WOMEN IN GERMANY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23284, 1 March 1939, Page 5

WOMEN IN GERMANY

MANY MARRIED WORKERS NURSES FOR THE CHILDREN SAFEGUARDING OF HEALTH A further description of conditions existing for women in Nazi Germany is given by Miss Enid Corrall, who was sent there recently as an observer for an English paper. Miss Corrall states that from five o'clock in the morning, Germany's tremendous army of women workers is 011 the move. There are 12,000,000 of them in paid jobs and of these about 5,000.000 are in industry. "There are more women working to-day in Germany than there are in the United States of America, which has a population twice the size of Germany's," Miss Corrall states "National Sociailism set out to prove to the world that women's place is in the home, and has actually proved something quite different."

Miss Corrall further states that 40 per cent of these women who work are married and have children. There are actually special compartments on the workers' trains for perambulators. Workers as such are tremendously precious to Germany, who has not got anything like as many of them as she needs. National Socialism has therefore built up a vast, complex mechanism designed to safeguard their health and working capacity, with special protection for mothers who are all-important to tlio State. For four weeks before the birth of a child and for four to six weeks afterward they get a holiday with pay. At one factory, which employs 40,000 people, the mothers leave their children in the nursery or kindergarten and there they are cared for by a special staff until collected by their parents in the evening. A large factory has usually about 50 staff nurses and about 15 doctors, the nurses being chiefly for the children. After the day's work is over some of the employees foregather in a club run by the factory. There are classes in needlework, dressmaking, cooking and handcraft, and these are organised for the factory by the social workers of the Women's Labour Front—that immense coalition of all forms of women's industry. These social welfare workers are trained by the Women's Bureau of the Labour Front, and it is their job to see that women in industry are not over-strained, either physically or mentally.