WAR-THE TEACHER

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 257, 18 July 1918, Page 2

WAR-THE TEACHER

Women everywhere are doing things which for years before were done by men alone (states a contributor' to the "Daily Mail").- They are also in increasing numbors doing more mid more of those things ivhich are usually considered peculiarly as woman's things. If the war has taught women to drive cars, make shells, plough fields, and become effective soldiers, it has also taught tlieni to cook nnd to sew.

I know of several girls in a Government office who spend their evenings in learning cookery. You would not describe them in tho least as domesticated. Most of them come from homes where the things of the house have always been done for them by well-trained, unobtrusive servants, or else from hostels and boardinghouscs : where they have not had to think in terms of cookery .or foodshopping.

1 asked one of these girls why she waß spending her spare time in learning how to boil cabbages and make potatoes look attractive.

"1 want to feel independent," sho said. "I expect to be married -shortly, and I should feel such a fool if my husband oame home suddenly on leave and I couldn't cook him - a decent, dinner. We. can't count on servantj theso days, and, anyway, if we could, I don't see how I could give orders to my cook without kifowing something about cookery. My work here has taught mo the folly of superintending work one doesn't understand."

Here was an. attitude, vastly different from that of the peace-time girl who drifted into marriage without the least conception of tho duties of housecraft. War work, whether it is work in an oflice or in a hospital or in a factory, isteaching women to bo businesslike'm;rt orderly. It is teaching them that if a thing has to be dono at all it is more pleasant and infinitely easier to do it well than to do it '.badly. And, aoova all, it is teaching women lo be self-de-pemlent, giving them tho desire to mako a success of whatever they undertake.

It is becoming clearer day by day that after-war homes will -have to be run very differently from the homes that existed in peace time. Simpler living will be the rule everywhere, ami simple living will mean that small homes will have to be as self-contained 1 in their household arrangements as they are selfcontained in architectural design. • And because every woman worker hopes lo have a home of her own, whether it is tho home of happy marriage or happy bachelorhood, you find girls everywhere to-day learning how to do the things of the house, how lo mako simple dishes, how to buy to the best advantage, how to mend and make their clothes.

When you seo.a girl motor-car driver tearing along the streets in mannish clothes and with a set, grim expression do not talk about the nnfeniinising of our women. See her ralher nl night, when she gets to her little home, as happy as a child as site stands near the chniiug-dish making "something for dinner." 'The war woman, just hecaise she is a war woman, is more than ever the home woman.