MIDDLE CLASS WOMEN

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6439, 17 January 1924, Page 7

MIDDLE CLASS WOMEN

THE NEW SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE

(By John Blunt, in the Daily Mail.)

One of the acute social problems of Great Britain is the disparity between the. number of women and the number of men. It has made many middle-class women realise tjiat they cannot afford any longer to be without some means of earning a livelihood.

Twenty years ago the daughters of the average middle-class family were brought up with no idea of making their own living. They looked forward to matrimony as their natural future, and those few of them who did not marry retired into a genteel poverty on which they could just exist. But many of these same women, under the changed conditions of to : day, have had to turn to in middle age to earn their own living and others are no longer content merely to subsist on a pittance. They have had literally to carve their new careers for themselves,' and, as often as not, to create work where no wort existed. An intelligent walk through London (especially through some of the smaller streets; round about the centre) reveals an .extraordinary number of shops, selling a variety of things, from hats to bric-a-brac, which have been started by women' during the past few years. In every direction such women are making careers for themselves which would have been undreamt of only a short time ago. All this is bound to affect still further social conditions in a social fashion. Perhaps in times to come the average pleasure-loving, useless girl of to-day will seem as old-fashioned as the fainting heroines we read of in early novels.

Some people speak as if votes for women had made a great change in the feminine outlook, but votes for women was only a visjble sign of a change that was alread yat work. The idea that English women are becoming masculine is totally fallacious; they are merely learning that economic laws have to be faced. , Of course, there are an immense number of women who have not yet learnt this lesson, just as there are an immense number of men who have not learnt it. Many of those women who might be in domestic service and who now prefer to draw the dole will find sooner or later that their services are not required anywhere.

The difficulty of procuring domestic servants* is teaching people to do without them. It is forcing middleclass women to learn cooking and housework. The self-reliance which the one class is losing, the other class is gaining. •

And, in the same way, the girl who depends mainly on her good looks and her charm of manner will get left behind in the race of life. Men cannot afford to marry helpless wives, however deightful they may be. The education and up-bringing of middleclass girls will inevitably tend more and more to make them self-support-ing and reliant in any walk of life to which they may be called.