Country Life Interests

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21260, 2 November 1940, Page 16 (Supplement)

Country Life Interests

A page devoted to the Interests of the Country Women of the Waikato, and in particular to advancing and recording the activities of (] those two great national organisations, the Women's Institutes and the v

Women Cursed By Household Gods

CAST OFF THE CHAINS OF POSSESSIONS

(By Christine Jope-Slade) A CLEVER old lady used to say “ There are many good women ruined by being left a houseful of furniture/’ She had jettisoned double-beds, mammoth sideboards and all her brontosaurus furniture when she moved into a smaller house. Her sister-in-law, with an income of £6OO a year, was paying £l5O a year in rent to house and live with the furnishing history of her own youth. Women have thrown overboard their prejudices, their illusions, moved out on beliefs and theories that hampered them, in the most amazingly brave way these last ten or fifteen years. I doubt whether they ever before lived so fluidly, elastically and fully. I think, however. they are still cursed by their household gods and chained to them. The moment a woman has furniture sold to her she is sold to it. It is worse if the stuff is heirloom furniture. If it is given to her she is doubly given to it. In the old world rapidly receding this was a strength in women. They clung to a permanent background against which they etched and built up the picture of their lives for themselves and the outside world. Today it is a weakness. There is no permanent background, except for a very few of us. If you have the courage. I have proved there is a curious freedom in wriggling free from the thraldom of familiar things and starting life again in a new place with new ones, whatever your age may be; and I am in the middle forties. If you discard the seat of your success and the tables of your triumphs you also discard the mute evidences of your mistakes, your indelible disappointments, your failures, your broken or quite unrealisable dreams. You move on with yourself from yourself. lam not talking, naturally, of rare pieces, period furniture. That would be crazy. lam talking of the ordinary accompaniment to family and individual life built up by an ordinary man and woman. If one looks at things very straight and quite uncompromisingly, I think, as one moves on in life, one discards from strength and not from weakness. Women Must Travel Light These Days For mothers, unless they watch themselves very closely, there is a curious psychological danger in living with the childish and adolescent evidences left by their grown-up family. They have difficulty in visioning them as grown-up. They expect them to come back as children; and out tips appropriate advice and censure; and it never was appropriate and never will be ! I have known women intellectually stunted in small country places by their faithfulness to early household gods. There was a primness, a rightness, a too faithful mirroring of the exact epoch in which they were bought, so strong that it is stamped on their owners’ whole personalities. Modernity seems immoral. What is the good, though, of clinging to a grandfather clock in a war, or any period in a period like this ? Travel light. Break with your household gods. Chuck overboard your past in wood and china and glass. I believe the world is not only internationally but socially and domestically on the move; and that the pioneer spirit must be shown by women. They must travel light, and more than that, they must not mind discarding useless things. There will be less and less use for them. You can raise a family and make a home anywhere. It is years, actually, before a family ever really sees a home, and then they never see it as you do. I find that my own children remember laughter, parties, new frocks, food, pantomimes, kittens, tumbles, illnesses—and they have no recollection of the nursery chintz into which I put my [pride and soul; the lovely long corridor I once had with bronze gates at the end and an illuminated statuette of a lovely virgin. It was the cvly period in my life when I ever felt grand, and it only lasted a year; and then my husband died and I sold all my really good, big furniture—and all they remember of that echoing corridor with the bronze gates and the exotic lighting is “ a kitchen on one side and a dining-room on the other.”