DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS

Southland Times, Issue 24760, 3 June 1942, Page 4

DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS

RELATIONSHIP IN LIFE AND LITERATURE “We must admit that fathers of the present day are a great improvement on fathers in literature,” said Miss M. W. May, principal of the Southland Girls’ High School, in a talk at yesterday’s meeting of the Invercargill Rotary Club. “Fathers in literature were a poor lot,” she added. “If you had a Victorian father and suggested that he should take you out for lunch he would have recoiled in horror and pointed out that he spent all his time in the city working arduously to support you. Most of these fathers suffered from the ‘slipper complex.’ They thought that their daughters were primarily intended to be ready with warm slippers when they came home after a long, hard day’s work.” Miss May was speaking at the club’s annual Daughters’ Day, an occasion on which members of the club bring their daughters to lunch with them. Her apt and witty talk was greatly enjoyed by both fathers and daughters. INTELLIGENCE AND HONESTY To illustrate her theme, Miss May quoted examples of the “slipper complex” as revealed in the Old Testament and in classical literature—examples which, as she said of one of them, were enough to “make anyone with one drop of feminist blood in her really spit.” Old Testament fathers were grim enough, and Shakespeare’s fathers were not much better. Most of his heroines had lost their mothers and were completely at the mercy of their fathers. Miss May confessed a liking for the father who took his daughter with him for company on the schooner Hesperus. He was one of the best kinds of father. Miss May ended by quoting a character from a modern novel— Virginia Woolf’s “The Voyage Out”—who laid great stress on the intellectual values of intelligence and honesty , and did not set so much value on amiability and unselfishness, qualities which were often unduly exalted in mixed households. This, Miss May suggested, was an ideal which might be followed by both fathers and daughters. On the motion of the Rev. Hugh Graham, she was warmly thanked for her talk.