WOMEN'S WORLD >The Hand that Rocks the Cradle

Te Ao Hou, April 1956, Page 58

WOMEN'S WORLD >The Hand that Rocks the Cradle by Lucienne Noblet Traditional ideas die hard. Eight men out of ten, if asked the not-so-simple question “Does your wife work?” rarely hesitate to reply: “My wife? She doesn't do anything … She stays at home.” Most men take it pretty much for granted that the ordinary housewife has the luck to lead a privileged life of ease, with plenty of free time on her hands during the day. He is blissfully unaware of how much really goes into the care of the home, cooking meals and looking after children. Just recently social research experts in the U.S.A., the United Kingdom, Belgium and France added up what they thought was the real value of work done by housewives. First of all they found that the wife who “doesn't do anything” provides the country with more than a bit of all its money. The experts use the term “quite a considerable part of its national income”. They also found out that the figures for the four countries were all much about the same, and if the four sets of figures were put together the stay-at-home wives were handling and administering some 60% of the national income in each country. So it looks after all as if the mother in the home is, perhaps, just as much a financial wizard as any Wall Street tycoon. The French survey, carried out by the National Institute of Demographic Studies, produced some interesting facts to show that a woman's work is never done. They found that the average French housewife in the large towns, such as Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, works a 70-hour week. They took this figure and put it against the total number of households in France (13 million). The surprising result was that housewives were found to work some 4 thousand million hours more than all the other kinds of workers in the country, both men and women. This means that looking after French homes and children takes quite a bit more time than the whole of French business, industry, agriculture and administration. Here once again the figures for the U.S.A., the United Kingdom and Belgium were much the same. These facts and figures are not, perhaps, so surprising if we take a look at some of the replies given by French housewives in another survey carried out by the International Association of Women Doctors, aimed at determining the extent to which housewives overwork. Most wives with children to look after put in between 10 and 14 hours work a day, and only those with grown-up families said that they did less than 8 hours a day. Asked whether they had a complete day's break in their working week, most replied “No” or “Rarely”, while some admitted to a half-day on