“SURPLUS WOMEN.”

Waipa Post, Volume XII, Issue 944, 20 May 1920, Page 2

“SURPLUS WOMEN.”

During a debate in the House of Commons recently on a vote for the Colonial Office, Mr Amery, the Under Secretary, ,said the vote included £2500, half of a sum of £SOOO proposed to be given to the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women. Partly as a result of the war there was a surplus of 1,300,000 women in Great Britain, and the work of assisting women to settle in British colonies was therefore very important. What was being done now in regard to overseas settlement was only the beginning of one of the most important movements in the Empire, for it was inevitable that within the next few years a very large number of men and women alike would be seized with the old passion for roaming which had made the Empire. Mr Tom Myers, -the recently-elect-ed Labour member for Spen Valley, observed that the reports of the Army Medical -Boards showed that only 36 per cent of the men examined for military service were normally fit, and he therefore urged that it was bad policy to send the best of our women out of the country.