INARTICULATE WOMEN

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1593, 8 January 1925, Page 6

INARTICULATE WOMEN

The women of the last generation were (as Miss Mayor, that observant novelist points out) "incapable of discussion. They were as inarticulate as the uneducated, though often almost erudite." Certainly those ladies were better read than most girls are nowadays; they knew several modern languages, painted tolerably in water colours, played Beethoven, and read their Robert Browning. But the mass of upper middle-class women did not talk we'll (writes Ella Hepworth Dixon in the Westminster Gazette). They bored their partners at dinner. The late Sir Victor Horsley used to declare to young women that only as the twentieth century dawned did he begin to enjoy dining out. Before that time it was considered "not quite nice" for women to air their opinions at the dinner table. . Like children, they were there to be seen, not heard. To "talk for effect" was as much a crime in later Victorian society as to "dress for effect." Neither was in the best taste. "My dear, eat your dinner and do not talk so much," was the parting advice handed out, later on, when the daughters took their mother's place at London dinner parties. How odd it would sound now, when most of the talk issues from feminine lips, and the men sit round, amused, and listening! The chief drawback of conversing with the young nowadays is that they all talk at once and seldom listen for a reply. It is something of an achievement to get a word in edgeways, and even then you may be proud if it is taken up and argued about before it is dismissed for good.