MODERN WOMANHOOD.

Dunstan Times, Issue 961, 17 September 1880, Page 3

MODERN WOMANHOOD.

“Motlis,” tbc new novel by Ouida, thus describes the fashionable womanhood of the day “Shifting as the sand, shallow as the rainpoois, drifting in all danger to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious; still as a friend, and ill as a foe ; hissing like Judas, denying like Peter ; impure ot of thought, even where by physical bias or politic prudence still pure in act, the woman of modern society is too often at duce the feeblest and the foulest outcome of false civilisation. Useless as a butterfly, corrupt an a canker, untrue to even lovers and friends, because mentally incapable of comprehending what truth means ; caring only for physical comfort and mental inclination ; tired of living, but afraid of dy ing ; believing some in priests and some in physiologists, but none at all in virtue ; sent to sleep by chloral, kept awake by strong waters, and raw meat, bored at twenty, and exhausted at thirty, yet dying in the harness of pleasure rather than drop out of th? race and live naturally’ ; pricking their sated senses with the spur ot lust, and fancying it love ; taking their passions ns they take absinthe before dinner ; false in everything, from the swell of their breasts to the curls at their throat ■ beside them the guilty afid tragic figures of old, the Mcdimra, the Clytemnaetra, the Phaedra, look almost pure, seem almost noble.’’