"NO USE PRETENDING"

NZ Truth, Issue 946, 12 January 1924, Page 2

"NO USE PRETENDING"

Middle Class Girl Has Bolted EVIDENCE OF AMERICAN SUFFRAGIST The Veil Is Thrown Away. Considerable frankness is shown by Alyse Gregory (Connecticut woman suffrage organiser, essayist, and critic) m an article m the American magazine "Current History" on "the changing morality of women." She seems to think that the war boosted a feminine depravel of conventions — a depravel that was bound to take place,, anyhow. Alyse Gregory does not go into the important question whether there has been a big increase since the war m unlicensed sexual connection, or whether there has been only a moderate increase m unlicensed sexual connection and a very big decrease j m the efforts to hide it. - ! If the latter, then it ia not so much j a matter of an increased breach of sexual conventions as an increased open defiance of them. Apologists for the defiant attitude will plead that anything ia better than hypocrisy and false appearances. They will reject Hamlet's advice to hia mother: "Assume a virtue if you have it not." ..-. : The big change m the sexual situation, as Alyse Gregory sees it k is that, among women, the highest and the lowest convention-breakers— those two extremes of sinners, rich and povertystricken, who have been always ! with vs — have now been reinforced by the Intermediate or middle classes. The bolting of the middle clas3 girl la tho great post-war development. CONTROLS HER OWN KEYS. This is what Alyse Gregory saw happen, when women reached the parting of • the ways; •, "Women of the aristocratic upper classes, and the poorest women, had never followed too rigidly the caatiron rules of respectability, because m neither instance had they anything to lose by digressing. But, for the first time In the memory of man, glrla from well-bred, respectable, middle class families broke through those Invisible chains of custom and asserted their right to a nonchalant, self-sustaining life of their own, with a cigarette afte* every meal, and a lover m the evening, to wander about with and lend color to life. If the relationship became more intimate than such relationships are supposed to be, there was nothing to be lost that a. girl could not well dispense with. Her employer, asked no questions as to her life outside the office. She had her own salary at the end of the month, and asked no other recompense from ' her lover but hla love and companionship. Into the privacy of her own snug and pleasant rooms not even her mother or her eldest brother could penetrate, for she and she alone, unless perhaps one other, carried the only key that would fit the lock." , HER SLOW, PENETRATING SMILE. So there it is— according to Alyae Gregory. Sexual freedom is no longer the monopoly of , the overfed woman and the underfed woman. The great middle class is a starter m the same race. ' To quote again: "Profoundly shocking as such a state of affairs may seem to a large number of people, there is no use pretending that it does not exist. There are too many signs already to prove that it does. Ministers may extol chastity for women from pulpit rostrums and quote passages from the Old and New Testaments to prove that purity and fidelity are still her most precious assets, but this new woman only shrugs her shoulders and smiles & slow, penetrating, secret smile. "'.:'■■. THE EXCEPTIONS. "This Is not to imply that over vast stretches of the United States, and certainly In the small towns and villages, young girls and women In bourgeois homes are not living lives of impeccable chastity, but m the great cities m thoso circles where women from twenty-flvo to thirty-five years of age can control their own pursostrings, many of them are apt to drift into casual or steady relationship with certain men friends which. may or may not end m matrimony. Undoubtedly In time these men and women will rediscover that monogamy has after all its many advantages, but it is unlikely, that tho Western World will ever again ask of women that strictness m behavior which it has never demanded of men. . "On tho other hand, certain unfair privileges still accorded her under the law will undoubtedly be changed, as will those . laws that discriminate against her. YES. THEY ARE VERY OBVIOUS. "It is all too true that these modern girls and women are often a little hard, uggressive, and obvious, and lack that gentleness of bearing and softness of voice which are so pleasing to every* one who prizes culture and hateß the voice and chaos of modern, mechanised democracies . But they have, too, a certain fearless and gallantry. . . . "Whether trial mnrriages between boys and girls will never be tolerated m this country (America) as they are m Scandinavia, is problematic Some people sec m such arrangements an antidote for divorce, others a danger to the institution of matrimony. Certain It is, however, that this country is witnessing one of the most extra* ordinary and disturbing changes In tho status of women that have so far taken plnce throughout the recorded history of man."