THE NON-RESIDENT DOMESTIC.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19009, 9 May 1924, Page 11

THE NON-RESIDENT DOMESTIC.

HIGH HEELS AND DISCOMFORT. PROHIBITION BELOW STAIRS. LONDON, March 23. If all we hear be true then English housewives are in for a period in which they will be faced with as domesticless a time as are their New Zealand sisters. Dr. Ethel Bentham, a leading feminist and a medical woman in practice for 25 years, asserted yesterday, in a lecture at the Institute of Hygiene, that the domestic servant difficulty was goin-g to give even more trouble in the future than it does now, and that people would have to rearrange their way of living to meet the problem. There would be more co-operative housekeeping, more flats, and generally a more scientific organisation of our household workers. There would have to be more sleeping out for domestic workers. The resident servant was an institution that she did not think was going to last. Already the old nurse who used to be such a dominant personality in the households of so many families in England was rapidly disappearing. Dr. Bentham incidentally paid a tribute to our less alcohol-ridden days, when she said cooks suffered less from “liver 0 than they used to do. There was much less drinking among servants below stairs than in the past. Prohibition began in the. kitchen long before it reached upstairs. She asserted it was almost possible to break the average English maid of the habit of doing everything possible on her knees. That accounted for many of the troubles suffered by female servants.

She was severe about fashion’s follies, and declared of high heels that, as long as it was the, fashion among employers to wear them, it would be the fashion among employees. She is quite convinced that, among both the employers and the, girls this fashion is responsible for one-third of the discomfort and ill-health of which they both complain. Jn one respect Dr. Bentham pointed a moral io English housewives which the Dominions have already gone some way to correct, when she said lack of recreation affected the domestic workers’ health. The hours prevented them going to concerts or theatres. Whore there were daughters in the family, the young servants naturally noticed the contrasts between the daughters’ lives and their own.