WAGE-EARNING WIVES.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5401, 18 March 1929, Page 3

WAGE-EARNING WIVES.

WHY WOMEN WORK. Between 1890 and 1920 in the United States the/proportion of married women working, for wag®|S or salaries rpse 100 per cent. 'To-day one quarter of America’s “occupied!” women are shown by the census to be married. The numbers of the unoccupied arp still considerably in excess of the workers, but nine married women in every hundred are imported as breadwinners. The majority of these two million wage-earning wives ar,e, of course, still to be found in industry, or in minor secretarial positions- Many are obliged to enter, domestic ser,vic.e, though the American woman will avoid this type of work until she has tried everything else. But a small number, which increases every year,, have made good in business or, profession, and are at least as responsible as their husbands for, the upkeep of home and family. At' the top of every tree; a few women possess inde-pendently-earned incomes, which sounds fantastic, even to the successful business man (writes a wellknown English woman novelist).

TWO- REASONS ADVANCED.

One such woman, Mrs Irma Dell Higglejston, is a member of the New York Stock Exchange. A leading authority on Government securities in the United States, She as, said to have traded in the last teni years, the immense total of £6,000,000 worth of Liber.ty Bonds. She belongs to a little group of women financiers in Wall Street who are regarded as at least the equals of any man engaged in that branch of business.

English vvomep company directors, many of them married, torday amount to about 300, of whom over 50 a re oU t.he boards of big business concerns. Now that the working wife lias begun to be accepted as a matter, of course in business and professions it is unlikely that she will disappearfor there are two reasons .to account for her which, are as old as society. The first of thesp r ea;s < ons is PU re J y economic.

“The bare necessity of living, or the craving for a higher, standard of living,” wrote Mr, George Johnson in his “Evolution of Woman,” drives hosts of women, including many married women, into the labour market, and m> philosophic theories of the ideal family life, unless accompanied by some radical econo,mic reorganisation of industry, will bring them back to their homes.”

The sqcond reason —the 'spirit of adventure —has often been interpreted and unnecessarily condemned as a craving for scented soap in one walk of life, or for. pearls and! fur coats in another. Pearls and furcoats, like scenfted soap, are all to the good, for nothing so surely leads to selfrrespect as, the ability to’ pay from one’s own warnings for ithe luxuries of life.

But the spirit of adventure is something more than a longing for, luxury. The making, of money, as men know so well, has attractions quite apart from its expenditure. It requires those special qualities of courage and: enterprise which women were never able to develop so long as only the lower post's, in. business and the professions were accessible to them.