IS OUR SEX UNFAIR?

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19803, 19 May 1934, Page 11

IS OUR SEX UNFAIR?

AN INCIDENT AND SOME COMMENT A remarkable disclosure relating to the attitude of women toward women was made recently by Miss Elise Sprott, head of the Women's Section of the 8.8. C., speaking at a luncheon in London. “It will be remembered,” writes Mr. A. G. Gardiner in the “Star,” “that not long ago the 8.8. C. made the experiment of employing being given to Mrs. Giles Borrett. The experiment had a very brief run. After a few weeks, Mrs. Borrett vanished from the microphone, for what reason was not explained, but certainly not because she was inefficient. "Now Miss Sprott let the cat out of the bag. The only persons who were to blame for the termination of Mrs. Borrett’s engagement, she says, were the women of this country. “They wrote to us in such large numbers saying that they did not want a woman announcer till at last we had to remove her.” It was not a personal objection founded on the tone of Mrs. Borrett’s voice, or her accent, or her competence. It was a sex objection. They did not want a woman announcer at all. They preferred men. “The incident lends colour to the alleged cattishness of women toward their own sex. It is an old accusation, which Lady Oxford once summed up when she said that the trouble with women was that “they were not gentlemen.” “The reason, I think, is that women have been, for thousai is of years, the subject sex, competin; for the attentions of the privileged sex that controlled all the desirable things of life. And the inferiority has made them apt to be jealous and vixenish among themselves. If men are more clubable than women it is because they have lived in the world and have had to learn to accommodate themselves to it. “They have been drilled into being ‘gentlemen’ whether they like it or not. They know the things that are ‘not done,' and they know the punishment that awaits them if they butt in at the booking office before their time, or cheat at cards, or play a shabby trick in the field. If they do not observe the. rules they get ‘pilled’ at the club or warned off the course, or quietly dropped out of the social current.

“Men, in short, have had an education in the social activities which women are only now beginning to enjoy. Until a generation ago they were outside the healthy rough-and-tumble of life. They were either too good to be true and had to be kept in a glass case, or they were inferior chattels whose lot was below the stairs.

“They were regarded as innocent angels who stayed at home and worked pincushions and antimacassars until Prince Charming came along. If they were lucky Prince Charming took them out of one cage and put them into another. If they were unlucky they wilted away into a lonely spinsterhood. It was not their fault that they were cattish. It was the spirit of the harem. “Now that they have got their place in the sun they will get into tune with the great game of the world.. With out ceasing, I hope, to be ladies they will become 'gentlemen' in Lady Oxford’s sense of the world, and will be ashamed of the cattishness that could not tolerate hearing another woman announce that an anticyclone from Iceland was about to traverse the British Isles.”