SURPLUS WOMEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 May 1920, Page 6

SURPLUS WOMEN.

PLEA FOR CONSIDERATION'. What the "2,000,000 surplus women" think of marriage prospects and marriage laws may be gathered from speeches made on the subject at a meeting of the Women's Freedom League in London. "We are already on the high road to polygamy," said Mrs. H. W. Nevinson, who took the chair. "Doctors and Poor Law guardians know very well that we are not monogamists." Speaking of the surplus women, she said that the competition was unhealthy for those who wanted to be married, while It was also had for the men, who were run after too much. Although there was a tragedy hanging over these women, yet there were compensations for spinsters, "Every woman believes her husband will bo a warrior saint, nnd a happy warrior," she said. "If a spinster docs not marry she can retain that belief. Uer husband will still be a dream husband. While other women get drunkards and wife-beaters, she will keep her ideal!" "My dream husband at the age of ten was the Lord Mayor of London," confessed Miss Helena Normanton, the woman law # student, in a delightful talk on "A Spinster's Reflections on Marriage " '"I didn't know that the term of the Lord Mayor's office was only for a year," she added, "and, anyhow, my dream did not materialise." Persons who have recently spoken freely about the "unwanted" and "surplus" woman were taken severely to task. "It is time that the women of our nation tnade a dignified protest against this cruel and outrageous way of talking," said Miss Normanton. * "The unwanted women are those who were begged by our statesmen—if you care to call them so—to give up their men to fight for their country. Those young girls and widows who made the sacrifices are now termed superfluous and unwanted. "I am most sorry for the young girls in their early twenties who have only a memory to hold to during their arduous lives—little girls who just had the awakening of romance, nnd have only a photograph, a few letters, or some faded flowers to remind them of the past, and who have to look forwarfl to matoless lives and probably the dreary grind of daily work under" arduous clrcumstances." Nor must they encourage their menfolk to shut the gates of the labor market against them. Deprived of their right to maternity, something might yet be done, if the adoption laws were put on a reasonable basis, and it were made economically possible for these women to adopt some of the children now barracked and confined in homes.