ENGAGEMENTS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 89, 9 January 1935, Page 5

ENGAGEMENTS

MAULE—McGUIRE. The engagement js announced of Evelyn Victoria, younger daughter of Mr. P. McGuire, Roslyn, Dunedin, to John Charles, younger son of Mr. and Mrs. J. C. Maule, Hataitai, Wellington. * * » TAYLOR—RUNMERSTRUM. The engagement is announced of Margarets, eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. E. 11. Runmerstrum, Dunedin, to John Frederick, younger son of Mrs. G. F. and the late Mr. G. F. Taylor, Kelburn, Wellington. THE “HURRY MANIA” Women’s Craze For Haste Many women to-day, says a writer in the "Daily Mail,” seem to be morbidly anxious to give one the impression that they are the busiest women in the world. Why? Is it a new kind of snobbery? Or is it just that many women to-day are living in a frenzy of hurry for its own sake? “In these days of feverish excitement, when every hour is filled up with countless engagements. . . That is not some angry old gentleman writing in to-day’s paper about the rush of modern life—it is the beginning of an article I have just been reading in a woman’s magazine dated 1889! So it is no good our trying to excuse ourselves by bringing out the usual argument—that nowadays we have to live at the pace of the speed dance in “Streamline,” and are therefore helpless victims of the universal whirl of activity. It is true that things move faster than they did in 1889—but that means that less time is wasted in getting from place to place and that, thanks to vacuum-cleaners and other aids to “speeding up” in the home, we spend a smaller proportion of our day on domesticities.

No, “hurry mania” is just another of those kinks in the feminine mentality that cannot be put down to “these days of feverish excitement” either now or 45 years ago. And it happens to be the fashionable one of the moment.

It is quite unrelated to the amount of work its “victim” has to do. The busiest woman I know is doing the work of three people in a famous London store. But she is never in a hurry, simply because her day is so planned that rush and scramble are unnecessary.

You never find her arriving late for an appointment full of breathless excuses and threatening to dash off somewhere else. You never find her refusing to see a visitor “because she is too busy.” Instead, she contrives to give an impression of never being busy at all.

She has what I am afraid, is not a typically feminine quality—calmness and. serenity. Oddly enough, you meet this unhurried calm very often In the busiest men of affairs, although it is rare even in the most efficient of women. Men like to pose as being leisured when in actual fact they are living at fever-pitch. And women, even thdse who have very little to do, take a strange enjoyment in pretending to be almost too busy to breathe. Obviously it is a bad state of mind to l>e in. I speak without medical authority, hut it is sound common sense that if a woman works herself into a frenzy of hurry every day she is putting an unnatural strain on her nerves.

And how widespread Is this feminine craze for hurry yon can see any day if you watch crowds of business men and women on their way to offices during the morning rush-hohr.

Most of the men seem to have allowed enough time to walk leisurely to their offices. But nearly all the women scurry and scramble in a desperate hurry to beat the clock. Not the best start for a busy day !