DISLOYAL WOMEN

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 14, 7 April 1927, Page 5

DISLOYAL WOMEN

Some years ago I heard a relative of mine say, when speaking of an exceptionally pretty and attractive girl: “Lilian will never marry well; she always runs down her own sex.” As a schoolgirl, I did not understand the full significance of those remarks; but I now see what that elderly relative had in mind. WHY BE SO STUPID? One constantly hears girls pulling others to pieces to their men friends. Sometimes it is done through jealousy or misunderstanding, but more often through stupidity. Underlying most disparaging remarks about women is the desire to appear better than the criticised ones. This is the motive, be it conscious or unconscious. A really manly man dislikes to hear one girl run another down. He may listen politely, but the speaker generally falls 50 per cent.*in his esteem. A girl frequently harms herself in the eyes of the very man she desires to please by unkind criticism of her own sex. BE CLANNISH Quite recently, a man of the world said to me: “I can never understand why women are so unkind to one another. As a very young man, I expected that they would all stick together and be clannish: but those illusions were soon shattered.” I murmured something to the effect that all women were not like that; but I knew quite well what he meant. In these days of emancipation for girls and women there is still one thing for them to remember, and that is to exercise the same loyalty toward their women friends which men usually show each other. THAT “EQUALITY” FEELING I was greatly impressed while on a visit to the States to find how women there supported one another and shielded their own sex. Some may say, “Oh, woman rules there; we prefer equality, especially in the question of marriage.” I quite agree that comradeship, equality and the give-and-take principle seem the real partnership to me; but how can a man look upon any woman as his equal when the frailties of her sex are for ever being enlarged upon by members of it? —V.E.G.