WOMEN IN DENIMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 341, 4 January 1946, Page 7

WOMEN IN DENIMS

(Written for "The Listener’ by

HERD-TESTER

HE women of the fighting services are getting the praise due to them. For my part I present this inadequate praise to the outback dairy farm women, the women in denims, who carried on a service second only in importance to the fighting. I know that many of these women were often sorely tempted to pull out; many younger ones did; but the great majority stuck it out, without the glamour, without the limelight, without the social excitement attaching to the services. They carried on through all weathers, seven ~* a week, .sick or well. There is no absenteeism on pe understaffed dairy farm. Benzine restrictions and the migration of the young folk to the towns and services brought social life to a standstill, adding a dreariness that made life hard indeed, I give these few factual cases as being typical of almost all outback any farm life during the war vears.

A man, 63, and a wife, 60, milking 70 cows and feeding a large number of pigs. Two sons fighting and a daughter a hospital aid. Coming in at night too tired to prepare a meal. A cup of tea and a scone and to bed, A young mother crying over her 10 months baby at 4.30. on a cold wet morning as she took it from its cot to carry it to the cowshed half a mile away. Baby six hours a day in the cowshed for three years, a cruel anguish for the overworked mother. A frailish wife managing 45 cows while her husband is overseas, her only help an eight-year-old son. Swinging @ brute of a diesel engine to life twice.a day. On cold mornings, when the engine

refused to start, milking the 45 cows by hand, Each morning stopping everything at the shed to run back to the house to see to the children and start their breakfast so they could get away to school. Then back to the shed. Never telling her husband she was without help because it would worry him. And the results? The production results, I mean, not their physical and mental results. The returns from a farm run solely by a man and wife both over 50 show that in 1943 \they produced enough butterfat to give 650 workers eight ounces of butter a week for a year; 15 persons 1 pound of meat a-.week for one year; 20 persons two pounds of mutton a week for a year; and calves to make 1,600 eight ounce jars of meat paste. As the meat weights are the dressed weights, there were also the skins, the hides, and the tallow. And behind the production always a woman: for when the woman quits, the man quits also. Women in denims, unromantic, unhonoured, deplorably tired, but they stuck to it. : Thank God they did.