THE WOMEN WITHOUT INCENTIVE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19850, 20 January 1920, Page 7

THE WOMEN WITHOUT INCENTIVE.

A lady in the “Auckland Herald” says;—'there is a problem facing us. "Wo trained women during five long years of effort to work for the war cause. Every dub, league, and society in the land dropped its peacetime pleasant sociability, and set itself to organise individual effort, to “rope in” young girls, mature women, society loaders, farmers’ wives, shop assistants, factory workers, to do some work, always entailing self-sacrifice and always achieving financial result— for the soldiers. ' Now those women and those girls stand wistful many of them, tired all of them, but not invalided, from their work. The chief feeling of moot of them, is ennui—that there is nothing in particular to do. Many ot them have grown, during the war, from schoolgirls to women; they have spent the years when ordinarily they would have been pleasuring, in working for the army. It is not lair to their dcvel- ' oped natures to leave them without any incentive. box-trotting and mere gniios are not enough for the girl today.

A great cry is going up throughout the Empire that frivolity, if not immorality, is on the increase. The accusation is probably not justified, uui if it wore, there is muen excuse for laxity of conduct under the sudden relaxation ot serious effort. For five years men have lived to fight, and women have lived to work for fighting men. Suddenly hostilities cease, and with them tho activities of thousands of organised women. The common pmpose of the nation's womanhood is dissipated. Lorn beings must do something. Women’s energy is, at a word a drug in the market. Sho is “at a loose end.” Older women can complacently return to their homo duties and their comforts. But the young! Where and what is their incentive? They appeal, consciously or passively, to the older to find them some exit from their slough of despond. A transcending spirit of self-sacrifice has been called forth, has been used to the utmost, and suddenly is cast aside. 'This is a great waste of splendid nationalism.