Where Thousands Of Women Study The Improvement Of Rural Conditions

Southland Times, Issue 23664, 12 November 1938, Page 16

Where Thousands Of Women Study The Improvement Of Rural Conditions

THE Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada have their sister federation in New Zealand, as many thousands of New Zealand countrywomen can gratefully attest. What the Canadian institutes are doing is not only of interest to thousands of New Zealand countrywomen, but to women in all walks of life. The Canadian federation, now almost 25 years of age, has 3000 branches covering all nine provinces, and has a membership of 75,000 women. It is characterized, as in New Zealand, by the steadiness of its growth, the philosophic calm with which it expects to take rather a long time about things while yet knowing, at the same time, that it will get them done. Every two years the Federated Institutes hold a convention, and adopt a programme to cover the following two-year period. Last autumn, the rural sanitation problem was attacked, and is now occupying their attention and action. Although it is -always several months before material reaches all the more remote branches, a mark will certainly have been made on the countryside by the

time the two years are up. The Federal Government has been asked to prepare the last word on Water Supply, Fly-Control and Disposal of Garbage. Inexpensive Plumbing Systems, Sanitary Toilets, Heating, Ventilation, and the Storage and Protection of Food. The farms of Canada are in for a thorough overhaul, it seems! As one National Convener put it, “We want simple suggestions, preferably such as can be carried out right on the

farm by the farmer and his wife with materials to hand. Come a rainy day, the wife can gently turn her husband’s attention to her scheme, and the things will get done for which there is no evident time to be had in the farm schedule nor money in the budget. We women can work it out.”

Already an extremely significant angle to the food storage study has appeared. The Department of Agriculture has pointed out that should the women of Canada substitute their own vegetables, canned in season and consumed in the winter, for the cold storage vegetables annually imported from other countries something over 1,000000 dollars that is now annually spent abroad would then stay in Canada. The department has demonstrated the use of recently designed home canning units that would make it possible for groups to organize community canning bees, oy a system of taking turns with the outfit that would save many tons of vegetables now wasted, and encourage enlarging manv a vegetable patch. Already units have adopted this scheme; Aylmer East in Quebec Province has for some years foregathered to put up tomato soup on a communal basis for the school children, and hundreds of cans are done every year. The women are now looking into the new steam pressure machines, and will probably enlarge their activity to cover vegetables for individual homes. OVER THE BACK ROADS Today the courage and steadiness of the Institute Movement has inspiration in high places in Canada. The present chatelaine of Government House the Lady Tweedsmuir, has made the institutes her main never-ending interest in her present post. She has been far more than an honorary president, taken more pains than to attend to Biennial Convention as its principal guest. Over the back roads of Quebec, across the dusty trails in the drought areas, and into the wilds of British Columbia, she has trekked to small meetings of individual branches, informing herself or their needs, swapping yarns of her own experiences as an early organizer of the movement in England, Lady Tweedsmuir has made no effort to tell these women what they should do: but she has made it abundantly clear that what they do is, in her opinion, vitally important both to Canada and to the British Empire. Perennial enthusiasm of both the institutes and their very special patroness in Government House are all forms of handicraft. A?. over Canada, but specialy in Quebec Province and Ontario, hand looms, spinning wheels, and home dyeing enterprises appear. Where sheep are kept, women are relearning the pleasure of personally carrying out the whole process from the moment the wool is sheared from the sheep’s back till the finished article produces pocket money, a useful object in the home or merely artistic expression where life might have been a little dull.