Some Thoughts On Spooning

United Press April 21, 1923

Detroit, April 21 —(U. P.)— "Now when I was a girl———

"Tut, tut, mother dear, things are different now."

So speaks the girl of today when her mother attempts to lecture her on the question of spooning, according to opinions of Detroit's loading social workers.

Those workers admit the prevalence of spooning today, and attribute it to the girl's fear "of becoming unpopular. Spoon and the world spoons wllh you. Refuse and you're left alone. This might easily be declared the flapper's philosophy, after hearing stories told by the social workers.

"Spooning is more prevalent today than over before," Dr. Mary Thompson Stevens, lecturer on social hygiene, declared.

"My advice to girls when they are in doubt", she said , "is to adopt "hands off" as their slogan, and to be repeated whenever occasion demands. Spooning is dangerous. For years I have tried to impress this fact upon girls, but the modern girls lake advice less than in the past. Girls tell me when they receive invitations to dances today they know if they accept they must be willing to spoon. Young men expect it and the girl has not the moral stamina to refuse. I have known girls who refused to go to such parties because they were still old fashioned to disapprove of spooning, but they are in the minority."

"Women are living in the first stage of freedom," said Miss Lorena Smith, superintendent of the juvenile division of tho police department, "and spooning is a natural reaction. The idea, once an unwritten law, that a girl must not kiss a young man until she is engaged to him has become obsolete."

"Spooning among young people is a problem we will always have to deal with," declared Miss Clair Sanders, head of tho Juvenile Detention home. "I do not believe that it is alarmingly serious today in relation to what it has been in the past. Mushy relations sometimes do lead to harm, and other times do not, depending upon the girl and the boy concerned."