Athletics Give Women a Sense of Fair Play.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXI, Issue III, 18 July 1903, Page 212

Athletics Give Women a Sense of Fair Play.

Athletic- games, in which nearly all growing girls and young women take part, are doing much not only for the bodily but also for the moral development of the feminine portion of tae race. Stress sufficient has been placed on the physical improvement of women. Tennis, golf, walking, riding, and other out-of-door sports have built up the female physique, given it health, stature, breadth, grace and strength, and made living a good deal easier and less painful for women than it was. Tall women are becoming rather common, and if the physical growth of women goes on at the present rate the men will soon average less in height, chest expansion and weight than the women; unless, indeed, these fine specimens of womanhood transmit, as probably they will, their excellent physical qualities to their sons yet unborn. The languid, anaemic beauty that we read about in the older novels has passed out of fadhion, together with her smelling salts, her fits of the vapours and her general air of debility. A woman that thinks five miles a walk to boast of is regarded rather contemptuously nowadays by her athletic sisters. This is good and augurs well for the men and women of the future.

But quite as important as this bodily melioration is the slower but equally sure moral growth for the better that has been caused by the participation ot man and women on the same footing m athletic games. This participation Is breeding in women, what they are said to lack as a sex, the spirit of fair play. The spirit of fair play is the informing soul of out-of-door sport. It impels a man to play according to the rules of the game, to take no foul advantage, but every fair advantage, of an opponent. It moves him to give a weaker opponent a handicap in order to make an equal match. It is only another name for the sense of honour.

This spirt of fair play, this willingness to play according to rule, this sense of honour in dealing with an opponent, women formerly possessed in a less degree than men. In their social battles, in argument, in conversation, in their relations with one another and with men, the majority of women do not play fair according to masculine notions of fairness. In dealing with one another, women, as a class, are especialy unfair. There was a women school principal in this city, once upon a time, one of those teachers was lame. This principal declared that she w-anted only young, sound and pretty teachers in her corps, and she set about to get rid of

t*he lame girl. To this purpose she transferred the unfortunate cripple from a room on the ground floor to one on the third storey, so that the teacher, who walked only with the aid of crutches, was compelled to go up and down two long flights of stairs several times a day. This barbarous cruelty was designed to force the lame girl to petition to be detailed to another school. Knowing the principal’s purpose, the poor girl held out as long as she could and endured the torture, but at last she gave up the struggle. The illustration is extreme, of course, and there are few women, let us hope, capable of the diabolical trick to which the principal in question resorted. Any number of men there are in whom the sense of fair play is dull or lacking, but men as a class have it, and women, as a class, and with numerous exceptions, have it not. Centuries of subjection to man, during which she was not treated fairly, dwarfed the development of this sense in woman, but under the kindly influence of athletics it is quickening and growing, and will soon attain full stature.

Generalisation of this sort, however, are dangerous and sometimes nonsensical. Women are as various as men, and any attempt to characterise either sex as a whole must be more or less unjust. Perhaps the best and truest way of putting the case would be to say that participation together in athletic games is giving both men and women a keener spirit of fair play toward each other. Certainly men have done a good deal more wrong to women than women have dene to men.