STRONGER WOMEN

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 316, 29 March 1928, Page 8

STRONGER WOMEN

RESULT OF HARD WORK TALLER AND HEAVIER New investigations by the British Fatigue Research Board have furnished unexpected support for British feminism’s effort to advance beyond suffrage to “equal occupational rights.” The board has found from more than 4,000 examinations that the average factory woman is two inches taller, seventeen pounds better off in weight and has a, stronger grip and pull than the unemployed woman. Only the college girl is her physical superior. In British mills the average woman weighs 110 pounds, is five feet two inches in height, “has a puli of 183 pounds, a grip of fifty-eight pounds and a crush of fifty pounds.” Girls being schooled for the sedentary professions average six pounds heavier, an inch and a-half taller, and have thirty-two pounds more pull than the average woman in industry. Girls employed in a chemical works on a ten-hour day, the report said, “worked with ease, barefooted, shovelling twenty to twenty-five tons of borite daily; the mothers and grandmothers of many of these had done the same work before them." At a Midland brick works girls carry loads of bricks five pounds short of a hundredweight for a distance of seventy yards, and some wheel barrows of four hundredweight and over. “The good carriage of the girls was noticeable,” the report continued; “without exception their physique was remarkable.” The law’s protective clauses, excluding women from the paint trades because of the danger of lead poisoning and prohibiting the employment of them for night work, are all objected to. They appear to the feminists to be merely “substitutes for equal pay and opportunity.” This view has the support of Lord Balfour of Burleigh, who remarked in Parliament that “the humanitarian grounds put forward by trade unions were too often a camouflage for the desire to do away with women’b competition.” Thus the feminists point out that they are not pursuing further equalities because they are enamoured of hard or dangerous toil, but because they want a uniform treatment for workers.