THE EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN WOMAN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2762, 20 February 1907, Page 77

THE EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN WOMAN.

(By Emmelixe.)

No. 6.— MODERN MOTHERS.

That "mothers are mothers all the world over"' may be true enough, but that the modern mother is a undreamed of by even her immediate forbears is. equally true. Conditions of life, requirements of society, and changes in education have evolved among the leisured classes a type of mother which we may broadly class as

THE "SOCIETY" MOTHER.

One studies her in novels of the moment, and finds her essentially the same whether she lives in England or America, in Paris or in Vienna. She is in her most youthful type rather the craze of the moment, and "is one of the stock attractions of fashionable photographers, miniature painteis, and artists. Ten or twelve years ago it was as the society beauty — not far removed from the professional beauty — that good-looking women of title or wealth ; posed. They were "frisky matrons," and, | for all that was seen of their children, might have been as free from encumbrance as the unmarried girls whose partners they unduly absorbed and whose pleasures they pursued with all the additional freedom conferred by the status of a married woman. That phase, however, of fashionable life has been exchanged in the great capitals of the old world for "the mother of the child.' Turn over the pages of the most notable journals — Sketch, Ladies' Pictorial, Queen, or Ladies' Field — and you will find the young mother in endless variety of po6e with her "little son," or her "tiny daughters," or "the little heir to the title" — marquis or lord, as the case may be. The artistic value of these charmingly combined groups is fully appreciated, and there may be, underlying the surface art and sentiment which ctietates this expression of maternal love, some faint idea that the beauty of home and family life is being reinstated by these pleasing and aristocratic exhibitions of domesticity. Is it not rather another foiin of that living before the footlights, that constant feverish desire for publicity which brings these little children on to the social stage as charming and picturesque adjuncts to their mother's personality? A recent writer remarked on the growing desire for personalities which infests English and colonial press alike as follows : — In former times the leaders of society maintained a sort of dignified aloofness and inaccessibility ; they would have deemed it exceedingly bad form to be always strutting before the world's footlights. . . . Their successors, on the other hand, seem smitten with a perfect mania for notority. . . . They are appraised, like cattle, for their physical qualities. "Miss ,'" I read in my morning paper not long ago, "has a beautiful little face." Another blushing debutante was inventoried as the possessor of a "charming little nose and ! mouth, large soft eyes, and lovely hair." The tastes, talents, and disposition of 1 a third were set out at length. She was devoted to cycling, we read, and i other country pursuits ; and an astonished world was' informed in capital letters that she was "FOND OF MUSIC." Writers, both masculine and feminine, have written, and are still writing, pen-and-ink 6ketches of the society woman both in England and America, and readers of Mrs Wharton's clever and forcible novel i "'l he House of Mirth" have an amazingly striking picture of New York society presented to them. Considering the atmosphere and conditions in which and under which she lives, our own common sense tells us that the modern mother of smart society can have neither time or inclination for any real intercourse with her children. Here, for example, are a couple of paragraphs on t lie society women of the old wculd taken from an article by H. Marriott Watson on American women of smart society: — "She is filled with worldly ambitions of the social kind; but what^sbe dreads is insipidity. The meats provided for her at the feast of life must be many and full-flavoured, even though satiety and mental indigestion bring in the end their inevitable revenges^' "The two prime necessities of so-called smart people are excitement and money. (iambi iag affords a cer^iin means of obtaining the first, while it holds out alluring promises of the second." The distinguished father and the socially brilliant mother of the great world would seem to see as little of their sons and daughters as they grow to men and women as mu^t inevitably be the case during their childish days. For, says a recent titled water of ability and distinction, "our sons are occupied in passing j competitive examinations until they are well on into the thirties ; our daughters in tearing from one house to another, one dinner-dance to the next, or in taking up what they fondly imagine to be some serious study, which occupies their time, if not their minds, and deceives the empty heart with artificial food, as starving men devour the most innutritious substances. This special development of our social edifice rests on the gradually required ' bachelor ' habits of our girls, partly owing to the greater safety and rapidity with which they can move about the world ; their greater knowledge of the world so acquired, which fits them in a measure to protect themselves ; and, lastly, their more extensive education." Are they happier? I shrewdly suspect not. The charmed veil of mystery which made of their mothers and grandmothefs, longed for prizes, whose 'society could scarcely be enjoyed in fulness, has dropped from our lovely, athletic, accomplished, but prosaic young women, whom ambulance classes and lectures on physiology have robbed of something of the tender freshness of their aacestre«j«s. It is however.