WOMEN “SLIDE BACK”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20851, 6 October 1937, Page 10

WOMEN “SLIDE BACK”

LEADING FEMINIST’S VIEWS Women’s new-won freedom in art and in business is in grave danger of being lost, according to Miss Gordon Holmes, the well-known feminist and joint managing director of the National Securities Corporation, Ltd., of London. Only a united effort by women on this side can halt the back-to-the-home movement, she contends. Miss Holmes was in Canada and the United States to attend conventions of business and professional women. In an interview she took the opportunity of urging women to help in the fight against the return of women to the hearthside.

“You are the only women in the world who are taken seriously,” she told her listeners. “Everywhere else men have half a smile on their faces when the woman question is raised. If you realise that you hold the future of business women in your hands, you would take the lead as Englishwomen did in the suffrage fight.” Miss Holmes blamed unemployment as the basic cause of the “general slide back” in the status of women, adding that all British Labour Ministers had envied those countries where the situation has been eased by the return of women to their homes. She suggested that American women should drop all their welfare activities and “bend every effort towards getting a woman representative in Congress from every State in the Union. That would really say something to the rest of the world.”

In conclusion, Miss Holmes prescribed a touch of British complacency, less shyness and less sense of inferiority for American women if they were to take the lead in “the proper way.”