THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1910. THAT "NO ENCUMBRANCE" ACCUSATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10020, 16 April 1910, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1910. THAT "NO ENCUMBRANCE" ACCUSATION.

The Sydney correspondent of "The Times" has taken it upon himself to lecture the farmers and squatters of New South Wales for offering employment to married couples withoutchildren in preference to married couples with children, remarks the "Daily Telegraph," and it proceeds as follows:-—He calls upon the farmers pnd squatters to "mend their ways" in that respect, but no amount of lecturing can alter the obvious fact that domestic service is utterly unsuitable as a livelihood for a woman with a family of children. Nor is the correspondent's lecturing at all likely to induce farmers or squatters, or anybody else, to take into their employment for domestic service women who have assumed the proper and laudable responsibilities of matrimony, and whose energies ousht to be employed in carrying out the duties of motherhood, and not in earning a weekly wage by cooking other people's dinners or looking af-

ter other people's children. A man who marries and then expects his wife to earn wages by domestic service in addition to bearing him children and bringing them up is not the kind of man that can be regarded as v desirable immigrant for Australia. He is a shirker of his natural responsibility as the pro-

vider for the wife and family. Why should a station-owner or a farmer be expected to give employment to a cook or laundress with a family of young children when nobody has yet suggested that the business man in the city ought to "mend his ways" by advertising fur domestics with | families. Station-owners and others who have employment for married couples without children, and who have no employment for a married woman with a family demanding her undivided attention, are no more deserving of censure on that account than is the Sydney correspondent of "The Timss" if he declines to employ a cook with a family of young children when he can get one without a family. .There is a regrettable confusion of thought in the minds of those who continually launch diatribes against stationowners and farmers who cannot find employment for married couples with children. They appear to think that domestic service is a right and proper sphere o? occupation for a married woman with a family. It is not. And the reason why it i 3 not a right and propsr sphere is because it disqualifies the mother from devoting all her attention to her children, and because it brands the father unless special circumstances disable him with the disgrace of evading his natural obligation as a homemaker and provider for the offspring that he has brought into existence.