Social Activities

Southland Times, Issue 22508, 16 February 1935, Page 17

Social Activities

It may be the example of Mrs Franklin Roosevelt which has inspired American women to greater activity than ever this winter. When you have a Presidents wife who thinks nothing of flying from Washington to New York in the morning, attending a luncheon, making. a radio speech, opening a club or an institution of some sort, making another radio speech, looking in upon a reception, and appearing at a big dinner and. making still another speech before going back to Washington, ordinary activities hardly seem worth mentioning (says an English writer). American women are in fine fettle this winter. The National Women’s Party is laying deep schemes for heckling the Government as to equal rights for women. The Federation of Women’s Clubs, the League of Women Voters, the Colonial Dames, the Women’s Pacifist League, and the American Liberty League, all numbering hundreds .of thousands of women, are planning every kind of activity to raise money to spread their own particular form of propaganda, and to show the world the American woman is “very much on the job,” as they would explain it. As for society events, there are more debutantes to come unblushingly forward than since 1929. They are to have big splashy parties again, the kind where a ballroom is transformed into a circus tent or a French chateau, or an Island in the Pacific. Already there has been one jungle ball, where a great armoury was turned into a tropical forest with palms and bamboos, monkeys and parrots, and in the name of charity society women and girls danced till daylight. A Green Ball. Then there was the green ball at the Waldorf Astoria, where the ballroom was edged with turfed banks, where pale green lights mingled with the rose and golden ones, and every feminine guest wore green in every shade. There were green wigs and green fans and more jade than New York has ever seen at one time before. How much these balls really make for the charity which serves as a reason for their being given, few people know, and they do not tell. It is women who are the most numerous and successful exhibitors at the chrysanthemum show. It is women who are getting up the big lunches of from two to five hundred of their own sex at which some visiting writer or lecturer will be guest of -honour. In fact, it is women who are going to make this a year of extraordinary achievement outside the home.