DOMESTIC LIFE IN AMERICA

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 42, 13 November 1926, Page 18

DOMESTIC LIFE IN AMERICA

* ( The average American woman is as ‘{quick to take opportunity as her hus-. _'. band, and she is as much an expert at ’her own. job.. , Therefore, high wages’ » and a cost of living that is proportionr ately low are not the only reasons for her prosperity. First of all, she is a joint householder „ with her husband, for American life is a ladder which man and. wife climb to- - gether. As soon as the worker rises r above his pound a day, with which “most operatives start, he borrows from the bank, on the security of his own career and builds his first frame-house, under a mortgage, twhjch he pays off as he climbs towards success. " '" So, from the very beginning, his wife , has something permanent and personal ’. in her charge. She is the spendingpower in the' homej. The responsibility of the budget belongs to the woman, and she takes it seriously. Scores of. college girls study domestic economy. “Evtery woman has got to be an economist. How else is she

going to get the most out of things?” ■ said one lovelv creature of nineteen, engaged to a budding engineer. 5. American life is just as co-operative { as American business,_ and in her budgeting and housekeeping the wife has the help of experts. Most of the big

drapers give free dressmaking lessons and the grocers run courses on "home economy,” while a dozen newspapers and periodicals publish weekly budgets, proportioned on a sliding-sca'le according to income. Every advertisement urges the advantages of quality and suitability, rather than cheapness, and since no class, financial or social, is permanent in America, and a mains opportunities are only limited by his powers of work, the wife has no reason to be tempted by cheap show. In the States life is an investment rather than a speculation, and there is very little make-believe No housewife will buy oilcloth masquerading as marble, rabbit dyed like sable, paste pretending to be diamonds, because, with unlimited confidence in her husband's career, she hopes some day she may possess the originals. Tn my pilgrimage round the factory towns of the Middle West, which is the most typical section of America, I met many voung women whose husbands must have been earning anything from £lOOO to £2OOO a year as salesmen accountants, railwaymen, architects, advertising agents, and so on (writes Rosita Forbes, the famous woman explorer, in the "Weekly Dispatch,” on her return from a recent, tour of «America).