FOR WOMEN LATE MARRIAGES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 308, 29 December 1944, Page 3

FOR WOMEN LATE MARRIAGES

EMPLOYMENT CUSTOM

EFFECT ON BIRTHRATE

Suggestions that the custom of employment which forbids marriage is having adverse ellects on the Australian birthrate are made in a report to tne National Medical Research Council by the Director of the Australian Council for Education Research, Dr. K. C. Cunningham. The report, which deals with the possibility of using education to increase the birth rate', says restrictions on marriage by employers operate chiefly against the better endowed members of the community. It was common for Government Departments to require women employees to resign on marriage. This meant later marriages, and fewer and more difficult births. "In Australia there are 15,000 women teachers employed at any one time by State Education Departments." Dr. Cunningham says. "It is probable that the number of children born to this group would be lower than that of any other considerable occupational group in the community. "So far as is known, no State education authority has ever given reasons Why women teachers must give up their positions on marriage. The mother should be in general more suitable as a teacher than is the spinster. The total addition to Australia's population through the removal of these restrictions would not be large, but it would be valuable." Dr. Cunningham adds that some institutions such as banks forbid their, junior male officers to marry. His report emphasises that the objective of an educational campaign on the population problem should not be so much to increase the number of births as to increase the births of the right kind of children. The little evidence available to indicate how effective an educational campaign would be was scarcely conducive to optimism. . Germany and Italy, adopting characteristic totalitarian methods, set out to boost the national birth rate. The German experiment suggested that deliberate attempts to raise the birth rate to its former level was much less potent than the "natural causes leading to its (decline. In Italy, after years of intensive work, the birth rate in 1930 was lower than when the campaign began.