GH back in March 1927

Fantastically sexist, this is SO worth a read!

When one is trying to express one's creed, it is by no means a bad plan to begin by indicating one's disbeliefs and prejudices. I do not like women who steep themselves in the sordid from a mistaken sense of duty. I do not like women who marry and deliberately remain childless because they plan to write, to act, to paint or dance nightly.

I do not like women of forty who show their knees outside the bathroom. I am afraid that I frown upon women explorers, not because there is anything unwomanly in exploring, but because they must be such an appalling nuisance to the country explored.

By now you will have expected me to abuse the women who go in for sport. You will be disappointed. Let women play every game. Men are attracted much more by the good health of a woman than they think. The swimming, the golfing and the tennis playing girls delight men, who think they are perfect in spite of playing games. In addition to finding them perfect, they find them pretty, which is ever so much better. They are right. There are no plain girls and not very many plain women. But their perfection and their prettiness, if men only knew it, come from the eager athletic pursuits of the glorious young women of today.

My sisters played cricket. All save one, who is a nun, have babies. I think the joy of games and the splendid feeling of fitness they produce impel women to reproduce. I doubt if the thought has ever crossed a woman's mind, but Nature watched over the fit, healthy girl. She sends her a mate and presently a daughter, who will be as fine as the mother. Nature makes mistakes, of course, lets useless women marry useful men, and overlooks some splendid material, but on the whole finds a way to self-expression for the fittest and fairest.

Self-expression! That must be always, for a woman, the bliss of maternity. True, women can also give us masterpieces of art. Herein they are fortunate above men, who have but one string to their bow. But the test of a woman's womanliness is her desire to be a mother. If she is sound in this regard she is unlikely to commit the sins of morbidity, self-advertisement and vulgarity in deportment and dress.

Holding as I do that the secret of true womanliness is the recognition that woman was born to reproduce herself, I shall cause some surprise if I say that the most womanly women are nuns.

By Basil Macdonald Hastings (who would most certainly not get a column on GH nowadays!)

Compiled by Tara Smith