VICTORIAN WOMEN.

Waikato Independent, Volume XXXIII, Issue 3060, 3 October 1933, Page 6

VICTORIAN WOMEN.

Were our mothers endowed with better looks than we are? was asked recently in a London paper. The question arose through Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of works by late members, and it was answered in the affirmative.

A survey of the portraits showed that our mothers were endowed with better looks than we are; their faces were more characterful, their features of finer chiselling, their types of greater diversity. In their day the films had not done their deadly work of smoothing the face of feminine beauty to a uniform mask. They owed, in fact, more to Nature and very much less to art than we do.

It would riot tolerate, for instance, the heavy loads of untidy, badlydressed hair that flopped round the faces of the last generation, spoiling the clear outline of the proud little heads that should have graced their long, slender necks. Our mothers were built in a more heroic mould than are we. With their fine features and generously-moulded limbs they could make some attempt to carry off hats and draperies, that would merely eclipse a crop-headed, flat-figured modern. Whether their more womanly curves and the management of their flowing skirts had anything to do with it I do not know, but one feels that these women of yesterday possessed a greater dignity, a finer breeding than we have time to acquire or practise to-day. I have a sneaking feeling, states Francis Mortimer, that if a bevy of our soignee, lip-sticked, pencil-browed, hipless, bustless contemporaries were suddenly precipitated into a drawing room of 20 or 30 years ago they would somehow look cheap beside the statuesque, unpainted, quite probably dowdy, but none the less innately dignified and well-bred women of that period.

Well, each to her own world. The spaciously, leisurely world of yesterday was suited to dignity and breeding. In the scramble, the catch-as-eatch-can of modern life, the diamond hard, diamond-bright modern finds her place. But I should like to note with real regret the passing of the " young ghd" as pictured in some of the portraits at Burlington House —that shy, delightful creature, hair not yet up, dress not yet decollete, flushed and tremulous with the joy of her first almost grown-up party. Where is she now? Among the crowd of what the Americans call "sub-debs" —so hard to distinguish from their already debutante sisters, since they seem to go to as many parties and be equally sophisticatedit would be difficult indeed to find her. Perhaps it will be as difficult in another twenty or thirty years to find women with faces that have grown old charmingly ; faces not lifted or smoothed by the plastic surgeon but bitten deep with the acid test of life etched with lines of patience, humour, or shrewdness ; faces not afraid to be topped by a bonnet, or whatever in the future may be the parallel sign of eld. Finally I began to understand why our fathers compare to-day's femininity with that of yesterday. This is not only due to conservatism; it is that beside the remembrance of the careless, unartificial magnificance of our mothers there must be—dare I whisper it?— beauty.