A CRITIC OF AMERICAN WOMEN.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3190, 8 April 1911, Page 4

A CRITIC OF AMERICAN WOMEN.

HIS MYSTERIOUS DEATH. '‘David Graham Phillips, a prominent American novelist has been shot. Mystery surrounds the cause of his assassination by a violinist, Edmond Goldsborough, but it is surmised that something in Mr Phillips’s writings gave offence to Goldsborough,” says the “Literary Digest.” “A mind, probably deranged, ‘sought to avenge a fancied wrong done him in some of the author’s books,’ especially in the novel “The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig.’ ” The “New York Times’ ’reports that he “thought he saw himself in the portrayal of ‘Joshua Craig,’ and one of his sisters in ‘Margaret,’ the Washington society girl who is the heroine of the story. Mr Phillips’s assassin promptly turned his revolver on himself and died by his own hand ; the novelist lingered'in a hospital for two days and then died ” A MAX OF POWER. “Mr Phillips,” says Hildegarde Hawthorne, in the “New York Times.” “was not a man who took life lightly. He felt a responsibility in the very fact of being alive, and in the other facts of his American birth, his culture, his power of expression. He had gifts—eifts i*o fett i*!';n-!i< <i io usi>. and tt, use directly in the service of humanity. Uessibly in an older generation his temperament would have made a clergyman a preacher of him. There was even a hint in his character of what in those days would have made a fine Covenanter. As it was, he felt that where he detected ' weakness or evil it was his duty, even his delight, to attack them. Not onlv by direct assault though he could charge the enemy with gallantry, but also by a. simple portrayal of the thing itself with the causes lying behind HIS OPINIONS OF WOMEN. ‘ ‘Here Ere three quotations from David Graham Phillips’s latest novel* The Husband s Story. There are so many, _ and they are so trenchant, so searching that one almost wonders that the shot which cut short- the career of the brilliant author was fired by a man.” says the “New York Times.” ' ‘Probe to the bottom of any of the present-day activities of the American woman—l care not what it mav be, church or lecture, suffrage movementor tenement reform—and vou will discover the bacillus of societv position biting merrily away at her. "The duel lest i ndictment of the intellect of woman is the crude, archaic, f utde and unimaginative wav in which ts carried on the part of life that is woman’s peculiar work—or. rather is messed, muddled, slopped and neglectcd. 0

it may be that woman will some dav uevelop another and higher sphere for herself. But first she would do well to learn to fi!l the sphere she now rattles round in, like one drv pea in a tengallon can.

1 want to see a few more women making a living without using their sex charms—a few less tending the typewriter with one eye. while the other and busier is on the look-out for a luisband.

*‘lho American woman fancies she is growing away from the American man. Vm t T uth 15 w hile she is sitting stiM, the American man is growing away from her.” ~ THE SURGEON S KNIFE.

A woman writer in the “New York Imies ’ says: “This is not pleasant reading for smug women, bursting with self-praise and scorn of the other sex. it is certainly much pleasanter to be assured (as they will find plenty ol book's to assure them) that the American women are the most wonderful women in the world, than to be told the plain truth, that they are the most spoiled, the most incompetent in the that count and the hardest on their husbands, demanding more and giving less than any other - women in the world. No one denies that the surgeon’s knife is nainfut. The question vs—ls it needed ? -If a. spray of rosewater will answer the purpose as-well, by all means take the rosewater.”