"The Minister for Education, Mr. Mutch, in opening the exhibition, said that there were over 100,000 girl scholars in the State, but only 6,000 of them were undergoing the two years' domestic course. Cooking, home management, care of children, and arts and crafts that tended to beautify the home were included in the "Mr, Mitchell (Inspector-General of Police) points out that owing to the serious crime wave in Sydney, police from the country districts have been drafted into the metropolitan area in an attempt to bring about a reduction of crime."
These two paragraphs appeared on the same page in the "Sydney Morning Herald." To the casual reader there may seem to be no connexion between the two statements, but to anyone interested in social and economic questions, the two are so closely related that they may be taken as cause and effect.
During the past half century the growth of industry hag" drawn more and more of our girls from the domestic sphere. For a long time the danger of this was not realized, because the idea was prevalent that women knew womanly things "by instinct," and the fact was quite overlooked that in the previous ages the womanly instinct had been developed by environment and example. Some old-fashioned people objected to girls doing men's work, but the genera] mass accepted the girls advent into industry as an inevitable part of progress. Nobody looked ahead ta the time when these girl workers should become wives and mothers, and no_ provision was made to fit them for marriage and motherhood. The result was that when they married most of these girls could not cook a chop' or boil "a potato. Many a man's digestion was ruined by his wife's bad cooking. When children came the poor, untrained mother had to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.