AMERICAN WOMEN

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1787, 27 July 1926, Page 7

AMERICAN WOMEN

HOME LIFE DISAPPEARING. CLUB LIFE IN ASCENDANT. According to British standards there is very little home life in the big cities of the United States. The interests of the average Englishman are centred in his home, and for generatons he has insisted on the home being run for his comfort. The English housewife regards it as he r first duty in life to stu'dy her husband's comfort. He spends most of the evenings in the family circle, especially the long winter evenings., when he sits in a comfortable chair before the fir© with a book. He seldom goes out, for he is not a regular patron of the theatre, ■like the 'Continental and American husbands.

The American home is not run for the comfort of the head of the house. In American cities domestic labour is far more costly and scarcer than in England. The American housewife gets through her ; domestic work with the aid of numerous labour-saving devices and a little manual assistance in the rough work of "the house. After having been in the house all day she does not 'look 'forward to spending the evening there in company Avith her husband. Her idea is to get some variety into life by having dinner at a restaurant with her husband, and then going on to a theatre. The American habit of dining at a restaurant lessens the housework by Tendering it unnecessary to prepare the principal meal of the day, and it provides a more varied meal than she could prepare. The American from his youth upwards is taught to accept the idea that the sexes are equal,, and therefore he thinks it is only right that his wife should want to escape from her home in the evening after having been in- : doors all day. <H'e has never been taught to regard it as her first duty in life to remain at home and ministe r to his comfort after his day's work is done.

According to Mrs Rosita Forbes, an adventurous Englishwoman, who has hobnobbed with ATab chiefs in Morocco and Arabia, and has recently been lecturing in the United States, home life in the Middle West, which is the most typical sector of America, ."is disappearing altogether before the onslaught of the women's clubs." These clubs are far more numerous in the Middle West than in the big cities in the eastern States.

The development of club life among the American women of the Middle West, states Mrs Rosita Forbes, "is partly because the advent of money gives the American wife a little more leisure, but no opportunity. Dollars have ceased to have reasonable purchasing power, because they cannot buy labour. For instance, I've often stayed in a small suburban house where my hostess, personally directed every detail of the service, and discovered that her fortune, changed into pounds, would have enabled her to live luxuriously in Mayfair. "The American business man is rightly optimistic, believing that the best possible investment for capital is his career, as represented by what he appears to be, so the scale of living is always a little in advance of his pay roll. Thus service does not increase with the size of'the house, and in many sm'all towns the wife prefers to dispense altogether with a servant, rather than give up the owner-driven car. In thjs case she will rise about 6.30, prepare breakfast with the aid of what we should call a charwoman, drive her husband to the office, return to see that 'the help' has cleaned up the house, and spend the rest of the day at one of half a dozen clubs. In the evening she will drive down io fetch her husband, and they will dine at a hotel before returning to the empty house. Yet this man may be earning an annual income of two or threo. thousand pounds. "The American women's clubs are the most attractive in the world. They are the ultimate expression of modernity in colour, range, and efficiency, but they are steeped in that atmosphere of culture which is like a moulting eiderdown of personality. Club women are in danger of losing the power of individual thought. For airless, steam-heated hours they absor* second-hand information, till their brains are too comatose ,to reason. In one Chicago club I heard four lectures in a single day, on such varying subjects as "The Man's Work in the Home," "You Are What You Eat," "The Abnormal in Modern Literature, Mysticism, and Opportunity." At the end I was left with two ideas, to which I clung like straws in a flood of sound. One was that one should not eat lunch, and the other that man's place anywhere was narrowing to that of a cash machine! A charwoman, in returning thanks, remarked lapprovingly (that she had 'never heard so many words in so short a time!"