WOMAN’S ADVANCE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3895, 28 April 1937, Page 8

WOMAN’S ADVANCE

MRS WATT BACK IN ENGLAND. A hundred thousand miles, 300 mass meetings. 200 Government banquets and 50,009 handshakes was the record taken from an eight-months world tour by Mrs Alfred Watt, president of the Associated Countrywomen of the World and founder of the Women’s Institutes She visited, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon and Palestine, travelling- to her meetings by plane, bullock cart, canoe, rickshaw, and victoria, and coming in contact with more than a million women. She found dark-skinned Siugalese and Hawaiian women absorbed in the task of improving plantation life for the workers and introducing domestic science into rural schools. ‘Broadcasting has played a dominant part in helping women to escape drudgery and isolation,” she told the “News Chronicle.” “But every foreign station I listened to catered more intelligently for countrywomen than the 8.8. C., whose idea does not use above recipes and hints on hew to grow carrots. “A new type of woman is evolving everywhere. She is avid for facts about world affairs, and >s no longer satisfied with the sugar-coated knowledge for women only.” Despite the tradition of the lack of solidarity among- women, Mrs Watt declares that she has found women in every country better organised than men, and much more effective at cooperation. She is looking forward to the next triennial conference of th? Country-women of the World in Lcndn in 1939. Ten thousand women are expected to attend.