DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 26, 22 April 1927, Page 14

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

UNDERSTANDING WOMEN (Copyright , 1927.) HG. WELLS confesses to London reporters: • “ After thirty years of observing and writing about women, I feel that I really know nothing about the question.” Tolstoy, in one of his unpublished manuscripts recently found in Russn, made the gloomy observation: “Women in modern times seem to be possessed of devils. They carer around like cats on a roof.” . With these master minds giving women up in despair, what chance has a poor Jiggs to understand Maggie? , „ In the past anyone who announced that he understood women gainra an immediate following. But if he lived long enough he usually ended in a frame of mind of Wells and Tolstoy. .. - Yet the reason men haven’t understood women has not been the iauit jl the women—or the men. The essential separating difference has been training. Says the scientist, Dorsey, in his “Why We Behave Like Human Beings . “ Men do not ‘ understand ’ women. How can they? But the reason is no because woman’s nature is fundamentally different from man’s; rather tna ten or twenty or fifty years of having to live ‘like a woman’ go into her maKe* “ The two sexes may ‘ grow up together,’ but they travel divergent roads. Men and women are emotionally different —by training. “Boys are conditioned to face one world; girls to face another. The 1 sexes do not see alike because their eyes have not learned to look at ta same things alike; for each sex the glasses have a different colour, focus ai range.” _ What is needed for men to understand women is not more observati but an evolution of things that will bring the lives they live nearer togetn. . The past few decades have made large strides in this direction. Co-education, women in business, woman suffrage, “ the new freeaon , all have come in recent years. If the present trend continues, fifty years hence there may be less an culty in “ understanding women.”