The Alaska citizen., 1914-11-23
The Joy of Being so


aged woman torture herself by the vain endeavor to do the things that in her soul she knows to be impos- sible? Women dress to attract men and no man ever gives second ! look at the appearance of a woman of fifty.
 The logic of the situation is ir- resistible. Be comfortable. Take off the things that crib. cabin, and confine. Let out your stays and get good free breath once more | Come down off the suited -heeled shoes that are the modern incarna- tion of the rack. Eschew the tor turing straightfront that makes a fat lady of fifty feel as if she had been squeezed into a cast-iron stove. Eat as much as you like, and-oh, blessed thought-what you like, once more.
 To many hundreds of thousands of suffering middle-aged women it would be heaven on earth just to have another square meal and to wear a gown that didn't choke the very life out of them-and shoes that didn't make every step an agony. The key to this paradise is in their own hands They have only to accept their age and to realize that no living man knows. or cares. whether they are twenty four inches in the waist or thirty six or whether they wear two and a half A, or a five E. shoe.
 Furthermore. the husband hunt is over for a woman of fifty. She has either got one. or isn't going to get one and, at any rate. she has got 10 have some other bait than her looks to succeed as a fisher of men :; so she might as well take the con- forts to which her age entities her.
 Then, no woman really comes into freedom until she is frankly middle aged We must preserve the pro- prieties and affect the ignorance and to blush, as long as we pretend to be sixteen.
 It is only after we pitch our bloom of youth" jar out of the window and let our Titan locks go back to their natural grizzled state. that we can admit to under standing problem plays and novels and travel from one end of the world to the other unchaperoned by anything but our faces. Also. and best of all. being frankly fifty en- ables us to indulge in that choicest of all mundane pleasures, friend ship with a congenial and under standing man. who dares to be as charming as he can because he does not suspect us of trying to marry him.
 Nor will the woman who is ex- periencing the joy of fifty lack for friends, male and female, for she is at her best socially She is worth talking to and listening to, for she is like Lady Kew's daughter, whom | Thackeray describes as being forty years old and having heard all there is to tell. Can't you see her, fat and comfortable, shrewd and world ly, humorous and entertaining and all because she accepts her age and makes the most of 1t!
 The only way for any middle-aged woman to get the cakes and ale that are her due at her fiftieth birth day party is for her to welcome age and not foolishly try to bar the door against it. This Is par ticularly true of married women and there is no other sight in the world at once so humorous and SO pathetic as that of elderly wives torturing themselves trying to keep young, hoping thereby to retain ttheir hus- bands love.
 Why cannot these poor, silly geese realize that by the time man has been married to woman for thirty l h1y f0r thing a thousandfold better than a peaches and cream complexion and a lissome form, or else he doesn't love her at all? If mans affection is a matter of his wife's possessing mere physical beauty, no living wo- man of fifty can hold a candle to the least pulchritudinous girl in the back row of the chorus and she might as we'll save herself the wear and tear on her constitution by try ing to rival the natural beauty of youth with the handmade beauty of age.
 An inch more or less, up or down, or crossways, in his wife's waist line will not raise. nor lower. the temperature of middle-aged busi- ness mans love one single degree. And if a man doesn't love his wife when they come to middle age, she can no more kindle the flame of affection in his breast with any 1mi- tation of youth than she can make a fire out of snow on a cake of ice.
 It Is one of the blessed immuni- ties of fifty, though, that ones heart has gotten over the brittleness of youth and has become a tough pro- position that will stand as many kicks as football In youth, love makes up the sum of a woman's existence; ; but by the time she has reached middle age she has discovered that there are a great many other things in the world beside sentiment and that one can live and have a very good time. even If one Is not thor oughly understood and has missed her real soul mate.
 The young wife tears her hair and calls on heaven to witness that she is the most miserable of her sex, because her hsuband falls to come up to her ideal of what romantic hero and a demigod should be. The woman of fifty has laid her regrets for what might have been, away in lavender; and while she admits to herself that possibly her hsuband Is not all that she could wish. she her limousine and reflects on the hod limouc;no and rof1octa m the