MODERN WOMAN

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12396, 16 March 1926, Page 3

MODERN WOMAN

IS SHE SLACKING? HOME-MAKING OR HOME-BREAKING? NO LONGER “THE SONG OF THE SHIRT" (By Telegraph.—Special to “Times.”) AUCKLAND, March 15. “Are modern housewives slacking?” is a question prompted by the great increase of shops purveying the readymade, whether it is clothes or food. Everywhere the “home-made” cakeshop flourishes, and establishments with cooked meats, ham, or preserves. There are firms to undertake that husbands’ horror, called spring-cleaning, and the week’s laundry goes to tho hag-wash. A sewing machine is unknown in many modern homes, where “ready-mades” have taken the place of home dressmakers. Twenty vears ago “readv-made” ~ioro nr less n t?rm of contempt. “Readv-mades” were the last resort of the shiftless end thriftless. ''Labour-saving” was practically unknown. Her labour was the last thing the busy housewife saved. Her home, husband, and children were the only things in life that mattered. For them sh* toiled from dawn to dark, To-dav “readv-made” and “labour-saving” lie as sweetly on woman’s tonrrne as most blessed of all words. FISH AND CHIPS They find their expression in drapers’ shops, in the handy little fish-nnd-chtps emporium just round the corner, in tho “home-made” pie and cakeshop. in great dishes of expensive and neatly-sliced ham and heef that smile from the pork butchers’ plateglnss windows. . In the carpet-cleaning factory, window-washing partnership, the darnin'. and mendin', bureau. IV--' practically no nook or cranny of the domestic realm which labour-savers have left unconquered. Few will regret the passing of the old order of the slave, which in years gone by was considered the right and fitting insignia of womanhood. Gone and well-ridden are the days when women rose and shovelled coal to heat the range to cook the family breakfast; gone the da vs'when everv i.-n of her carpets had to he swept with hand-broom and beaten with a prop on the clothes-line. The song of the tub still sounds in the majority of Auckland’s households on mornings, but every year sees an increase in family laundering business, while family cooking of to-day is little more than a matter of one frypan and a handful of small aluminium saucepans. All this reduction of labour gives the modern housewife more time to call her own Man ever she had before, and yet if you ask one of these modern ladies how she manages to fill in her day she will respond with a surprised stare and say she is so frantically busy that she literally has not one moment to spare.

MODERN PROGRAMME Pressed for details, she will talk impressively of appointments in town, hair trims, new curtains, tennis, and golf, cakes for WednesdaS'’s bridge afternoon, club lectures, jam-making, and other Varied duties, and there is no doubt about her duties either, but they are not such soul-deadening duties as they used to be. The modern housewife is* a good cook, she excels in dainty and expensive morsels that melt like snow before the onrush of appreciative guests, but she is not strong on the plain buns, suet dumplings, and other homely fare ( on which ahe herself cut her second teeth. In suite of the enormous sale of very excellent factory-made iams and preserves, she is undoubted!- good in this branch of housewifely art. A DEALER’S COMPLAINT A dealer in a southern city recently voiced a bitter plaint that women were not buying his pots and pans—that they bought all their jams and fruits ready-made. That is now the experience of Auckland shopmen. They speak up well for local housewives, and say that, given a good fruit season and cheap sugar, the ladies are as good at the jam-making, or even better, than their grandmothers, and in proof of it one was beggod to tnkq the word of a leading dealer that one firm of Auckland indent agents had placed orders for no less than 1000 preserving Pans last month, while preserving bottles and jam jars had almost disappeared; In the housewives’ recent raids it was left for a veteran tradesman, however, to cast a shadow on the happy picture which the pots-and-pans merchant had conjured up. “Are our housewives slacking P” he repeated, “Yes, I should say they are. it not, what’s the meaning of all these hundreds of little pork pie and fish and chip shops springing up all over Auckland? Who supports them? What are our Auckland husbands and fathers getting for their tea at night? What is the first thing a child of to-dav remembers seeing in his mother’s hand? A Bible? No! a fry-pan. Fry-pans morning, noon, and night, and when they run out of dripping they rush off to the fish and chips shop. Very nice and convenient, but you just wait and see what kind of digestions these youngsters of the present day are going to develop in twenty or thirty years’ time. As for the husbands. . He shook his head mournfullv. Things looked black for the husbands. He may, of course, have been a pessimist. It is a very wonderful age with some very wonderful people in it.’ You can get almost anything in the world to-day ready-made or made to measure, but there is just one thin-; that no wizard can evet produce, and that is ready-made homes. The world is deluged with labour-saving devices, hut none of them will ever ‘supplant tholdest and most honoureb’a re-"', work to which woman ever turned her hand—that of making a home: mil of course, the' old ideals and traditions are indeed being scrapped and the home-makers and housewives are slacking.