LOOK-BEFORE-YOU-LEAP GIRLS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 638, 15 April 1929, Page 5

LOOK-BEFORE-YOU-LEAP GIRLS

WISE FLAPPERS SURVEY WIFEHOOD

Flappers happen to drift my way rather often, it being my privilege to own a 19-year-old daughter. And often, over the teacups, discussions of an engaging candour take place. They leave me wondering. Wondering just what the future of marriage may be. And whether these sagacious young girls are as wise—and as sincere—as they appear to be. For not one of them, if they are to be interpreted literally, has any of the old romantic illusions. Not even when—to quote their own vernacular —they have a ‘pash.” for a particularly nice boy, do they permit themselves to imagine that the enthusiasm and the thrill will last.

Half a dozen of them were laughing over their “pasts” at my tea-table the other day. Between the ages of 17 and 20 they had managed to accumulate quite an array of sentimental souvenirs. They admitted that, in the early days, there had been oldfashioned tears when romance faded out and disillusionment set in. But at their present advanced age they giggled whole-heartedly over their sorrowful initiation in calf-love. “Weren’t we priceless idiots?” That was the general suming-up of the sentimentality they so early learned to scorn. No less general, and not a little alarming to unaccustomed ears, was the emphatic expression of doubt as to their ability to “put up with” the lifelong society of one man. Two of their number talked of the swains they had “tootled round with” for a couple of years, and concerning whom they could not make up their minds, matrimonially speaking, now that the swains aforesaid had definitely proposed. The whole party essayed obligingly to come to their aid. Those two male absentees were discussed up hill and down dale, from every possible angle, by as cool-headed a company of young women as • ever surveyed the potentialities of wifehood from a 20th-century viewpoint. m Finally, from one of them: “Dick's rather a darling, but I couldn’t face marriage with a man so golf-mad that he’d never be at home!” And from the other: ‘That’s just how I feel about Gerald! Y r ou know what a bridge fiend he is, and when I visualise long, lonely evenings while he’s inludging his pet passion at the club, the idea of an engagement ring is off” . . . Which may be amusingly illogical on the lips of damsels professedly averse from the life-compan-ionship ideal, but is no less patheitcally revealing. It isn’t the ideal they shrink from ;it’s the way it too often works out in practice. They look ahead to the days when they may have to choose between the fiftyfifty marriage game of continuously separated interests or the role of tearful wifely solitude that has lost its old resources. And neither prospect appeals to enlightened flapperdom. J.H.