WOMEN IN THE AIR.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 45, 30 March 1914, Page 5

WOMEN IN THE AIR.

A week or so ago Sir Gerald Strickland nodded " Yes " when the enterprising young Harry Hawker asked if the State Governor would allow his eldest daughter to 1 ' fly with him.'' In olden days, such a request could only have been, interpreted in one way, and visions of Gretna Green and " Boots at the Holly Tree Inn " arise in one's mind at the very words. But the literal .flying was something of a nature much more astounding than the old romantic elopement; and nervous elderly folk can only remark of the feat with a shudder, " How could she? " Yet those who saw Miss Dixon and Miss Strickland take those amazing flights with the aviator in that magical Sopwith biplane of his, so much better than any bird, being indeed a bird guided by a man's brain, marvelled at the ordinary look of the whole affair. Really, it seemed nothing out of the way. When a difficult thing is well done, it looks so easy that not only do we not wish it were impossible (like Dr Johnson), but we doubt if it be really difficult at all. It is the same with acting, singing, dancing, painting, or any art. The perfect expression is so simple. But bad art of any kind is apparently a labour of Hercules, so plainly is the effort visible. The first women to fly in Sydney, Miss Strickland and Miss Dixon, have no impressions of danger at all, merely they declared, an exhilarating sense of flight. \ Women are, or were, supposed to be a timid sex, but that adjective must be erased from the diction very soon as a feminine attribute. Women to-day are anything but the little timid flutterers they were brought up to be long ago. Sixty years ago it would have been thought bold and unfeminine for a woman to walk alongside a '' gentleman friend '' without taking his arm to support her feeble footsteps. In the Mitchell Library it is very interesting to see the old prints of bowing ladies in coalscuttle bonnets, pointed shawls and crinolines, hanging on to the arms of the gentlemen in tall hats, choking stocks, and strapped trousers. Can you imagine a crinolinr belle sitting in si biplane? Or can you picture her dancing the tango or playing golf? They seem as remote, these shawled and bonneted grandmothers of ours, as if they were contemporaries of Edward" the Confessor or Julius Csesar. Yet they only lived 60 years ago, or thereabouts!

Lady Victoria Pery, whom we take the more interest in, as her family was intimately connected with Tasmania some years ago, celebrated hej: coming of age in January by flying upsidedown, looping the loop, and doing all the daring feats which; her aviator, Mr Gustave Hamel, permitted her. It was a superb way to spend one's birthday. Then Miss Trehawke Davies about the same time performed similar feats, which read all the more thrillingly because • these swallow flights, which i surely Sairey Gamp would have called '' owdacious,'' were undertaken in winter, amidst the cutting blasts and dense fogs of England, at the New Year time. We have all thrilled over the account of Mrs Aschetown Harbord's flight across the English Channel with the French aviator, when they were lost in the fogs, and at intervals could only see the grey, tumbling waters below them. They were nearly frozen, and dropped down on France, thinking the grey cliffs were a fogbank. Mrs Harbord's flight reads like the most improbable romance, and yet it is just the ordinary newspaper "story." But it is no exaggeration to say that all the women ''stories" in the world's journalism, as it comes out in the daily news, provide the day's sensations, whether it is the story Of a lady politely being led forth from a Brussels ballroom by order of King Albert, shocked at her slit skirt, or the story of the suffragette sitting on the' doorstep of the Ulster Hall, and solemnly cursing Sir Edward Carson. Whatever we call the women of .to-day, we cannot with # justice call her timid. It is extremely probable that we women have never in reality been timid and fearful all these centuries, but have merely adopted the cowering and fawning attitude to man, as animals adopt protective colouring. Natural selection brings about the permanence of protective colouring in animals in the course of the ages, and gloomy critics of women, such as Weininger and Sir Almroth Wright, who like to say the uncomplimentary thing, aver that this parasitic quality of dependence and cringing on the mighty male is at least second nature with women. But does not it look now as if Schopenhauer, Wright, Weininger and Co were all wrong? Women are acting now like the delightful animals in H. B. Neilson's charming "Topsy Turvy Tales." There was " Jferemiar, the Timid Lion," there was "the limpet that would not cling," and "the worm that would not turn," and the whole merry crowd, of living creatures who were readjusting all their points of view, and revaluing all their values. Mme. Troly Curtin, a vivacious writer, said, only the other day, that "courage and frankness in women are not appreciated." They like to think that they have cornered those virtues, and it is not necessafy for a woman to possess them, as a man has enough of them for '' self and partner.'' All these ideas are growing out of date. New notions and conceptions of womanly virtues are, literally, in the air. There are two kinds of courage—- ! moral and physical. Woman has always allowed to have plenty of the former. Now these splendid young women of the 20th century, who "take the air" without a tremor, are showing ; the world that woman has her own share of physical courage as well.— Flora Bee in the Sydney "Daily Telegraph."