imprint of His Majesty's Stationery Office at home, and I.feel that they know something of practical matters. And I really have divided the gases into their "due clases of eye, nose, lung and skin irritants; but the trouble is that if another enthusiast gives ;nc an impromptu oral exam., barking without warning: "What would you do against Lewisite?" I am inclined to waver, which is unfortunate, for I clo distinctly remember that time is the essence of the contract in dealing with Lewisite. , . . , Although my actual knowledge is vague, however, and requires the contact with actuality from which we here are, unfortunately, free, so far, I catne away from that class with a few additions to my general knowledge. Romantics or Realists In the first place, I am continually being astonished by my own sex. Who is't can read a woman? says Shakespeare. I don't know. Although many of my fellow women claim facility in this mystical art, I certainly am beginning to lose confidence. I have tor long adhered to the thesis that women are incurable romantics, either shutting themselves away from reality, or else veiling it over. This, in spite of the fact that they should be the supreme realists, actors and servitors they are in the great primal realities of birth and death. The evidence of this class belied the romantic theory. There must have been nearly a hundred people there; ten, at the most, were men. , , . ' True, many of the _ men outside might have been more in touch with reality still, doing rifle practice in anticipation of active service; but this class was held just before the war started, which rules out another argument that tho women were doing it to be macabrely in the fashion. The class lasted just on eight hours, and nobody fainted or turned a hair. I found myself having to concede something to the argument of Mr. James Harpole who, . in his "Leaves from a Surgeon's Casebook." says that woman is really the tougher sex. A distinguished soldier patient, he says, once collapsed in his surgery, through the prick of a hypodermic needle, and ho .has had similar "accidents'' with bold riders to hounds, but never with a woman. "The reason for this courage," he « says, "is, I think, that women really represent the race; that they are built to resist pain so that tlhe race may go on." But I was forced to fall from these lofty reflections by a paradoxical revelation of feminine traits. Women may ba willing to deal with reality, but do they know what reality is? Very early in the proceedings I suppressed a strong desirp to ask questions that, when examined, appeared merely silly. But there are a great many women in the world,--I am glad to find, who are not of this pausing, contemplative nature. Without a moment's hesitation — whether from a sheer desire for knowledge or an assumption of nonchalance in face of desperate odds, I cannot say —they voiced my thoughts and fears for me, and gave a touch of insouciance to the afternoon. ,Quick Thinking, Indeed! "Well, now," said a lady near me. "you say that unless this bleaching is applied against Lewisite within a minute, it's no good. How are wo going to find out what kind of gas it is in that time?" Calmly the lecturer insisted that quick thinking would be called for. "I have told you that this gas has certain very definite signs; one of thpm immediate pricking of the skin " "But how are we to know if someone else's skin is pricking?" she persisted. , The obvious retort carne that one could ask him, or one might feel pricking oneself. "But he might be unconscious" . . . "Well, that would be just too bad, but I'm afraid you would have to leave him there!" Then there is tho question of refuge rooms, with even the tiniest crack for air admission pasted over with a papier mache mixture. How could I voice my feeling that I. didn't like tho idea? Another woman did it for me. "And how long," she snorted glumly, "would one last in that?" The lecturer did one of those cubic content sums to prove that one could last quite a while; "but,',' he admitted, "one wouldn't be feeling much good on coming out." The immediate reaction to such instruction is laughter, but it is the

laughter of despair. To come to this, after tho long course of life —the hours of sunlight wasted tho accumulated hours of all mankind, that might be given to pleasant things, given to this awful study. Yet, looking at such faces as these around one, bravo, determined and placid, one cannot let tho mood of desperation prevail. Irony, as Anatole France lias said, is the right weapon for tho salvation of mankind. A new angle on my fellow-women — laughter, despair, irony—all these T gained from my eight hours, and more —the crying need for n more constructive antidote than treatment after tho damage is done. There has been a theory propounded lately of a sort of Pacific union, under the leadership of the United States —an extension of the Monroe doctrine for keeping out of the muddles of the Old World. To British peoples there is, perhaps, something too new and radical in the idea; wo have old loyalties, and when a crisis conies, we feel that wej too, must help to set the same old tangle straight. Tho issue is very clear now; tho conflict has come! But there is a mind issue very clear, too —man cannot go 011 living like this. We may take upon us some share of tho immediate burden, but there is a higher duty upon us, also, for we are, comparatively speaking, "outside the battle." The time is ripe for a Monroe doctrino of the mind, at least, among tho peoples of the Pacific. *