ARE WOMEN GETTING SPOILT?

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5698, 17 October 1896, Page 3

ARE WOMEN GETTING SPOILT?

(Pearson's Weekly.) It requires some hardihood in a mere man to suggest that now women are taking their destinies into their own hands they are not shaping them to the best advantage, but it is not only men who are inclined to think that there is danger of women being Bpoilt by all the indulgences that they receive to-day. " I find the Englishman," said Emerson sixty years ago, "to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes," and he declared that England produced the finest women in the worldl Butthe old brainy system that gave us the men and women whom Emerson admired haa disappeared, and in its place we have an excessively indulgent system that must end in softening the moral fibre of the race, and unfitting it for the sacrifices and duties of its destiny. For the last decade woman has been the pampered pet of philanthropists and reformers— there never was a time when she h^d so much done for her and so much said about her. She, with her rights and wrongs, pervades our newspapers and periodicals ; in season and out of season she asserts the equality of the sexes with aU the aggressive vigour of the proselyte. She is pampered by legislators and lawyers; she has her club, her bicycle (which she rides in all manner of fearful and wonderful garments) ; in some of the colonies she already has her parliamentary vote, and our own statesmen will not much longer have the courage to refuse her the same concession. I have ho sympathy with the narrowminded croakers who tell us that all this is "nnßexing" woman, making her like a man, only worse ; my fear is that it will have quite the contrary result — that instead of women becoming "as hard as nails," over-indulgence will make them too soft. And the peril threatens not only the women of the future, but the men they live with, arid the children they will bring up. The treatment of women in the past is now generally recognised as unjust, and even crueL The single woman was shut out from life. The wife was sometimes happy in the subservient sphere to which she was confined ; frequently she was the drudge of a tyrant to whom public opinion and law gave a power to practical purposes supreme. Many women lived then a life of wretchedness that is nearly impossible today. Matrimony was indeed a hard school, tout it was a "school that produced women of tough moral fibre, women who could suffer and be silent, Spartan mothers who begot sons of an invincible Btoutness and courage. - ... . . We have changed all that now, and although in the abstract it is impossible to deny the beneficent intentions of the new leaders, there is too much reason to fear that the reaction is carrying us too far, and that the present system of laxity and indulgence will have an emasculating effect on the next generation. The crusade against injustice has become a revolt against all restraint, and instead of liberty we have lawlessness. The most casually observant of you must have seen instances of this in your own .circles. The children in season and out of season are indulged to excess ; they choose their own schools, which they are allowed to attend when they will ; bribery has taken the place of discipline, and "I like" has i taken the place of " I ought/ The natural result of this is the destruction of all moral fibre, and the softness thus bred j m the child renders self-indulgence inevitable in the woman ;they are all in a state of revolt against something • or other. If this had resulted in ths happiness of womankind, we could have little to say against the system. It has resulted in nothing of the kind. Responsibilities . and restraints have been flung oil, all authority is denied, yet the women of to-day seem as far f roni happiness as their mothers were. They still suffer, and as each restraint is relaxed fiercer grows their revolt against those that remain, until self-control is impossible. To this it is we owe the spread of neurotic affections. Specialists tell you that it is not our rapid living, nor excessive work, nor worry, that is responsible for nem-otic patients, it is not the exercise of the nerve, but defective control of them, the result of the softening induced by our mistaken notions of training. It is not by pampering and luxury that you produce a racehorse or an athlete, but by strenuous labour.So you cannot have a fine race of moral warriors ty carefully eliminating from the life of women everything that i 3 distasteful or irksome, by removing every burden, by relaxing all restriction. This is a working world, and women must, like the rest of us, wear harness. They may shift their burden from one shoulder to the other, or cast off, as they are doing, the burdens that for generations have been the lot of their sex ; but they will find in the end that they have but exchanged their task, and the sooner our risters realise this and, distinguishing a*asfe- i»m lawlessness, set* theaselse&.

courageously to do the work that is in hand, the better it will be for themselves and for their children. The new school of women, with its invertebrate mothers and revolting daughters, will give us a race with hard hearts and soft heads, a race utterly lacking in moral fibre, a race of flabby, intolerant malcontents, in place of the quiet, courageous women who mothered the glory of England.