WOMEN’S WIDER INTERESTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3808, 8 March 1927, Page 65

WOMEN’S WIDER INTERESTS.

While I write the annual conference of the National Council of New Zealand Women is being held in Christchurch, about 60 delegates from the various branches being gathered together. The daily papers notice briefly the chief features of the meetings, and three brief reports alone will give readers to whom the National Council is little more than a name some idea of the great number of human interests with which it deals. World peace, international friendship, health, education, social morality, child welfare, are main ones, and under these as chief aims come numbers of special questions of reform and social welfare, as the treatment of young offenders and of the mentally defective, measures for the promotion of family’ welfare, prison methods, food inspection, and others. Increase in .woman’s political and civic powers has been and is being sought as a means of enabling women to work for social betterment.

At the opening, meeting of the conference at Christchurch the president, Mrs J. Cooke, spoke of the work of the League of Nations, and urged the vital need of making justice and right the -guiding principles in all national and international interests. She condemned the competitive principle in education as fostering self-seeking, and envy, saying that if envy could.be done away with the world would become peaceful. Dealing with child welfare, she spoke of the period of childhood between infancy and school age as of supreme importance, since this is the most impressionable age, and in it the foundations of character are laid. She referred to the recent child welfare conference in Auckland and the stress there laid on the necessity for spiritual training of children in the home. Reference was made to the Family Allowance Act, • and the appointment of womenjustices of the peace as important steps in social progress. No doubt the number, of the -Witness in which this article appears will .contain a succinct report

of the work of the conference, and those ■who take or see the Mirror may find a fuller account of it, for this popular women’s journal devotes a page or two to the National Council and the interests it upholds. In the February number of the Mirror, I find, besides National Council notes, •y notice of the Marchioness of Aberdeen’s taission to Eastern Europe entitled '"lnternational Bonds Between Women.” Oue of the most hopeful signs to-day is übe wny in which women all the world ov&. are recognising what may be done by ranen to prevent war and bring about sounder and happier social life. The Women’s Temperance Union has ■always made the promotion of peace one of its foremost aims. The Women’s National Council, which includes representatives of the W.C.T.U., together with representatives from a large number of other women’s organisations, does the same. And the more lately formed International Federation of University Women is also a factor in the promotion of peace and friendship between nations. It forms a bond of union between the most highly educated women of al] countries. At its general conferences, held successively in (lifferent countries, women from the most widely severed lands meet in friendly cooperation. One means of promoting friendly feeling in which the University Federation assists is the interchange of students and teachers between one country and another. By means of this interchange New Zealand young women may work for some years in a foreign land, learning its language-and ways, seeing its people in their homes, and forming friendships with them. Returning to her own country, a woman who has enjoyed this experience may give her pupils (if she is a teacher) and her country folk generally the benefit of the knowledge and breadth of mind she has gained abroad. Women all over the world are touched with the spirit of progress, and this is especially notable in Eastern lands where women from time-immemorial have been kept in subservience and ignorance. Now in China, Japan, India, Turkey, and

other Eastern countries large numbers of women have been educated on modern lines, and many are entering into economic competition with men, as in European lands. Within the last few years the advance of Indian and of Turkish women has been particularly rapid. Of course, compared with the total feminine population of these lauds the numbers of educated and modernised women arc small, but they are increasing rapidly each year. And in both countries women have won political rights that women in the Latin countries of Europe are still denied. A recent issue of New India, a weekly journal published at Madras under the editorship of Mrs Besant, contains a notice ’of an important gathering of Indian women held at Poona, the first All-Indian Women’s Conference. It was presided over by tlie Maharani of Baroda, one of the most important of the native states of India. The leading object of the conference was the promotion of the education of Indian girls, but other questions, such as the legal status of women in regard to property, control of children, etc., were dealt with. It is gratifying to find that leading Indian women lay stress on the. moral, social, and spiritual aspects of education. In outlining the kind of education needed the conference advocated that “in the education of girls and women, teaching of the ideals of motherhood, and beautifying the home, as well as training in the methods of social usefulness, should be kej>t uppermost.” It was also resolved that “a complete course of physical training should be.made compulsory in boys’ and girls’ schools,” and finally that “moral training,” based on spiritual ideals must be made compulsory in schools and colleges. Such resolutions recognise that education should be a preparation for life. In some ways modern developments in education and economic opportunities c or women seem to threaten domestic life. No change ever produces unmixed good. But we may hope, that on the whole the developed intelligence and wider opportunities of women will work for social good. Women leaders generally are alive to the supreme claims of the home, and the need of combating the competitive

and aggressive spirit that makes war and class strife, by -instilling ideals of social service and human brotherhood in the minds of the young.