Razzberries for Housewives

Home and motherhood got an unexpected shellacking last week at Stephens College, famed finishing school for future mothers. Stephens' homey President James Madison ("Daddy") Wood, believing that "the mother in the home is the key to future civilization," had gathered some 500 housewives and professionals (psychiatrists, teachers, et al,) for a three-day forum on The American Woman and Her Responsibilities. But Daddy Wood's family gathering turned into a family brawl.

Stephens, a highly successful Progressive junior college of 1,700 in Columbia, Mo., brooks no such nonsense as the theory that women are like men, devotes itself strictly to making women more womanly. It likes to boast that 85% of its girls get husbands within five years after graduation. To train them fully for their functions as wives and mothers, it teaches them the arts of dressing, making up, keeping a budget, reading the Bible, riding, singing, talking politics intelligently.

Convinced that U.S. morale, like charity, should begin at home, Daddy Wood staged his forum to show off his college as a model of female education and to broadcast the opinions of assorted experts --dietitians, doctors, educators, clubwomen, journalists, etc.--on how to improve U.S. homes. The forum started with talk of nutrition, soon became more lively.

At a jampacked meeting on how "current world conditions" affect U.S. women, Publisher Thomas Beck (Crowell-Collier) cried: "The hell with Johnny and his spinach; there are going to be many substitutes for spinach. . . . Are cooking and sewing going to win the war? No! You are going to have to work like men. Industry will win the war. ... If we had less sex distinction, there would be fewer divorces. . . My current wife was making $12,000 a year before she married me, and this ability of hers to do all the things I can do makes her my past, present and future wife. . . . [After the war] you . . . won't have the kind of home life you seem to be looking forward to. ... You can't train 40,000,000 housewives to be good cooks, but you can make 40,000 perfect cooks for restaurants. . . ."

Next day Stephens' startled Daddy and girls heard still more shocking talk. Exclaimed Dr. Leslie Benjamin Hohman, famed Johns Hopkins psychiatrist (author of As The Twig Is Bent): "Don't marry a soldier just because he wears a uniform. . . . Marriage in this country is based too much on romantic ideals. Romance is the whipped cream of marriage. . . . Whole civilizations have been founded on the theory of marriage without love; for example, the French marriage of convenience. . . ."

Stephens' girls booed and hissed.

Unruffled, Dr. Hohman went on to propose that young wives go to work.

Retorted Mrs. Douglas Timmerman, wife of the executive vice president of the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce: "No! Marriage and a career don't mix. I tried it ... and I'm glad to be back home. My child needs me." (Applause from Stephens' girls.)

Dr. Hohman: "I think that's just plain "bunk. Any woman who can afford $15 a week for a nurse will gladly turn over her kids to one." (Boos, hisses.)

Mrs. Timmerman: "Do you have any children, Dr. Hohman?"

Dr. Hohman: "No, I'm a bachelor. But women pay me large sums of money to train their children for them!"

Daddy Wood and his girls were distressed, but carried on. At the forum's end, he passed the ball back to the ladies who had attended, declared:

"It is the responsibility of these . . . women's clubs, churches, parent-teacher associations . . . Boy Scouts, Y.W.C.A. and the like, who are in position to attack specific parts of this over-all problem, to do so. .

Revising French history to conform, Vichy has instructed French teachers to pay less attention to the French Revolution of 1789, more to "the Kings who built up France." Until new history books are written, teachers are to use the old, eliminating some parts, "interpreting" others.

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