THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, JULY 18, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8186, 18 July 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, JULY 18, 1906.

Quite a ourious little epidemio of woman-baiting has recently been raging im various quarters, remarks the World. In daily papers and places where they quote, hardly a day has passed of lato without the citation of some fresh attack upon the unappreciated fair, who—especially if she happens to move in good social circles —is auooessively invited to reoogrtlse herself, in manners, morals, nabits and, deportment, as an utter and discreditable failure. It would be an amusing, if a rather startling, exeroise to piece together the portrait of the average woman of to-day, as delineated by the various feminine censors, who have taken a hand at "setting her to rights" during even the past few months. Within that time she has teen oharged with being ill-man-nered, slangy in speech, loud of

voice, ungraceful in gait, and afflicted with a congenital inability to "put on her clothes'* to the best advantage. These, however, are comparatively minor failings; for she has farther been indicted for a congenital meanness whijb expresses itself in exiguous "tips" and niggling economies, and for a lank of consideration for inferiors which does muoh to make the shopassistants life a burden. If maiden, she has been called upon to do penI ance for an alleged tendency to make herself "too cheap" to the other sex; if matron, she has been pilloried for her dullness and effloienoy, as a hostess, or for her neglect of the duties of home life. She has been roundly accused of snoblery, of strongly developed gambling propensities, of laokj of intelligent interest in public affairseven of the ignominious failing of greediness. Only the other day she was taken to task for chronic untidiness, on the evidence afforded by the normal statu of her club reading-room and her recognised lack of ability to keep a newspaper in order or to re-feld it when read; while her habit of sweeping the streets with the hem of her gown ftas been made the basis of h still more humiliating charge. With a very little searching of "back numbers" it would be possible to add almost indefinitely to these feminine criticisms of femininity. In some of them there may be—we are not going for a moment to admit that there is—a fraction of a grain of justifying truth. But in the aggregate they make up a grotesque caricature which the charming original has every reason to resent as a libel. Fortunately, though men read these things, and are possibly "brutes" enough to chuckle oonsumedly over them, they are not thereby deprived of all their illusions. The very fact that they, as a sex, are constitutionally incapable of "giving each other away" in similar fashion arouses in them not only sympathy with the victims of this kind, of sisterly oanMour, but a kind of subconscious resentment of its criticisms. For though in these prosaic days man is content with something less than a wingless angel, or even a "divinity in muslin," the thing called chivalry has not even yet been quite "improved" out of existence.