The Henson Journals

[44]

Tuesday, May 22nd, 1928.

Philip Strong went off after an early lunch. He is an attractive, and, I believe, really good–principled young clergyman, whose departure from the diocese was an appreciable loss. I finished the sermon for Newcastle. In the afternoon, Lionel and I walked round the Park.

The appetite for photographs is embarrassing, for it seems ungracious to refuse a request which appears to indicate a certain affection for one's self, and yet the satisfaction of multiplying requests is a costly business. And every photograph given draws requests for more, & so the circle of fruitless expenditure tends to expand!

Somebody sent me a feminist journal, "Time & Tide", which contains the music & words of a kind of Battle–song entitled "The March of the Women". The music is by Dr Ethel Smyth, and the words by Miss Ciceley Hamilton. It is of the usual vague bombast, & glorifies the Suffragettes, whose maniac violence had become a public nuisance before the War. Politically the Women have triumphed, but socially and economically there are still some surviving fragments of the old order to be destroyed before "the equality of the sexes" can be said to have triumphed. The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood cannot be long hindered!