Helping Women To Use The Rights They Gain

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30561, 2 October 1964, Page 2

Helping Women To Use The Rights They Gain

Teaching women in underdeveloped countries who had gained their rights to make use of them was as important as helping them to secure those rights, Miss Elizabeth ten Bruggen Cate, treasurer of the International Council of Women, said in Christchurch yesterday.

Groups of women in some of the new countries now took an important part in the running of their countries. “They have won their rights, but they must learn to use them,” she said. One important function of the I.C.W. was to give them an opportunity to learn.

There had been a change in emphasis in the work of the International Council over the year, Miss ten Bruggen Cate said. “When it was founded its main purpose was to secure rights for women in underprivileged countries; now it also works to further the cooperation of women in all countries, teaching them to know and appreciate each other, and to make women’s voices heard in international affairs,” she said.

“When women come together, they can find out what they have in common—not only what difficulties lie between them.”

On women’s ability to make their opinion and beliefs heard, she said: “For ever and ever women have been influencing men. They will keep on doing it.” Miss ten Bruggen Cate, who is Dutch, has taken a deep and active interest in women’s organisations in the years since the Second World War. From 1944 to 1947 she was secretary to The Hague branch of the Women’s Voluntary Service, and from 1960 to this year, the federation secretary of this organisation. From 1947 to 1958 she was secretary to an organisation for the protection of unmarried mothers and their children; from 1951 to 1960 she was president of the National Council of Women of the Netherlands, and vice-president of the Dutch Women’s Committee. She has been treasurer of the International Council for the last seven years. Miss ten Bruggen Cate is a member of the Dutch branch of the International Federation of University Women. Although she originally studied law at the University of Lieden, she never practised. “But my niece, who studied law, is practising,” she said. Round The World Miss ten Bruggen Cate, who will spend two weeks in New Zealand, is visiting national councils of women in manv countries in a three-and-a-half month tour that is taking her round the world. Today in Christchurch she will address a luncheon being given in her honour by the Christchurch branch of N.C.W. and next week she will be in Hamilton for the Dominion conference of the New Zealand council. On her way to New Zealand Miss ten Bruggen Cate attended the Pan Pacific and South-east Asia Women’s Association’s conference in Tonga, and a regional N.C.W. seminar in Brisbane. She will go to Australia to visit state N.C.W. meetings before going on to councils in Thailand, Pakistan, Iran and the Lebanon.