MARTHAS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17234, 9 August 1919, Page 4 (Supplement)

MARTHAS.

During the war my duties took me all over England, and I was billeted in dozens of houses and saw the internal economy of many homes says a writer in an exchange. Two types of women impressed me particularly— incorrigibly lazy and the inveterately clean. And I came to the conclusion that the average husband suffers more from the woman with the cleaningup mania than he does from the woman who shuffles her work.

I have been in homes where comfort, convenience, utility are all sacrificed on the alter of supor-cleanliness. Everything is spick and span. Then, .before the unlucky family have enjoyed it for more than an hour or so, everything is dismantled again and the place is turned upside down as an offering to the fetish of cleanliness 1 »

There is no comfort in such a home. If you drop a. match on the floor your hostess ostentatiously stoops and picks it up. If your wet boots, no matter ,how you cleaned them on the mat, leave the slightest mark on the floor she will pause in whatever she is doing to wipe it dry— or ring for a maid to do soand talk at von nil the time about the place never being clean. If you put a newspaper on the table for five minutes or a book on the couch, when you want it, 10, it has gone. " The house is never tidy," she tells you. and she " can't have the place littered up." A woman with this obsession is a burden on a man. She cannot realise that he has a share in the home as well as she has. She cannot understand thai, after the rigid dicipline of the army or the office he wants to enjoy relaxation in his own home. To her it is her nome, her sphere, her palace. More domestic happiness is ruined by the cleaning-up mama than by cruelty or neglect. Let such women take this warning. Let them realise that a man wants not only to use but to enjoy his home, and that it does not add to his happiness to have every atom of comfort and joy scrubbed out of it.