A CHALLENGE TO WOMEN

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19523, 24 June 1933, Page 10

A CHALLENGE TO WOMEN

STORM JAMESON’S INDICTMENT “The world is not yet a rap better because women have been let loose in it. Our effect upon its major evils—war, poverty, and what belong to them —is nothing, our achievement ol our Independence is nothing.” This is how Miss Storm Jameson sums up the-position of women in the modern world, in her most recent book, says an English contempory writer. Briefly, the famous novelist indicts a materialism which takes for granted not only our slums, our unemployed, our wars and the perpetual lifedestroying inventions of our scientists, but a religion so divorced from the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount that “if usury, if poverty, if war are ever abolished no part of the credit will belong to a church which has condoned all three.” “Women,” she writes, “have only added to the quantity of human activity, and little so far to its quality. If it were true that women have no values as natural to them—as women —as their shapes are, we should have to be pleased with the spectacle of women in football shorts, women scribbling for the newspapers, women flying, preaching, quoting shares and all that.

“But it is not true. Women have not naturally the same attitude as men to all that touches breeding, marriage and destroying life. They have a mind, an attitude, a gesture of their own. For them to pretend otherwise is a denial of life ... it is treachery and desertion—since the human destiny is not complete without the working in it of women thinking, feeling and acting also in terms of their womanhood.”

In discussing the recent speech of a certain eminent scientist who described war calmly and dispassionately “as nature’s pruning-hook,” she passionately protests against the cold-blooded Inhumanity of any modem, responsible thinker who is actually able to persuade himself that gardeners cut down their healthiest trees in order to improve the rest. “No one,” she continues, “not even this Laputan among the scientists, has yet explained in precise language how it strengthens succeeding generations for a million men to be killed and an incalculable number maimed or spoiled. If this country ever gets into another Great War I shall take every means in my power to keep my son out of it. I shall tell him that it is more shameful to volunteer for gas-bombing than to run from it."