WOMEN NEVER FORGET.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2536, 30 January 1923, Page 1

WOMEN NEVER FORGET.

The longest memory in the world is a woman’s.

If to forgive means also to forget, women arc not the forgiving creatures they are supposed to be because a woman cannot forget. She will forgive most sweetly and end by saying, “Now let us forget all about it.” But she remembers.

Make no mistake; she does not want to remember, she would much rather not but she cannot help it; it is the kind of memory she is unhappy enough to possess. Unfortunately she can no more get rid of it than a person can change his face because it is an uncomely one. Women have most assuredly the most retentive minds for the personal things of life, if they can be so styled, but the poorest memories for tilings of world-wide importance.

They never forget a slight, cold look and not often do they forget a mistake.

In days gone by this was looked upon as a merit and a thing to be extolled. Poets like Tennyson sang of women who lost their health and their happiness and even their lives to keep an unhappy memory. Nowadays we treat such things very differently, calling them hysteria or neurasthenia, and laugh at or try to cure them as the case may be. At present a woman’s memory is totally different from a man’s. With a man, when a thing is finished with it is forgotten and lie realises that nothing but unhappiness can come from thinking of it again. Sometimes he goes away and forgets. A woman now goes away too, but she comes back remembering. Her memory is her curse. Let us hope the future may be able to cure what the past has fostered; that now she has a fuller life and equal chances with man she may lose the self-centred memory. Only let her take care that in doing so she does not lose something more valuable. For whose is the memory that stores up all the childish sayings and likes and dislikes, the birthdays, the promises made in idle moments which must yet be fulfilled on pain of forfeiting a child’s trust?

No, we cannot afford to lose a mother’s memory; so let us keep that, whatever else we may east from us. —Daily Mail.