THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, JULY 14, 1938 HOME SERVICE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23089, 14 July 1938, Page 12

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS THURSDAY, JULY 14, 1938 HOME SERVICE

Efficient home service, if it were available, would contribute more to health, happiness and general welfare than many other loudly trumpeted reforms. Until recently, however, the problem has not been carefully studied and it still remains largely unsolved, although some promising approaches are beginning to be made. The fact is that the increasing number of girls and young women who prefer to make a living by working in .factory, shop and office has created an acute scarcity of domestic assistance, a scarcity that is producing social, economic and physical consequences that cannot be ignored. It was not by accident that tho committee which inquired into the heavy incidence of abortion in New Zealand turned its attention to the problem of home service, nor that the same subject is raised by the doctors in their statement on the national health insurance scheme. Further suggestions are made in the report published on Monday by the committee that inquired into maternity services, and yesterday the Women's Division of the Farmers' Union was discussing the difficulty of obtaining competent help for its own nurse and housekeepers' scheme, which provides help to country homes in cases of illness and trouble. The division and certain local organisations, such as the Auckland Home Service Association, have worked in a practical way to meet the need, but usually they find demand outrunning supply. So there was the suggestion at the division's Meeting that home workers should be imported from English orphanages or Central Europe. Hawke's Bay women already have a representative in Europe seeking to recruit help. British women are themselves looking to the Continent, and last year no less than 13,576 foreign women were given permits to perform domestic service in Britain. In the previous six years, the average number of permits issued annually was 5200.

Immigration may offer a partial solution, but involves neglecting the training of New Zealand girls in the arts that for most of them will prove their vocation for most of their lives and for that important part when they become wives and mothers. The real and lasting solution was stated to ths division by Dr. A. G. Strong, dean of the home science faculty at Otago University. She pointed out that the remedy lay with New Zealand women themselves, by seeing that their girls were trained in homecraft and that the work was made as attractive as other work. There it is in a nutshell, although this kernel of wisdom is notoriously difficult to extract and apply. The general tendency nowadays is to lay all the blame for the scarcity of home service on the mistresses and to prescribe better working and living conditions for the maids. Certainly reforms on this side are often but not universally needed. Not enough allowance is made, however, for the hard-pressed housewife, who is just as often reduced to paying good wages for incompetent service. Hence proper training must accompany proper conditions. A great deal is said about " raising the status " of home service and many people seem to imagine this can be done merely by improving living and working conditions and fixing hours. A moment's reflection will bring conviction that status is not raised by such means alone. The tradesman and artisan, the stenographer and the teacher, owe their status tc acquired skill and knowledge. They command a trade, an art, a vocation or a profession. They have graduated above the army of the unskilled. Home service has suffered in public esteem because it has too often been the resort of girls and women without other skill or training, and it was presumed that no special qualifications were required in the home. There could be no more pernicious presumption, none better designed to leave wives and mothers to struggle single-handed, to the sacrifice of nutrition and the depression of the home atmosphere and of the birth rate itself. Home service must be raised to the status of an art, looked upon as the skilled occupation that it is —and too often is not. The experience of the mothers' help societies, the women's division, the townswomen's guilds and home service organisations proves that it is not all a question of pay and working conditions. They all attend to that side adequately, and still, as the report of the maternity services committee records, " encounter almost insuperable difficulties in obtaining sufficient helpers." Surely that is because the work is not held in high enough esteem. If the education of boys lacks an agricultural bias, that of girls is largely deficient in the domestic bias. The whole trouble resides in an attitude of mind and it is fixed in the schools. Subjects bearing on homecraft take a subsidiary place on the syllabus. Girls work hard to matriculate for the university or qualify for an office, but give scarcely a thought to matriculating for wifehood or qualifying as housewife and mother. The fault is not theirs. The emphasis in the schools falls elsewhere and they are duly impressed. The home is not thought of as an avenue for a "career," although in the home most women have finally found their highest career and done their best service for mankind. To improve the conditions of home service, where they need improvement, should prove a comparatively easy task, now that women are putting their minds to it. The harder part will be to raise the calling in general esteem and that will only bo fulfilled when homecraft becomes a vocation requiring proper qualifications and therefore commanding the respect given to the skilled,;