THE LONELY WOMAN

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2972, 9 January 1917, Page 3

THE LONELY WOMAN

According to_ St. John Ervine, the dramatist, one important social change in England resulting from the war is the disappearance of "the Jonely woman" type. In peace times, on account of, the surplus of female population, spinsters with small private incomes and widows without families were a common eight'in tho boardinghouses of coast cities: —"Lonely, workless women, carrying their dullness with them wherever they went." The war has altered all this. If there is an unoccupied woman, m England, or one without friends, it is her own fault. "Women, formerly idle, now are busy on bandages and surgical dressings. They are packing parcels, and picking moss very carefully so that it is free from all foreign substances that might injure wounded men on whom it is to be I used. i Tho work they aro doing not only inspires them, but has made thorn many valued-friends, and has given them an interest in work for tho welfare of humanity that they will not loso when peace comes. In Australia and New Zealand the lonely woman typo has never existed to any great extent. But among the leisured butterflios before the war the helpless woman was to he found even in young Australia, tho land of the selfreliant pionoor. In the "Land of Promise," St. John Ervine's drama, is: beheld the evolution of a typical "genteel" helpless Englishwoman into the brave, stout-hearted, helpmato of a Canadian pioneer. Necessity, together with tho impulso of lovo, mould her into such nobility, just as tho war is acting as the salvation of thousands of women to-day.