MODERN HOUSEWIFE

Southland Times, Issue 19823, 20 March 1926, Page 23

MODERN HOUSEWIFE

IS SHE SLACKING! READY-MADE IN CLOTHES AND FOOD.

Are modern housewives slacking is a question prompted by the great increast of shops purveying the ready-made, whether it is clothes or food. Everywhere the

“home-made” cake shop flourishes, and establishments with cooked meats, hain or preserves. There are firms to undertake that husband’s horror called spring cleaning, and the week’s laundry goes to the bag-wash. A sewing machine is unknown in many modern homes, where “ready-mades” have taken the place of home dressmakers, reports the Auckland correspondent of the Lyttelton Times. Twenty years ago “ready-made” Was more or less a tefin of contempt. “Readymades” were the last resort of the shiftiest and 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 she tolled from dawn to dark. To-day “ready-made” and “labour-saving” lie as sweetly on woman’s tongue as the most blessed of all words. They find their expression in drapers’ shops, in the handy little fish-and-chips emporium just round the corner, iri the “home-made” nie and cake shop, in great dishes of expensive and neatly Sliced ham and beef that smile from the pork butcher’s plate-glass wnidows, in the carpet cleaning factory window, the washing partnership, the darning and mending bureau. There is practically no noOk nor cranny of the domestic realm which labour-savers have left unconquered. THE ORDER OF THE SLAVE. 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 woman rose and shovelled coal to heat the range to cook the family breakfast. Gone the days when every inch of her carpets had to be swept with a 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 Monday mornings, but every year sees an increase in the family laundering business, while the family cooking of to-day is little more than a matter of one fry-pan and a handful of small aluminium saucepans. All this reduction of labour gives the modern housewife more time to call her own than 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. Pressed for de- j tails she will talk impressively of appointments in town, hair-trims, new curtains, tennis and ‘golf, cakes for Wednesday's bridge afternoon, chib lectures, jam-mak-ing and other varied duties. WHERE SHE EXCELS. And there is no doubt about her duties, either, but they are not such soul-deaden-ing duties as they used to be. The modern housewife is a good cook. Sre 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 she herself cut her second teeth. In spite of the enormous sale of very excellent factory made jams and preserves she is undoubtedly good in this branch of the housewifely art. A dealer in a southern city recently voided a bitter plaint that women were not buying his pots and pans, that they bought all their jams and preserved fruits ready made. That is not 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 begged to take the word of a leading dealer that one firm of Auckland indent agents had placed orders for no fewer than 1000 preserving pans last month, while preserving bottles and jam jars had almost disappeared in housewives’ recent raids. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PICTURE. 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?” he repeated. “Yes, I should say they are. If 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 bur Auckland husbands and fathers getting for their tea at night? What is the first thing a child of to-day remembers seeing in his mother’s hand? A Bible? No, a frypan. Frypans 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 mournfully. 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 jqst one thing that no wizard can ever produce, and that is ready-made homes. The world is deluged with labour-saving devices, but none of them will ever supplant the oldest and most honourable form of work to , which woman ever turned her hand, that ' of making a home, unless of course, the old ideals and traditions are indeed being , scrapped and the homemakers and housewives are slacking.