HOME LIFE.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15308, 5 June 1922, Page 6

HOME LIFE.

SHOULD MARRIED WOMEN WORK? ’ s DANGER OF REVOLT. ~ [By Francis Gribble: Who says that wives, in working outside the home, are liable to risk their marital happiness.] Those of us who are middle-aged can remember a time when the fuestion, “Should married women work?” if asked at all, was _ asked only to be answered with an instant, emphatic and indignant negative. Even in those days, of course, a good many married women were act- 1 ually working. j Actresses were not expected to • leave the stage, on concert singers to quit the platform when they married. There were married women, , like Mrs Browning and Mrs Heinans, I who earned money by writing poetry; ( and there were married women, j like Lady Blesington and Mrs Trol- ! lope, who made good incomes out j of fiction. But these facts did not influence j the settled opinions of self-respect-- 1 ing people of the middle-classes.); A , f Artistic work, in their.view, yty&S .! not work at all, but a kind play j by means of which a fortune few j could supplement their pocket- j money. Real work,', they considered, j though obviously proper for work- j ing-classes, was a badge of social in- , feriority. * ■ / ) So they held thdir heads high, ■ when they could afford to do so, | avoiding paid work as carefully as a cat, crossing the road, avoids the puddles; boasting that there was no “need” for them or their daughters to stoop to it, and regarding it as the bounden duty of every man in his own station in life to maintain his wife in comfort without expecting her to work. > Now things are changed. The question is not only open to debate, but is continually debated, and presents itself in different shape from of old. The quality and nature of women’s work, in the old days, did not inspire respect. Few careers were open to them, and there were few kinds of work for which their education fitted them. i . Work, for them, meant, as a rule, the unskilled and uninteresting i drudgery 6? the elementary teaser, or the galling dependence of the lady Companion. Nothing was more natural than that they should feel that they lost caste when they engaged in. it, should loathe it while they remained single, and look to marriage as a way of escape from it. Since those days, however, two social developments have made a difference: the great spread of women's educational opportunities, and the overthrow M the barriers which made it difficult for any woman to move freely about the world without a chaperon, a female companion, or a duly accredited male protector. Education has enabled picked women—an annually increasing band —to undertake interesting, responsible and important work, and to compete with men on equal terms in many callings. The disappearance of the old, hampering social restrictions has brightened the lives even of the women who work in a subordinate capacity and filled. their careers with daily possibilities of adventurous excitement. So our question comes before us nowadays in a new form and is being given a new answer by a good many of the people who write to the papers about it. The women of the professional classes who work for money are no longer a minority, but a majority. Some of them work because they need the salaries; others because they hanker after additional pin money; others, again, because they find office life more amusing than home life. Consequently, to drop the work in order to marry is not, as it used to he, to throw off a hated burden, but to give up a life of interest and variety for an unfamiliar and perhaps monotonous occupation. An increasing number of them are showing reluctance to do this. Not, indeed, that they exhibit any disconcerting reluctance to marry. But they do, rather frequently, insist that maiv.ag* should neither be the end nor the beginning of a career, but merely a romantic incident, after which two careers, the husband’s and the wife’s shall continue, side by side, under the same roof. It is an arrangement which lias lately received much glorification, mainly, though not exclusively, from feminists. A Avife, we are constantly being told, who mixes daily with all sorts and conditions of people in the City, is a far more interesting companion for man than one who stays at home all day looking after the children and disputing with the servants. She has so much more to talk about. Perhaps she has; and 't is quite certain that, in these times of financial tightness, the money which she brings home may be useful in brighttening the home, even when it is not actually needed to keep the wolf from the door. THE HOME AS A BOND OF UNION. A wife’s capacity and readiness to work, therefore, may sometimes make possible a marriage which would otherwise be impossible, or at the least make comfortable a marriage which would otherwise be uncomfortable. So far so good. But arrangements which fulfil a useful purpose in certain circumstances are not necessarily ideal in all circumstances. Circumstances alter oases, and those people who assure us so confidently that a married woman can make her home an earthly paradise by goin gout to work are perhaps drawing a little on tlieir imaginations. For one thing, the home is apt to be neglected; and a neglected home is an uncomfortable home; and there are many men who prefer domestic comfort to a tired woman’s prattle about what Mr So-and>-So said in the office. The main interests of both husband and wife lying outside the home, what ought to be one of their ■iiMliiiliHliii

seen to become estranged and indifferent to each other, pursuing their separate interests and living their separate lives, until, without any definite quarrel, the tie, which has ceased to have any reality for either of them, snaps. Quite a number of women, well known to the world as useful public workers, h’ave recently had reason to complain, in the Divorce Court, Of their husbands’ conduct; and it impossible to read- the reports pf those cases without feeling that, however uesirable it may sometimes be fpr a married woman to continue h,er professional or philanthropic activities, both she and her husband are more likely ■£'’ find happiness if they s common interest in the home instead tjfiiuiiie sep-’ arate interests outsid^-'it.