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Show Kathleen Norris Says: Ti ere's Deadly Boredom in Being Too Lucky (Bell Syndicate WNU Service.) mrt- if v4fer dinner we listen to any good radio program and then Leonard goes to bed and reads for two or even three hours. By KATHLEEN NORRIS THE truth is, most of us American women live under unnatural conditions. condi-tions. Our lives are so easy that life is very hard for us! We have to keep thinking up artificial ways of keeping busy. There are great necessities neces-sities all around us, bitter needs of hunger, housing, unemployment, un-employment, mothering of the motherless, comforting the hopeless, solving any tiny one of the millions of problems prob-lems that our ' civilization leaves in its wake. But these are uninviting subjects. What to Do? So we support matinees, afternoon movies, bridge clubs, amusement clubs, language and book-binding lessons, tea shops, beauty parlors, cultural and pseudo-political lectures; lec-tures; we encourage smart middle-aged middle-aged women to talk new book and new movement and new thought to us; we gather in big department stores to learn how to make lampshades lamp-shades and hook rugs; we attend the club when the dramatic section or the musical section or the domestic science section is putting on a program, pro-gram, and we live within sound of the radio. Added to these are unnecessary shopping, and unnecessary fussing over meals. Our mealsl Foreign women look in complete bewilderment bewilder-ment at the countless menus that are published in this country, thousands thou-sands and thousands of meals printed print-ed every month, and consider we have spoiled appetites. Chopped nuts and whipped cream, larded this and breaded that, jellied soup and stuffed celery, desserts that are beaten and creamed and set and surrounded with walls of lady-fingers and soaked with rum; even the simple sim-ple old cellar vegetables of our forefathers fore-fathers are minced "and rolled in crumbs and fried and puffed and embellished with raisins. they get frightened, as realer women wom-en never are. For example, here is a letter from an Arkansas woman, who lives in a four-room city apartment, loves her husband, fears she's losing him. "Leonard is always kind to me," she wails, "but he doesn't need me! His breakfast is only orange juice, which I leave in the ice-box overnight. over-night. He lunches at the factory 13 miles out of town. He comes home after a late afternoon stop at the club, where he plays a few games of dominoes or bridge, and has a tomato to-mato juice. His taste at supper is simple, nothing fussy or elaborate; in fact, he often has only a bowl of rice, cereal or crackers and milk, and a cookie. He likes the packaged cookies better than home made. An Empty Existence. "I get up after he goes in the morning, wash his orange-juice glass, my coffee cup and spoon, and make the beds. It is now about quarter past nine. And Leonard gets home at six. "We are among the many," the letter goes on, "who decided early in married life that we could not afford a family. I would not want a child unless I could give that child every advantage of raising and education, edu-cation, and the experience of the few couples we know who have taken tak-en the risk does not tempt me. "Perhaps I am critical, but this life does not seem satisfying to me, and I feel that my husband and I are drifting apart. It is in vain that I occasionally try to interest him in cards, some outstanding movie, or an effort to widen our circle of friends. He seems to need very little, lit-tle, and it is not imagination that I am not included in that little, after 14 years of wedded life. If I am away for a few summer weeks, he keeps the house quite as well as I do, getting his own breakfast and supper and washing up after them." Misses Joy of Being Needed. Poor woman, 14 years a wife, and trying to interest a man in cards, movies, or new acquaintances! She is not really needed anywhere; she never feels the glorious necessity of Nothing REAL to Accomplish. And all this means that we haven't enough REAL things to do. It sounds so fortunate, so much as if we were to be envied! Electric lights, gas stoves, linoleum that needs only a wipe with a damp cloth; everything canned and packaged pack-aged and convenient even the humble applesauce, the unpretentious unpreten-tious new potato, the familiar biscuit. bis-cuit. One can buy shelled peas and lima beans, shelled crabs and shrimp, ready made pie-crust and patty shells. Fifty years ago housework was all-absorbing. all-absorbing. No permanents and painted finger-nails then! The kitchen kitch-en was a place of ashes, coal, yeast rising, mops, scrubbing brushes, peeling apples, chopping and stirring stir-ring and skinning, cleaning fowls, handling great pots of soup bones, rolling out square yards of pastry. Women did all the family laundry, they did all the sewing, they cared for the children in health and for everyone in illness. Frightened at Boredom. And that's what women are doing in nine tenths of the world today. When they are doing anything else, although they may be free and rested rest-ed and groomed and lovely as to hair and skin and fingernails, and up on the latest lunch dishes and bridge points of The Four Aces, they are also apt to be bored frightfully, as their more hard-working sisters never were bored, and sometimes doing tnings, deciding mings, trying to crowd in a little extra service for someone, trying to squeeze out time for an hour's delicious leisure. I have known women whose hands were always full of cooking utensils, or swiftly busy with blankets and sheets, or burdened with heavy, exacting babyhood, had more actual joy in living in five minutes than this woman knows in as many years! The woman who wrote me that letter doesn't know it, but she is a coward. She has been made a coward cow-ard by her own nature, that is unimaginative, un-imaginative, lazy, easily influenced. These are minor faults, perhaps, but we pay for them more highly than for more serious ones. Just Isn't Living. To live in one dull apartment, year in and year out; to agree that having children is too much of a risk to run; to follow the example of other stupid women blindly, wondering won-dering all the while why life tastes so flat, is to grow gradually less and less aware of the amazing opportunities op-portunities all about her, to forget what freedom and independence are, to sink gradually into an atrophied condition from which nothing can arouse her! Science and civilization have taken tak-en away from us women many of our old royal rights of service and usefulness. But it's a poor heart that doesn't find a latter day substitute substi-tute in a world as needy as this one. |