BOOKS

Famous work by pioneer of
women’s movement reprinted

HE pioneer of the women’s

movement of our day—the ori-
ginal ‘‘strong-minded woman”’
and the originator of that phrase
—was Mary Wollstonecraft, and
it is good to find her most
famous book, The Rights of Wo-
man, now in print again in Dent's
Everyman Library.
_ Most of us have heard of her
— if only because the poet
Shelley married her only daugh-
ter, Mary Godwin, but probably
few have read The Rights of
Woman. Yet there is hardly a
page of this work of wit and fire
that does not-ring a bell today,.
just as when it was first publish-
ed, in 1792.

it was written when
French Revolution was shaking
the earth, and filling people
like Mary Wollstonecraft with
hopes of a new, just society, and
undoubtedly she meant it to fol-
low up Tom Paine’s The Rights
of Man, which was published
two years earlier.

She dedicated the book, in a
delicately satirical introduction,
to leaders of the French Revolu-

DRAMA

B.C. Drama

the ,

tion, who stood for “liberty,
equality, fraternity,” but had ap-
parently forgotten to apply it to
half the human race—the female
half.

Mary was no man-hater. A
beautiful and intelligent young
woman, dowryless, and therefore
compelled to earn her living as
a teacher. and later as a private
governess, she became involved
in a love affair with a man whose
infidelities made her so unhappy
that she tried to drown herself.

Later she married William
Godwin, the atheist philosopher,
but died a year later, at the age
of 38, giving birth to cot only
daughter, ee

Bes os .

The seri of Woman is not
concerned with setting right par-
ticular inequalities endured by
women—with universal suffrage,
equal pay, or any of the things
which women have fought for
and won, step by step, since her
day.

It is an exposure of the de-
moralisation of both men and
women, created by the depend-

Festival

set for March 15 to 18

gos of the leading -drama
sues in the ease mainland,

ANDRE VAN GEYSEGHAM

will

University of B.C. Alumni Play-
ers, Holiday Theatre and Van-
couver Little Theatre, and the
Vagabond Players of New West-
minster, are entering plays in the
B.C. Regional Drama Festival to

be held in York Theatre here |

March 15 to 18.

The festival will open on
March 15 with the University of
B.C. Alumni Players’ production

of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

On March 16, starting at 7
p.m. to enable parents to bring
their children, Holiday Theatre
present Beauty and the
Beast.

New. Westminster’s Vagabond

- Players will follow on March 17

with Flight. Into Egypt.

The last night, March 18, will
be given to Vancouver Little
Theatre's production of Craig‘s
Wife.

Andre Van Gysegham, British
actor-director, is the adjudicator.

ence of women upon men, and
the ideas of morality, modesty
and sex built upon that depend-
ence.

Where were morality or mo-_
desty, she asked, when it was the
business of a woman’s life to get
a husband, where the possibility
of intellectual equality while
women were denied the right to
education and taught that it was

_ attractive to be afraid of a mouse?”

How far have we travelled since
her day? When I read her biting
description of how little girls
were brought up then, ignorant,
vain, and physically cramped in-
to inactivity, I felt we had come
very far. And so we have.

Yet isn’t it just as true as ever
that the business of every young
woman’s life is generally con-
sidered to be to find herself a
husband, and, if possible, one
who can support her?

And those “contemptible little
arts” of fine ladies, about which
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote ‘so
cuttingly, are still daily recom-
mended in every conventional
women’s magazine, and have be-
come the basis of vast industries.

Girls are still brought up to
regard friendship as very much
second best to making men “mad
about them,’ while boys bring
themselves up, it seems, to pore
over glamor girls and pin-ups.

No, I’m afraid we haven’t got
so very far.

Mary Wollstonecraft believed
in friendship as the best and
most enduring bond between hu-
man beings, and she hated a
society in which the dependence
of one sex upon the support of
the other made friendship or
honesty impossible.

“J will venture to predict,” she
wrote, “that women will he
either the friend or the slave of
man.’

And she complained: * «Gentle-
ness, docility and a spaniel-like
affection are consistently recom-
mended as the cardinal virtues

of the sex... ..
“Friendship or indifference in-
‘evitably succeeds love,’ she

wrote, and to be happy a mar-
riage must be based on friend-
ship, not simply on passion.

She believed, too, most ardent-
ly, in the importance of educa-
tion, of work, of usefulness, of
‘independence, as being the only
conditions under which any hu-
man being could really claim to
be virtuous at all.

“SHEILA LYND.

Seems the city where Sean

OCasey worked on the
roads in his youth, saw the
world premiere of his latest
play last week.

Since Dublin’s Abbey Thea-

Pre adopted a cautionary ap-

proach to progressive plays
about 20 years ago and re-
jected The Silver Tassie,
O’Casey has not offered a first
-perfdrmance to that theatre.

Now a cast with Abbey
Theatre experience, led by
Cyril Cusack, has put on The
Bishop’s | Bonfire at the Gaiety
Theatre, directed by Tyrone
Guthrie.

Much of the advanced pub-
licity it received was hostile.

“J think it is my best and
it may ‘be my last,” O’Casey
has said about this play.

As it contains his greatest
blow against hypocrisy, it is
undoubtedly his ‘best.

Now: over 70, O’Casey is

greater than ever. .

New O’Casey play produced in Dublin

The scene is a small town
where a councillor, who owns
everything worth owning in
the place, is preparing his
home to receive a visit of a
bishop who grew up in the
town.

It is from the mouths of
the men who are carrying out
the alterations that O’Casey
presents his wit and wisdom
to the audience.

In this play. O’Casey shows
the sharp difference of opin-
ion between the ordinary
priest, who is close enough
to his flock to realise their
aspirations, and the hierarchy
that provides the councillor
with aenwon for his pros-
perity.

The bonfire is to destroy
books that the Bishop might
not like.

Trish newspapers have dealt
sharply with The Bishop’s
Bonfire, but that is not likely

:

to affect its success to judge
by the first night scramble
for seats.

SEAN O’CASEY

a

d be original bell of the his-
toric steamship Beaver has

. been found in Seattle and is
now in the possession of Fred
W. Geibel, editor of the Mar-
ine Digest.

&

Why not bring it back?

The first steamship on the
Pacific coast, the Beaver saw
service for half a century un-
til she was wrecked on Pros-
pect Point in Stanley Park in
1888.

When she was sold by the
Hudson‘s Bay Company in 1874,
Henry Saunders, the Victoria
merchant who bought her, re-
moved thé bell for safekeep-
ing and for many years it
was on display in Victoria.

The 50-pound brass bell,
suspended between. two cast
figures of dolphins, bears the
inscription “Beaver, 1858.”

Henry Saunders obviously
intended it to remain in Can-
ada. Why not bring it back?

Memorial concert for |
John Goss in London |

WO of Britain’s finest choirs,
fhe Unity Male Voice Choir
and the Workers’ Music Associa-
tion Singers, winners of this
year’s London Music Festival
competition, contributed to a
John Goss memorial concert held
at the French Institute in Lon-
don on February 13, second an-
niversary of the famous singer's
death.

The program was arranged by
the Workers’ Music Association
to enable artists and groups John
Goss had inspired, as “singer,
conductor, trainer of choirs, con-
cert artist and song anthologist,’
to present songs and composi-
tions identified with his work. |

In a tribute to John Goss’

work, both in Britain and Can-

ada,. where he organized the
Labor Arts Guild in Vancouver
and exercised a strong influence
in the city’s cultural life during
his 10 years’ residence, World
News wrote:

“What was the essence of the ©

life work of John Goss? It can
be summed up as a profound be-
lief that all beautiful things can
belong to the people, and that
the Marxist artist must labor at
the perfecting of his means of
communication, achieving a liv-
ing unity of theory and practice.

“He began to apply Marxism to
his art at a time when he was
considered a consummate pro-
fessional singer, with a flawless
diction. . His. singing was prais-
ed by the critics both here and

in the United States, where he

toured in the early thirties.

“John Goss saw the need to
communicate his ideas and meth-
ods, learned in the course of his
own activity, in order to strength-
en the whole musical basis of
choirs, singers and audiences in

the labor, movement.

“He had always been associat-
ed with the labor movement, but,
ironically enough, it was through
the agency of Lord Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express that he was given
the opportunity of conducting
and inspiring large masses of
people in community singing.

“He turned this initial experi-
ence to political purpose later,
when he toured the country with
Harry Pollitt (general secretary
of the British Communist party)

JOHN GOSS

and Willie Gallacher (former
Communist MP) and brought mu-
sic as‘an ally to their teachings.

“He saw that music without
history was meaningless; that
the first emotional and_ intel
lectual expressions in art are not
private, not divorced from the
lives of ordinary people.

“Tt was in Canada and, on his
return ‘to England, in Birming-
ham during the last decade ob
his life that he was able to ad
to all those who had an opport-
unity of learning from him, the
inspiring correctness of ‘his
whole attitude to song in the
service of the people.”

SCOTT

NEARING

MANHATTAN
BALLROOM

1727 West Broadway

MONDAY, MARCH 14

8 p.m.
Subject:
“THE KEY ROLE OF
GERMANY”

Admission 50c

B.C. -Peace Counei

PACIFIC, TRIBUNE — MARCH 11, 1955 — PAGE E8