The Least Happy Women

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 1 September 1928, Page 26

The Least Happy Women

MARY BORDEN, AUTHORESS, PAINTS A PEN PICTURE OF VIVACIOUS AMERICAN SOCIETY FOLK

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HE is soft and sniall- | boned. She has pretty feet, slim ankles, a thin voice with a lilt in it. It rises and falls, as she I tips her head this way and that, and

waves her hands. She is never still, but always graceful. She understands movement but not repose. She dances beautifully. She talks incessantly. When her dancing days are over she takes to a rocking chair, or to bridge, or to reforming the world. She fears silence and solitude. Child of cinemas, prairies, motor-cars, steam whistles, and saxophones, she has a craving for noise, activity, and crowds. Her idea of a good time is a w r hirl. If things round her are moving fast enough, if her husband is getting rich quick enough, if they are asked to enough parties, can go to enough theatres, can get about rapidly in a car, if there is always something different to look forward to, she is happy, or at any rate not too discontented, for she is really the least happy of women. Her main craving is variety. She must have change. Everything round her must change or bo changed often if she is to feel alive. Change is in the air she breathes. In her country it means growth, in herself it means the opposite, but she has not yet learned to stand stili and develop as a plant does, naturally, in the turmoil of her world.

I stop short, doubtful, a little con-science-stricken. My composite photograph is not a good likeness. There is no such thing, perhaps, as a photograph of the American woman. Perhaps there is not yet even such a thing as the American Woman. In any case. I am not, I feel, drawing a life-like portrait. I will begin again, this time with a definite type in mind, the serious self-supporting professional or business woman of the

| United States. She is the best of : them all. There are. I believe, six ! million women in business America. I and I don’t know how many’ equipped j for professions are turned out of uniI versities every year. These are the happy women of America. They are jin tune with their country and their age. Their country believes in work and workers, and their age is one of production and experiment, and since ■ there is enough work for everyone they find no antagonism on the part of the men, nor do they suffer any 80- | cial sfigma, if they belong to the upper j classes, from being workers. Doctors, lawyers, sanitary experts, shopkeepers, or business women engaged in any i ordinary trade, keep their individuality, find little or no difficulty in enjoying life, go to balls or smart dinners at night, to their offices in the morning, remain well dressed, witty. I frivolous at the right time, and human. The democratic spirit of Am<~ j rica supports them, helps them, re- | spects them. It is a reality. The mind of America does not understand idleness, but it understands work and |it approves of these women who are helping to ' develop the vast resources of the country, who are a vital and harmonious par; of the great hounding energy, enthusiasm and optimism of the nation. Work is in the air. Work is fun. A business career is a lark. Fortunes are to be made, to-day, to-morrow. Everything is on the move. And so it is not fair to judge the American nation by its leisured class, because America despises leisure and the class that indulges it. The American society woman's j background is almost entirely made up of beautiful houses full of beautiful clothes. You cannot separate her ' from her clothes and her house, if | you do she has no social position left. Suppose you strip her of her house, her clothes, her motor, and all her expensive paraphernalia, what is left that is peculiar to her among women, and proves her to be akin to those i others, the workers? Surely there is : something that is her real self? Not her ideas, no. Those she purchases j in tabloid form. They are standardised j ideas, circulating like the Ford car by the million. Not her moral principles. These are equally conventional. Not her passions. They are thin and fleeting. Yet there is something. Inside this dazzling kaleidoscopic creature i i here is a vivid spark, a great sizzling j vitality. It is this that makes ber : brilliance and her monotony. Frail j though she may appear, she has the i energy of a dynamo. Soft as she may look, she can, at any rate in her youth, ride, swim, play games as well as » man and dance a man off his legs. # is this that is surprising. She Joes

not look what she is. She looks a 1 sprite, a fairy-, a doll, a porcelain goddess. She is an engine. She appears languid, indifferent, dainty. She f* eager, insatiable, tireless and devoured with ambition. ; She is really less interesting tba* i the American mail, though infer**" , tional gossip would have it the way round.