WOMEN CLUB FAILURES

Southland Times, Issue 19823, 20 March 1926, Page 10

WOMEN CLUB FAILURES

COMPANIONSHIP SENSE ABSENT. Women secretly envy men their clubs. A women’s club, however, exquisite, however well managed, is a put-up job. A woman may go to a club because her own pens and ink refuse to function, and she may go because she likes a peculiar blend of biscuit that they serve round at lunch; or, again, she may go in out of the rain, because her club, whether in Kensington, or Mayfair, or Bayswater, is certain to be on her beat. But this is not the reason that men go to clubs (writes Miss Viola Tress, in the Evening Standard). We cannot guess their real feelings, or, at least, we must make a very poor plunge in the dark as to how they feel. It is for women as difficult to know the promptings of a man’s mind as for them to know ours. Whatever people say, the barrier between men and women’s thoughts is still quite enormous. For some reason or other —I suppose because of the catastrophe of the war—there are at the present day a great many feminine men, and as many, if not more, unfeminine women. But in our generation (the thirties and forties) men and women still think as differently as it is possible to think and feel. Imagine trying to guess at- what are the feelings and instincts of a herd of deer who suddenly sniff the wind, and for some reason walk up a stream when they have been walking down stream; at the feeling of the tide when it suddenly takes it into its head to turn. It is not obliged to turn, except by the laws of Nature; a man is not obliged to turn into his club, yet he does so. It may be that if one asked why, he would be unable to say; he would say something quite vague, like “I’m seeing old Gregson,” or “I always chaff old Robson,” or “There’s a fellow called Huddleby,” or “I get a good cold lunch.” It is true that I have not visited many women’s clubs, but if I do so go to one there seems to me to be an all-pervading silence, as of an hotel “lounge” on Sunday in some terrible watering place. Perhaps at teatime there will be a little flutter over the buttered toast, but it will soon subside. Women’s conversation does not interest women. Women of what is known as the upper classes are often too reticent to talk about men, but that is what they would like to talk about. Washerwomen in back yards and Billingsgate fisherwomen, noted for their conversation, are only talking, if one concentrates and goes into the matter, of the jealousies, their men’s inconsistencies, their men’s drunkenness, and their men’s jobs. I wonder if the men who are left to “join the ladies” after a dinner party realise the disconsolate hush that falls upon the women when they gather together round the fireplace. They generally shiver, and then wonder about each other’s clothes, openly or secretly, while from the dining room float up full-throated roars of a joke or the hard, hoarse scrimmage of a discussion.