MAKING A HOME

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20587, 28 November 1936, Page 20 (Supplement)

MAKING A HOME

THE PROFESSIONAL WOMAN “The business or professional woman who can afford to buy a home of her own is faced with the problem of how much time and money she can afford for the care of it,” states a writer in an exchange. “In the first flush of possession she may undertake the housework herself, proudly boasting that her home is her hobby. Gradually she finds she has added ‘bits’ to the home, in spite of resolutions of austerity in furnishing. Other factors begin to make the ‘hobby’ rather too exacting—such as increasing professional duties or increasing hospitality, or both. The daily ‘help’ is apt to be unreliable and limited in her scope. “The ideal solution of the problem is a good housekeeper, but even the professional woman with a ‘comfortable’ income may not feel justified in incurring the full responsibility of one. “I was beginning to debate this difficulty when chance offered me halfshares in both a housekeeper and a house. I am one of those difficult women who have never made acquaintance with another woman with whom they would care to share a home. So I have divided house with a comparative stranger, who lives in her own suite of rooms occupying nearly onethird of the house. I share nearly another third, and the housekeeper and her husband (who has outside work) occupy the rest.

“The situation might present difficulties but for its casualness. Neither of us has stipulated for any definite number of days or hours of work, both of us having known the housekeeper long en’ough to be able to rely on her impartiality. In case of emergency neither of us is too incompetent to make her own bed or vacuum her own carpet, so the arrangement works without tension.

It is not an arrangement that would suit everyone, but for two women of easy-going disposition who are not likely to make unreasonable demands on the housekeeper’s time or attention, who do not live in perpetual fear of not having their fair share of the housekeeper”. services and have no curiosity whatever about each other’s movements, it is as nearly ideal as one can hope for in an imperfect world.”