GERMAN GIRLS AND DOWRIES

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 August 1933, Page 10

GERMAN GIRLS AND DOWRIES

“ONLY HIRE PURCHASE.” All over Germany young people are considering the Government’s offer, announced recently, of a loan of £5O for buying furniture and other requisites, to couples who marry and set up house (states the “Daily Mail”). There are some girls, however, who will not be tempted by the £5O to give up their jobs, and that is a condition of the offer if the husband is earning as much as £6/2/6 a month. “We shall 1 be able to manage very well on what we both earn,” said one girl, “but if we took this loan I should have to give up my work, and we should find it very difficult to make both ends meet.” She thought it wiser to wait until they had saved enough money to furnish a house.

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 children.

“It is only furnishing on the hirepurchase 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 £3/15/- and £6/2/6 a month will pay back 10/- a month, taking more than eight years to pay off the loan.

“Marry or pay,” says the Government. The money to be handed over to happy couples' is to be 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. But the bachelors are not to be rushed into matrimony. “It would cost a lot more to keep a wife than to pay the tax,” said one.

These incitements to marriage are partly due to the Government’s desire for more children in Germany. There are more deaths than births in Berlin', and the population in the country will begin to decline if the birth-rate is not raised. The Ministry of the Interior has formed a committee to see how the quantity, and also the quality, of the nation’s children can be increased by imposing a suitable law.