THE NEW WOMAN.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 14 March 1917, Page 6

THE NEW WOMAN.

CAPACITY AND ENDURANCE

" ' STRANGE LONDON TO-DAY. • LONDON, January 2. Great and permanent changes are occurring in the life of women in Great Britain. With four million young. men out of the country, there Lave been diminished prospects of marriage, and the ordinary social mixing of the sexes has been much lessened. • s This is a war sacrifice of real severity, and no woman will deny (if she i» e truthful) that the years of war have proved dreary. It is not, however, such a hardship as the mothers and wives, ever anxious about their menfolk, and in fully a million cases suffering because of casualties to their menfolk, have had to bear. With the young and able-bodied woman there has been the consolation, and in most cases the new interest, of work, For in industry it has been the 'woman’s year. In all directions new doors have been .opened. Women are now driving the Red Cross ambulances abroad. They drive also for the Munitions Department, the Army Service Corps, and the Royal Flying Corps, whilst the London County Council has staffed one of its husy ambulance stations with women orderlies and drivers, and the post office uses them for the mail vans. The girl conductor has long been the sole collector of fares on tranm and buses, and We have girl ticket collectors on all the railway stations. Women are taking charge of the railway signal boxes; they are acting as camp cooks at military depots, where at the beginning of the war .■ they had great difficulty in gaining access as cook instructresses. Long since the woman waitress took the place of the man at clubs and ' liotel and restaurants. The banks are full of women clerks; the Commonwealth Bank the other day was reduced by the recruiting officer to three males, one of whom has only a month’s further exemption. Women doctors are in great demand at the army hospitals in France. Women carpenters are being em-. ployed to make military huts. And in the munition works and shipyards the women labourers arte to be counted in their hundreds of thousands.