GIRLS OF YEARS AGO

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22563, 6 May 1935, Page 32

GIRLS OF YEARS AGO

♦ AN AMUSING COMPARISON ' CIGARETTES AND LIPSTICK An amusing comparison between the .conditions for schoolgirls and women of .60 years ago and their successors to-day I was drawn at the New Plymouth Girls' j High School jubilee celebrations by Mrs Gilkison, of Dunedin, who was one of > the first 20 pupils. She noted great i changes since her first day at school. - Mr 3 Gilkison thought, however, t >.at the essential girl was unchanged. Sound at the roots then she was sound at the root's now, and if sometimes 'the older people felt inclined to criticise the youthful attitude they must remember that they, too, were modern once and their parents shook their heads over their behaviour. Fifty years ago, if a girl's family lived in comfortable circumstances she stayed at home after she had left school and occupied herself in social and domestic duties. If her family was not, well off she taught, was lady help, or married. For none of these careers was there ■very good training. Tndeed, for the last and most important of the. 1, marriage, there was still no training. Home science taught a girl how to " feed the brute," how to house him and make him comfortable, but only experience taught how to manage him. Fifty years ago girls had no tclc- - phones, no hot water bags, certainly no lipsticks or cigarettes. Electricity was known dimly as a thing that made frogs' legs jumn, not as the good giant that worked, cooker, or curled hair. If a girl had a " boy friend" there were no tea rooms for long chats together, no kinemas providing, as a vulgar young ! man in " The Wind and the Rain " had Baid, " a bob's worth of dark." Any , entertainment had to be done under the parents' eye, if amenable; stealthily if not. . Mrs Gilkison recalled an incident of her school life when Miss Ramsay or Miss Montgomery, the earliest mistresses, had decided the children should learn' more of what went on inside them. The mistress brought to school a sheep's lung, with all the appurtenances thereof, and blew it up in class. It swelled realistically before the excited eyes of the girls, who went home very thrilled to tell their parents. But the news won a very cold reception. It was her private opinion that representations were made to the authorities, ■aid Mrs Gilkison; in any case the practical section of the physiology classes stopped from that time. Yet of those classes the sheep's lung was the only part she remembered, and whenever a novelist brought forward a heroine with heavißg bosom she thought, " Well, I know how that is done."