Personalities of the Month

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 261, 31 July 1937, Page 5 (Supplement)

Personalities of the Month

London Letter Contains News of Interesting Women

“Dominion” Special Service.—By Air Mall. London, July 9THE most prominent woman in Finland is at present in London. She is Madame Bella Wuolijoki, poet, playwright, farmer and industrialist, and she has come to England for the production of her play, “Woman of Property.” This amazingly versatile woman has been aptly described as a feminine dynamo. She was born in Estonia of a political family, and went to Helsingfors at the age of seventeen. Subsequently she married, and then went into the export business, in which she made a considerable sum of money. In 1918 she bought a sawmill and a farm and soon became a force to be reckoned with in the' timber world. She is also president of a large oil company. Her play has had a great run in Finland, but her ambition has always been to have a production on the English stage. The theme deals with the fundamental struggle of a man torn between the love of mother, wife and daughter. “If you don't want to get a “one track” mind you must' have either a career or a hobby, according to Miss Lena Madesin Phillips, president of the International Federation of Business - and Professional Women,- who has just paid a flying visit to this country from New York. Miss Phillips has devoted the past twenty years to improving the status of business and professional women. Quite apart from the desirability of women being trained to support themselves, sire told me, some sort of disciplinary vocational training develops in a girl qualities which were useful in any walk of life. The problem of the “spin • money" girl, who enters business to fill up the gap between leaving school and getting married, was one .which Miss Phillips found required to be tackled because such girls were in a sense a handicap to every sincere business woman. Miss Phillips approves of the combination of a business career and marriage, “but,” she says, “if a woman continues her business career after marriage she must be prepared to give

up part of her day to her children, and she should certainly be very careful not. to neglect her husband.” The description “appalling” to two dresses made by a West End firm for the British section of the Paris Exhibition has raised quite a furore among dress experts in London and Paris. It was Miss Irene Ward, Conservative M.P. for Wallsend, who threw the bombshell, and she followed It up by tabling a question in the House of Commons asking the Secretary to the Department of Overseas Trade to have them removed from the exhibition on the ground that they “fall far short of the high standard expected of British workmanship.” The dresses in question, which were designed for a Saville Row firm, were labelled “For evening wear in the country house.” In the view of Miss Ward one of the dresses was “beyond description” —“surmounted by a frightful yellow cut-away coat reminiscent of the hunting field." Foreigners, she added, went by “laughing and jeering at what they imagined to be a representative British fashion.” According to the manageress of the firm concerned the dresses were not intended to be the kind that might be worn at a West End function. They were designed especially for countryhouse wear and were intended as in expensive models for occasions when women did not wish to appear at the dinner table in the country elaborately dress. On the question of the cut-away coat she jo’ned issue with Miss Ward, declaring that it was nothing like a hunting jacket but was the sort of thing many women wear in England over simple evening dresses.