Woman's chronicle. (Little Rock, Ark.) 1888-1???, 1889-12-14
From Dress. /

OAAS Va
one calls the present PERIOD has made emphatic is
that womans charm is not as the earlier novel
lists taught and people generally believed, thing
exclusively of youth. There was a certain halo
flung in former generations over the head Of fem-
ninity, which became shadowy and unreal when its
possessor got beyond the twenties.
No changes of thought wrought in the last CEN
tury are more marked than those which note the
steady advance in the period of life at which the
feminine part of humanity is thought to reach its
prime. The heroine of the original novel was
the fourteen-year-old. ''Sweet sixteen and
"blooming eighteen were the favorite ages less
than half century ago; but after Mrs. Liver
more began to tell us that the thing to do with our
daughters was to give them a fair chance with our
sons in the race of life, and womens colleges be-
gan to spring up and new avenues to open to our
girls, and femninity was no longer relegated to
seclusion at twenty, it was decided that the charm
of girlhood was not thing of the teens only and
a successful novel actually made its heroine a
woman thirty-fve years of age, and unmarried at
that
''No woman is so charming as the woman of
thirty years" wrote wise and witty Frenchman,
and many man of modern society has echoed his
sentiment. The woman of the world knows that
with years she gains in charm-that whereas in her
first season she bored and rritated the man who
took her out to dinner, she has in the added expe
rience of maturity fascination and stimulus for
him.
In the better circles girls do not enter society at
as early an age as they did when the tag sold
maid'' was affixed to them if they didn't marry by
the time they were twenty-five. The modern
young woman is busy with her studies and prepa-
ratons for the future up to the age of twenty-one
and later.
The age of our grandmothers, who took the re-
sponsibilties of life upon them while they should
have been children, is past. The girl who marries
at sixteen no longer exists, and the old-tme faacy
that girls are earlier matured than boys for the
cares of existence is rapidly giving way to more
progressive thought.
The average boy of sixteen or eighteen is quite
as matured as the girl of that age. She is no more
fitted at that stage of growth to assume the role of
womanhood than he is of manhood The Spartans
recognized this physiological truth when they made
law forbiddng their females to marry under
twenty-five.
The women of prominence in the world today
the social leaders and the society favores are no
longer in the freshness of their first youth. The
reigning favorites of the present are women who
have studied life, and whose faces oftener show
lines of thought than cheeks of bloom
The color of blooming eighteen no longer
conceals its crudities, and societys queens are
oftener women in the thirties than girls in the
twenties women, moreover, who have something
more fascinating than youth, more lasting than
beauty, more real than style. The modern woman
is learnngthe secret which made Mesdames de
Stael and RecAmer the rivals of youthful beauties
when old age had claimed them, or would have
claimed them them had it been given chance.
The loveliness of youth is the loneliness of the
rosebud but the glory of the garden is the rose
What woman would wish always to be eighteen?