WORKING WIVES—II Common sense valuable asset

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32801, 29 December 1971, Page 5

WORKING WIVES—II Common sense valuable asset

(By

STELLA BRUCE) x

LONDON. Most evenings last winter, a welding-plant foreman, Mr Reg Millard, sat watching television in the living-room while his wife, Penny, was hard at work at the kitchen sink. She was not washing the dishes, however. She was experimenting with a formula for making soap.

And after six months she was able to go to her employer, a Birmingham soap and detergent manufacturer, and suggest an improved mixing process. Her time and trouble have now been rewarded with a cheque for -almost £lOOO.

i .This helps to prove what (employers have suspected fot some time that when the ■average wife goes to work, Ishe takes her job far more I seriously than her husband ( takes his. . | “The money is marvellous’ |of course, but what I’ve done (gives me more satisfaction,” Mrs Millard said. “I’ve proved to myself that 1 could do something that had been baffling men for years. MAIN DIFFERENCE “I came up with the idea when I was doing the washing at home. Reg is pleased about the money, but he can’t understand why I think about work in my own time.” This, according to management consultants, is the main difference between working husbands and working wives. “A married woman usually

t works partly for the money but primarily for the interest and independence a job brings. So no wonder, she’s interested in what she does.” In Britain, 35 per cent of wives are back at work within a year of getting married, and 70 per cent return within four years. And all of them are welcome. “COMMON SENSE”

“Common sense is the thing wives, as a race, seem to have more of than anyone else,” says the personnel officer of a factory employing 900 women. “It hasn’t much to do with brilliance or intellect—but it’s more valuable.” For instance, it was a wife who recently came up with a common-sense idea to stop high-speed conveyor belts fraying at the edges. She painted them with hail polish, and was awarded a prize of £2OOO. It was a wife working in a shoe factory who was awarded £7OO for suggesting several ways of improving efficiency. It was a wife who walked into the boss’s office one day saying: “The job I’m doing is just silly. I’m wasting too much time.” Of course, men had been doing' it for years without complaint. MALE PREJUDICE Her employer listened to |ier idea for stepping up production on her machine, liked it, and gave her a £6O bonus. It was a wife who came up with an idea for preventing glue from staining plastic used in car interiors, and her method is now saving the firm involved more than £5OOO a year. For its inventor, a middle-aged woman, it has meant a houseful of new furniture and a trip to America to see her married daughter. Although countless, wives are ready and willing to take on responsible jobs, male prejudice remains. Mrs Joyce Butler, a British Labour member of Parliament and a staunch fighter of discrimination against women, says that there is still the idea that training a woman for a job is a waste of time as she will later marry and have children. As Mrs Butler says: “The time taken out of a working life to < have a family is getting shorter and shorter. Today the economy would probably fall down without our efforts.” But that does not prevent husbands of working wives from sometimes wondering if there isn’t something'in that old slogan, “a woman’s place is in the home,” which their forefathers intoned so regularly.