WOMEN’S RIGHTS.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 339, 21 January 1937, Page 2

WOMEN’S RIGHTS.

Should Be Individualists, Says Dorothy Sayers. London, December 29. 1 Women have proved that they can unite as a class to gain recognition of their rights as a class, and the time has now come to insist on each woman’s and each man’s requirements as an individual person. This was the contention of Miss Dorothy Sayers, novelist, when addressing the London and National Society for Women’s Service here recently. Aggressiveness Decried. Miss Sayers went on to warn her audience against running into the error of having an aggressively feminine point of view about every subject which crops up. Though she agreed it had been necessary for women to unite for ‘‘their rights,” she felt to continue to put one class against another, women against men, was to split the foundations of the state.

Peace and democracy depend on the individual, she said, but classes and categories lead to a totalitarian state where no one is free to think or act except as in a category. When one hears that women have once more laid hands on something which was previously men’s special province, Miss Sayers said, one must ask is it something suitable for them, or are they adopting it merely because every man does 'it Home and Fsctory. Concerning the question of women doing men’s jobs, Miss Sayers said: ‘‘The only decent reason for tackling a job is that you want to do it and feel you are the person who can do it. In the Middle Ages the whole of the spinning industry, the dyeing industry, the weaving industry, the entire catering business, the canning industry, all the bacon curing, were in the home and done by women.

“But these ajid many other- women’s activities have been taken into factories under the direction of men. The home to which women are asked to return now contains a great deal less of interesting activity. It is, therefore, foolish to take away traditional occupations of the home and complain because women look for new ones.”