NEWS from one hundred years ago: THE FAMILY OF THE FUTURE

‘All is changing, all is wavering, all is in the melting pot,’ writes the distinguished elder poet Jessie Mackay. The ‘very basis of society is so fiercely debated in these days that the norm of society, the family, cannot be regarded as outside the sphere of change.’ The family, she says, ‘has been profaned, straitened, deflected, stultified by two malign factors — the industrial system and the subjection of women.’ Mackay goes on to say that communism and feminism are two ways of tackling the problem. Communism understands ‘the misery and frustration of the working mother’s life, compelled to let her children lack for early tendance, and go from her untrained and immature to the same competitive mill in which she herself is being ground to death.’ Feminism understands things even more deeply. ‘The feminist, while equally aware of the economic failure of the man-made world, puts the child’s main loss on higher and more general grounds — the grounds of a stunted life and a distorted vision of the world.’
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Otago Witness, 26 October 1920