Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 159, 26 September 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings

Because We Are Too Many

Trousers, it appears, are to be worn by women for tennis this year. Not the neat compromise we have effected so far, but the whole grim flannel column of them, all the way up. And when we have copied men’s trousers as well as their hair cut, there seems little left for them to call their own. Who can tell? Another season, and it may be fashionable to have a blue chin. These are days of freak fashions and odd behaviours, and it is all because we are too many, says an English writer. The fact is ever with us that there are something like one million seven hundred thousand too many women around at the present moment, and as nature likes to hide her mis-

takes as artfully as possible, 10, all our young women are disguising themselves as boys. Trousers are to be much worn for tennis this season. It is an interesting fact that freak fashions of this kind only manifest themselves in countries where there is a preponderance of the female. In any country where the male predominates no girl had any wish to be mistaken for her own husband or brother. EXALTED AND IDOLISED There is no more feminine woman in the world than the American woman. Through all her ages she is exalted and idolised because she is a woman, and because in that great land there are not too many of her. She is courted as a flapper, and deferred to as a wife in a way we cannot understand and consider almost servile. I once saw a young American woman in a Saville Row tailor’s establishment. She refitted her husband throughout with real zest. He never said a word. As long as she was pleased, what did he care? If she said checks —checks Even when her youth is behind her, they do not let the limelight of sentiment with which they surround their womenfolk die. For her they have invented Mothers’ Day, when they say it with flowers all over again, that old, old message women love to hear however much they may pretend they don’t. It may seem silly and sentimental to us. But deep down m our hearts don't we envy them just a bit, those women who are not too many . No one can realise the drawbacks of being too many until they have lived in a country where women are too few. Where to be one is splendid and not a mistake. Where the young men mind their manners and the old men ask our advice. Nay. and listen to the answer! When they come to us in their sickness to be made well again, and in their adversity to be cheered. The arguments of ages can never change the fact that for this was woman made, and all the rest is merely makeshift because we are too many. WHERE WOMEN ARE SPOILED They say that American women and white women who live in the East are spoiled. But are they more spoiled than the superfluous woman of the West? Pees kindness spoil worse than neglect? Surely the result of neglect is worse. Nowadays the laudable and natural desire of every young thing to draw attention to herself can only be manifested in doing something really odd, or noisy. She has claimed equality with men. but must by nature ever feel a strange embarrassment in their presence. She still has to take lower wages than he will, and now she has come to copying his fashions —the oldest ruse of Mother Nature’s, who makes the butterfly endeavour to look as like the flowers it lives among, so it may survive as long as possible in a crowded world. Trousers, they say, are to be much worn by women this year! But do not be angry with us. when you meet us close-cropped, eye-glassed, with our trousers and our shaven necks: our shapeless figures and our manners to match. Rather be a little sorry for us. We do not really like it. -Deep down in our hearts there is a great mistrust. We shall top doing it quite soon. It is only because we are too many.