ARE THERE TOO MANY WOMEN?

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIV, Issue 14044, 29 April 1920, Page 2

ARE THERE TOO MANY WOMEN?

(By A. M. Drysdale.) Men will have to do something quite serioii.- and definite about the so-called e.\ee« of women. The first thing they will have to do will be to resign the ancient assumption that they themselves are the standard absolute, that women and their number are to be related to nothing in heaven or earth but men. . .Man in hi.-, majestic course through time and space is attended by woman as a satellite—that-is the fixed idea. When the man dies the woman must fling herself upon his funeral pyre and perish with him. or there will be that monstrosity in nature, too many women -• "the monstrous regiment.'" There are n« ver too many men. for all men — alt. at least, except thewe for whom we count out the calories that will merely maintain them, like the horses, at efficient working heat—have souls, and .-oitls subsist unrelated among the eternal verities, inherently and independently valuable.

Do I misrepresent the fundamental assumption? I was reading the other day a description—not by a man, but l>v" a woman—of some- perfect houses, and I paused and reflected at this sentence: ■• Everything is made as easy as ! possible for the wife, in order that she nmv be able 10 give more time and attention to her husband." And has the Divorce Court not just found that single women are -'valueless/' on the ground, that they an* not chattels? AVithin a certain range of conditions which I need not define, single women do not belong to anybody, they are nobody s property, and accordingly damages do it.jt he in respect to them, as they do in respect to their chattel sisters, the married women, in the same circumstances. There are inanv incredible things which are true. It is incredible that the English Parliament once passed an Act to boil prisoner- alive, and it is tonally incredible that men actually have been boiled alive at Smi'.hficld—.Smithfield, where the meat comes from. It is incredible that slavery subsisted in Scotland to the end of the I*th. or perhap.- even into the IT'th century. It ts more or less incredible, according to our several views of Cromwell, that Cromwell sent thousands of Englishmen. Scotsmen, and Irishmen to the Barbacto.-s as slaves.

It !> quite im redible that respectable Bristol merchant-., impelled by the necessity of competing with the Dutch, who had a moii»|>oly of the negro slave trade, kidnapped shipload after shiploal of their poor fcilow-countrymen and sold them as slaves to the American planter.—a very profitable line. The English penal code down to Homilly's day i> incredible. All these tiling are incredible in our time. 4>nt in the presence of the evidence they are undeniable. May not some ot the commonplace of our own clay be equally incredible to our descendant.-?

May it no; he utterly incredible to them that when women came into our law courts, either'as accused persons or as litigants, they found not only the laws exclusively man-made, but tin* judges, the juries, and the advocates all men. and never, even in the most generous lltiiht o/ iair play, women ?

May they not refuse to believe that when the women offered their help to win the great war the men accepted the offer by giving thousands of them the roughest and most arduous jobs, in the engineering shops, in railway portering. and so forth, while men were still employed in women's work? May they not find it unbelievable that men so long acted upon the unexamined as. sumption that women had no souls of their own ?

Xow that women have successfully asserted their"right in so many respects to equal treatment with men, we shall have to arrive at a redistribution of the occupations, so that they may also have an eq.ua! chance to live. Generally, we men ought to accept all the hard and disagreeable-jobs;: and leave to women ' those" which " least demand physical strength and endurance. ■ . I-would niake over' to them large tracts of clerical, sedentary, and mental work. Religion would receive* a' stimulus in our midst if; all the}clergy, were women. They should more and" more become doctors. lawyers, and journalists.*" I would have no waite'rs ancL no men-servants as long as there were unemployed women who wished to be employed. All insurance agents and collectors might very well be women. . These. T think, are practical suggestions, and beyond them there is another vast area unoccupied. All women aro born with the maternal instinct, and «o long as there are thousands of tinmothcred and uncared-for children in our land it is a satire upon onr social sense to allege'that there are. too many Women.

Tt would be just as rational for women, when they have supplanted the lord of creation at the* centre of society. U> complain of a deficient number of

men. And that mi 6 „>. very plausibly be .shown to be the case now, for the production of commodities, peculiarly the work of men, is notoriously in arrears.