WOMAN'S WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 168, 15 January 1914, Page 6

WOMAN'S WORLD

HOVEL NUPTIALS AiioxcsT UK emeus AXO UXDEU THE EAKTH. '"The \v!i;. s ii? a man with a are not a Hi)it more r.ni;.;v and wonderful than his mcliiiiiN of making iu-r his own when lie hits won her. Indeed. he would be u most ingenious man who could discover an avenue to nmtriwouy ■which has not already been trodden by one or more adventurous couples before liim. Only within the Inst few weeks wc have read of a Inir Dutch maid who was securely bound to her lover at tin* moment whim the bridegroom was in Xaliil. «'?!» mill* away, his ple.ee at the altar b"i:i;.t taken bv an obliging friend, who spoke (lie fateful words for him: of an enterprising eouple in Illinois who were united in the ear of a balloon. llontljig serenely p. mile above the gross earl!) to which they must return for their honeymoon; and of an Austrian actress who became Krai! Gnuiberg at an improvised altar on the snowy summit of a peak of the Sirem .Mountains.

■ When Miss Nellie Stone, a belle of Ottawa, was on the very eve of her nuptials a short time ago. smallpox made its appearance in the house in which she was spending the last days of spinsterhooii. and it seemed "all Lombard street to an orange" that her happiness would be postponed for many a sad week, liut her lover was a man of resource, not so easily balTled by ail unkind Fate. Procuring a phonograph and a collide of cylinders, the necessary words were recorded by each in turn on the wax, after careful fumigation, and Nellie, in spite of her quarantine, was the happiest girl in her State. Matrimonial picnics, at which a. clergyman is present to unite all couples'"who are in the mood to wed, and weddings in shop windows and in the cages of wild animals, Jiave lost much of their novelty already; but there was 'both originality and daring in the nuptials'of Harry Wildman. who recently, made a wife of .Miss Winnie. Wavman while shooting the White Horse Rapids, the roar of the leaping waters almost drowning the voice of the parson as ; he pronounced the liappv pair man and wife.

Walter Tyler, of Tndianapolis, was in sucli a hurry to place si rin*r on the finger of pretty Margaret Schaafsman that he dragged ft reluctant Justice of the peace to Hie stable where Hie pair had stalled their steaming horses after ji runaway ride together, and emerged a. few minutes later a married nan. A Miss Markhani and Mr. fiontou were made one on a public merry-go-round in Missouri while : the band pla.vcd ragtime melodies; and Houston Hubbard placed a wedding-ring on the linger of Miss Margie Tobb, so impatient was lie, in tflie middle of'a public highway, the couple standing in a two-horse waggon •while the parson officiated from the driver's seat. When Miss Edith Johnson and her fiancee, Mr. Charles Simpson, voyaged together from Sheffield across Ulie Atlantic on the liner Baltic, thev found •it advisable to set foot in America as a wedded couple. Mr. Simpson therefore sent for u clergyman, and the pair were married in a second-class cabin on the last morning of the voyage. The chief stew •ard was best man, and when tihrt ceremony was over the spectators, including -many members of the crew, had the privilege of kissing the young •bride.

■ In rather grim contrast to sueri frolicsome nuptials was the wedding of Charles 1!. Hudson and Florence K. Edwards. who were recently united at Providence, Rhode Island, when standing' beside tlie coffin containing the body of the bridegroom's mother ,to whose •last wish they were thus giving dramatic and touching effect. A( convict under sentence of deatli in Paris was married to liis fiancee, Eugene HoMmeq, in the condemned cell a few days before he was led to the guillotine; ami Hie son of a Michigan millionaire, both of whose legs had been broken in a motor car accident on the eve of his weddingday. was married on the appointed day iu the Flower Hospital. New York, with half Hl'S bodv enclosed in plaster of Paris.

Weddings under wati-r, on the skating l'ilik to the music of circling wheels, on the top of a monument, iu the lowest depths of a Siberian mine, and in an airship travelling swiftly over Havana—all figure in the chronicles of novel nuptials during the l;l>t few montlhs. thus proving that 'matrimonial ingenuity is as resoui'ceful as ever: while one,bridegroom a Mr. Otto Mill, a hairdresser, has established a record which it is lo be hoped will not he beaten, by graduating as a married man ■within halt'-an-hour of first setting eyes on the brideM. Arconct. a farmer of Tsnwin«. St. AlTrique, lias just made his twentyseventh appearance at the altar with a wife who had already been a wife nineteen times before she met hint: and at a recent wedding at '.Marseilles the bride was escorted to the altar bv tweutyfour grandchildren, many of whom when older than the advcnlui'olls biidegtooin himself, whom they now call grandfather.

THE WISEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD Dr. C'. W. Salceby calls Klli'n Key, t.lio Swedish writer, I In- wisest woman in the world. "Thanks, as Mr I'utiinin himself told me," writes Dr. Salecbv in the Pull Mall flazette. ''ln a chance meet ill;;' of his with Dr. Ilavelopk Kllis in Italy. his attention was directed to the Iwoks which Ellen Key has lately written, and which have received such wide attention in (.'ermany. Hence their appearance in English translations, and their wide distribution in the t'nited Siatos and ill this counlry. Tho hooks .in i|iicstion. in the order of their piihlicat ion, are 'The Century of the Child.' 'Love and Marriage,' ami 'The. Woman Movement.' They all display an astonishing amount of reading, of experience, and of thought: luit I here alone would not suffice to make. Ellen Key what I believe her to he---llie wisest woman in the world. Knowledge, after all. is only a constituent of wisdom, which is a state, not of the brain, hut of the soul. lll'll I.OVK AN"I) SYMPATHY. "Ellen Key's philosophy is founded, uot on hale, Itut on love, not on jealousy hut on sympathy. She believes in women, ami she believes in men. too. In nil her writings there can he found 110 trace of sex antagonism at all. She knows that it takes both sexes tc. make a world. Slip finds that woman has already achieved wiuch of her due as a woman—which normally means as a mother. Sim thinks that it may be just as fine a thing to 'he a woman as to be a man. She makes no claim for the vote on the ground of 'justice.' '.f

thin]- she would agree with the dictum of I'usknt. after which there is 110 more to say: that the only form of government worth having is that the wis,, nnd i.'iml. wliethei; they be few or manv. should govern the unwise aud unkind. And she would go on to argue thai certain asperls of wisdom and kindness, which we need for government, arc con spicuously feminine. (For instance, if women had had their say in education, should we only now. after -II) years, be beginning to leach women's work to the girls i:t our schools:')

IiKK A!i;;r.\lKNT FOR FEMINISM. "Her for feminism, (Iteretore. is tliiit the reeo;:mt;on of the disliiK'iivc need.s and eapacities of wuatan will .serve both sexes. She hastens to add that one can scarcely imagine a case where a kind man will ma he worth more than a hard woman—and she permits herself, vou will observe, though a femini-t. to rei'dgnisr tin? existence of 'both those individuals.- I do not-want to advocate the grunting of tin- sull'rage to women in this place now; but 1 believe that if they arc tn have the stifli - ;vthere is only one ultimate political "round for its 'granting;.: that thereby more wisdom and kindness' will be available for onr government. ''liest, and deepest ami rarest of all in ■Ellen Key is tilt l entire absence of any ■bitterness in her composition. She writes strongly: ?.,hc hates .Mammon and -Bacchus and l'riapus intensely; she utterly repudiates as false, vicious and ephermeral many conventions which we. regard as moral and founded in the depths of eternity. Hut die sympathises with and understands every type of human being. In her m.ignillcent study of the woman movement wo find that she understands and sees' the vital problems of the 'Unmarried woman, the another. P'lioinme moyen scnsuel, and everybody else. The sexless, or unsatisfied, or hitter woman, the worst encmy of both sexes, ami especially of her own, the woman who compromises feminism and, makes it a byword—even she linds understanding in Ellen Key's universal mind. This wonderful woman believes, that normal womanhood should include ■motherhood or foster-motherhood, but she recognises the existence of women of 'amaternal' type, and instead of Irving to scold them into being something else she would have, them develop their strange individualities to the. best nilvantage in I heir own way. Only she will not allow siioh women to declare that theirs is Ihe ideal type, or to decrv (he motherhood which they do not desire to share."