MODERN MORALS

Southland Times, Issue 22999, 19 September 1936, Page 16

MODERN MORALS

English Opinions

(By Cecile Brent in the London News Chronicle).

I have been bored considerably by people saying: “Isn’t it disgusting, all these girls in shorts!” Perhaps it is disgusting, but it seems to me more than anything else practical and suitable for the outdoor sport concerned: tennis, rowing, hiking, cycling. Such condemnations are not useful, and, when you come to think about it, are rather backhanded tributes to the commentators themselves. Not all of us can go running about the tenniscourts in shirts and shorts. Because of decrepitude and ugly legs, it would not do. Carping criticism is perhaps a thin cloak for envy 7 What Spinsters Say.

Anyway, I am tired of hearing scathing comments on the modem girl, who lives her life to the full, made by antique spinsters, who never get any nearer to life than the dinner-table. Asked what alternatives they can suggest, how they would replace the frank, gay, fearless attitude of the modem open-air girl, these Misses Grundy have no answer. Theirs is a destructive criticism, uncreative, useless. Old people have long taken the view that anything they did not themselves do or wear in youth is incorrect or indecent. While these opinions are debatable when made, they are often proved absurd a century later. Only some hundred years ago it was written then of a then “modem” girl that: “her unwomanly love of mathematics increased the guilt of her infraction of the feminine code of propriety. Her afflicted relatives adjured her to give up her discreditable studies and urged her not to bring disgrace upon her family and herself by indulging in such unwomanly pursuits.”

Who knows, in another century’s time, the wearing of shorts by women may be as usual as now the learning of mathematics? Parents’ Opinions.

Unlike certain spinsters and oldsters, parents of to-day have realized that too frequent and too harsh criticism is a deterrent to youth. English parents are tolerant and indulgent They allow great freedom of relationship between the sexes.

Many children are brought up in co-educational schools; girls and boys, men and women, share together their work, sport and pleasure. This has the happy result that a young English girl may walk for miles with no other companion than an Englishman, in complete moral safety. Whereas a Spanish girl, even when engaged, must have her guardian or “duenna” six paces behind her if she goes out with her fiance.

With this present attitude of English parents towards children, much of the veiled hypocrisy and futile affectation of the Victorian age is gone. The modem young may discuss quite openly, frankly—and even a little loudly—topics whose whisper would have brought a blush to the Victorian young lady’s cheek. And if talk is the safety valve it is reputed to be, young people of to-day, who chatter more than nineteen to the dozen, are morally as “safe” as—well as houses.

The same frankness that pervades friendship also has its influence on the present generation’s ideas on love. Moderns adopt a romantic rather than a sentimental attitude. Every day we see or read about the real sacrifices they are willing to make for the sake of their love interests.

Lack of money, difficult working conditions, uncertainty about the future—none of these obstacles to love deters young people nowadays. They continue to fall in love, marry and even bring up children, in circumstances which would have appalled our easy-going Victorian forebears. This makes Victorian ideals, as quoted by poets wishing they were bunches of violets or amber necklaces, seem somewhat paltry in comparison. The books, films and plays that mirror present-day life show a romance that is fine and beautiful rather than a sentimentality that is sickly and tawdry. Young Ideas. Generally speaking, morals have improved. No generation is without its discreditable members, but exotic wildness and vice belong chiefly to the rich and idle; the majority of young moderns, with their work, enterprise and love of sport, have no time for such indulgences. One has only to turn to books of memoirs written by French and English “moderns” of Victorian days to realize that pseudo-modesty concealed a vast love of intrigue, lascivity and even vice. It was an eighteen-year-old modern who remarked to me that if such stuff could not have been written somewhat more delicately it should not have been written at all.