ENGLAND’S THIN WOMEN.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXI, 10 August 1921, Page 6

ENGLAND’S THIN WOMEN.

WHY ARE OUR WOMEN SO SKIMPY? (By H. B. Marriott-Watson). In one of Pinero’s plays the central figure, who is described as a pawnbroker of genius, .remarks cynically about England that it is the land of lean women and smug men. I think I have got it right. At least, I know the “lean women” is right, and that is to be the text of my homily. The pawnbroker of genius was right; England is the home of lean women. The heroine of to-day is a spindly girl, wit hnothing to her save her clothes, hi the olden days the favorite heroine was always plump, and most often short. Now she runs to many inches, and is as thin as a lath. How lias thia change come about?

There is an old theory that fashions actually make women, just as manners maketh man. That is to say that if artists and writers of fiction continually draw and talk of a. certain type of woman, she develops. I dbn’t know what truth there is in this mystio suggestion, but I believe that du Maurier did invent a type of Englishwoman, just as Dana Gibson invented a type of American woman. In the days when du Maurier set out to portray English girlhood for “Punch,” English girlhood took the hint and modelled itself on his drawings. He invented the svelte, tall type of Eng-

lishwoman, and discarded the Victorian smallness and plumpness. But he certainly did! not start the lean woman epoch. Who, I should like to know, was responsible for that?

I fancy it must have beep taken out of the hands of artists and writers by modistes. Perhaps it started with the tube skirt and abolition of —well—petticoats ; I know that every fashion leader I see represents an impossible figure of tenuity, to which I can only suppose young women endeavor to conform. They conformed to the awful “tube,” just as they conformed in other times to the crinoline. The influence of mind over matter is supreme, and a wonderful thing. But literature also maintains its reputation for altering the shape of women. Except when profiteers’ wives and coster women (and no young woman of taste wants to bo either) are introduced into its pages, these ladies are of a thinness so remarkable that you wonder how they can possiby exist. They must be just skin and bones. Perhaps it is tomic artists who have been revolutionising our young women; or are they merely ■ registering them? My mind goes back to the beautiful lissom, justly rounded fortn'of du Maurier’s days, to the girl

who is now the mother of those skinny young creatures, and I sigh. \\ hat influence has inflicted the latter upon us? Heaven forbid we should emulate the Teutonic type, the Getchens and the Trudas, or even the robust Gallic types. But why go to the other extreme? Fashion, I suppose, has her interminable changes. It would never do for the costumiers to keep the same modes going. They will have waists here this year, and there the next year. They will have corsets that pinch and constrict now,' and to-morrow another kind that is useful. They will insist on short skirts for thia year and next, and then w ill lengthen them. If they could, tomorrow they would even introduce a

irinolctte (if that is the proper word; It is all business.

Yet I see no reason why they should be allowed to have this baneful influence on our young girls. This blindly faithful imitation of fashion must bo Stopped, or otherwise our girls will fade and shrink into nothingness in the emulation of each other to be like the “plate.” Though we do not want England to be the land of Getchens, we do not want her to be the land of “lean women” who are two yards of pump water.