FARMING FOR WOMEN

Hawera Star, Volume L, 4 March 1931, Page 5

FARMING FOR WOMEN

FIELD IN GREIAT BRITAIN

ABSORPTION OF UNEMPLOYED. The wave of unemployment, as it particularly affects the women of Great Britain, is causing, no little anxiety to those Who watched the figures climb from 200,000 in the autumn of 3929 to nearly 600,000 in the autumn of . 1930. On a.'U sides, therefore, practicallyminded women are setting themselves the task; of devising schemes to ease a situation which, according to those in authority, presents perhaps the most difficult phase of the whole, unemployment tangle, in that the ordinary avenues of relief work laid down for men do not appear applicable to, women and girls. “The main fact to be grasped in listening to the many opinions and suggestions put forward,” said Airs Margaret Wintringham, in talking of the problem with a representative of “The Christian Science Monitor” in London during November “is the fact that, so far as women are concerned, we are dealing with a great body of people who, in all probability, are never going to regain their old work.

I’jmtMiANENT I’i.ANS NEIHDED “For this reason it is imperative that whatever schemes are adopted shall be adopted not because they are going to offer a temporary palliative, but because they show possibilities of developing a character that will be permanently constructive. ’ ’ Mrs Wintringham is an expert upon aIL questions which concern the land, and she holds firmly to the belief that in agriculture—“not merely in wheat growing, of course, hut in some of the 50 branches of which agriculture is made up”—lies a, great promise of better things.

At the moment, she explains, some £409,000,000 worth of food is imported every year into Great Britain, of which almost -half could, with adequate organisation, be produced instead in this country. Of this half, the major part is composed of that provided by the smaller lines of agriculture—buttermaking, vegetable growing, poultry and pig-keeping and the 'like.

MANY ALREADY EMPLOYED

“Take into consideration,” she says, “the fact that agriculture already absorbs 63,090 regular and 42,000 casual women workers, which means that it holds third) place as an employer of women’s labour, ‘being smaller only than the textile and metal industries —and yon discover that one-eighth of the agricultural work of Great Britain is already directly performed by women; that at least 1,000,000 more are vitally connected with it through their business a:s home keepers to the men who work on the land, and that it is therefore a reasonable deduction to suppose that agriculture is suitable to women andi that more could be used in connection with it.” In the northern, counties of England thousands of women are coming out of tlie textile industries, and it is highly probable that they will never return. Mrs Wintringham advocates a scheme whereby these women shall have the opportunity of training for land work with the object of supplying the great industrial centres of the North with the farm produce which is now being imported from other countries. Among other recommendations, she urges that the machinery_ already in existence, all of which provide training, in one form or another, for women — shall be utilised and extended; that not only the women recruited from the ranks of the unemployed, but any i women, shall be invited to attend • these colleges.