THE DOMESTIC REVOLUTION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21616, 7 October 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE DOMESTIC REVOLUTION

MAN PLAYS HIS PART MORE LEISURE FOR WIVES In older, simpler days there was no domestic problem whether paid help was kept or not, for the women always did the household tasks, while the men smoked and looked at the stars, or talked politics or read the newspapers, or pursued some other occupation exclusively suitable to the male. Those were the good old days, when each sex knew its place and kept it —for him the leisure to tread the paths of intellectual and aesthetic pleasuro; for her the greasy dishes. No single fact can more emphatically demonstrate the great revolution which lias taken place in the relation between men and women than that they now take their place side by side at the washing-up bowl. A social revolution is also implicit, a whole change of viewpoint in mankind's relation to work. Fifty years ago certain necessary tasks were looked upon as menial, as derogatory to man's dignity. There were things which "a gentleman" could do, such as rat-catching in a barn, and things which must be done for him by others, such as cleaning his boots. To a mere woman it might seem that there was nothing more "gentlemanlike" in setting a terrier at a rat than'in scraping one's own muddy boots, but so it was held, and there are still old ladies who would sooner take a man's boots into their frail and withered hands than that lie should do it himself. At this time, which seems to have been the period of the greatest snobbishness and false pride ever known to the English, nearly all domestic tasks were looked upon as "menial." From domestic work being derogatory to men, it became derogatory to

"ladies," and we see in the charming pages of "Cranford" how painfully a "lady" had to hide the fact that many domestic tasks had to bo done by herself or not at all; and when the beautiful Diana of the Crossways knelt and laid the fire in her empty house, a heroine of fiction was shown for the first time in the 19th century exalted by a "menial task." We have travelled far since then. The principle that leisure and beauty and pleasures of the mind should not be the prerogative of a small privileged class, but of all civilised mankind, lies at the root of our social legislation and of all our educational endeavours, however much it may be obscured by superficial changes. And the logical outcome of this principle, that for women also there should be leisure and beauty and intellectual adventure, has profoundly modified the whole of social and domestic life. Domestic work is coming to be recognised as a necessary function in civilised life, which some do better than others, or more conveniently, but which is not in itself better or worse than other forms of work. The lady now who would feel herself "demeaned" by laying her own fire is an anachronism and ought to perish with the dodo, as also should the man who would feel himself less of a man by taking his share in those daily and inexorable tasks which are necessary for civilised living.