WOMEN AND LABOUR
SIR,—However this period is described by future historians, it will most certainly not be described as an age of chivalry. The war has shown up in a vivid way the real position of the majority of women in this country. Their labour is taken for granted, their physical sufferings are-taken for granted, their inferior material wealth is taken for granted.
The problems of the majority of women have been largely ignored. The destructive, degrading poverty during the years of youth, while their children are still young—the poverty that turns many women of forty and less into worn-out wrecks—and all the evils that this poverty produces have been accepted as inevitable and " natural." Little has been done to provide nurseries and kindergartens, the vast material waste and mental degradation that is the real nursery of the majority of our children. has been allowed to continue.
And now comes a time of emergency. We need the maximum out- put of every individual—and it cannot be given. Sufficient arrange- ments have not been made for the care of infants and young children. The health of thousands of women is below what it should be There is the usual, vast, unnecessary waste. Further immense demands are now being made on this majority of women,. and there is still no effort to guarantee their welfare. Welfare inspection of factories, workrooms and shops employing women is not, so far as I know, compulsory. Nor is it compulsory, so far as I know, for factories to employ welfare workers and provide suitable rest-rooms for women employees. And why is it not compulsory? Because it would expose the conditions in which many women have to work. It would expose the bad state of health in which they are expected to work and the general lack of care which surrounds their lives. There is nothing between us and the materialisation of certain reforms, including family allowances, except the irritation it would cause to a small majority, for reasons that are wholly despicable. The standards of chivalry have been discarded, but need they be discarded for ever? The principles of Christianity are ignored, the ideals of Democracy are given lip-service only—and all to satisfy ., small materialistic minority. Surely it is time that this minonty was ignored and those who have laboured for the well-being of the majority should insist that certain great evils are ended, now?
War does not justify the postponement of social reforms, on the contrary, it makes their need overwhelming. For those who feel that I may he exaggerating, the following books might be of interest: Working-class Wives, by Margery Spring Rice; The Case for Family Allowances, by Eleanor Rathbone ; and Progress and Poverty, by
Seebohm Rowntree.—Yours truly, JOAN BROOKE. Grimstone Manor, Gelling, East York.
SIR,—We are rationed for food and for clothing, but there remains one commodity whose unequal distribution will certainly be increased by the canting up of all single young women. I refer to domestic help. Many hundreds of women are for the first time in their lives doing their own household work to the best of their ability, and doing it cheerfully, but there is real hardship and suffering among elderly and delicate women, and among the mothers of young children whose servants have left them to do war work and whom they cannot replace.
If you can offer fabulously high wages and specialised work on a staff you may be successful in obtaining help, otherwise your success is likely to be in inverse proportion to your need.
A pathetic advertisement for domestic help from an ex-Civil servant and his wife appeared in The Times the other day, both were over seventy and unable to do housework. In the same column there were two demands for upper housemaids, one for a family of three! Domestic help is as necessary as food and clothing for some old and delicate people, it is, in fact, more important that they should have one servant than that anyone should have two or more Can anything be done about it?—Yours truly,
MARGARET SPARROW.
New Barn House, Ferry Hinksey, Oxford.
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