THE BACHELOR WOMAN OF THE FUTURE

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 12, 9 October 1917, Page 3

THE BACHELOR WOMAN OF THE FUTURE

(8.D., in tlie "Daily Mail.") War has done strange things to women; it has made thousands of them home-makers and home-lovers. In the days of peace there was a great Testlesstess, a craving for club or corporate life, but out of the confusions and disruptions of war has been born a deep longing -for quiet /things and' for the solitude of the home. Clubs and hostels for women were popular three years ago, especially those which were run on common-sense lines without annoying rules and restrictions. Because so many women must live in London, to-day, and because there is so little room for them, most of these hostels are full. But they are now -unpopular: They are regarded as useful stop-gaps. In the heart of almost every hostel-dweller, however, there barns the secret desire for a little house of her own—a house that is utterly unconnected with marriage and motherhood. The dream of wifehood that shono as a star for so many girls before the has faded away. Happy mating is the remotest of possibilities' for hundreds of thousands of women workers to-day. Women have given not only their husbands but the men who might have been their husbands .to the battlefield, and so it is that the dream-home of to-morrow is one in which tbe man has no part. Ask any estate agent in London about the new conditions of living, and he will point out as the greatest change the extraordinary demand for flats and unfurnished rooms by women workers. A couple of rooms on the top floor of a drab and dilapidated old house let readily to-day as a "charming amLairy flat." Women search ceaselessly for such places, and when at last they find them their hearts are made glad. I'or hero is a little place apart, the nucleus of a home, something that will in its pathetic insufficiency servo as a substitute for the dwelling that might have been but for this scarlet business of war.

"I work with women all day long. I'm glad to be alone at night, to como home, to be with my books and my queer bits of furniture, to be able to ask whom I like to visit me without the permission of a landlady or superintendent." Here are words, spoken,by a gin in a bank, which express this (new s.mse of home. And is it not natural? It is the worker outside the home who n:ost appreciates the home. It is the girl who toils for other people and in other people's offices or houses who most dearly loves a house of her own. And she feels it is jher house whether it is an attic in Bloomsbury or a three-roomed flat in Streatham. I think that after the war, when tho spaces that grow potatoes will -crow houses, wo shall hear little about hostels for women. . They have, been useful, but there is no permanency in them, no comfort for the heart. Women who have won the great freedom of the working world havo rediscovered the freedom of the home, and tho hostel or club, with its publicity, its rules, its spirit 50 antagonistic to "'the sense of ownership, will be no more. It will remain a relic of the days of slumber aud of the great war, but ft will not bo of tho peace" to como. "'