The Women's National Council.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 379, 13 August 1903, Page 5

The Women's National Council.

(Christchurch " Truth.") {'§' The Women's National Council are at it again. This time the leading lights of the hallowed institution have been intej viewing the Premier about the sacred rights of women, and, feeling himself on safe ground for once, the right hon. gentleman" gave; them some sound, if. unpalatable replies. The Women's Councils are composed of gossips with a morbid desire for notoriety, who discuss unsavoury subjects and debate the decrease in the birth rate, instead of attending to the birth rate themselves.: These gossips elect those of their number who are most expert in dodging home-duties to the National Council, and the National Council, under the extraordinary delusion that it represents the views of the women of New Zealand, is demanding the removal of the civil disabilities of the sex. They; want to see women Justices of the Peace, listening to the revolting evidence of the Police Court, women politicians wrangling across the floor of a demoralised Parliament, and. no doubt women policemen hauling the ragtag and bob-tail to the lock-up It is an elevating idea. We congratulate the Women's National Council on having evolved a platform that no decent, modest, self-re-specting matron would ever dream of subscribing to. Let them keep right on. They are so ridiculously out of sympathy.with the ideas of the vast majority of the women of the colony that nobody will take any notice of them—not eveh.My Seddon—and they do provide us with a certain amount of amusement. . ] '4 We observe that.Jr'ue to their instincts, the Women's National Council found one nauseous subject on which to dilate. It is a subject they display a marked preference for. It fills in the iblanks when they are notdiscussing the age of consent and the illegitimate birth rate. The Women's National Council want the CbntagiousDiseases Act removed from the Statute Book. Now, this is a question the Women's National Council have no knowledge of—at least we hope sp—and their ideas are consequently lopsided and valueless, and, in any case, it is a subject the Women's National Council would do well to leave severely alone. As Mr Seddon remarked in reply to the request that women should sit as Justices of the Peace, their emotions warp their judgment. Like the rest of the sex, impulse passes as a substitute for reason. It a woman believes a thing to be bad nothing will induce her to reason that it is expedient, and, therefore, necessary.. Women don't argue that way. And if they have no other similarity, the Women's National Council have that common failing of the sex. In the average woman it often amounts to a virtue, in the Women's National Council it doesn't—it only amounts to a spectacle .that isn't nice. If the( Women's National Council want to distinguish, themselves, and .earq the respect and gratftflde of the community, they, will go honie and dar#. ; their husbands' sox and pull the baby out of the coalbox—if there is one; there generally isn't—and tidy up the back parlour, and the C D. Act and other odoriferous* and nasty subjects severely and entirely for mere men to deai With.