Word: matronly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...designed by Architect Daniel Zamudio and the hotel's owner Guillermo Mella, that distinguishes the place from other quickie havens. Says Owner Mella: "There is poetry here." There is also discretion. Cars glide quietly through a back gate, park in a row of partitioned stalls. A middle-aged matron in a white nurse's uniform greets the couple, leads them down a corridor lined with a rock garden and waterfalls and on to the illusion of their choice...
...with the person or the situation behind the gag. That was true in Cactus Flower, where one wanted the prim moth of a nurse to be transformed into a seductive butterfly. It was also true in Forty Carats, where one somehow cared whether or not the 40-year-old matron became the bride of her ardent 22-year-old lover...
Walter Mitty is alive and well in the appealing shape of a young matron on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She is Margaret Reynolds, the decidedly sane housewife-heroine of Up the Sandbox, a fresh, beguiling, bittersweet novel that looks into those three old hats: men, marriage, motherhood...
What really sets this miniature exercise apart, though, is Pamela Hansford Johnson's perception of a sad pedagogical truth. Any good school is a delicately balanced work of civilization as febrile and vulnerable as a colony of hummingbirds. The private vice of a matron, the loss of a particularly gifted student, the departure of even one fond teacher can alter it decisively-for the worse...
Finally, in the mind of one who actually believed it, the happy-matron-career woman notion promoted by Radcliffe is a dreadful illusion, and one which if taken seriously can keep us not only from developing our own possibilities, but from relating to other women. The contempt and distrust women have for each other, even when they are "friends," is the counterpart of the excessive awe we feel towards men, and part of what makes us sense that we would be utterly desolate without a man in our lives...