IGNORANT WIVES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 804, 26 October 1929, Page 28

IGNORANT WIVES

HUSBANDS DRIVEN FROM HOME UNABLE TO KEEP HOUSE More than 20,000 wives receive separation orders from their husbands in this country every year, writes Mr. R. E. Corder in the London "Daily Mail.” The majority of these separated wives are young and well able to work, but they have discovered that a bad husband may make a good investment. “Find him young and leave him early” is the cynical slogan of many girls who regard marriage as the way to an annuity. The Women and Children’s Protection Society has long done excellent work in safeguarding women and children in cases of neglect, cruelty, desertion, and other wrongs, by affording them advice and legal assistance, and. when desirable, prosecut-

mg the offenders. But the society recognises that the husband is not always to blame. In the seventy-first annual report, it is frapkly stated that one of the causes of unhappy marriages is that both parties are too young. The report says; —"The wife has had no experience of home life, even though she may have lived at home, for when her work —which is usually away from home —is finished, her evenings are spent in cinemas, dancing halls, or any form of amusement she can get. She can neither cook nor manage her new home, for she has no idea of the meaning of comfort, and she is incapable of making her home, even if it consists of only one room, attractive to her husband. He, on the other hand, is too young to recognise the responsibility he has assumed, and when the novelty has worn off is only too ready to spend the evenings with his bachelor pals. "Another cause of unhappy marriages is the lack of housing accommodation. Young couples take rooms with their parents, which makes for family wrangles.” The society urges that girls should he instructed in household management before marriage. and that husbands should provide a separate room for their wives remote from relations. In the metropolitan police courts, young husbands are complaining in increasing numbers about their wives, and they too are returning home "to their mothers. As Mr. Cairns, the experienced and popular magistrate at Thames Police Court, remarked:—“All wives are not angles, and all husbands are not devils, hut the wife usually has the first and last word.”