Ye Prisoners of the Kitchen

In Flushing Meadow the Chilean delegate rose last week in the U.N. Assembly session to take up a family tragedy. For 28 months, said Hernan Santa Cruz, young Alvaro Cruz, son of a former Chilean ambassador at Moscow, had been trying to take his Russian-born wife back to Chile (TIME, Nov. 17, 1947). The Russians had stubbornly refused to let her leave. Close to a thousand U.S., British and French husbands who had married Russian girls, said Santa Cruz, were in the same predicament. The Soviet decree forbidding Russian women married to foreigners to leave the country was a moral outrage.

Britain's Hector McNeil was quick to back up Santa Cruz. The Russian ban, cried McNeil, "cuts across the almost instinctive disposition of ordinary men & women to make allowances for [those] who consider themselves in love."

Black-Market Babies. The Soviet answer staggered even U.N.'s hardened connoisseurs of Russian logic. The Russians, rasped Ukrainian Delegate Vasili A. Tarasenko, were holding the women for their own protection. Only in the Soviet Union were women assured of fair treatment. Look at the U.S., he cried, some U.S. women are so poor that they have to sell their children. Triumphantly he cited some news clippings that told of a black market in adopted babies.

Delegate Semen K. Tsarapkin read from the letter of a Soviet woman, the ex-wife of an Englishman, who complained: "Not only had I to cook meals for my husband, but I had to know the exact minute when he entered the house and at that time the hot dishes had to be ready on the table."

Spring Is Here. McNeil spoke up again. "When I am working hard ... I think it not unreasonable to ask my wife to provide me with a hot meal," said McNeil, "but I have been known to urge my wife to leave the making of the Sunday lunch to me ... I make a very excellent Sunday lunch." U.S. Delegate Eleanor Roosevelt threw a sharper spear: "Who does the housework in the Soviet Union? Is it always done by the men, or are all the services performed through some communal arrangement?"

The Assembly voted 39 to 6 that the Russian ban was "likely to impair the friendly relations among nations," and should be withdrawn. Poland's Jan Drohojowski, who voted against the motion, thought the Assembly had yielded to U.S. and Chilean "political acrobatics." The Assembly has been misled, he snapped, "by a feeling of sympathy for the young people, now that spring is here."

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