FEMINIST FORUM.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 242, 12 October 1929, Page 4 (Supplement)

FEMINIST FORUM.

"SHUT OUT FROM LIFE'S ; BEST." REJECTION OF "PROTECTION." : (By a Feuilnist Correspondent.) One would have, imagined that at' this time of day the feminist, would have been content with what she has gained. But, like those mentioned in the adage about ah inch and an ell, she is not satisfied. Here, for example, we have one of our new women M.P.'s declaring that most girls are shut of ..the best:of life, and calling for some thing to be done about it. Miss Hamilton, ~-' member of Parliament and novelist, has been contributing an article to a series intended to advise parents.

On what is the girl leaving school trying to make up her mind? she asks. The vast majority of the girls actually leaving school do so round about the age, not of 18, but of 14. At 14 they are expected in some way or other to help but the family budget. . . . The "average" girl of 18 is already a wageearner, committed to drudgery in which there is little intrinsic interest.

But it jvas the girl of 18 and her job in life that the editor of the "Standard" set Miss Hamilton to study. But she persisted in talking of the problem of the girl who left school at 14. • "It is, in fact, of those girls which I would fain impress," she says, "on the minority in the happier case of choosing over a wider range of possibilities what work they will prepare for, or if they will work at all. Because, in the last resort, the only advice worth giving to any of them is that given by Henry James to a young writer, 'to try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.' Studying Life. "I am not pleading," she goes on to say, "that every middle-class girl who leaves school should become an earnest social worker. Far from it. What I am suggesting is that, while complacency purchased by ignorance is a deadly form of self-stultification, the knowledge of what the life one shares -is really like is, whatever jt may cost, the secret of interest and of an interest that can g»"ow as one grows; and

also that it is a shaft of light into the truth that the opportunity of knowing, of seeing, of hearing, of taking in the whole range of artistic values is one's personal passport to .satisfaction." Miss Hamilton's article comes at the moment when those whose business is what we now call "vocational control*" and -parents with children leaving school,. are rightly incited to. think of the subject from a higher plane than that of mere worldly success. Her reminder that girls—the majority—are still shut out from the best, sets us to further thought, in what direction are rights already theirs being:_ snatched from them. For that very reason the Open Door Council has been formed, and it has much to do seeing that Avomen teachers are being dismissed on marriage, restrictions are being placed on their employment in certain industries, notably painting, and a new Factories Bill seeks to impose new restrictions on women workers, while the International Labour Office is pressing for restrictive legislation which would turn certain lines of work into monopolies for men. The Open Door Council, too, is taking note of the i.L.O.'s proposals to reduce the hours of labour for women in Japan, and the council is impressed by the fact that these measures, which it regards as reactionary, are the work of a body on which women are quite inade quately represented. That the O.D.C. should object to these measures on behalf of women strikes the unthinking as being almost stupid. Why should women oppose legislation intended to protect them from being overworked or sweated? The O.D.C.'s motto is that bad conditions should be opposed, no matter what the sex of the worker. They object to so-called "protective"; legislation in toto. Its object is "to secure that a woman, should be free to work and protected as a worker on the same terms as a man, and that legislation and regulations dealing with conditions and hours, payment, entry and training shall be based upon the nature of the work and not upon the sex of the worker." This certainly is the most controversial object in the whole programme of post-war feminism.