Work For Women

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 17, 20 October 1939, Page 16

Work For Women

N the course of a speech last week at the ib opening of a social room for the troops, ‘the Minister of Defence. said that such places would give women the opportunity so many of them were asking for to do some active war work. For this, hundreds of women will be grateful. But it is to be hoped that they will not misunderstand the position. The fact that they wish to play more than a passive part in the struggle is natural and reasonable. Apart from anything else, they have never before been so free to help. Families are smaller than they were twenty-five years ago, and houses very much more convenient. The woman who could give an hour a day to war work in 1914 can to-day give two or three hours. In addition, women feel to-day as they have not felt before that methods of war which threaten all make combatants of all. . But in spite of all this the kind of work that women can most usefully do is the same as it has always been. If the war drags on indefinitely some of the work now done by men will be done by women; but at present the men are here. It has to be remembered, too, that fifty men in the front line to-day are as effective as seventy-five men in 1918. The Empire is not short of men anywhere. It is short-as all peaceful nations must be when war begins-of the training and organisation that give those men their maximum fighting efficiency. The task of women is to supply the comforts that soften the hardships of camps and trenches and the cheerfulness that eases mental! anxiety. They are not asked merely to "stand and wait." There is definite work to be done which no one but women can do. But at this stage it does not mean farming and working in factories. It does not mean driving trams or ‘drilling or getting into uniforms. It means simply being mothers and sisters with busy hands and thoughtful but not worrying minds.