Those Too-Conscientious Housewives

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 661, 13 May 1929, Page 5

Those Too-Conscientious Housewives

You will sometimes find that the ! very women you would most expect j alter marriage to keep alive the' varied interests of a wage-earning spinsterhood, are the first to let those J interests go. Conscientious workers i in their pre-marriage jobs, they bring I that conscientiousness to bear on unfamiliar duties. And to an exaggerated extent. Housewifery is not compatible with a fixed time-table and regularly recurrent periods of leisure, in a house where but casual domestic help can bo afforded. A young wife’s overconscientious pursuit of the myriad duties that can always be found within the domestic four walls may result in a complete collapse of what one may call the cultural side of life Over and over again I have heard thoroughly intelligent women, whose bright mentalities were the joy of many a little “hen-party” in their spinster days, lament that since marriage they can find practically no time at all for reading. The strict truth is that human nature can find time for anything it has a mind for, and that it is the will to read, not the time, that is lacking. Once let house-pride become a sort of monomania, and something has to go. That something is the mental breadth of outlook necessary to keep | in touch with life in the large. If these over-conscientious young ; housewives were completely happy in their new pot-and-pan enthusiasm, and the renunciation of wider re- j sources, there would be nothing to ( say. But happiness is obviously not i

Something Has to Go

I their portion. Simultaneously they ' I forgo their housewifery chains and J 'rebel against them. They set them- ; I selves impossible standards of burni ishing and polishing, domestically j speaking; then bewail their inability ; to keep their brains similarly polished j i and burnished. j "I'm no sort of companion for Jack j any more,” said one such young wife i to mo recently. ‘‘l’m just a house- ’ hold drudge.” And site was. Without. ! the smallest excuse for it. Her Jack j is the sort of man who marries a i comrade, not a row of housewifery * medals; and who would cheerfully eat carbonised chicken and leathery meringue if such accidents happened while he was telling his wife a particulary good story that made her temporarily oblivious of the cooking-stove. Most men, I fancy, would exchange specklessly gleaming furniture tor ideal wifely companionship! 13ut such powers of companionship are not fostered by dropping completely out of touch with the mutual interests of pre-marriage days, and those shared i enthusiasms that gave the one- | ; worn an-in-the-world her ideal-wife j I aura. j