ATHLETICS FOR GIRLS.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 September 1921, Page 6

ATHLETICS FOR GIRLS.

ADVERSE MEDICAL OPINIONS.

ATHLETIC WOMEN CHILDLESS.

The London Daily Telegraph of May 11, states: —In a Park* Crescent, W., flat last night a campaign against the alleged racial suicide of athletics for girls was inaugurated. A resolution was passed by an audience of headmistresses of girls’ schools and ladies who have made a study of physical culture, protesting against the present system of physical education for girls as something injurious to future generations, and a small committee was formed to draw up and circulate a manifesto on the subject. . Letters of sypathy with the movement were read from Sir James Crich-ton-Brown, the Marchioness Townshend, Sir Philip and Lady Magnus, Mr. and Mrs. G. K. Chesterton, Miss Lilian Braithwaite, Dr. Arabella Kenealy, and others.

“Physical exercise and training,” Sir James Crichton-Brown stated, “are as necessary to girls as to boys, but these must have regard to physiological and development considerations. To ignore sexual differences is to court disaster in the long run.” Dr. Arabella Kenealy wrote: ‘Women who develop masculine instead of feminine attributes do this at the cost of the male potential which is transmitted by the father to the daughter ir, trust for the male line. Athletic women product female offspring, mainly, and seldom have sons. When sons are bom to them these arc apt to be puny and delicate, or generally emasculate or of inferior type. The cultured classes who are mainly afflicted 1 by athletic training are tailing to provide sons of the fine physique and manly talents and initiative which have set our Anglo-Saxon race in the van of evolution.”

Miss Cowdroy, of the Crouch End Girl’s High School, who moved the resolution of protest, said that the girl who had been trained to hockey, cricket, and football suffered at childbirth. Sometimes the child suffered, and sometimes the mother, sometimes one of them died. Doctors Had told her that difficult confinement could often be traced to strenuous sports. Eighty per cent, of the girls she had known who bad been trained to become gymnastic mistresses had been incapacitated for motherhood. A girl had a large store of vital and nervous energy which she could draw upon, if normally developed, at the great crisis of motherhood. That strength was a deposit account; but if she used it afe a current account, as a boy could afford to do, her children would pay the bill. She believed the Victorian’girl was a better mother than the modern athletic girl.