[To TER Enrroa or zees " SPECIATOS."1 Elm—Though some of
your correspondents curiously- twist or miss the point of my remarks, all of them indirectly give anpport to the niain purpose of my letter. Obviously, I am not so simple as to wish trained Red Cross nurses to forsake work of the first moment for work, however useful and dignified, of secondary importance. I said nothing of the sort; though clearly, unless a woman can arrange that her household will hold together without her, her place is at home. But my point was that for months, for years even, gently nurtured girls are kept at work of the utmost drudgery and roughness, while the places they might fill at home are occupied by women better able, by reasons of upbringing, habitude, and strength, to discharge those duties. I am well aware of the difficulty of cutting down establishments; but it is generally possible to shut up a wing of a house altogether and than facilitate matters. That this is often not done when it might be is attested by numerous advertisements in London and provincial papers, wherein demand is made for a large number of servants to administer to families of two or three persons. Of *aurae, women, speaking generally, cannot see to their houses and
go out on special war work. But I have in mind masses of quite useless women who do neither, and imagine that showing up on visiting days at military hosptals, where they frequently make themselves a nuisance to the staffs and their patients, meets all demands which can reasonably be made upon them. Again, there are thousands of gentlewomen to whom the reduction of their "establishments" means parting with the one maid to which the economic pressure put upon the poorer members of this class had, before the war, already reduced them; and it is these who show their wisdom and patriotism by deciding to fend for them- selves; with such occasional assistance as cannot be dispensed with.
As to the assumption that no penalty in the social sense attaches to this course of action, doubtless in the free-and-easy atmosphere of London proper, where folk are accepted on value, so to speak, such may be the ease. But the main currents of British life have their backwaters, some of them fairly stagnant at that—most London suburbs, for instance, or those extek,ded suburbs, the residential enclaves abounding in the Home Counties, which are neither urban nor rural, and where folk have no standard to guide them, save a kind of subconscious nervousness of doing something which might not be regarded as comme fl feat by persons who have arrived from nowhere by a train somewhat earlier than that which brought them into these select folds.
The last sentence of "M. C. D.'s" letter seems to betray some- thing not far removed from contempt for the art of managing a house and for the culinary art. Whether this is the writer's feeling or not, this ignorant and vicious attitude toward those arts is common enough in this country. Both of them require as much brain for their successful accomplishment as many another form of industry. The chance throwing of crude meat into a pan and trusting to Providence for the result is, alas! too often the high-water mark of British cookery. Bat the economic and artistic use of food materials, so as to ensure—doubly necessary in these days of shortage—that meals shall be eatable and digest- ible, and that they shall be palatable, is no mean art. It requires patience, thought, judgment, and above all sensitiveness. Having regard to the results in health and efficiency of properly prepared and attractive meals, women who address themselves to this work are clearly serving a national purpose. French and Italian house- wives, whether they actually select, prepare, and cook the meals they set before their families, or supervise the work, have been able to achieve, generally speaking, far better results with the employment of half the material, so far in any case as meat be concerned, than the women of England have found necessary; and this not merely because the material has been less plentiful, but because they have not been contented with the standard of attainment in themselves or in their servants which "a more or less unsatisfactory candidate" for-the "Women's Army Auxiliary Corps " may be assumed to have reached.—I am, Sir, Ie.,
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