WE DO CROW SO!

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 572, 26 January 1929, Page 23

WE DO CROW SO!

By

EVELYN VIVIAN

X6\v that we are getting on a bit in the world, and establishing some sort of claim to sex equality, isn’t it rather a pity that we should spoil things by making such an inordinate fuss about it? Whenever a woman does herself comparatively proud in any one of those exciting arenas erstwhile restricted to men, she megaphones the news to the wide, wide world. It’s no excuse to say that if she didn’t do it the Press would do it for her. The Press knows what it’s about. And it has not been con spicuously discouraged in its overtures by any display of a feminine anti-interviewing complex. Women provide interviewers’ field-days. The crowing mania has reached the stage when the gentler sex squabble vociferously, in print, over their claims to world-records in track speeds or celestial altitudes as against those established by their masculine “rivals.’ It isn’t a pretty gesture, nor one calculated to enhance their aura of achievement iu those worlds where men have received them, cap in hand, and placed all the wealth of their j older experience at. the newcomers’ ! disposal. The bays would more be- ! comingly encircle feminine brows if j women kept their hair on, so to speak, j in the moment of unaccustomed j triumph. If women were really as clever as j some of their deluded menfolk think ! they are, they would emphasise everjlast atom of their most gracious femininity when they pulled off their best “stunts” in the new fields of adventure. They would make an exquisitely alluring modesty their strongest weapon. As it is, their crowing proclivities threaten to alienate their sincerest well-wishers in the masculine camp. Up to a characteristically strategic point, they manage so far to camouflage their inherent feminine kinks as to win over their male compeers to a new comradeship, only to undeceive the simple soul of Adam when the too heady wine of success proves too much for Eve’s good manners. Her aggressive allconquering attitude is so alien to the psychology of the stronger sex as to compel her quondam ally to reconstruct his quixotic complex. Reluctantly he confesses that women are I indeed "different.” Must we keep on crowing every time we get approximately level with the men who have guided our novitiate steps? Can’t we let them teach us their decent modesty no less than their daring prowess? Mock modesty? That is as may be. But its silent reserves are none the less refreshing after a surfeit of tooarticulate feminine vaingloriousness.