IS WOMAN'S PLAGE IN HOME?

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 162, 11 July 1925, Page 26

IS WOMAN'S PLAGE IN HOME?

The name of Rebecca West, writes our !London correspondent, is one widely known in the literary world, but little in that larger circle where best sellers rank as literature. With only two novels to her credit, "The Return of the Soldier,"' and "The Judge," she established herself at once in the front rank. a place she had a right to as far back as suffrage days, when her brilliant dramatic and literary articles caused London editors to go about asking, "Who is Rebecca West?" Brilliant as she is with her pen, Rebecca West is equally so on the platform, and it is not to be wondered at that her recent successful tour in the States is being followed up by entrepreneurs who st>ek to secure her for lecture series even as far oil' as Japan. Australia and New Zealand. For Miss West has, in addition to wit and the highest literary quality, personality, a voice which charms, and a clear deliver}', which delights an audience. It was therefore the height of temerity on the part of Mr. Duff Cooper to challenge Miss West to a wordy battle on the platform, when, in aid of King Edward's Hospital Fund, they debated "Is Woman's Place in the Home?" even if Lady Diana Cooper accompanied him on the platform in support of lii__ thesis that it was. There was a crowded audience, and many of the cheap seats were sold at the price of the higher ones, and none present, we think, were dissatisfied at the value they got for their money. Miss West began a brilliant argument in which, while not denying that woman's place is the home, and must continue to be so, pleaded for the throwing freely open to those women as are condemned not to have a home—that is, a husband and a family—every opportunity to carry on that calling for which they find themselves most fitted. "A curious change has come over the male species," she declared. "They like the home, and they are becoming more like women in the way they address you. I don't think these modern trousers

really do mean anything very profound, because I have known women, quite often, so feminine that they wanted to wear the skirt, but I never came across a woman who wanted to wear two skirts—which is practically what the Oxford trousers are." She maintained that "woman is not at war with her primitive self, for her main task is still to look after men and children, but that mon. who in primitive times developed courage and initiative have now little use for these qualities, and therefore they were at war with their primitive selves, and tended to become unstable and hysterical." She declared that men most admire those characters like themselves, and adduced the entertaining theory that nearly all men admire Napoleon because he was a colossal failure—because, at his death not only had he lost everything •but he had shorn his country of all its power. "Virile failure is the symbol of the career of man," she continued. "You will get that in modern politicians. Who is the most popular politician? Winston Churchill, who keeps on being popular, no matter what he does. One can hardly think of a Cabinet of any party that would not include Mr. Churchill. That is because he has been so wretched a failure in everything he has done. "I am surprised that there has not been a riot over the scanelalous way in which Mr. Churchill proposes to give pensions to widows, but the House of Commons has taken it lying down. Has ever anything been so absurd as the pensions proposed for 'childless widows?' By having a quick, fatal effect on a husband, the widow is to get 10/ a week. "He wants to go back to the home, and I do think really we ought not to oppose him. If men want to go back to the home we should be sympathetic to them. The species has changed enormously, and there is going to be a further change in that direction very soon. Men have been running the world for centuries, but woman is seen to be a more 6atisfactory article than man." Mr. Duff Cooper, M.P., who claims the double distinction of being the husband of Lady Diana—a lady in her own right and a Manners born—and of having in our new Parliament made a fine maiden speech, discreetly pleaded his responsibility as an M.P. as his excuse fc-ia following Miss West in her excur-

sions into politics. He argued that there was a fundamental difference between men nnd women, that failure to recognise this produced much of the trouble in the world, lie went so far as to assert that women could best exercise their literary and artistic talent in the home, instancing Jane Austen, who, he said, within the limits of her narrow circumstances, found material for five masterpieces. A woman's abilities, he declared, found their host outlet in the home—in cooking, caring for children, and making it ready for her husband when be came home tired. Instead of this tlie modern husband is at night dragged out to eat in some public place, to night clubs too crowded to dance in, and rso noisy that one cannot talk. In the second round of the debate Miss West took up the gauntlet on behalf of Jane Austen, who had thrown the most searching light on men to be found in literature. Her place might have been the homo, she said, but her spirit did not remain there. 111-. Duff Cooper, in reply, said that so long as woman remained at home he did not care where she kept her spirit. He was, he said, all in favour of women enjoying themselves according to their bent. "But," he said, "when Miss West goes so far as to say that it is a proof of feminity that we wear two skirts, then one remembers the abomination of the hobble skirt, which almost prevented women walking at all—what was in fact one trouser."