Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn | Page 5

For all these indiscretions nature invariably inflicts a penalty, and the doctors, chemists, and patent-medicine makers receive the fines. It does not pay the doctors to teach health rules to the masses and it therefore behoves outsiders to cry out to the people that they can be healthy if they will study the right methods. The unfortunate children after they are weaned, struggle under the sins of their ancestors with remarkable success, but it is an obvious fact that the race might be strengthened and improved to an indefinite extent if the mothers would consider health as capable of evolution, instead of regarding it as an accidental accompaniment of birth and permanent through life in that state of better or worse in which it was originally inherited. If husbands when they return home ask their wives what they have had to eat in their absence, ninety in every hundred replies would be--"tea and bread-and-butter". This may tend towards spirituality and the maintenance of that "dear delicate little woman" variety of the "clinging" species prized by some men, but the world would be none the worse, for a robuster, healthier, stronger type of woman; nor should we be sorry if we could see the tea merchants transformed to market gardeners and all the milliners driven into the pro--vision trade.

The Man Question Or, The Woman Question Re-stated
The Dawn Volume 2, Number 5. Sydney, September 2, 1889
"WOMAN" as a topic for male journalistic pens has been popular ever since the infancy of literature; the little feminine vanities and vagaries have formed a delightful nucleus for descriptive and imaginative literary work in "leaders", paragraphs, poems, plays and essays. Now and then, exceptional tidal waves of controversy occur when "marriage", "woman's suffrage", or similar subjects attract and swell the billows of printing ink, but these subside, and the permanent currents of the literary ocean carry always the same kind of debris--disquisitions on woman, her weakness, inconstancy, vanity, and little failings innumerable. When we read such articles we are reminded of those sermonisers who
"Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to.
and we should like authors to turn upon men and boys the searchlight of genius with which they have hitherto illuminated the character of women; for a serious examination of modern social affairs, renders apparent the significant fact that women and girls in the mass, have a higher standard of action, and a finer moral tone, than men and boys in the mass possess. Begin at the top of English society and go down. Apart from political considerations, Her Majesty the Queen has lived a blameless and good life. She may have made political mistakes incident to a difficult public position, but she has undoubtedly been a good woman. Consider her feelings as a good mother and decide whether she has found more comfort in the careers of her sons or of her daughters. The Princess of Wales has won affection everywhere and no one doubts that she is well worthy of it. Have the ways of her sons or of her daughters most warmed her heart? Whose rectitude and goodness has reached most nearly to the standard she herself has maintained? This kind of enquiry may be pursued through all grades of society, and it may afford the writers on "women" some new and impressive subjects of study. At the foot of the scale, enquiries will find the hardworking laundress, aided in her drudgery by her daughter, while her heart aches over a selfish, idle, and vicious son, it is the daughter who helps to keep the home together, who takes one handle of the clothes basket, who walks long distances to get the food at the cheapest shop, who runs the errands, and who misses her schooling in order to aid the old folks. Go where you will among the poorer classes, you will see a mother toiling at the tub or mangle, or in some way earning a living, while one or two of her sons idle about the house. The sons are always ready to eat or to complain, they do not hesitate to ask for the few shillings she has, while she, poor soul, is happy to work for them if they will only keep decent and "outof trouble". So also with that weary and overworked woman, the boarding-house keeper. She chops the wood in the backyard, while a son, whom she will not expose, "vamps" on the piano or plays cards in the dining room. The sons gamble and drink; if they earn any money it does not help to keep any home together, it disappears at races or in amusements. There are hundreds of young fellows able to work, yet invariably idle: so long as they have parents, they think it the