WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 95, 22 March 1939, Page 11

WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMAN, We must not overlook one oF the outstanding achievements of this century —the emancipation of woman. Most of us now take woman's entry into almost every sphere of life as something perfectly normal and natural, but could we go back to the Victorian notion of woman —the man’s interior partner in the home —we should realise the vast progress which has been made. Women to-day share all the activity of life. '1 hey are to Ire found in banks and in Government departments, on the Stock Kxchange, in insurance, in shipping, the Civil Service, and elsewhere. They excel in journalism and authorship, in sport and daring, in linn-shooting and aviation, in Channel swimming and advertising. Broadcasting has given still more opportunity lor women; and more and more women a.re taking up professional work —as doctors, dentists, and so on. As aeoountants and architects men outnumber them in the proportion of 50 to one, as librarians women outnumber men. All this—though it has brought its own crop of problems and very real difficulties—i s a social advance of profound and far-reaching importance, it has materially altered the machinery of the home and of our soefal order ; and though there are among us many who can see only the deplorable consequences, there a.re also among us those who realise that, if not taken too far, this liberation of woman, this equality of the sexes, this bigger world into which woman has at last- entered, is in the main an achievement of supreme significance.—(L.)