AMERICAN WOMEN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19844, 17 July 1926, Page 21

AMERICAN WOMEN

HOME LIFE DISAPPEARING. CLUB LIFE IX ASCENDANT. According to British standnrds there Id very little home life in the big cities of the United States. The interests of the average Englishman are centred in his home, and tor generations he has insisted on the home being run for his comfort. The English housewife regards it ns her first duty In life to study her husband’s comfort. He spends most of the evenings in the family circle, especially the long winter evenings, when he sits in a comfortable chair before the fire with a booh. He seldom goes out, for he Is not a regular patron of the theatre, like the Continental and American husbands. The American home is not run for the comfort of the head of the house. In American cities domestic labour is far more costly and scarcer than in England. The American housewife gets through her domestic work with the aid of numerous labour-saving devices and a little manual assistance in the rough work of the house. After having been in the house all day she docs not look forward to spending (he evening there in company with her husband. Her idea is to get some variety into life by having dinner at a restaurant with her husband, and then going on to n theatre. The American habit of dining at a restaurant lessens the housework by rendering it unnecessary for her to prepare the principal meal of the day. and it provides a more varied meal than she could . prepare. The American from his youth upwards is taught to accept the idea that the sexes arc equal, and therefore he thinks it is only right that his wife should' want to escape from her home in the evening after having been Indoors all day. He has never been taught to regard it as her first duty In life to remain at home in the evening and minister to his comfort after his day’s work is done. According to Mrs Rositft Forbes, an adventurous Englishwoman who has hobnobbed with Arab chiefs in Morocco and Arabia, and has recently been lecturing in the United States, home life in the Middle West, which is the most typical sector of America, “is disappearing altogether before the onslaught of the women's clubs.” These clubs arc far more numerous in the Middle West than in the Pig cities In the eastern States. The development of club life among the American women in the Middle West, states Mrs Rosltn Forbes, "is partly because the advent of money gives the American wife a little more leisure, but no opportunity. Dollars have ceased to have a reasonable purchasing power, because they cannot buy labour. For instance. I’ve often stayed in a small suburban house where my hostess personally directed every detail of the service, and discovered later that her fortune, changed into pounds, would have enabled her to live luxuriously in Mayfair. "The American business man is rightly optimistic, believing that the best possible investment for capital is bis career, as represented by wlmt he appears to he, so the scale of living is always a little in advance of Uis pay roll. Thus service does not increase with the size of the house, and in many small towns the wife prefers to dispense altogether with n servant, rather than give up the owner-driven car. In this case she will rise about (i. 30, prepare breakfast with the aid of what we should cal) a charwoman, drive her husband to the office, return to see that ‘the help’ has cleaned up the house, and spend the rest of (he day at one- of half a dozen clubs. In the evening she will drive down town to fetch her husband, and they will dine at a hotel before returning to the empty house. Yet tills man may bo earning an annual income of two or three thousand pounds. ‘‘The American women’s clubs are the most attractive in the world. They are the ultimate expression of modernity in colour, range, and efficiency, lint they are steeped in that atmosphere of culture which is like a moulting eiderdown to personality. Club women are in danger of losing the power of individual thought. For airless, steam-heated hours they absorb second-hand information, till their brains are- too comatose to reason. In one Chicago club I heard four lectures in a single day on such varying subjects as “The Man’s Work in the Home.” “You Are What Yon Eat.” “The Abnormal,in Modern Literature Mysticism, and Opportunity.” At the end I was loft with two ideas, to which 1 clung like straws in a flood of sound. One was that one should not cat lunch, and the other that man’s place anywhere was narrowing to that of a cash machine! A chairwoman, in returning thanks, remarked approvingly that she had heard so many words in so short a time!’ ”