Foreign News: No Modernist

Paradoxically enough, Miss Margaret Bondfield, Britain's first female Cabinet minister, is no modernist. Far from praising the onward rush of women to what they joyfully term "emancipation," Miss Bondfield dealt the modernists last week a snappy slap, declaring that homemaking was the greatest art to which a woman could rise. Said she: "The fact of the matter is that a large number of women are not fit to be homemakers because they have never addressed their minds to it as a vocation. They have regarded it as merely an opportunity to satisfy instinctive cravings, to express themselves and to have a husband who will give them a good time. . . . Homemaking requires the greatest intellectual effort and the most sustained service—the infinite capacity for taking pains which amounts to genius. "I have very little patience with the woman who wants to leave husband and children to the care of paid workers, while she herself seeks outside work because it is more intellectual."