Feminist will keep up the fight

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32474, 8 December 1970, Page 7

Feminist will keep up the fight

"The Press" Special Service AUCKLAND. Professor Muriel Lloyd Prichard has had two lifetime passions. They are economics arid feminism—and she has fought for both with a gritty zeal.

She left her job as asso-ciate-professor of economic history at the University of Auckland last week. But she plans to carry on the fight. A tiny, greying .woman, Dr Prichard has battled against British entry into the European Economic Community and fought for women’s rights ever since she arrived at the university in 1960. She seems- puckishly amused by the stir she has caused over both issues. The issue that extracts the keenest reaction from Dr Prichard is women’s rights. But she is disappointed at the progress made in the last decade and puts this down to the personality of the New Zealand woman.

“Women’s apathy,” she says, “is as much to blame as male hostility.” She finds

the New Zealand female the gentlest woman she has ever met but doesn’t think this is going to help the cause much. “They don’t want the peace of the pond disturbed,” she said, and suggested that New Zealand wives will have to learn to fight a bit harder and argue a bit more before they even begin to topple men from the domestic pedestal. Australian women, she said, are much more aggressive. Speaking in her still marked southern Welsh accent, Dr Prichard said that New Zealand women must stand together if they really want equal rights and equal pay.

She cites without hesitation a running list of examples of modern-day female persecution by male superiors: The totally disproportionate number of women members of Parliament (“I’ll only be happy when there are 42 women M.P.s"), the rarity of women executives in business and industry, and the lack of sufficient women professors at the university. She speaks with nostalgia of a pre-war trip to the Soviet Union in a Soviet ship. The chief engineer was a woman, and so was one of the able seamen. When the engine broke down, the men on board were prepared to scoff —until the chief engineer fixed it. “You don’t have any of this inequality in the Soviet Union,” Dr Prichard said. She also reserves a few barbs for Mr T. E. Skinner, the Federation of Labour leader. He has done a lot for male wage-earners, but not much for women, she considers, in spite of the fact that a number of women figure in the F.O.L. membership. SUFFRAGETTE MOTHER Dr Prichard’s background was a blueprint for a feminist carer. Her mother, she said, was a staunch suffragette sympathiser and always believed that she was equal to any man. “She would have liked to have done more for women’s rights but I feel that she made a solid contribution by the way she raised

Dr Prichard’s father died when she was 12. They lived in the coal-mining district of Monmouthshire in the harsh days of the depression. “My mother insisted that all her children (two boys and two girls) have the same education.” And they did. Politicians and economists already know and try to avoid the rapier thrust of Dr Prichard’s intelligence on economic questions. She bristles at the thought of British sovereignty being undermined by a Western European decision-making apparatus, and repeatedly warns of its dangers. Her other economic hobbyhorse is inflation. She wonders at the stupidity of politicians, union leaders and employers alike. “They never try to work out whit’s causing inflation,” she said. “We have to go to the root of the trouble.” SEVERAL BOOKS Author of several books, including two due to be published on December 4 (“Economic History of New Zealand to 1939” and “Economic Practice in New Zealand—--1954-55 and 1967-68”), Dr Prichard points to a 25 per cent inflation in the last decade and predicts a 40 per cent inflation in the next! Dr Prichard has been a contributor to the literary page of “The Press” for several years. She will return to Britain and hopes to lecture at Edinburgh and settle there. She will also continue with research—and the push for women’s rights, At an age when most women are beginning to think of the fireside comforts, Dr Prichard is striking out once again. “In'England,” she said, “they-don’t make you retire until you’re 68.”