WOMAN’S WORLD

Evening Star, Issue 19782, 4 February 1928, Page 23

WOMAN’S WORLD

[By DIAHfL]

preliminary stage to mating. It takes place among bi.ds, beasts, and humans. The object of mating is the reproduction of the species. All tenderness and lotfer-like manifestations between the sexes are the preliminary steps towards attainment of tjiis final goal. Love is dynamic in nature, and must be expressed. To this end, marriage has been instituted for the wellrbeing of the individual and the benefit of the race. A lengthy courtship demands a continual repression of the emotions, and this is detrimental in the end. With time the eye once love-lit tells of stifled desires and frustrated hopes. J) is appointed love shows itself in irritability, anxiety states, nervous “tricks,’' loss of interest in life, and an apathetic manner. Sooner or later some mental or bodily illness may supervene, or that depressing genius, “ the sour old maid,” is the tragic end of a prolonged engagement. Often her remaining days are spent in the form of a dream life for that which she had loved and lost. Lengthy engagements are purely selfish. Whether they are the result of anchorage to a parent or the evasion of responsibility on the part of the m'an, nevertheless, heartache is the cause of many a nervous breakdown, both in men or women, more especially in women. What is the remedy? SELF-DEPENDENCE. The human family should look to nature for its 'lessons. Independence is the keynote of the, animal world at an early age. Likewise, self-de-pendence should bo taught in the human upbringing from the time of toddling days. The relationship of mother and son sLoulc] be one of mutual help and understanding, not dependence. Fathers should be fathers and relinquish the claim of being unconscious husbands to their daughters. Far wiser is it for the lover and his lass to take the responsibility of living “hard” or “ dangerously ” together in marriage than to continue to jive apart and fall into a “ca’ canny ” state of mental and physical apathy with dire consequences.

GOOD-BYE, HOME! i WHAT CITY HAS DUKE l Home as our parents and grandparents knew it is disappearing. The change that has taken place in our domestic arrangements is as great in its way as the 'change in the scientific outlook of mankind. And the process is still going on. The other day, getting news that the charming wife of ' a friend had presented him with a ‘son and heir, T waited upon her in hospital, seeking to pay ray respects. To ray astonishment I found that the infant was not with her, but lay confined with a dozen others of its kind in a remote ward, perhaps a block away. Having been brought up in Victorian days, when it was thought to be next to simony or piracy on the high seas for a mother to let her new born jewel out of-her sight for an instant, I was naturally somewhat shocked, but a friendly nurse cpiicldy reassured me. “ SERIOUS MENACE.” “ The most rigid scientific inquiry,” she said, “ has revealed jho fact that tho little.devils are far better off away from their mothers than with them. We haul them in at intervals to be fed, but the rest of the time they snooze in their ward. They are pever pawed, and hence they seldom bawl. “ The most serious menace that confronts a baby in its first months is its mother’s Jove. Let her have it to cherish and play with, and she at once makes a mess of it, physically and spiritually, “The safest and happiest child is that one which sees little of its mother until it is old enough to distinguish clearly between her face and her complexion.” These strange words gave me pause and set mo to pondering. Are the happiest children those who are tied to their mothers’ apron strings or those who are turned over to hirelings? Do rich children have a better time than poor children, or a worse time? INDIGNANT MORALISTS. The answer is not easy—not nearly so easy as sentimental legend would have it. Nor is it easy to say whether close and unbroken propinquity binds or looses a tie that human sentiment regards unanimously as laudable. Some of tho most devoted sons that I have ever known saw little of their mothers in childhood. And some of the daughters who hated their mothers most were with them every day. In all such matters we are apt to be somewhat misled by the indignation of moralists, who convert every change in tho habits_ of man into grist for their gloomy science. To-day they_ tell ns that the old-fashioned home is disintegrating, and that its disintegration is a calamity. CHANGE FOR BETTER. But the predecessors of these same moralists, let us remember, thought that it was a calamity when society first stepped in between parent and child, and forbade the exploitation of tho latter by the former, and that it was another and even worse calamity when married women ceased to he the chattels of their husbands and took to facing tho world on their own accounts. The changes now going on, indeed, may turn out in the long run to be vastly for the good. They seem anarchistic and immoral to-day simply because it is hard for human beings to throw off old ways of thinking. Those of us who are of middle age were brought up to believe, for example, that a girl in her later teens was at her best when she was a shy and trusting creature, untutored in the ways of the world; it thus shocks us to seo her starting out on her .own and defying her parents. But is she herself really worse off than her mother was a generation ago, or better? The best opinion of the future, I incline to think, will hold that she is better off. If she faces new perils, she ’at least sees them clearly. And if she occasionally embraces them it is at least rationally, and not as a mere fool. What is too often overlooked is the fact that the home life mourned by the current Jeremiahs was developed and standardised under conditions that prevail in the world to-day only in tho remotest backwaters. The British home of pious legend was essentially a country home; the home of to-day must adapt itself to city life. VALET TO HER CHILDREN. Why should a city mother, with all the aids and arts of a complex civilisation at her command, made a virtue of a farm wife’s dire necessities? Why should she play valet to her children when professional nurses know how to do it so much better? She no longer schoolma’nis them herself, and she no longer doses them when they aro ill. Why, then, should she dress them and undress them, or supervise their play, or act as policeman over them? It is conceivable, of course, that she may have a great natural talent For these arts, but it is equally conceivable that she may have none. If, in the latter case, she recognises the fact frankly, is she to be blamed for neglect or praised for sense? The moralists allege that the alternative to the orthodox home is anarchy and crime, but that is simply bunkum. Whatever we aro headed towards is quite as apt to be better as it is 10 be worse. The fact that the transition is disconcerting and painful means nothing. Such pains go with all human progress. APPALLING MOTHERHOOD. The world’s ancients protest against the increasing liberatio nof the young, but they say relatively little about the correlative liberation of parents. Yet the latter, it seems to me, must feel the change more, and by the same token they are the greater gainers. When a mother who failed to make herself- a slave to her children was regarded as unnatural and immoral, motherhood_ must have been an appalling business. But to-day it grows bearable, and on some near to-morrow it may actually become agreeable. And with the old-time penned-up mother will go the old-time penned-np housewife. WITLESS DRUDGERY. Keeping house, up to a few years ago, was an enterprise that had been little changed since the Middle Ages. It was full of dull ; witless drudgery. It meant working interminable hours, and at almost intolerable tasks. It made the average woman old at thirty. To-day the immemorial burden eases. Of a sudden the house becomes , a machine, as the office has become a machine. Many of its old drudgeries are abandoned altogether, as gratuitous and useless. And the rest yields rapidly to human ingenuity. Here, it seems to me, at least one great reform remains to be achieved. The-coal hole has gone and the washtub is fast going, but the kitchen remains. How long will it last? In the cities probably not very long. For of all the survivors of the infancy of humanity it is unquestionably the most burdensome and irrational.

KITCHEN SURVIVAL. In the average British household its business makes no less than threefourths of all the work that is done. It is dirty, expensive, time-wasting, and an endless nuisance. That -British'inventiveness has not devised a satisfactory means of getting rid of it is, really most amazing. Home cooking probably causes more sanguinary battles at tho domestic hearth, year in and year out, than all other grievances and atrocities combined. That it will be abolished, soon or late, is plain. Far, far better schemes for feeding Englishmen could' be imagined by a schoolboy of ten, or even by a school teacher. The kitchen survives for the same illogical, nonsensical reason that, fearing Friday as an unlucky day, and all other such heirlooms from the childhood of the race survive. On some fair to-morrow a couple of competent inventors will throw themselves upon the business of getting rid of it, and half a. century later it will seem as silly, in retrospect, as keeping a cow in the backyard or trying to cure bunions with incantations. SAVE YOUR STEP To have “ a place for everything and everything in its pace ” is worry-saving as well as labor-saving. In the course of a recent investigation in an up-to-date kitchen, a psychologist watched a housewife make tea—perhaps the most frequent and the least complicated process in the daily routine of the kitchen. The kettle was standing on the cooker. She carried it to the sink, filled it with water, took it back to the cooker, lit the gas, and put the kettle on to boil. Then she went to the cupboard to fetch the teapot, to another shelf to fetch the tea caddy, and to a table drawer to fetch a spoon. Between each movement she hesitated for a second, thinking out the next move. Now the psychologist recognises that this- “ thinking out ” —the mental effort required to make minor decisions—multiplied many times during the day's work is one of the principal causes' of fatigue. It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that it could produce brain fag. but it certainly induces a tired feeling which, as many housewives are aware, is the first stage towards physical exhaustion. A little worry, a little time, and a. little trouble could be saved by keeping the kettle near the sink, ready for filling, and the tea pot, tea caddy, and spoon near the cooker, ready for use when the kettle boils. Similarly, in the preparation of vegetables for rooking a. great saving may be effected by a little forethought.