WOMANHOOD’S IDEALS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 428, 20 November 1930, Page 2

WOMANHOOD’S IDEALS

LECTURES BY DR. AND MRS ARUNDALE, A candid exposition of the ideals ot motherhood in woman and tho necessity for a universal acceptance of those ideals was conveyed in lectures given by Dr G. S. Arundalc and Airs Rukimini Arundale in the Art Gallery on Saturday evening, says the Christchurch I’ress. There was insufficient accommodation for the hundreds of people who attended. “There is no country in the world where the spirit of true womanhood is more splendid than in India, “ said Dr. Arundale, who has lived for many I years in the East, and w'hose wife is an Indian of high caste. “You who live in the West hear distorted views and receive distorted presentations of Indian womanhood as it is to-day. “It seems that all the ills from which the world suffers are in no small way due to the fact that women are forgetting that motherhood is the great power that fructifies all life, the source of all courage, the dispeller of all despair, and, above all things, the abode of creative rest. “

Women sometimes forget, too, the glorious gift of love which motherhood gave them, that motherhood which was the heart of all lov.e. Was not God the mother as well as the father of all things? Woman symbolised the eternal —men worked in terms of time. The greatest priesthood in the world was the natural one of -women, and this priesthood, upon the proper exercise oi which depended the welfare of the world, women were in danger of forgetting.

Airs Arundale appealed to women to exercise the ideal of mother-love, not only as mothers physically, but spiritual! v in everv-day life.

“Whatever political or social power a woman may have,” she said, “she can always exercise the great influence

of motherhood on tho lives of tho people. In all civilisations and in all times motherhood had given her tha»

The speaker, refert’ing to woman's fight for emancipation in recent years, pointed out that what women called their freedom -was merely equality with mon, when men had yet to realise what true freedom was. To copy was not to gain freedom; ideals and inspirations were needed.

“There should Ke equality,” Airs Arundale asserted, “but equality in spiritual things, not in trivialities. A now idea of what woman is to do witn this freedom is needed, a more beautiful purpose to which those new qualities in women can he put. Women today arc not expressing as they should the ideal, divine and beautiful, of motherhood. ’ ’

It was also necessary that men should understand this true ideal of motherhood, which needed a man’s reverence for true happiness. The danger of the exploitation of sox was also referred to, the speaker pointing out that an understanding ot sex as a natural part of our lives w r as

necessary first on the nart of woman. A woman would not be so much of a plaything if she did not allow herself to he