WAR RELIEF WORK

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9792, 16 October 1917, Page 8

WAR RELIEF WORK

CONCENTRATED HUMBUG CAUSTIC COMMENT ON WOMEN’S SELF-DISPLAY. Tho San Francisco “Argonaut” baa tho following caustic comment on seltadvertising society women who are finding in war relief work an opportunity for quenching their thirst for publicity: Mrs Amelia E. Barr has something appropriate to say about the noble society women who have thrown themselves with a certain frolicsome joy into the work of war relief and toed conservation. We are glad that Mrs Barr has done this thing, but we Could wish that she were better equipped with an adequate vocabulary. She is too lovely and. gentle for a task of this kind She has not oven heard of the right words. What we need is tne terminology of the bucko mate and tho stevedore. These noble women, says Mrs Barr, have been told that they must conserve our food resources, and to this end they have been advised to “plant garden patches.” Now, when a woman starts on. a job her first thought is. not how to do the job, but what to wear while doing it. For her all human activities are reduced to terms of costume. And so here we have a list taken from a current newspaper of the things that a woman must have if she would “plant a garden patch”: Dole. Three hats at SO cents each 1-60 Six blouses at Idol, each 6.00 Two pairs of blue serge bloomers at Sdols. each 10.00 Two pair blue serge skirts at sdols. each 10.00 Two red silk ties at SO cents each 1.00 Stockings 4-00 Shoes 20-00 Underwear - 20.00 Sweater 6-9® Coat —IO.OO Extras - 2-K> Total 90.00 Her costume alone is to cost 90dol, that is to say at least ten times more than the value of all the ridiculous radishes and comic lettuces that the patch could possibly produce. Mrs Barr says that she has not yet heard of a costume for planting garden patches that costs less than 50dol. And then these fantastic women run around babbling of saving the country, and the newspapers -print their pictures, and the pictures of the garden patch, and pictures of the resulting radish, with their own fawning and slavering comments. Here is another woman who i* B 0 intent on saving the country that sho discharges her gardener and then spends more on a pair of “garden shoes for herself than, she would Bav® paid for him for tho entire season. Mrs Barr has something to say about slogans. How sick we are of slogans. Nothing, it seems, can bo done without a slogan. “Carry your groceries-.home,” says Mrs Barr, Is a sensible slogan. ■ It is f° r sensible people, hut not when at implies the purchase of a specially-constructed market basket for lOdoL It is a beautiful thing, continues Mrs Barr, to see a woman knitting for tho Bed Cross, but one’s enthusiasm is. somewhat tempered by the revealed fact that she gave Idol, for a bag to carry her knitting in. Why not carry the knitting in a brown paper hag and give the 7dol. to tho Bed Cross? Even then it seems a pity to spoil a good brown paper bag over such knitting as that. . There is more double-distilled, concontra ted, triple-expansion, four-cylin-der humbug over relief work by society women than is to be found elsewhere under the canopy, of heaven. Nino times out of ten it is a mere excuse for self-display, for pleasure, and for vanity. Women who could draw cheques that would relieve the unbearable misery of a thousand families and who would never even know, that they had spent the money are found knitting unwearablo stockings, cultivating ridiculous garden patches at immense expense, organising elaborate devices for extracting nickels and dimes from poor people, for which they and not the poor people will get the credit, and screaming their activities, to high heaven. They’arc spread like a miasma over civilisation., Wherever tho moving-picture man is to bo found, there are they, too, openly and brazenly posing, posturing and pretending. And the women who are doing the real relief work, many of them great aristocrats. are never even heard of. They are under fire, hidden away in, reeking hospitals, hedged in with abominations, dreading the publicity and the decorations for which the poseurs would «0 willingly pledge their infusorial souls