WOMEN’S INSTITUTES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 221, 14 June 1930, Page 20

WOMEN’S INSTITUTES

MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN. Since the formation of the first Women’s Institute, in 1915. in a small Anglesey village, the Women’s Institute movement has spread with astonishing rapidity in the villages of England and Wales. Because it is a country movement and concerns itself little with propaganda, remarkably little publicity has attended its development. The women’s institute, however, is now definitely recognised as an important factor in women’s education and in public life, and its annual meeting is regarded as the country women’s parliament. The National Federation of Women's Institutes now consists of 3845 institutes, and has a membership of over 230,000. The interests of the different institutes are many and varied —domestic matters, questions of social and public importance, child welfare work, agriculture, the various housewifery arts —these are only a few of the topics with which women’s institute members concern themselves.

A particularly significant milestone in the advance of the movement has now been reached. In 1920 the National Federation received from the Government a grant of £lO,OOO towards the general organising costs of the movement. Now the movement is independent of Government aid as regards general expenses, the institutes having themselves built up the income necessary to finance their own organisation. It is not too much to say that thei women’s institute movement has revolutionised life in country districts and given a new and absorbing interest to the hitherto dull and restricted lives of many women living in isolated parts of the country. MRS. STAPLES-BROWNE PRAISE BY “THE TIMES” The following appeared in the London “Times” :— “The sudden death at Oxford on Wednesday of Mrs. Staples-Browne at the. age of 55 will be a severe loss to all students of primitive religion and folklore, and to a wide circle of friends. Mrs. Staples-Browne was a full-blood Maori. After taking the regular anthropological course, in the University she was devoting her time at Oxford, where she was a member of the Society of Homestudents, to a complete exposition of Maori folk-lore and religious customs. The especial value of this work lay in the fact that it did not consist, as do so many similar works, of the scanty gleanings of an alien anthropologist, but was a history of a remarkable people written by one of themselves, who by her hereditary position knew all the traditional lore, and at the same time had studied Western methods of comparative anthropology. It is satisfactory to know that this, her life’s work, although not yet published, had received her final revision. “In addition to her literary work, Mrs. Staples-Browne had formed a large and valuable collection of objects illustrating Maori culture, and on rare occasions could be persuaded to use them as a background for a lecture or informal talk, an experience not easily forgotten by any who had the good fortune to be a member of her audience.”