THE MODERN GIRL
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The path of progress is stony and strewn with thorns, and the sharpest stones and most virulent thorns are the jeers and adverse criticisms of the world. This fact is brought home with full force to the modern girl, but she suffers in
silence, for she knows that her generation must go on where the previous generation cannot follow.
I read with interest Miss Gertrude Kingston's articles, for no one knows better than I do the miseries of genteel poverty ; but why, in passing, must she hit out at the modern girl ?
" It matters not," she says, " on what social structure you meet the girl of the moment, she is unhesitating in her self-absorption . . . she receives you with a blank expression of stony indifference."
In the first place self-absorption and womanhood are a con- tradiction of terms ; to say that the women of to-day are self-absorbed is to say that they have lost an attribute of their sex. Is it not strange that a function which must have taken more than a hundred generations to evolve has disappeared in the course of one ?
The second remark is contradictory to all the facts of my experience at least. Surely the girl of to-day has an interest in life and in humanity which is unprecedented in its intensity. It is probably this interest which causes her to leave the sheltered domestic circle which, with its narrowness of outlook, no longer satisfies her. She leaves it, not because she is an unnatural and perverted creature, but because she hp.; grown out of it. She has thereby not lost but gained in joyousness. There has grown up a camaraderie and loyalty among the girls of this generation the seeds of which were never planted in domesticity. Far from maintaining a mirthless attitude to life," we have that freedom of body and of spirit without which health and happiness are impossible.
In modern girl discussions—I have joined in many-- I have often heard the woman of yesterday pitied for her seeming entire lack of a sense of humour. It is amusing to find ourselves pitied for the same reason.--I am, Sir, &c.,
A You No MODERN.
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