A NEW PROBLEM

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIV, Issue 21000, 31 March 1938, Page 10

A NEW PROBLEM

I Dutch Wives Claim Right to .Job Women of the Netherlands are face to face with a new problem concerning their status. Rudolph H. Romme, Minister for Social Affairs, has declared his intention of introducing a bill under which married women will be forbidden to carry on a business or a profession simply because they feel an urge in such a direction. In the case of married women, breadwinners. or of women married to men who earn less than £3 a week, or of women who serve in their husbands’ shops. Mr Romme is prepared to be lenient. There is logic, he admits, in "allowing” such women to work. He is prepared, however, to be adamant in regard to married women who work because they want to work, and for the reason that, in his opinion, such work constitutes an act of desertion by which a married woman willfully neglects her work as wife and mother. The women of Holland are in vigorous oposition. They contend that. even on a generous estimate, not more than 6,000 among them will be obliged to relinquish their jobs. But that is not the point. The real point lies, they say. in the fact that every grown individual who is of sound intelligence is, or a.t any rate should be. capable of deciding his destiny' for himself, and that any act of the State which sets aside that fact constitutes an injustice which can bring good to nobody. If the married woman, capable of contributing things of value to the general community, is granted the right of contribution, the community will be th? richer, the women contend, and her individual home the happier. Nothing they declare, is more satisfying and more satisfactory to a woman than the free use of her talents in the field in which those can best be exercised.