WOMEN'S THREE CARES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12955, 26 August 1905, Page 6 (Supplement)

WOMEN'S THREE CARES.

KIRK, KITCHEN. AND ' KINDERGARTEN.

The Kaiser's three K's for women will be in the memory of most feminists, within the Fatherland and without it. He limited the sphere of women to Kinder, Kticlie, Kirche, three K's which Agues drove, in the Nineteenth Century, translates by C's: Children, Cooking, and Church. Taking them one by one, she maintains with great glee that the German Emperor, so far from limiting the sphere of knowledge permissible to women, has handed over to them for study all knowable topics, and a few others: —

Children.—Where does their province begin or end? For not even the German Emperor can by " children" mean only our own individual offspring. When a- person kuows everything appertaining to the child, its birth, 'its life, its death, its growth, its health, its mental, moral, spiritual, and physical, development, its work, its play, its welfare as governed by the .State, its happiness as best furthered 1 , in the home, what a. colossal monument of knowledge that person would he, and what position would he, or she. not be lilted for'.' Carrying her .academic joke into the kitchen, the'writer asks if cooking be a- limited sphere: The brain reels at, the thought of the number of subjects involved in a. comprehensive comprehension of everything connected with human food. Here are. a few connected with dietary, alimentation and gastronomy, therapeutics, more especially the prophylactical branch of this science, botany, zoology, mineralogy, dynamics, mathematics, and' physics. Trades, seasons, imports, exports, taxes, tariffs (reformed or tinregenerate), and many other questions enter in; and last, but not least, if a popular belief is to be credited, the temper of the male portion of the human race. The mineralogy" and "zoology" of the kitchen make excellent sport of the Kaiser's second K, which certainly contemplated no further feminist advance in either science than the coal cupboard and the cockroach. But the writer's humour begins to wear bin when she reaches Kirche:

It cannot be only our prayers, 0 Emperor! to which wo are bidden to attend'.' That would not exhaust the subject under the heading "Church." No, we must try to he faithful to our trust and to know what there is to be known. We must try to emulate Air. Gladstone's monumental research into the origin, methods, and responsibilities of the Church in all ages. We must, endeavour "thoroughly to comprehend the. eternal principles of the commutation of the tithe rent-charge, and the difference in the. justice due to a. transitory and a permanent curate"; possess " a double grasp of leading principle and intricate detail, unequal command of legal and historic controversy, and of all the actuarial niceties ami puzzles of commutation!"