IS THERE A SEX WAR.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 635, 24 May 1921, Page 3

IS THERE A SEX WAR.

I have asked myself the question going to and fro in the tubes and underground trains at the busy hours of the day, writes Katharine Tynan, in the Daity Mail. The men sit and the women stand, but the men do not sit indifferently. It seems to me that they sit defiantly as a definite act of aggression. I do not think their minds are altogether on their newspapers. There is a consciousness about them. They sit four-square, so to speak, sending a silent challenge to the sweet enemy. I think myself that the men between twenty and thirty are still at the emancipation of the women, Probably it is salt on their wounds that the women get up for each other. The young men hardly betray by a quiver of the eyelid their knowledge of the fact that tin ding all along th train b ecanse^Tlicy‘~V?nK-irdl—i while an older woman stand:' but they know. Men are tran parent creatures, and it is very obvious that they know and resent, They have many apologists even among women. I have been told that a woman accepts a man’s seat without gratitude. I have watched for that woman and never seen her. I have seen surprise, but always gratitude.

f have been told—-this is a man’s argument —that, woman being the equal of man, she must accept his burdens. But that is a shallow argument. Nature has decreed otherwise, and there are many reasons against straphanging and long standing for women. 1 was startled when a young man of more than common intelligence and I should say, essentially high-minded, said to me in the presence of his fiancee that he would not give his seat to a woman in the tube. I didn’t think the fiancee liked it, but she defended him to me afterwards. “It’s those girls,” she said thinking for nothing but dancing and dressing those Government clerks making tea all day and talking about jumpers. The men are disgusted with them.” Where, then, are tiie serious, patient, and courteous women omnibus conductors and .officials of one kind or another of the war years? I had a fleeting glimpse of them in summer of 1919 before they were lost, and I was amazed at the great things responsibility had done for the women. Perhaps the war has something to do with it. Men are not heroes for five years to relish going back to be mere man; and it was the women who spoilt them. I heard a beautiful young girl complain: “ I used to love being a woman. Nov/ I hate it. All that made it worth while to he a woman has passed or is passing.” But there is hope for the next generation. There is no consciousness of the sex war in the man over forty and the boy in liis teens. It is they who stand in the tube that a woman may sit—just because she is a woman.