Stand-Up Clap

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 418, 27 June 1947, Page 13

Stand-Up Clap

HAVE heard nothing better in the morning talk line than the series on Ideal Home Life which concluded at 2YA last Friday with Violet MacMillan’s Art of Reading to Children. In fact, only the following "Story Behind the SongRobin Adair" restrained me from rushing out to pay my radio licence on the spot. Apart from the practical help offered by these talks, the A.C.E. deserves credit for the attempt to raise the status of the profession of housewife. Housewives as a class are tempted to look upon their occupation as a lowly one, to fill in Domestic Duties on the census paper as though it were synonymous with Unskilled Labour, to. exclude themselves wistfully from the ranks of Career Girls and Professional Women, This series of A.C.E. talks is based on the confident assumption that it takes an intelligent woman to be a homemaker, and that an intelligent woman is interested in homemaking as a profession, on its theoretical side as well as its practical side. She wants to be not only as good a cook as her husband’s mother but as necessary to her children’s mental and emotional development as Brick Bradford and Dorothy Dix. These talks have not only given the Woman in the Home direct guidance on specific topics, but have also reminded her that, as inf any other skilled occupation, reading, discussion, and eternal vigilance are necessary to keep abreast of modern developments.