WIVES IN BUSINESS

Taranaki Daily News, 17 March 1931, Page 7

WIVES IN BUSINESS

CIVIL SERVICE QUESTION.

NEW SOUTH WALES AGITATION.

The dismissal of married women teachers from the New South Wales echools has caused trouble to break out in other places. The campaign to retain. their services has .not been successful; but it has taken a' new turn. The Sydney correspondent of the Argus sayS: “The Education Department appears to be the only one in which married people remain in service. In dozens of instances the man and wife ar- both teachers, and not always at the same school. One does not meet with this sort of thing in the other departments pf the public service with a male clerk in, let us say, the Treasury, and his wife a typist a few rooms away. • “Those who are defending the cause of the married teachers have discovered that the married men in other departments of the public service do. things differently. There is quite an agitatioh going on for the Government to deal with° public servants whose wives have businesses either in the city or suburbs. Vicious little statements are behl<r made that there is some sort of evasion of the income tax or the wages tax-—possibly the betting tax, to say nothing of ‘the child endowment tax, and the Commissioner of Taxation is beino- urged to make inquiries whether the '’Government is receiving its just dues.

"Some members of Parliament are being embarrassed by constituents who direct attention to Mrs. Civil Service conducting a business, and requesting that he should go to the department and have her husband’s ability to keep hie, wife inquired into. Other Constituents want the matter voiced in Parliament. The agitation is growing to such an extent that it may lead to complications at the next election. Even shopkeepers are taking the matter up. It is even suggested "that unemployed relief coupons are assisting some of these businesses. "However, it is the Government’s pigeon, and it is the duty of Ministers to define the difference between a married woman maintaining her profession of school teaching though her husband is in the public service or out of it and the wife of a public servant continuing her work as, say, a florist, milliner, dressmaker, jeweller, artist, bookseller, ham and beef shop proprietor, grocer s shopkeeper, and a dozen and one other things. What would happen to a civil servant who married the widow of a publican who maintained her right to conduct the* hotel as in the days of her