Frills Fads $ Foibles

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 230, 17 December 1927, Page 21 (Supplement)

Frills Fads $ Foibles

Do Women Want Easier Divorce?

FOUR women sat talking on the well-upholstered settee of a ladies’ club in London. They discussed, all on a recent afternoon —Divorce. It was, they said, a terrible thing to think of people forced to live together in the semblance of unity, who in truth did not live together at all. Would it not be better, they said, for such homes to be broken up and the partners to have another chance 1 ? Would it not be better, they said, for children to have no home than be brought up in surroundings where they must of necessity taste the dread cup of disillusionment before their time?

JgEIIIND what those four women said there floated a mirage of great thoughts. More freedom for everyone, and women’s right to sex, and inclination the only reason that should make people live together. It appeared to be taken for granted that one would b© luckier with one’s inclination B than one had been with inclination A. And that a second chance at a soulmate would inevitably prove more successful than the first.

As I sat at an adjacent writing table, forced to overhear them, I wondered all sorts of things, says an English writer. I am a keen gardener. Being a gardener, I am aware of the result of too much freedom in the garden, only too well. I know the time, the trouble and the work it entails, to grow anything really worth while. I know, given sufficient scope and freedom, the lovely crop of bind weed, elder weed, chick weed, and groundsel one can raise without any trouble at all. I know the mutual inclination of nettles and thistles, to arise and make the country all their own. Let us consider nature in any of her phases. Is she ever an astounding success, entirely unchecked? Consider the lilies of the field, how they perish, unless the country is adequately weeded. Too Much Comfort and Caro

I have read, in the muddle-headed way women do read, a great many books on history, evolution, and the gradual growth of mankind from nothing into what he is to-day. It ddes not appear to be very different from the process of gardening. There is nothing which leads us to suppose mankind would be any better if he had been left entirely alone. Various prunings, by batle and hangings and burnings, by battle and hangings and burnarticle not entirely discreditable to its Maker, and the only thing that ever seems to puM the human race down is too much comfort and ease.

Suppose we get this freedom from an often irksome restraint, what are we going to do with it? Not one woman in ten wants freedom to sex, with all due deference to Mr. William Clissold. She may think she does, until she is up against it. Contemporary fiction may have led her to suppose she ought to. At heart the best women are home makers, entirely faithful to an ideal.

There are too many of us in England already, and to the meanest intellect it is obvious there are not enough husbands to go round. How would the spinsterhood of the land hold its own against the army of practised ex-wives that would flood the already crowded marriage markets, living on alimony, with endless spare time and suites of furniture in store. I cannot see that in the long run anything would be gained by it. Why

should w© take it for granted that a woman who has made a hash of one marriage is likely to be any luckier in another?

Nowadays the number of women rushed into marriage by designing parents or force of circumstances gets smaller and smaller. Typewriters and foreign travel being as cheap as they are, few women need marry unless they want to.

They do want to. They always will want to. They will marry again and again. In America, that land of freedom, it is no uncommon thing to meet a woman who has had four husbands, and as a rule she is only marking time to the fifth. Alarriage is a habit with us, but I doubt if we shall get on any better with husband number five than we did with husband number one.

There is no law to force people to live together if they do not want to, and the inference is that if they do not separate, and cannot face a little social awkwardness to get rid of one another, they are not so terribly unhappy aff2r all. Happiness is the fairy tale illusion of the immature. All we have any business to Wcint of life is decency and quiet, and a certain amount of peace. Alarriage is a career like any other career. You don’t have to go in for it, if you prefer medicine or the law. The woman who has to marry for a home in these days is such a poor creature she would never have made much success at anything, and one man having undertaken to support her, it is in the interests of the community to see that he goes on doing it. It will be cheaper in the long run than supporting her in one of the institutions evolved for these people for whom life has been too long a walk. A Tragic Desertion There is one other aspect to the question which struck me as I listened to them. Let us suppose for a moment that husbands are all contemporary fiction would have us believe them to be. That being so, when we turned forty-five or forty-six, they would leave us in a body, and there was nothing to restrain them. Leave us, who had stood by them and borne the burden and the heat of the day, to tako the fruit of their success to some slip of a thing with goo-goo eyes, and the youth that we, too, had long ago. Leave us to enjoy as best we could the freedom we had clamoured for before we were old enough to realise all it might mean. When our good looks, if any, are on the wane, and all we ask is a little loyalty and a little companionship—good enough things to keep house on—and a fireside over which to sit and talk of the good days together.

That easier divorce has not certain advantages for certain extremely unfortunate people I am the last to deny. But marriage, on the whole, is a won-