ENGLISH WOMEN

Hokitika Guardian, 21 December 1929, Page 8

ENGLISH WOMEN

BETTJiIt THAN MOST WIVES. “Women have it easy in America and hard in Europe, where war, poverty, and lack of opportunity cramp every one,” declared Henry Ford, the American motor car magnate, in an interview with a representative of the. Pictorial Review. Perhaps comfort dulls their sense of reality, so that American women are accepting life as a routine and are just playing with its surfaces. Look at what English women do. Young women and old from the host homes go out and colonise the far places of the Empire right hy the side of their men, sharing the dangers and privations of a pioneering life with a. smile on their lips. ‘lf the English.are the only people who can pioneer it is because their wives go with them. They are better than most women; their idea of life is to be helpmates; not only that, real partners of their men, to build a life with them. I know this from my own experience, because my wife was one of 10 children of an English woman who went to America when she was 15. AVe have been partners for 41 years.

“Unless power is used it has no value, and leisure is a power which, if misused, becomes harmful. American women must pay for their release from drudgery, and they can pay it in only one way—that is to study and work at their job of being wives and mothers. Unless they do, leisure is a failure, and a mother is a failure if she does not study out what is best for her children and her husband with the time saved from drudgery. “It comes to this. Women have got to be the partneres of men in the whole meaning of that word. If husbands and wives could work more to gother—l don’t mean at wage-earning, but on the entire problem of theii lives— something more would come out of it than has ever come out of each taking his or her course. Such partnership is a great stimulus. “American women have got to modernise their household, their husbands, their food, and themselves, if they are going to live successfully to-day. They have got to rear fine children, which means they must keep their minds right while they are doing it. j. they haven’t the opportunity, they haven’t the money to give themselves and their children all the advantages of modern living, it is because they want to shirk their, jdb. It’s the same old story of complaint and failure. WOMEN’S POWER IN 1 THE HOME. “The mechanical age means tile comfortable age. AVomen will be released from the drudgery they won’t put up wiui any longer. They will he electric power all over the country, and give men and women the chance to escape from the cluttered life of the cities to grass and trees and animals, and ensure a more human and happy life for every one.

“If women are wise, they are a coming power, but a power in the home, not in industry. Homes are tbe motive of man; industry exists only because in tbe end it ministers to homes. AA r onicn are a diminishing rather than an oncoming force in industry. As precision increases in industry women will tend to decrease and disappear because they are not precise and mechanically minded They have not the patience to make or handle machinery. and they have not the interest to develop in mechanical work;”