AMONG OURSELVES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 95, 23 April 1926, Page 13

AMONG OURSELVES.

A -WEEKLY BUDGET. (By CONSTANCE CLYDE.) WOMEN ACCOUNTANTS. Miss Jeanie M. Boyd is the first Australian woman to set herself up as public accountant, but for some years there have been many . such professional women employed by firms. It was only last year that the Federal Institute of Accountants allowed membership to women, though the Commonwealth Institute of Accountants had opened its doors in 1919. The total membership of the Federal Institute now throughout Australia is 2000, and of these, many are women. It is stated that the girls take no longer to master accountancy than do men, a girl . student, tieing with a man for first place in an examination set by the Federal Institute last November. A woman who has risen high in this career advises girls to take the work very strongly. "It is. not enough to understand figures; there must he a determination to master the details to which the figures Tefer." Some leading Melbourne firms employ women in preference to men, alleging that they are umch more thorough. An American writer adds a tribute of another kind, which seems to include women of other countries besides his own. "A woman's capacity for loyalty is so great that the business world often gives her position of trust without security, where men in.the same place would he bonded. The defaulting and absconding ' woman employee,is exceedingly rare." ADOPTION OF CHILDREN. The possible appointment of a woman magistrate to our own Juvenile Court lends interest to the English bill for the

adoption of children, the second reading of which was lately moved in the English Parliament. This bill should interest us as resembling our own, for some time on the Statute Book. There must be considerable difference in ages, according to the new English law—that is to say, if the adopter is, a man and the child is of the opposite sex. This new bill safeguards the rights of the adopting parents over the natural ones. No law, however, can compel adopting parents to he loyal to their self-imposed trust. Thus legislation could not have helped the little girl the other day whose foster-mother, disliking her after children unexpectedly came to herself, dispatched her at once to an institution. The real truth is that the law cannot count on the adopting parents having the same natural instincts as a true one. Under the proposed English Act the "Court may order the adopter to make adequate provision for the child," hut this again raises many difficulties. Because of these difficulties many are still opposed to such measures. British law has always been chary of taking away rights from the true parents.

SWISS WOMEN'S RIGHTS. Switzerland is a country of which we seldom hear, and even less frequently in connection with women's rights. As a rulß the smaller countries have been quicker to grant privileges in this direction than have the greater ones, but this is not so true, to-day as a few decades past. Of recent developments in this little land, however, we may note that the Grand Council of the Canton ol Waadt has unanimously recognised the right of women to suffrage and eligibility in industrial courts. This is the fourth canton to adopt this reform. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance News Service tells us that the Staatsrat of the Half-Canton Basle-land lias proposed to tho Grand Council that women should be given the franchise for educational, ecclesiastical, and welfare bodies.

THE OUTSTANDING DIFFICULTY. On the burning question of equal suffrage, the "Women's Leader" writes graphically: "The last lap of the suffrage movement some years ago was marked by the most hopeful characteristic that any woman can boast. It was marked hy the burning enthusiasm of the young. Young women Rewarded the meetings and carried the banners; Young women surrounded the militant leaders and followed them to prison. Still younger women hoisted the standards of revolt, in school and college. A girls' phibliC' school seethed with the question whether suffrage badges might; he worn in class. A London college was convulsed to its foundations over the election of the greatest of all suffrage leaders to the honorary presidency of its union.- If every woman over thirty had 'been swept away, then with a roar of fury and a cheer of confidence the young women would have leapt to the breech, and the movement would have swept forward—-ultimately to its samp inevitable end. Where are those young women now?" asks the writer.

'She answers z herself that many of them are now ..approaching early middleage, and that the young women who now

represent them are less enthusiastic, because already they have had so much given them. Even their easier attire is a help, as compared with the dress of quite recent times' "when the suffrage badge was pinned to a cumbrous coat and above a flopping skirt that was in itself a continuous reminder of the disadvantage of being born a woman. If such young women are to he moved en masse," the "Leader" goes on to say, "it is by an appeal to the imagination that they must be moved. For they are, the majority of them, at least, too young to be moved by an appeal to experience. That motive power comes later." Just what form an appeal to imagination must take possibly we shall hear any time. Once these younger women realise the discredit of an "imperfect franchise" they will probably he as enthusiastic as their predecessors. It is well known that an absolutely equal franchise was taken for granted by suffrage leaders, and I have myself heard some of tlie leading women declare that they "would not accept any other," meaning, of course, that they would continue demonstrating, as if nothing had been conceded.