WOMAN'S PLACE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 235, 3 October 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

WOMAN'S PLACE.

PRESENT AND FUTURE.

"CAREERS" OR MOTHERHOOD?

(By EILEEN DUGGAN.)

An American called Betty Ross, for whom interviewing celebrities was evidently a labour of love, was by dint of doggedness, cajolery and influence able to canvass their opinions on many subjects and transmit tliom to the public in articles that could be read by all. Though much of it merely frisked in the joy of having secured audiences, her subsequent book yet contains, matter for the thoughtful, concerning the future of women and their place in the brave new world, which, one fears, is the same scared old world after all. When she asked Mr. H. G. Wells he said that, as he saw it, men and women would i/ccome more alike: from the point of view of occupation, conduct and morals, an assimilation of feminine and masculine life which can already be seen in the middle class, and he prophesied that motherhood will be only one phase of a woman's existence, lasting only fifteen years. Did he realise that her thoughts and her attitude to life might be hard to change? Motherhood is so strong a passion that it is like a prevailing wind that makes a tree lean towards the point to which it blows. But to continue. "Fewer women," he said, "will have children, and families will be limited in number. As science will minimise housework and cookery, it will at the ?ame time lengthen the span of human life —giving woman more and more leisure." And yet the pioneer women were a hardy strain with very little time for vapours and megrims. Is it not rather our danger that if every woman does brain work human muscles will atrophy like a kiwi's wings?

One Optimist Left. He added: "Before a tenth of our present-day possibilities of hope and happiness are used up, my generation is going to die. But, may be, before our grandchildren's time, a great wave of common sense will sweep over the world. Then they will find out how to buy homes on a community plan, as we do battleships." Some battleships are peaceful compared with previous experiments by pioneers on these lines. However, to give him his full say: "And there they will have all the abundant, delightful and healthful foods that could be grown now, were it not for bad distribution and petty trade." In other words, "and they lived happy ever after." There is at least one optimist left the world. One grave charge he brought against modern women. "There is no specific feminine thinking on the side of peace. Women have not brought anything special towards that end, and they seem to care little for all the efforts going on to create cosmopoli-

tan control that would banish war from the world." As to that, some at . least have risked the 'name of fanatic to appeal for peace; he is right that women seem unconscious of their full powers in this direction, but to make nationalism into patriotism will . exercise the energies of more than one generation. And Mahatma Gandhi. "Women," he said, in a brief talk, "will do something • better than office work. They will go to the fields—millions of them —and work with spades. Already I think they are on a par with their husbands because they cook and rear children. This is no fairy tale. It. is only when they go to the city that some of them become dolls. . . . It is my conviction that the natural task for men and women is to till Mother Earth and get from her -whatever ahe offers. With that will come the peace that comes from doing one's obvious duty and being content with it. You depend on externals for happiness—it must come from within. . . . And the art of rearing children is that of rearing the world. ... As children the things that guide our lives we learn from our mothers—not from servants. Yet today all that is left to hirelings. Selfsacrifice, the highest ideal that I know, I learned at my mother's knee." It is a far cry from Gandhi to Bernard Shaw. When she interviewed him the subject cropped up and he gave his mind with his usual decision. "The mother's duty is over when the child is born. Parents should let their children be. When they'are strong enough to stand alone, they must let them fly like birds from the nest." That is more Shavian in thought than in expression. "I remember," lie said, "talking this over with a great friend, Samuel Butler, the novelist. I said to him, 'Who is best suited to take care of children?' 'Anyone but their parents,' was his reply." It would be. " ' They coddle them—-try to shield and protect them from everything in life. This turns them into I perfectly useless human beings." The Moslem View. v . Then she asked the same question of King Feisal of Iraq. "Every woman;" he answered, "is part of humanity and should shoulder the responsibilities that are part of the lot of every individual. . . . In the past our women were' not educated, because of" the country's isolation until the war. • But those benighted days are over—we need them 1 for duties more important than management, nursing—in all the household arts that give a nation solidity. Their happiness should be in the home. Man also should seek for happiness there." ' His brother was even mpre reactionary: "If a woman turns her attention to a career how has she time to look after her children? That means they must be brought up by someone else who cannot do it as well. But why should a woman look for interest outside the home? Nature meant her to be a wife and mother. (Polygamy is practised in Transjordania.) . . . Either a woman marries and stays at home or else goes to business and stays single. ... A child is entirely what his mother makes him. She must bring him up carefully, so that he uay improve the race. That is why women's greatest work is not to be taken lightly."

Children v. Cheap Luxuries. Add to this medley of views those of Professor Julian Huxley and Professor J. 8..' S. Haldane. Professor Huxley gave it as his considered opinion that if things continue as they are at present America's birth rate before the year 2000 will be stationary. And so with England and t Germany. France is at a standstill now, he says, and it is interesting that lie does not blame women for the rapidly declining birth rate —at least not more, than the :nen. "The competition," lie said, "is between children and cheap luxuries, -In a world full of new pleasures—motor cars, radios, beauty parlours—children seem expensive. And education is so costly —especially in England. .. . It's up to the politicians! It's about time they began to think about this problem and determine how to regulate the size of the population. . . . The stock's going to degenerate! That brings us to society's next great problem—the conscious control of evolution and eugenics." His remedy is birth control •among those not fitted to be parents, and more parenthood among others. Professor Haldane attributed the declining birth rate of the white races partly to the overdoing of birth control and partly to various economic conditions. "Most Governments," he thinks, "will want to. do something about the dropping population, so they'll undoubtedly arrange some form of motherhood endowment. That'll be a. splendid thing, for at present mothers of large families are pretty badly exploited. They're doing a social service for the rest of the community—why shouldn't they be paid for it; receive some sort of subsidy . . . provided they come up to a certain standard in the way of health that would preclude the breeding of defectives."

East and West. , The b .°°k was interesting chiefly because it gave the opinions of East and West. The immobile East upheld toil for its physical value, and Gandhi, at least, would add, its spiritual value. The representatives that she chose in -the mobile West seemed to ask for mankind more leisure to enjoy the refinements of life. The East, which specialises in contemplation, seemed to see in such a passion for leisure the inertia of melancholy. All the Western representatives seemed to agree that the birthrate of the white races was declining, and yet some of them thought that child and mother were better apart. It did not seem to occur to them that by this separation they were assisting in the decline of the birth-rate, for if the instincts of motherhood disappear there will be still fewer births.

In this lightly written book a Jonathan Swift would find the theme of a mighty and mordant satire, for while the whites brood on the regulation of births to produce the perfect race, the coloured peoples, following the old unruly ways of earth itself, continue to breed unleisured millions, whose myriad menace the eugenic few. Many of those millions are mentally the equals of the white intellectuals, nor can it be said that Masaryk's ideal of a renaissance of character is peculiarly Western, for Gandhi spoke the same for the East when he uiid that peace is from within.