Of Interest to Women.

Digger (Invercargill RSA), Issue 4, 9 April 1920, Page 12

Of Interest to Women.

THE PROBLO/I OF DOMESTIC LABOUR. (Continued from April 1.)

Do we succeed then in liaving tlie work done satisfactorily and cheerfully in our homes ? In some homes, yes; but only in a minority if we look closely into the matter. There are doubtless numbers of houses kept as well as they can be kept, by energetic and capable women, not hampered by ill-health, but even in these, improvements rnight be effeeted and the standard of efficiency in maintained only at a heavy cost in nervous and muscular strength. There are also numberless homes where ill-health or incompetenee, c.r sloth, or some external circiimstance spells itself out from day to day in ineffective service, querulousness, sordedness, and dirt. The field of observation is so large, when we come to answer the question above propounded, the variety of conditions presented is so great that we must proceed methoaically to arrive at anything enlightening in the wav of an answer. Let us remembcr that there are, roughly speaking, three classes of homes those of tlie wage-earners, those ot the salaried and middle-class, and those of the wealthy. There are also town homes and cour.try homes. In Southland, perhaps in New Zealand, there is nothing to approach the gigantic wealth of other and older lands; we do not produce as yet millionaires and we hope we never will; but in our own degree we do possess a wealthy class, as distinct from the earners of salaries and

tlie small middle-class tradesman, as these in their turn are from the wage earner. Domestic problems reveal their urgency in the homes of the middle and lower classes ; but the conditions that produce them are fostered by the practice of the rich. The value of money to women is most often to procure for them relief from the drudgery of life, to enable them to live softly, eat daintily, and wear fine garments. Tlieir food and furniture are better than those of their neighbours, and they can hire other women to do the toilsome and uulovely work of the establisliment. Our economic conditions give them these material advantages irrespective of ' their merit or demerit. As long as those conditions obtain we must reckon with the fact; and not until we arrive at some means of securing a more equitable distribution of the world's wealth, can we hope for any fairer division of material comfort and refinement, any fairer sharing of leisure and recreation among married women. The inequalities existent among the homes, their necessary reflex in the life of the children, seem to me the most insistent call heard to-day for the drastic overhaul and amendment, if not revoluiion, of our economic and social structure. I do not think it necessary to dwell on the f all, on the evidence of the fact that in many homes, perhaps a majority, domestic labour is carried on under adverse conditions and is incfficiently performed. The observations of workers during the epidemic of 1918 showed the state of affairs to be worse than most comfortable people had dreamed. What we want to do is to examine the causes that produce, or the conditions that aggravate present evils. They seem to me to admit of clas.sification under two headings those pertainingito material things, conditions of hoiising, and appliances first ; second, those belonging to the character and capability of the workers. In the act.ual liouses we live in, we are only very slowly escapijig from the limitations and mistakes of the past; the women who have to work in our homes, are often handicapped by ignorance and traditional prejudice. Tlie first houses built in New Zealand were, as a rule, small and inconvenient. Some were mere shanties. Sueh houses were .put up for a generation and a half and they can still -be seen in various stages oi decay about our towns and countryside. As conditions improved for some people, they built . new homes, equipped with modern conveniences ; but the old dwellings are still lived in by the poorer cltiss, and until there is no one living in a house without bathroom or sink or proper drains, our civic conscience cannot be at rest. These old houses contiriue to do duty until they fall to pieces. May' they fall quickly. They ought to be systematically pulled down year by year and modern dwellings of a more solid and lasting structure put up in their place. And now for the ignorance and prejudice. The lore of house-keeping has been in the past traditional; daughter learned from mother what the latter had acquired from grandmother. Tlie tradition of. an elder and more leisurely generation, too, was often good, but its prejudices have stood in the way of many modern innovations tending to simplification and the saving of labour; while the. home as the

only place of domestic training was hopelessly inadequate for the simple reason that in many poor-class homes there was no domestic craft at all, only ignorance and incompetenee. It is to that ignorance and incompet1 ence in tlie homes from which domestic servants are drawn, and to the absence iii those homes of all modern conveniences and refinementSj that we owe the difficulty if not impossibility, of securing competent domestic hired labour; and the popular opinion that tacitly supposes all domestic work to be an inferior and degrading form of labour, espeeially when done for hire, is to blame for our having no otlier class of person offering for it. Our ideal commonwealth would lodge all its people in comfortable, convenient, and beautiiul homes ; it would train its domestic workers to keep these homes clean, orderly and beautiful ; it would so esteem and reward domestic service as to induce persons of good character and capacity to taka it up as a means of livelihood outside marriage; it would require of all women who married a standard of character and competency ; it would arrange all possible means of reducing by simplification and co-operation the burden of unnecessary work. In a word, it would [ cherish character and promote capability while it economised in time and energy. What can be done to bring this. ideal e\;en a little nearer ? In succeeding articles we shall try to indicate some practicable avenues of progress, those of symplifieation, co-operation, and training.