WOMEN’S GUILD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 August 1941, Page 2

WOMEN’S GUILD

'INTERNATIONAL BODY. WORKING TO PROMOTE CO-OPERATION. According to a statement issued by the New Zealand Co-operative Women’s Guild, the International Co-op-erative Women's Guild, which was founded in 1921, in spite of lost affiliations in Europe, still has a membership exceeding a million. The bulletin issued by the guild, the statement adds, still reaches 18 countries. One of the tasks of the guild has been to awaken public interest in the manifold problems and difficulties of housewives —-still one of the most neglected sections in every country. The International Guild pul the housewives’ case before the League of Nations and other international bodies, showed how they were excluded from many social welfare schemes, and issued a Housewives' Programme setting out what the woman at home must demand from the community in order to improve her status. “The work done by the national guilds on such questions as nutrition, maternal and child welfare,” the statement continues, “provided material of great interest and value to the League of Nations in its special investigations, and in a number of countries guildswomen were appointed to the national nutrition committees set up on the league’s recommendation. Its active work in go many spheres won the guild a strong position in international circles, which was further strengthened by the fact that its president, Mrs Emmy Freundlich, was the only woman attending the 1927 World Economic Congress as representative of her Government. “Then, in Collaboration with the other big women’s organisations and with the most energetic and enthusiastic support from its national members, the International Guild strove to evolve a lasting peace from the armaments truce .which separated the last and the present war. Unhappily women did not achieve their goal, largely because they had not sufficient power to compel the putting into practice of the principles which alone could lay the foundations for a different and better world. The International Guild did issue a peace programme, and strove to win general support for its proposals, but things were already too far gone, and nothing could avert the catastrophe of another world conflict. But this has only made co-opera-tive women more determined to study all the problems presented by postwar reconstruction, and fortmulate a women’s reconstruction programme that, triumphing over tradition and personal interests, will pursue undeviatingly the road that will make world peace not just a vision but a living reality. And so for twenty years thousands of women have been working together in all parts of the world under the banner of the International Co-opera-tive Women’s Guild. Their aim: to build a world where mothers and children will know happiness and security, and the peoples live unthreatened by those political and economic crises that lead up to world war and total destruction. Women have a great mission: they must win the power to fulfil it.”