The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-10-03

pIex mothers in these free-and-easy days is how to take care of their daukhters, and protect them from the dangers into which youth, and ignorance, and foolhardiness are all days liable to stumble.
 In the good old times this was easy. Then mothers first duty was to be an efficient watchdog. She kept a wary eye on her girls, and they were never permitted to stir away from her skirts unless some other reliable duenna was on the job. She kept faithful tab on the com ings and goings of her daughters, and they never went without her taggin them.
 But now! Oh, lac la! The girls have broken their leading strings, and they've got their own latch keys, and mother has got nervous prostration lying awake at night listening for them to come home, and wondering what she ought to do about 1t.
 Some women were discussing this question the other day, and one of them said:
 When I was young, no nice girl went anywhere without a chaperon. Such thing as a lot of young peo- pie going off alone together on lark, without some older woman along, would simply have been out of the question, and as for girl going on a long ride alone with a man why, you would hardly have done that with your own brother, and no decent young woman would have dreamed of such thing as going to a restaurant with a man unless she had been properly chaperoned.
 A.. v1h parties, and when young men called, our mothers received them, and helped entertain them.
 When I tell my daughter this. she says, thank God. the chaperon Is as extinct as the dodo, and she simply wouldn't stand for anybory shadow Ing her, and with the brutal candor of youth she informed me that her beax do not come to see me, and gave me to understand that when young men came to call, my presence in the drawing room was neither ex- pected nor desired.
 "Furthermore, when I tell her my mother looked after me when l was & girl, she pities me, and asks me If l didn't have a very dull time, and she wonders how l ever managed to get married when was under that sort of surveillance. She further eX- presses the opinion that no girl who has a mother who 'queers her that way could have a good time. or catch a husband nowadays. She says the boys simply would pass her up.
 And she's right. Look at the Blank girls. Pretty, beautifully dressed, fine dancers, attractive - in every way. And their parents spend loads of money entertaining for them. but they never have particle of attention from men, because, wherever they go. mother or father IS along. Father and mother take them to places of amusement and come for them. If a boy asks one of the girls to 20 riding, mother appears in het automobile coat and hat to go too. If a young man calls, father sits and reads his paper in the back parlor' and it's good night with that youth. He never comes again. Every one of those girls is being chaperoneo into the spinster's retreat
 And there we are." concluded the woman. If we don't chaperon our daughters, we don't feel that we are doing our duty by them, and If we do chaperon them. we are spoil, sports who kill all their fun, and make old maids of them, so what are we to do?'
 '"rhe chaperon went into the dis card with a lot of other old tradi- tions and conventions in the war said another woman, and perhaps she was always more of a figurehead of responsibility than any real pro tection, because 1t has always been my experience that the people who have to be watched are not worth watching. Besides, there always comes a place where the watching breaks down. If a girl is wild and giddy, she will give her mother the slip somewhere and go her own gait. And if she has got the right sort of sense and principle, she will go straight whether her mothers eye is on her or not.
 More than that, how are you go- ing to chaperon girls when they don't stay put as they used to? Mother can't go to work with her daughters flee. And, anyway, its absurd to suppose that a girl who has brains enough to take college degree, or to hold down a good job, hasn't got sense enough to know how to behave herself.
 to see our little young daughters venture outside of the sheep fold without our being there to protec. them, 5ut the girls say they know how to take care of themselves, and apparently they do. for there are no mora scandals than there used to be. Certainly a girl of IS in these days, Is more sophisticated and hard 'er boiled than her grandmother is at sixty"
 60."
 'T think" said the third woman, that we have to do our chaperoning in the cradle, and that If we do that