HOUSEWORK AS A HOBBY.

Waikato Times, Volume 99, Issue 16596, 12 September 1925, Page 15 (Supplement)

HOUSEWORK AS A HOBBY.

The days when the average woman could obtain, or afford, a cook and a housemaid are long since past. Today the mistress of many a middleclass household is often left to her own resources.

Talk to one of these servantless mistresses, and what do you get? Usually grumbling, and yet more grumbling, over mental tasks. Why? I know plenty of women who play games regularly and strenuously in order to preserve their figure. Why not look on housework in the same light? Because directly you make a hobby of housework, and look upon it as fun, you w’ill agree that you use the very set of muscles you use in games, and the whole boredom of domesticity vanishes (writes Mrs Stanley Wrench in the Daily Mail). Though this is a democratic age, there is still a little snobbery about housework: We might well emulate the French housewife, wh<s is not ashamed to do her own shopping. And although it may be urged that when tradesmen will call for orders, and the telephone is at our elbow’, the morning walk is superfluous, I have always found myself better served by doing my own marketing. As l'or housework, with all the la-bour-saving devices now on the market, the running of a house is child’s piay compared with what it was in the time of our grandmothers. It is much more interesting, too. They wore bonnets at thirty, and at forty w’ere frankly middle-aged. To-day the woman of forty is just at her best and in her prime, and if she is wise enough to make her home her chief interest and housework one of her hobbies, she Will never become fat and discontented. To be interested in what one is doing keps one young and happy. Many a depressed and neurotic woman would become a new creature if she would wake up to the fact that housework can be made a thoroughly enjoyable hobby.