ASKING HUSBANDS FOR MONEY

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 104, 26 January 1939, Page 3

ASKING HUSBANDS FOR MONEY

“The day-to-day humiliations” which many married women in England experience in having to ask their husbands for money were denounced by Dr. Edith Summerskiil, M.P., at a meeting of the Married Women’s Association in London.

“The married woman, while she may have achieved political freedom, has a still harder task,” Dr. Summerskill declared. "She has yet to maintain her right to economic independence. “While a woman is doled out certain moneys by favour of her husband, to which she knows she has no legal right, so long will her dependence be reflected in her acts and thoughts. “Her whole manner of life will be dictated by her economic relationship to her husband. Her freedom of thought is shackled by the knowledge that her existence depends upon the pleasure of the one who controls the finances of her household.

"To the proud and independent woman the day-to-day humiliations which she experiences in asking for money prove unbearably irksome. But her pride will tend to make her closely guard the secret of .her unhappiness. "It is not cruelty, drunkenness, or even adultery which account for the greatest number of eases of domestic infelicity, but the resentment engendered in a wife by the knowledge of her complete dependence. “Wages for wives, apart from its equity, would be the surest way of bringing happiness into the home, adding dignity to household drudgery, and curing the neurotic woman, who eventually develop; into the nagging wife.”