CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 166, 16 July 1942, Page 4

CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

PROBLEMS OF MOTHERHOOD

cTo The Editor!

"One of Many Mothers" protests that a mother and her children should be able to live in comfort, war or no war. The war has little or nothing to do with the matter. So long as a mother and her children can exist without being a trouble to other people, that is all that is required of them. The State offers no help, and, indeed, has no use for children until they can be economically productive or militarily useful. So the reward for having a family is economic hardship and loss of all personal freedom. It is normal to have children, and most women want them. I myself have five young children, and it would be normal for me to have yet another healthy, intelligent child. But I now find myself wondering how I could ever have been so rash as to have more than one. A society which implies that a family of seven can subsist on the same sum as a family of two does not deserve to have children. For, even though our salary is somewhat above the average we find it impossible to feed and clothe our family adequately fcr their health and comfort. I am for ever trying to make one and a half pounds of meat do—for a household of seven —instead of two pounds. And I am for ever repairing clothes that are already worn out. It is a strange penalty to pay for having a family! Most distressing of all to a mother is her inability to provide her children all the good food they need. Sufficient fruit, vegetables, milk and cod liver oil can never be bought from the average purse. So a large percentage of our children are constantly undernourished and open to attack from infection. As for the mother herself, she is on duty 24 hours a day. She can never have any clothes worthy of her selfrespect—for such is the "dignity of motherhood"—and her husband has always the one shabby suit. They neither of them have any rest or recreation until they reach a drab middle age, broken in both health and spirit, no longer able to enjoy each other or the family that they had so eagerly and so wholeheartedly reared. RADIANT MOTHERHOOD.