HUSBANDLY PROTECTION.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 June 1926, Page 18

HUSBANDLY PROTECTION.

FULMINATI9NS OF FEMININISTS. (By Stella Harley.) Gesuine femininists must. be constantly irritated by the fulmmations ot some of their self-constituted spokeswomen. Recently much eloquence was expended on the “solid” husband who belonged to the days when feminine economic emancipation was the unrealised dream of an isolated little group of rebel's. For all his household tyranny, affirmed the writer, it was at least in his favour that he “kept” his wife and children. And cases were cited of “innumerable” modern marriage partnerships where the wife shouldered the major part of the financial burden.. This sort of talk is as unreasonable as it is illogical and unjust. There may be a few instances of irresponsible men saved from financial domestic shipwreck by wage-earning wives. One does not dispute that is unfortunately a proven fact. But between irresponsibility and sheer inability to keep the pot merrily boiling is a wide gulf. .And so many modern wives insist that the pot shall boil as merrily as may be. . No; there is another side to this picture.of modern husbands in generally calmly-accepting as their right their wives’ contributions to the household exchequer. The wife of the very moderate-salari-ed “protector” type of 'husband had to be content with crumbs as fell from her lord’s table, so to speak. Her natural appetite for many innocuous but exhilarating pleasures had to be sternly suppressed. The liege-lord’s income would not run to books and music and restaurant lunches and the like. If husbands have changed, so have wives. In those old days of complete husbandly “protection,” wives were content, er successfully pretended to be, with much less of life with a capital "L” that is the young iqgrricd woman of to-day. Their husbands could keep them, because they expected only the minimum—and got it. To-day young wives clamour for the maximum. The average young marrying-man’s earnings are swallowed up in sheer necessities in these terribly costly post-war times. To earn. a separate income is the young marrying-woman’s only hope of securing any sort of luxury-margin. That is the plain unvarnished fact which makes these lamentations over the departed-heavy-husband-protector type a sheer waste of breath. Modern young wives could still enjoy (sic!) this kind of .protection if they were willing to do as their forbears did; to set back the clock, drop all but the most meagre appetites, and cast any children they may bring into the world into the wageearning arena at the earliest_ possible age and inadequately equipped. But you don’t hear genuine, honcst-to-goodness femininists grousing about their share of the financial responsibilities attendant on marriage. They are only too glad to be able to lift the partnership out of the rut of anxieties and suppressions. ~