Housewives' Panel

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 467, 4 June 1948, Page 8

Housewives' Panel

HE recent discussion "Should Housewives Adopt the Forty-Hour Week?" (2YA, May 17) resembled Claire Booth’s The Women only in having an all-female cast. With malice towards none the four participants put their heads together and after forty minutes of

concentrated confabulation came to the not surprising conclusion that the fortyhour week for housewives was neither possible nor desirable. But though the dicussion was not the means of dissolving any long-standing difficulties at any rate it made one point clear-that housewives as a whole are not over-conscious of the white woman’s burden (though Mrs. Gilmer put in a stout plea for household deliveries). With soul-search-ings in "keeping with the best traditions of the Oxford Group, members asked

themselves had they been guilty of doing more housework, than was strictly necessary, merely from sinful pride or from a desire to kowtow to convention? In martyring themselves thus had they tended to see to it that the rest of the household knew -of their martyrdom?

(Mrs. Parsons made the sensible suggestion that the sense of grievance many women laboured under was probably due to many nights of broken sleep getting up to Baby.) The panel seemed agreed that mothers of young children were over-worked, mothers of grown-up families only if they organised their chores badly; that housework wasn’t so bad in spots (e.g. shopping), but that even the good spots looked like bad ones if you could never get away from them; that community services would be a partial solution. What impressed me most about the discussion was its delightful informality, There was many a matey digression, which the chairman, wisely realising that masculine oar-putting would not be welcomed, largely ignored.