THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1908. THE REBELLION OF WOMAN.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9178, 29 August 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1908. THE REBELLION OF WOMAN.

In a recent "Contemporary Review" Mrs Billington-Greig contributes an interesting article entitle:!, "The Rebellion of Woman." "To-day," she remarks, "woman is in rebellion, and her rebellion is the fact of the age. Her revolt against repression and restriction is manifest in all classes of society and in all parts of the earth. It has infected literature and art and economics. It is clamant in the politics of the West. Convention and custom are undermined by it, and old ideas lie shattered and discredited in the dust. It assails eye and ear in the highways and byways of the world, making new manners and muttering the vague beginnings of new messages. It is in the very atmosphere. So potent is it, so everpresent, that it is recognised as one of the tendencies of the age, and deplored or delighted in because of its inevitableness. But everywhere, whether deplored or greeted with rejoicing, it is admitted as an existent reality—u fact—a force—to bo measured, to be combated, to be reckoned with. The rebellion of woman against the bonds of the ages is not of this generation alone, although in all probability this generation is to see its culmination. There are signs that the rebellion of woman is as oid as the conditions against which she rebels. Her unrest has made itself felt through th-3 whole history of the world, civilised and uncivilised. Her revolt against subjection and slavery has produced a recurrent problem for the man who has striven to manage the affairs of humanity alone. It is not recorded in the pages ot history

under a positive aspect, for the historians of the world have been commonly men to whom the fate and teeling3 of women as a class have appeared of little consequence, and women have had no independent chance of self-expression. But evidence of a constantly existing rebel-. lion has accumulated from all sides, j It is found in history, in literature, in popular proverb, and in spoken tradition, as well as in the customs and conventions by which precautions were taken or repression ensured. In proverb and aphorism man has crystallised his conception of woman, and in all ages this conception has revealed his fear of her unrest and his knowledge of her discontent. The many proverbs admitting the impossibility of men understanding women are monuments to this uncomfortable knowledge. The common saws about 'woman's sphere,' all based upon the necessity for the sedusion of woman within the home, prove that the forces of public opinion and of law, as well as the admonitions of the Cuurch, have had to be employed to restrain women from seeking wider interests. From the strength of the forces required to keep them there, women appear to have regarded the home as not so much a sneltsr as a prison." Mrs Billington-Greig, having laid it down dogmatically that woman is in rebellion, proceeds to enlarge upon what terms "the fact of the age" in a literary and somewhat pretty style—a style that is certainly quite appropriate when woman is under discussion; but, after all, is not the posi : tion this, that woman is not following the life lead by her great grandmothers any more than man is following the life of his great grandfathers. We live in an age, the conditions of which simply cannot be compared with those that prevailed, say, a hundred years aco. If Mrs Billington-Greig had not been in quite such a hurry to enlarge upon "the fact of the age" she might have stopped to remark that literature, like woman, is in rebellion, also man and many other things. If man is not becoming emancipated he is, at least, becoming changed, and it would bo absurd to expect that the changed conditions of modern life would reveal themselves in man only, and that m wwld remain sta* • cionary, that is, unchanged.