HOUSEWIVES ARE HUMAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 554, 3 February 1950, Page 5

HOUSEWIVES ARE HUMAN

Sir,-In her letter of December 16, Ruth France seems to have in mind the discussion by the Women’s Panel of a question that I submitted regarding the formation of a women’s party to provide members of Parliament to represent women only. She states that there is a movement on foot among women’s organisations to bring this about, but so far as I know this is not so. When I submitted the question to the panel I was acting entirely on my own account. I am not a member of any women’s organisations, and the idea of a women’s party in Parliament came to me out of the blue whilst listening to Parliament one morning. It seemed to me that our democratically elected members of Parliament are so hopelessly and muddleheadedly male that nothing in the way of progress can be expected from them. "These men," I thought, "have no ideas to sell, and no currency with which to buy ideas from others!" Their pompous utterances were filled with the masculine refusal to face up to facts. It seemed to me then, and it stifl\ seems to me in spite of Ruth France's plaintive animadversions, that what this country needs is a women’s party devoted to gaining a majority of elected representatives in Parliament so that the inglorious muddle made by a hundred years of man-rule could be cleaned up by the application. of feminine shrewdness and clear-headedness. Where — men blunder and bludgeon their way round the outskirts of a problem until they find themselves quite unintentionally involved in a strike or a war, women a a

cut cleanly to the heart of the problem with a ruthlessness that comes with the ability to recognise essential factors. It is from fear of this ability that men have attempted to hold women in subjection throughout recorded time and have been reluctant even in recent times to allow the so-called privileges of democracy to them. Some women make a show of pleading for equality with men as human: beings, and imagine that by this means they are raising the status of women; but in reality they are simply pleading for the continued subjection of women, They do not realise that men have always been ready to grant equality to women as human beings-provided the women did not seek equality as legislators, judiciaries, and administrators. It is exactly this withheld equality that the world needs, for without it I see no hope that the ramping nation states, jingling with the sentimental trappings of honour, sovereignty, and commercial advantage that men have decked them out in, may be curbed away from war and broken to the plough of world federation. Women have the power to subdue the pride of the nation states, because women do not believe in the things the nation states stand for. These things come from the childish imaginings of men, the vast majority of whom still want to play at soldiers or be king of the castle right on into senility, And in this you will find the reason for men’s fear of women’s ability to recognise essential factors in a given situation; they are afraid of having their toys: smashed. What is needed, as another New Zealand object-lesson to the world, is a party of independent women and a woman prime minister.

AGNES R

McLEOD

(Johnsonville

(Abridged: Ed: )