WHAT WOMEN HAVE DONE WITH THEIR FREEDOM

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 124, 19 February 1938, Page 6 (Supplement)

WHAT WOMEN HAVE DONE WITH THEIR FREEDOM

The Results Of Twenty Years

In 1918 women were given a vote. Only five years earlier they had been imprisoned for militantly asking for it. In 1938—how do they stand? asks Constance Waller in the “Sunday Express.’’

What have women done with the freedom heroically won for them by a legion of magnificently spirited and gifted pioneers? How much better off is England, and are women, for their having got what they wanted? At the beginning of the century ISO out of every 1000 babies died before the age of twelve months. In 1936 fifty-nine per 1000 died. In 1913 the Deptford Health Centre issued a report in which it stated that among 230 children examined only one in nineteen had a straight back. One-third of them were deformed. Few children had not either bandy legs or knock knees.

A child with bandy legs or knock knees is a rare sight nowadays. Why have these tremendous improvements—tremendous in view of the short time —come about? They have happened because women of all classes have been given knowledge. The advanced women have made it their business to see that they were given it. Babies are well born today.

Nursery schools are generally recognised now as an excellent institution. Margaret McMillan was reviled and had bricks thrown at her when she opened the first open-air nursery school.

Workers in the badly paid trades today thank Heaven for the Trade Boards, Government protection against sweating and near-slavery. It was an exhibition of goods made bv sweated labour, organised by Mary MacArthur, that led to the Trade Boards Act.

Mary MacArthur was the greatest leader' of women in industry there has ever been, she was forty when she died in 1921.

One striking thing about the great women fighters and leaders is their

you tin Margaret McMillan, it was said had

the tongue of an angel. Dr. Louisa Martindale, who has been one of the most brilliant surgeons i for many years, is a little slip of ’ a woman, utterly feminine to look at. witli tiny white, beautiful

hands. Mrs. Corbett Ashby, one of the greatest organisers of women’s movements to-day, would focus attention in any room by reason of the charm she radiates. The two sisters —Doris and Muriel Lester —who have given up their lives to making a centre of help and education for poor people and children in Bow are pretty and delightful women. Octavia Hill, patron saint of housing reformers, was a good-looking girl in a well-to-do home when she started prying among the slums of Marylebone. She found hovels more insanitary,

more verminous than our worst today.

She cleaned them up. bought a small property and remade it into respectable dwellings. Every week she collected the rents herself, promised the tenants that a percentage of the rent would be set aside for repairs. If they kept the house carefully and repairs were not needed she would spend the money on any improvements they wanted.

In that way, and by the force of her character and charm she made good tenants.

From her early campaigning grew the Octavia Hili system of housing estate management, the pattern today.

There is a gay, lively young woman in an office-flat in Hanover Square whose profession is housing consultant.

Elizabeth Denby’s passion is the proper housing of the poor. She detests the modern housing estate with its bleak unsociability. She wants estates for even the poorest ]>eople to have swimming pools, indoor and outdoor games centres, restaurants, entertainment halls, nursery schools, and narrow roads banned to fast traffic.

She has planned two estates so far with great success, and will be working on one for the London County Council shortly. Her models will be copied. In medicine they have triumphed. Women doctors are accepted everywhere.

In the law progress has been slow. They had a bitter fight Io be admitted as barristers, and they are having a long wait to win equal recognition with men.

In the world of commerce women tire well on their feet. There is no prejudice against them in the big stores, where they make excellent and highly paid buyers (and have a hard life). Quite a lot of women are in the big salary class in industry. Caroline Haslett runs her own electrical engineering company, employing and training girls, and is so cheerful ami merry about it that important people love to have her speak at their functions.

There is Mary Field, only British woman film director, Monica Maurice, director of a safety lamp company in Sheffield, and Mrs. Ella Gasking, also in Sheffield, head of a firm of canners. Miss Gordon Holmes has been a successful stockbroker for many years. Dora Green is head of one of the biggest calculating machine firms in the country. Florence Sangster is managing director of Crawford’s, one of the largest advertising agencies, Nora Miller is advertising manager of Edison and Swan. There is another field in whicli women are accepted without question on the same terms as men. There are hundreds of women scientists working in scientific research.