WOMEN'S RIGHTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22613, 3 July 1935, Page 5

WOMEN'S RIGHTS

TO THE EDITOR Sir, —I presume your correspondent, G. Brooks, is a woman, who is so disgusted with conditions as they are to-day under man’s dominance, and that it is for this reason that she sends out an appeal to all intelligent women to get together and try to remedy this semi-starvation policy, which thousands of New Zealanders are experiencing in a country flowing with milk and honey. It does not take much imagination to visualise the bare cupboards and scanty raiment in the home where the bread winner has been on relief for the last few years, but it does take a mightly upheaval to get men and women, even intelligent men and women, to give much thought to conditions unless they, themselves, are affected. It is a true saying that, man never thinks properly until he has to tighten his belt. Let us take this grain of comfort and cherish it as the one bright spot amidst the misery that is stalking around in the faces of the starved children.

I ask your correspondent, “ What could the women do if they banded together? Go on, hunger strike as the Suffragettes did? Surely not; as that would be no new thing for many, of them, and if we started helping ourselves to the good things of life, we should be popped under lock and key at once. Perhaps your correspondent does not realise . that the Government at the present time is paying big salaries to men for the sole job of solving this economic mystery, which seems so plain to many of us. If she does realise this, shrely she does not suggest that we women should take the bread out of these men’s mouths. If women banded together it would have to be for a specific purpose, such as capturing seats in Parliament—not one oT two, but the whole lot of them and then they would have the chance to make the laws that govern the people. _ After all women on the whole are as intelligent as men and would not, I think, make the mistake of robbing the children of their daily bread, while enormous sums of money go out of the country to pay for the purchase of luxuries.— I am, etc.. Topsy-turvy.