HOME OR BUSINESS?

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 12, 15 January 1932, Page 2

HOME OR BUSINESS?

FRENCH PSYCHOLOGIST HAS DECIDED VIEWS BACK TO SHELTERED LIFE Professor Charles Riehct, the wellknown French psychologist, has brought a hornet’s nest about his cars by suggesting that woman’s place shoul’’ be legally restircted to the home. Unemployment and over-production, says Dr. Richet, might be cured by making it illegal for women to work outside the home. The Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, president of the Women’s Suffrage Union, and one of the earliest to take up the cudgels, suggests that before any Jc Inlion is introduced on this subject, French women ought to be given the vote, so that the matter could be discussed without danger of gross injustice being done. She points out that France has live and a half million women who are cither spinsters or widows; and, indeed, when the last census was taken in 1926, out of a population of between twelve and thirteen million women over twenty-one, there were four and a half million employed outside their homos, excluding more than three million others engaged in agriculture. ALme. Rene Garnier, a member of the Faris Bar, declared that the professor’s remedy would “ re-establishe for women a state of degrading sercitude without benefiting either society or family.” Aline. Elizabeth Fonscque, president of the Society for the Amelioration of the Lot of Women, is the most scathing of all the women commentators. Alost members oi the sex, she declares, ask for nothing better than the opportunity to preside over the destinies of the home. But for that to be possible, she says, “it will be necessary to provide homes for two million French women who have been deprived of a husband or a fiance by the war or its consequences.” France, it would seem from all these arguments against Dr. Richet’s scheme, cannot put the clock back, and French women may console themselves that at the moment there are few indications that even the minute hand is being retarded. Paris has an excellent muncipal school, where working girls from the age of thirteen are taught to earn a living in any career they choose, though a budding shorthand-t pist learns how to cook, wash and iron, mind a baby and run a house generally, in addition to her special subjects. And, of course, there is no class of society in France in which girls are not learning „o follow a trade or a profession. The midinettes of Paris, so indispensiblo tc* the maintenance ot Paris fashion reputations, are at present the special subject of concern on the part of the famous dressmakers and milliners. The economic crisis has brought about such reductions in their wages that there is a proposal to establish a kind of co-operative store where the work girls and wemen can obtain the necessaries of life at wholesale prices.