Word: distaff
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the House of Representatives, last week had another distaff knot embroidered into the cloth of his family's fame. He is husband of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, father of Paulina Longworth, brother of Countess Jacques de Chambrun (wife of a French general). Last week, in Paris, the French Academy awarded the Bordin prize to the Countess for her studies of Shakespeare...
...tearful with success. But who was Cleopatra's daughter? What heroine did Dido mother? Joan of Arc, Queen Bess, Florence Nightingale, Jane Addams are all ineligible by hypothesis; and it is not recorded that Sarah Bernhardt had a daughter. But what of Portia and other married celebrities? The distaff side seems never to have been illustrious twice running, possibly for the reason that most women acquire fame by being either too "good" or too "bad" to have a domestic side...
Gandhiji's present political views. . . . I have no messages from Mahatma Gandhiji, either private or public. . . . He swears by nonviolence, Charka, Hindu Moslem unity and the removal of untouchability. He spins [with a distaff] regularly every day for four hours, unless his eyes do not permit him. He reads largely religious books, chiefly the Gita and Upanishads. He has read the Koran and he is now re-reading the Bible...
...Antwerp which gave Rubens his two beautiful wives, Isabella Brant and Helena Fourment; and, although Rubens' male line is extinct, more than 100 great families of Belgium and the rest of Europe claim descent from him on the distaff side...
...Vassar they wave a distaff over the heads of the professors, and threaten to force all their instructors to undergo grading by the student body. At New Haven they wield a stouter weapon. "The Saturday Evening Pest", a single sheet anonymously printed, has announced its purpose to bring about a complete change in the undergraduate point of view: "We believe--that Yale is preparing men not to live, but to make a living--that the life of the undergraduate is stupid, empty, and meaningless". At the same time the communication columns of the more conservative "News" have been rife with...