Feminine Interests

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 568, 22 January 1929, Page 5

Feminine Interests

Money-Making Wives

One of the time-honoured duties of the married woman has been the judicious spending of the money provided by her husband for the day-to-day requirements of the family. According to our still-existing standards of social behaviour, the model husband makes as much money as he can, while the model wife spends as little of it as possible. In the United States the expectations of the average husband are somewhat different. The American wife is required not so much to economise as to give the impression that the income which she manages is larger than it it. So widely have American husbands and wives separated the art of provision from that of expenditure that women now spend S 5 per cent, of America’s annual payroll of sixty-six billion dollars, and are said to hold SO per cent, of all the savings funds in the United States. Such facts as these tend to conceal front the world the extent to which, in both countries, the traditional married woman who spends her husband's income is being reas breadwinners.

placed by the money-making wife. The trained teacher, doctor, journalist, or business woman has ceased to contemplate with equanimity a lifelong economic dependence upon a spouse whose earning capacity may be less than her own. She is no longer willing to manage her home and bring up her children on an income exactly half that which would be forthcoming if she made use of her ability. No doubt she will always be society’s chief spender, but she is becoming also an earner to a degree that would horrify our dutiful and domesticated grandmother. Wage-earning Wives

Between IS9O and 1920 in the United States the proportion of married women working tor wages or salaries rose 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 are still considerably in excess of the workers, but nine married

women in every hundred are reported The majority of these two million wage-earning wives are, of course, still to be found in industry or in minor secretarial positions. Many are obliged to enter domestic service, though the American woman will avoid this type of work until she has tried everything else. But a small number, which increases every year, possess independently earned incomes which sound fantastic even to the successful business man. One such woman, Mrs. Irma Dell Eggleston, is a member of the New York Stock Exchange. A leading authority on Government securities in the United States, she is said to have traded in the last ten years the im-

mense total of £6,000,000 worth of Liberty 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 bi-ancli of business. In England there are no women on the Loudon Stock Exchange, and the tradition that a wife’s place is the home lingers longer in the mind of the British than of the American husband. Nevertheless, the English 1921 Census showed that out of every thousand women workers, 91 were married. Four and three-quarter million “occupied” women included nearly 700,000 wage-earning wives, not counting the 425,000 who had been widowed or divorced. Economics —and Adventure Most of these wives cannot be described in any romantic sense as

"money-making,” hut in a few fields, | such as advertising, wholesale busi- 1 ness, and the better-paid forms of | journalism, there are married women whose incomes run into four figures j and who are the owners of luxurious j cars. English women company j directors, many of them married, to- I day amount, to about 300, of whom j over fifty are on the boards of big business concerns. Now that the working wife has begun to be accepted as a matter of course in business and the profes-1 sions, it is unlikely that she will dis- j appear, for there are two reasons to account for her which are as old as society. The first of these reasons is purely 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 no philosophic theories of the ideal family life, unless accompanied by some radical economic reorganisation of industry, will bring them back to their homes.” The second 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 fur coats, like scented soap, are all to the good, for nothing so surely leads to selfrespect as the ability to pay from one’s own earnings for the 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 requ ires those special qualities of courage aud enterprise which women were never able to develop so long as only the lower posts in business and the professions were accessible to them. A Free Choice

Modern husbands are now beginning to realise that the self-confidence which comes from independently footing a dressmaker's bill, or from contributing half the funds needed for housekeeping, is quite as stimulating for a woman as for a man, and that the male preference for a financially helpless wife was rooted, not in chivalry, but in the old shameful notion of women as property.

The man who marries a woman worker has the satisfaction of knowing that she has chosen him of her own free will and for no ulterior economic motive. And it is impossible to believe that even the most possessive of men would not rather be loved as a companion than exploited as a meal-ticket.