German Girls and Dowries

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 31, 5 August 1933, Page 19

German Girls and Dowries

All over Germany young people are considering the Government's offer, announced recently, of a loan of £50 for buying furniture and other requisites, to couples who marry and set up house '(stages the "Daily Mail").There are some girls, however, who will not be tempted by the £20 to give up their jobs, and that is a condition of the offer if the husband is earning as much as £6 2s Gd a month. "Wo shall bo able to manage very well on what wo both earn," said one girl, "but if wo took this loan I should have to give up my work, and we should find it very diilicult to make" both ends meet." She thought it wiser to wait, until they had saved enough money to furnish a home. Now it is exactly that sort of .girl, whom the Government desires to get away from a job so as to make room for a man, and to turn her into a Hausfrau who will devote herself to cooking, cleaning, mending—and child- " "ONLY HIRE-PURCHASE." "It is only furnishing on the hirepurchaso system, for you have to pay back the loan," said another girl. That is true, but the Government will give long credit. Couples whose incomes are between £3 15s and £G 2s Gd a month will pay back 10s a month, taking more than eight years to pay oil1 the loan. "Marry or pa}'," says tho Government. The money to be handed over to happy couples is to bo taken from bachelors, spinsters, and widowed or divorced persons who have had no children, for all these persons will have to pay a special tax. ]3ut the bachelors are not to. bo rushed into matrimony. "It would co.^t a lot more to keep a wife than to pay the tax," said one. These incitements to marriage are partly duo to the Government's desire for more children in German)'. There arc more deaths than births" in Berlin, and the population in the country will begin to decline! if the birth-rate is not raised. Tho Ministry of the Interior has formed a committee to see how the quantity, and also tho quality, of the nation's children can be increased by imposing a suitablo law.