A FEMINISED NATION?

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18622, 18 July 1930, Page 4

A FEMINISED NATION?

LORD GORELL ON THE NEW MENACE THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN To New Zealanders, hardened to co-education, there is something amusing in the idea that anyone should think that boys will become feminised by contact with women teachers. Nevertheless, the English National Association of Schoolmasters thinks this is happening in Britain. The National Association declares that "the boy who comes only under women’s influence cannot become a 100 per cent, he-man, and you cannot feminise boys without feminising the nation.” Lord Gorell, who is president of the Royal Society of Teachers, derides this view in the “Sunday Times.” Women, it is obvious, are no longer going to be allowed to have it all their own way, he says. For half a generation they have been marching forward triumphantly against the strongholds of men; the House of Lords is to-day one of the last remaining to withstand jjiassault, and the tide is washing strenuously even round its walls. But now there are definite signs of counter-attack, and the resolution just passed by the National Association of Schoolmasters at their conference at Manchester, only two members voting against it, cannot be ignored in silence as of no account. This urged parents to compel education authorities to entrust the education of boys beyond infant stages to men and not to women. Hitherto the main force of the opposition to the substitution of women for men in the teaching of boys has been economic; that remains, but it is obvious from the speeches in support of the resolution that to that force is now super-added the agesold antagonism of sex. This has been a factor in human affairs all through history; it is hardly necessary to go beyond the biting gibe of Tacitus, as quoted by Gibbon: “The Sitones are sunk even below servitude; they obey a woman.” One wonders what Queen Elizabeth would have said, or even Queen Victoria, to such an assertion. To-day, at any rate, in the view of the National Association of Schoolmasters it is once more a case of “the monstrous regiment of women” of John Knox. Boys, they declare, “need strong control; no emotion, petting, or jealousy.” That is a declaration which involves rather a large assumption—namely; that men are naturally capable always of exercising strong control and women never: that men never show emotion, have favourites, or are afflicted with jealousy. Would it were! true! Many a common room, inhabited only by men, is a hot-bed of jealousy. But that may be so without really destroying the argument. The charge is- that boys older than in- ! fants become feminised if taught by women. Obviously infants is not used in this connection in its legal sense; no one has suggested that boys up to 21 should be controlled and taught by women. The idea is that * women should be confined to babies, and that all older males need the impress of virility, “he-men,” to quote the absolutely ridiculous modern expression. There is something in it, to put it mildly. I can imagine the outcry if a brilliant girl were appointed class mistress at one of our great public schools—yet the “dames” at Eton were very successful and very popular in their sphere. Appointments cannot, even in the twentieth century, be made wholly regardless of sex, a human being is not merely a brain, but is either a man or a woman as well, a personality in fact, and nothing is of more account in teaching than the personality of the teacher. I was reading a book only the other day written from very much the point of view that dominates the National Association of Schoolmasters. That divided the lives of juveniles into cut-and-dried sections. The first was the kingdom of the mother, and the second of the father, the third the mother again. A young man was dominated by his mother rather than by his father; a girl just grown up, vice versa. It was interesting and it was ingenious, but, oh, so easy to upset. It is not possible so to generalise about either children or their parents. Is the nation becoming feminised through women teachers? We are familiar with the accusation; it is levelled against Oxford, directed there against women as fellow-students and not as teachers; it is heard about some

of our long-haired, plus-foured young exquisites. Yet it is not twelve years since they were dying in the trenches; every day we read of hairbreadth adventures, undertaken solely for adventure, on the dirt track, in, over, and under the sea. Are we sinking lower than other nations —in a year when we are challenging the world in almost every sport? Life all accusations, this of feminisation is exaggerated. No one wants big boys to be solely under the influence of women; few want them wholly divorced from such influence. I would say also, on the other side, that if women have a part to play in the education of boys, so men have one to play in the education of girls. Neither sex can do without the corrective influence of the other. I would like to see women’s influence more prominent than it is in our boys’ public schools; and I certainly w r ould not wish my own son, big or little, to lack the vitalising stimulus of a good and manly teacher. The National Association of Schoolmasters need not really be afraid; it will be a long time before as a nation we “sink even below servitude,” and the day of man is not yet quite done.