NOTES FOR WOMEN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVI, Issue 5, 1 February 1911, Page 64

NOTES FOR WOMEN.

(From Our Lady Correspondent.) LONDON, December 2. “ The Tailors’ Friend.” It is only a few weeks since I wrote an appreciative notice of the work of Miss Angelica Patience Fraser —“the tailors’ friend”—among poor young tailors and cutters of England, and now she is being mourned all over the kingdom, for she died on Sunday morning. Miss Fraser was born in Aberdeen, and first took up her social and religious work among tailors in Edinburgh as long ago as 1856. Her work in London had been carried on for twenty-three years. On the completion in 1906 of the jubilee of her labours, a scheme was inaugurated to endow the tailors’ hall and readingroom, Mill-street, Conduit-street W., which Miss Fraser founded, and with which she was connected up to the time of her death, and it was hoped that this would be accomplished in time to take the form of a gift to Miss Fraser on her 88th birthday. On the 87th anniversary of her birthday in February last, Miss Fraser received a handsome diamond brooch and a letter of congratulation from the late King Edward. Master tailors, at a meeting called after Miss Fraser’s death, decided to close their premises for two hours on the day of their good friend’s funeral. Mrs. Humphrey Ward. is surely one of the most surprising and enterprising anti-Suffragists that ever held forth, with much eloquence, on the enormous importance of withholding votes from women. Her series of “Letters to My Neighbour” have been revised in order to adapt them to the present political situation, and they will be issued as a pamphlet on December 1. Children's Strike An unusual strike has taken place in Chopwell, a village near Newcastle-on-Tyne, the residents of one district having determined, after holding a meeting last Saturday, not to send their children to school until the roads are improved. The mud, in some places, it is reported, is 18 inches deep. Plucky Aviatress. A pilot’s certificate was granted to Mlle. Marvingt on Sunday, who won it by a fine flight lasting fifty-three minutes, and covering about thirty miles. Mlle. Marvingt is a keen athlete, and has frequently taken part in the longdistance swimming races in the Seine and elsewhere. Unlovely Women. A heated discussion has been taking place in New York lately, about the good and evil effect that sport and athletics generally are having on the physique and gracefulness of American women. The opinion of some experts in these matters make Americans, who have long prided themselves on the beauty of their women, chagrined and indignant, we hear. One of the most severe criticisms of women who go in for sport comes from Mr. John Alexander, president of the National Academy of Design, of which Mr. Edwin Abbey and Mr. John Sargent are prominent members. Mr. Alexander says that “athletics are making American women flat-chested, large waisted, and small hipped. In a few years they will so resemble men that feminine clothing will appear incongruous.” Mr. Dudley Sargent, the director of physical culture at Harvard University, not only backs up Mr. Alexander, but goes a step further. “The Frenchwoman,” he says, “is graceful, the English woman stately, the German woman motherly, but the American woman ie mannish." Shadow Value £BO I A rather extraordinary case is proceeding in Paris, In which a certain Mme. Lacroix is suing her landlord because he refuses to reduce the rent after having cut down a large tree in front of the house, whose shadow in summer, she maintains, WM worth fSQ of the total teat.

Mme. Curie Honoured. Mme. Curie, the famous French scientist, has been presented by the British Ambassador with the Albert medal of the Royal Society of Arts in recognition of the services rendered to the world by her work before and after the death of her husband in the discovery and study of the properties of radium. Mme. Curio is the second woman to be honoured with the medal, it having been conferred on Queen Victoria in 1887. Medical Women. At the annual dinner of the Royal Society of Medicine held this week, Sir Henry Morris, the president, said that a notable event of the past year was the admission of women as fellows of the society. There were to-day, he said, 1050 women who had' passed through the London School of Medicine, and of that number he understood that 800 had taken a degree at the University of London. 855 women were practitioners on the register. • An Artist on Corsets. Mr. Marcus Stone, the eminent artist, was interviewed by the “Daily Mail” on Wednesday as to his opinion about the beauty, or want of it, of the feminine figure of to-day, as compared with that of a few years ago, and said, very decidedly : “Undoubtedly the figures of Englishwomen have grown worse, and it is extremely difficult for an artist now to find an ideal model. In my profession we are students of anatomy almost as much as doctors are, and we know how figures are corrupted. I hold that the corset is the reason for the feminine figure being worse than it was. “You scarcely ever see a normal length of neck nowadays in a woman, because the shoulders are of necessity held so high. The impression of squareness in the shoulder given by the modern girl is due to the unnatural holding in at the waist by the corset. Young women are growing flat-chested, and that also I ascribe to the corset. “I paint pictures in which the figures are of women of the last century at Its beginning, when the women wore high-

waisted gowns and no corset. I have many girls and young women to sit fofl me, and I find that they cannot pose in these gowns properly. They always sifi as though they were wearing corsets fl and I have often devised poses, which I can do, but w-hich the models cannot, because they have always been cramped! with a corset, and have lost the natural way to bend.”