THE MODERN GIRL

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6438, 15 January 1924, Page 7

THE MODERN GIRL

GAMES AND GOOD HEALTH

IMPROVEMENT IN TYPE

“Every chocolate box gives evidence of the change of taste that has occurred during the last century,” writes a Harley Street doctor in the Weekly Dispatch. “Gymnasiums are the modern beauty parlours. Perfect beauty nowadays is perfect health, like the beauty which the ancient Greeks loved and immortalised/ in their statues.

/Our great-grandfathers admired women with sloping shoulders, swan necks, and narrow faces. We admire braced-up shoulders, upright necks, and faces with the eyes wide apart. INTELLIGENT AND FIT

“The explanation is simple. We have learned that beauty and health are almost the same thing. The women that our great-grandfathers 'admired were far less healthy than the modern women. Sloping shoulders and swan necks are both signs of early consumption and narrow faces mean lack of brain power. “To-day the more intelligent and the more fit a girl looks,’ the more men esteem her beauty. When unfitness passed for beauty, the hope of improving the national physique was very slender. Girls did not want to look brutally healthy, so they cultivated anaemic faces and narrow chests.

“Now the tendency is in the opposite direction. Physical culture classes are most popular, and the result is that the health of women is improving amazingly. 4 Anaemia is almost extinct. REAL .SPIRITUALITY ; “We aye only at the beginning of a revolution which will take two generations Of. girls to produce a perfect type. Our grand-daughters will be lovelier than'' their grandmothers. It is possible that the girl who is called a strapping lass to-day will appear a fragile type 50 years hence.

“Those ; critics who declare that women are uglier and have lost the spiritual type of the last century for-get-that the beauty of the past was capricious, troublesome, and unreliable. Beautiful modern women are

living down that reputation. They possess the real spirituality belonging to a clear and active mind. The modern beautiful girl is good-natured and as fair and square in her dealings as her brothers. Health has given her a new disposition.”