MANTELPIECE PAIRS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19759, 9 April 1926, Page 5

MANTELPIECE PAIRS.

Anybody who is just a little older than the present century has had the experience of looking on at the dwindling visibility of women. A street crowd today is made up from people, instead of being notably composed, as a street crowd was until about 1910, of men and women. To-day, when one gets into a bus it takes a while to find out whether men or women predominate among one's fellow-passengers (writes Edith Shackleton in the Evening Standard). But when we were very young one sensed at once whether they were nearly all fussy, feathery, voluminous women or mostly tight, stiff, and dark men. Late Victorian photographs, which are sometimes produced as a reminder of the bygone narrowness of ;he Strand and the bygone elegance of Regent street, or, better still, the oldest cinematograph films, show women occurring as elaborate accidents, like parrots on a moor or poppies in the cabbage bed. “ Was a lady such a lady ” as the one who clings in photographic records to the side of the angular gentleman who shows her the Diamond Jubilee d-corations in Whitehall ? She was, indeed! And now it is scarcely possible to tell whether the next two-seater one escapes from is driven by a girl or a boy. The Oxford street [lavements used to look like flower borders in summer with their preponderance of women, but, though the preponderance of wdmen still persists, the crowd there now is not much unlike that along Cheapside. One might launch forth from this fact of the disappearance of women from the general view on some highly-flown theory of feminism (or anti-feminism either) if one did not pause and remember that it is the likeness which is normal and the great divergence of the late nineteenth century the freak. If you go on making imaginary mantelpiece pairs you find that that is the only period in which the pair is unbalanced, unsatisfactory, and unequally decorative. Adam and Eve go quite well, so do Boadicea and her Prime Minister, so do King Harold and Edith of the swan neck, so do the young King Henry Fill and bis first Katherine. Of all the famous pairs that might conceivably have passed along the Strand, down through Pepys and Nell Gwynn, Sheridan and Betty Linley, Shelley and Harriet, to the blue-coated Prince Consort and the flounced and tippeted Queen Victoria, men and women went on “ matchmaking ” until the smoke of the industrial period and the general acceptance of the common law brought in a new sort of man who wore black suits and stiff collars and need not keep his figure because the carrying and using of swords were almost forgotten. In the ’nineties women tried to restore the old pictorial balance by adopting the (hick tailor-made and the stiff straw hat, but soon recovered from this mistake and divergence of flounced skirts, balloon sleeves, and ha(s that were rather like bazaar stalls. Now the equilibrium is recovered. The haberdasher and the milliner join hands, and men an women in the mass again look like one species.