A GREAT MOVEMENT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21478, 29 April 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

A GREAT MOVEMENT

REVIVING RURAL ENGLAND WOMEN PLAY THEIR PART Seventeen and a-half years ago, says an English contributor, 011 September 25, ISIS, a small group of country - women met to form the first Women s Institute in Britain in the Welsh village of the unpronounceable name that begins " Llanfairpwll. . . The idea had come from* Canada, where, by a strange coincidence, the first Institute had been opened on the very same day of the same month eighteen years before, at Stoney Creek. In Canada the movement had been started to brighten the lives of lonely settlers' wives by a meeting once a month, to improve the housewife's technique, and to disseminate agricultural knowledgo. It was the war that made these same interests common to the villages of Britain, whence so many men had gone to the front, and it is now generally recognised that it was the revived interest in agricultural England created by the war that enabled the movement to be launched under such :favourahle auspices. The first institute had a committee of six and a handful of members. To-day the 5000 th institute in Britain has just been formed at Market Bosworth, in Leicestershire, and there are close upon 300,000 members in England and Wales. They are the largest organised body of women in the world. But the story of the growth of the institutes is greater than the• history of a movement; it is the s';ory of the growth of women. Ihe institutes have been the greatest single influence upon country life since the Enclosure Acts. As in New Zealand, handcrafts have received particular attention, and many old cottage industries have been rescued from oblivion. Again, as is now being done in Now Zealand, women are turning their attention to marketing and selling the produce of local gardens and are running market stalls in the. towns. But in Engand the women are now beginning to go further than that. Politics are barred, also religion. But can agriculture, which they were created to promote, be divorced to-day from politics? Or disarmament or the League of Nations, or national housing problems? All these are matters of great interest to them; they are discussing them and passing resolutions on them on non-party lines. It is for New Zealand women to follow suit.