DOMESTIC LIFE IN AMERICA

Evening Star, Issue 19411, 20 November 1926, Page 21

DOMESTIC LIFE IN AMERICA

' The average American woman is as quick to take opportunity as her husband, and she is as much an expert at ‘her own job. Therefore, high wages and a cost of living that is proportionately low are not the only reasons for her prosperity. First of all, she is a joint householder with her husband, for American life is a ladder which man and wife climb together. As. soon as the worker rises above his pound a day, with which most operatives start, he borrows from the bank on the security of his own career and builds his first frame-house under a mortgage, which he pays olt as ho climbs towards success. So, from the very beginning, his wife has something permanent jjnd personal in her ciarge. She is the spendingpower in the home. The responsibility of the budget belongs to the woman, and she takes it seriously. Scores of college girls study domestic economy “ Every woman has got to be an economist. How else is she going to get J:he most out of things?” said one lovely creature _ of nineteen, engaged to a budding engineer. American life is just as co-operative as American business ; and in her budgeting and housekeeping the wife has the Kelp of experts. Most of the big drapers give free dressmaking lessons, and the grocers run courses on “ home economy while a dojen newspapers and periodicals publish weekly budgets, proportioned on a sliding scale according to income. Every advertisement urges the advantages of quality and suitability rather than_ cheapness: and since no class, financial or social, is permanent in America, and a man’s opportunties are only limited by his powers of work, the wife has no reason to bo tempted by cheap show. I In the States life is an investment rather than a speculation, and there is : very little make-believe. No house-1 wife wilb»buy_ oilcloth masquerading as j marble, rabbit dyed like sable, paste, pretending to be diamonds; because, with unlimited confidence in her bus- i band’s career, she hopes some day she may possess the originals. I In my pilgrimage round the factory towns of the Middle West, which is the | most typical section of America, I met j many young women; whose husbands 'must have been earning anything from £I,OOO to £2,000 a year as salesmen, accountants, railwayman, architects, ad- | vertising agents, and so on (writes Rosita Forbes, the famous woman explorer, in the ‘Weekly Dispatch,’ on her return from a recent tour of America).