SUPERSTITIOUS FEMININITY

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1714, 4 January 1905, Page 22

SUPERSTITIOUS FEMININITY

The cases which crop np from time to time in police-courts of palmistry fraud® practised on all grades of society from the educated well-to-do woman down to the unlettered factory girl, reveal humiliating facts as te the superstitious credulity of Avomankind. That women, the avotH over, are intensely superstitious is all too plain. Superstition has been for a long time very fashionable and very much encouraged. Jewellers who produce in quantities the innumerable "lucky” charms and costly little mascots to adorn my lady’s pretty person will reveal to you gladly the rapid growth of a picturesque and rather foolish mode. There are some women who are hung all over with dangling and jingling "lucky” beans, <r lucky” tortoises, “lucky” pigskin fact, whole menageries of fortune-in-ducing animals I They are living witnesses to the superstition of their sex and it® —-to quote a mere man —“barbaric love of adornment 1”

The intelligent lady who nails a horseshoe daintily enamelled in gold paint to her boudoir wall is ABSURDLY SUPERSTITIOUS, and so is her handmaiden, who crosses her fingers vylien passing under a ladder, or "wishes” frantically and devoutly when she spies a white horse amid passing traffic.

If we are to believe current magazine literature, all celebrities—man, woman, and child—for there are child celebrities —are a prey to pet superstition®, and the great upon earth pin their faith to the efficacy of the four-leaved shamrock, or the 14th bean, as firmly as do ordinary individuals.

It is rather quaint, this return of the modern to the ways of the mediaeval, and there is really no calculating its consequence*).