NOT SUFFICIENT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 151, 28 June 1945, Page 3

NOT SUFFICIENT

WOMAN ON PEDESTAL "IT CAN BE A SHELF" "Women to-day might think that they are on the pedestal that womanhood deserves, but it might be well to consider that for practical purposes, a pedestal bears a close relationship to a shelf," said Miss Maisie Smith at a meeting of t the Women to Wellington Movement last evening. "It is not enough," she continued, "for women to be celebrated by poets and crooners, even on Mother's Day. For such sentiments to have any real value they should be followed by practical efforts in the form of housing schemes, community creches and such things." It was for women to-day, who looked forward to the post-war years, said Miss Smith, to take stock of women's position in society and to decide what contribution they had made in the past, whether it was their real contribution and, if not, albng what lines they should work for the future.

It was time for women to decide whether they had made any progress or whether their principal value was a source of frequently replaced labour.

With society as a whole geared to production of goods, women's particular qualities with regard to preserving human welfare had not been brought sufficiently into play. They were passing over to the schools, religious instruction, sex instruction, mothercraft, and all those other things so intimately bound up with emotion.

Women's education had been taken over from the pattern of men's and as yet there was no particular education to bring out the special qualities that were women's.

Women might well realise, concluded Miss Smith, that they must keep the practical issues before them and instead of entering the commercial and political world along the lines that men had conducted them, they might well play their own part in keeping before society the fact that human welfare was its main end and aim.