WOMEN"-IN BUSINESS

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 29, 3 August 1927, Page 13

WOMEN"-IN BUSINESS

AMERICAN CONDITIONS

That the English business woman has in some directions made greater progress than her American : sister was the view expressed by Miss E. M. Kennedy, the director of an engineering firm, in the course of a lecture on her visits to America which she gave at a recent meeting of the "Women's Engineering Society, says a London writer. She instanced her own profession, in which women have succeeded in. getting to the top more frequently, in this country than in America. There was scope tor ; American business women in the organising and drawing departments of the big engineering works, Miss Kennedy stated, but not so much on the practical side. In. the great drapery and general stores and in restaurants a number of women had got to the top in America; In some cases they practically ran the whole organisation, and were paid fabulous salaries. Many American men were unwilling that their women should., do anything, and the prosperous conditions very often rendered it unnecessary. In a great many English businesses, girls earned promotion after having gone through the rough and tumble of an office, but American girls did not have the same chance, and they were treated with excessive courtesy. It was quite a common thing for American girls to carry on with_ office work after marriage.; , America always struck her as being a paradise for women. The-homes were ailed with really beautiful things. American women did not crowd their houses a3 English women did, partly because they had not got the heirlooms we had., They furnished with the very latest things. In England, if a better electrical cleaner came on the market, the housewife said, "I gave twenty guineas for mine, and it has got to do me. The American woman's attitude was that if the new machine could do the work better, the old one should be replaced. On the maid's day out in an American home the mistress did not; set to as she does here." She asked her husband to take the family out to a restaurant. ' Owing to their servant problem, which was worse than ours, Americans did a great amount of entertaining out. The' American bathrooms were perfectly delightful. Factories, homes, and hotels were all fitted with bathrooms on the most lavish scale, London West-end crowds at their worst, she remarked, did not compare with the Crowds in the New York shopping centres.