Evening star., 1925-03-01
The Extravaganza
of Women

T HAVE long believed the general
accusation of natural extrava-
gance brought against women
i was fallacious. SO far as my
acquaintance with the members
of the sex goes they seem to me
naturally thrifty; but how is one to
get documents to sustain theory
so contrary to popular opinion?
never had any of account fail
into my hands until the other day
there came along the results of a
QUESTIONABLE which DIR. Lorine Pruette
"a serious and lively minded student
Of her sex-has recently been making.
She has been prying into the minds
of some 375 high school girls trying
to find out what they wanted-mar-
riage or a career. The questions
had been about what you would eK-
pect in such an undertaking.
III you could choose anything in
the world, what would you most like
to beT'
why do you want this,?" etc, etc.
Now, among her questions was one
as to the daydreams OF these young
ladies'. Sometimes when you are
sitting before the fire, with nothin &
to do, or are doing work with your
hands which does not occupy your
mind, your thoughts wander far away
and you make up wonderful romances
and stories about yourself. You
dream of things which perhaps might
never happen but which you would
enjoy having happen. Probably
every girl in the world has these
dreams in which she is the heroine
and has wonderful things happen to
her. Write down ir the space below
90 tc q
you can remember of one of these
daydreams. How long ago did you
have this dream?"
OF course, the answers to this ques-
tion were just what any woman who
remembers her youth would expect
them to be. But that is not the
point here. The point here is the
modesty of the set which the majority
built for the life drama In which
they were to play leading lady. 1t
was simple, homelike, restrained. 1t
is quite evident that the girls were
thinking of their hearts desires and
that these desires were not primarily
material.
What most of them wanted was a
cottage, not a palace. They wanted
something simple, white, cheerful
not something vast, gorgeous, compli-
Gated. There were a few mansions
but many cottages. There was a
general desire for activity, little for
Incidence.
I do not begin to say that there
was not an occasional fantastic
creation, something that you might
properly call extravagant. I should
say that the young lady who dreamed
of being a great opera singer, to
whom the manager came one night
and raised her salary from s2,000,800
to $4,000, 100000 a month, was an ex-
travagant dreamer. And I should
say that the young woman who
wanted to be a movie actress and
dreamed that she had "a harem, in
cluding Adolphe Menjou, Dick
Barthelmess, Ralph Graves, and a
million other wonderful men," could
properly be said to be extravagant. ]
suspect them, however, of a desire COM
mon enough to youth when held up and
asked to disclose to the world its
precious inner self-a desire to hood
wink, to lead the questioner into a blind
trail!
That this simplicity of taste in the
majority Of these girls is fairly general
in women the country over is corroborat-
ed by the observations of any one who
travels much about these States keeping
his eyes open. For example, in the last
30 years there has been an extraordi-
nary change Of ideas among well-to-ds
people about what is desirable. In Q
home. Back in the 70s and SOS and COS