TWELVE YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY GIRL

New Zealand Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 5832, 24 February 1906, Page 11

TWELVE YEARS OF THE UNIVERSITY GIRL

Three generations of girl students Have gone from' tit. Andrews, and last man who remembered a womanlcas ’Varsity has vanished to a Highland mause. Tho great change which has come over student life in those twelve years has been produced by feminine influence. Tho Toddy Clubs are gone; tho (iaudeamuses, Solatiumo. and Symposiums are fewer every year. The membership of the T.T. Society has increased enormously: you see, afl tho women are members, and they organise tea parties. Instead of holding fish cuppers in the old Cross Keys Hotel, ■ho men now go to dances in tho women’s Unit of Residence, instead of disregard of such conventions as collars, culls, and hair-brushes, there is stylishness and neatness. Matches against townsmen at billiards have given place VJ mixed foursomes and mixed hockey matches; cocba has succeeded whisky as a supper beverage and no ono keeps a Bloc ot beer in his'rooms. The University has become more workmanlike, too. Drinking ami idling is not fashionable, nor do men go through tho Divinity course to snatch three vears more of Bohemian life. . . Of the women students there are about a hundred. Most intend to bo teachers, a few study medicine, a few others are well off and study for their own pleasure. Two or three have had the courage to id op t a University career, and lecture on mathematics, economics, or chemistry. Some have taken parts of tho Divinity ■•onrse, and ono has become a woman minister. All the women work conscieniously. and they gain more than their bare" of distinctions. Of none yet can * be said that she surpassed all the men f her time, but in two subjects out of ■’vc n woman i« absolute leader. The women vote nnd-are elected to the Students’ Council, and even face the heckling of a mass meeting of men students. Mon and women Gaels both join the Celtic 'Society, and a mixed society debates nhilosonhy. This sounds like the Platonic ideals, but there are plenty of "’ill! flirtations—mixed foursomes end

-i.-its (o the nier by moonlight, iso reputations forbid it; there arc no reputations. The majority of the women will

no! cmhiro tho mild discipline of the Hal! of Rerileuco, and live in lodgings, receiving their own guests and keeping ilioir own hours—talc hours, too. For, (hough the women liavo conventionalised lie men, they themselves have become '■emancipated” and do nil the men do, short of walking in torchlight processions. And the result? Well, a St. Andrews man .when ho leaves the old city ■ icon ceases to wish to sing in the streets it midnight, to play tricks on constables, n- to wear his oldest clothes on Sundays, lie is frozen into a respectable citizen. The women, of course, return to Mrs Jruiidy with less demur and never think jf ; hocking the neighbours by paying unuvite I calls at lO.lll) p.m. In time they 'onvc their school or patients, and marry, lint to no college friends. That never happens. The St. Andrews man mid the 51. .Andrews woman remain friends: after our years" comradeship (hey find it peric ily impossible to invest each other's head's with halos.—‘"Pall Mall Gazelle.”