Flirtatious Husbands

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12181, 4 July 1925, Page 11

Flirtatious Husbands

How Women Can Deal With Men

ELL-MEANING Western _ feminists who wish to incite their Eastern sisters to rebel against the indignities of harem and zenana life will have to put their own houses in considerably more order than they are at present if their revolutionary arguments are to carry any weight

LV VttllJ ttllj (writes Esme Wynne-Tyson). As it is, our "reformers,” on Indian and Egyptian soil, find the bitterest opponents to their ideas are riot the men. whom they blame, but the women they camo to hejp. They learn, further, that in a more subtle way than in the Western world women govern as autocratically here as anywhere. A missionary once confessed that India was ruled by its old women, and it is they who keep temptation from their sons and power in the hands of their daughters by decreeing that the Pardah shall continue. SEGREGATION Segregation settles the sex problem more or less successfully in the Orient. Can it be said that we have discovered a solution anything like so successful ? The state of our Divorce Courts provides the answer. One of the happiest British marriages within my experience resulted from a reactionary Pardah frame of mind in the plain but observant wife. The husband had been notoriously “wild” in lug youth, and very little was seen of him* by women visitors who came to the house-, he departed with their husbands (they were invariably married) to his study, leaving them to the consolation of their hostess and the drawing-room. A woman can usually persuade a normal husband, at the beginning of their married life, that he Retests dancing. This had been done, and comparatively innocuous forms of entertainment, such as dinner and card parties, were substituted. Few men are unwilling to prolong indefinitely the port and anecdote stage of a dinner party, and in this household it was the accepted custom while the ladies amused themselves upstairs. WEEDING OUT \ Of course, women who preferred the

company of the opposite sex to their own did not accept a second invitation. It was thus an efficacious way of separating the wheat from the tares —those who came to talk to the .wife and those who. wished to flirt with the husband. Bv this means all undesirable acquaintances were weeded out. and tho wise wife not only kept her husband to herself but gathered about her congenial and loyal friends, as content with their own husbands as she with tiers. She bore the criticism and censure of baffled he-womcn as stoically as a woman may who hears nothing of such things and cares less. She proved that the condemned Pardah system loses none of its efficacy,

as an answer to the matrimonial problem. by its transplantation to more “enlightened” climes. NOT PREPARED FOR SACRIFICE In spite of this, there is no chance of the Western world going baclf to the Pardah. for the simple reason that the majority of its women are against even its advantages. In other words, “civilised” womankind would not be prepared to sacrifice the society of other people’s husbands even though, by this means, they' might secure their own. It’s all a question of the point of view, but morally I think right is on the side of the despised ladies of ’J.e Pardali.