THE MODERN GIRL.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4883, 28 September 1925, Page 4

THE MODERN GIRL.

HER FUTURE OUTLOUIi. MARRIAGE OR CAREER. “Sexless” is the latest epithet hurled at the shingled head of the modern gnl. She need not be perturbed. It is ■•. meaningless vvbrd, for sex does not 1 bunge—only ideas about it. tVbat perhaps is meant is. that girls to-day have lost the conventional art of •naking love. Sentiment'!! courtship and marriage are giving Dlace to less idyllic, miore matter-of-fact love-making. The secret behin 1 the change is «that Mary—now a little more contrary, independent, and indifferent than she ever wag—is not c'ontent to play the role of the weaker half to her lord and master. Her matrimonial watchword is equality, not obedience. Wedlock is no longer the only alternative to existence on pocket money from her parents till the right man comes along. Mary now more often than not earns a comfortable income If she gave it up she might be much worse off sharing John’s salary on the upkeep of a home. Dress, theatres, tennis parties, and the education and experience that wide contact with other epople gives, might

all have to be sacrificed or strictlylimited to the scope of- her husband’s income. Thus she casts a more prac'tical than romantic eye on the prospects of matrimony.

Can you blame her ? The sentimentalists and romanticists certainly do. They accuse her of being sexless, just as if she has lost all the instincts of a .wife and mother. If the tendency of the modern girl is not to rush into marriage it is because she may be wondering whether, with her newfound independence, it can give her as full a lief as spinsterhood does.

If families are smaller it is not because the mothers of to-day and tomorrow are lacking in ,the, maternal instinct, but because there is a desire to give children a better education and chance in life than their grandmothers had, and because, as a consequence, the cost of their upbringing has immeasurably increased. If some girls waste their time today, well, so they did a generation .ago. I have yet to be convinced that hearts beat coldly under “pneumonia’ blouses, or that short skirtsi and shingled heads are any indication that their wearers are “unsexed.”

On the other hand I do thing that sex feeling is lessened by excessive familiarity and contact. The modern lad has no illusions.