SOCIAL CONDITIONS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 206, 31 July 1937, Page 12

SOCIAL CONDITIONS.

REFORM IN UNITED STATES. An interesting account of wliat clubwomen were doing for moral reform in the United .States was given by Mrs Peter J. Brooker, who passed through Auckland en route to Los Angeles, after accompanying her husband on a visit to Australia. “When you stop to think that over three million women in the United States are members of our organisation. and that these women are working to better social conditions, . then you hare some idea of the magnitude of our endeavours,” said Mrs Brooker, who is a member of the General .Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Since the organisation was nonpolitical, non-partisan and non-sec-tarian, it was in a position to take up any issue, said Mrs Brooker. Only lately a campaign had been started to teach people the facts about several diseases alarmingly prevalent m the country. At first there was considerable criticism of a women’s organisation taking k stand so frankly on this subject,, but doctors all over the country hurried to the defence of the organisation and so heartily endorsed its efforts that public opinion soon fell into line.

These campaigns., said Mrs Brooker, were conducted through programmes carried on by individual clubs. The main board of the federation would formulate as many as a dozen programmes, and the clubs adopted the ones they preferred. Pamphlets were sent out, lecturers were encouraged, and a huge machine set in motion to carry out the ideas of the federation. In all there were 14,500 clubs in the federation, excluding 84 established in 25 other countries. Phere were several main departments of work in which the clubs were chiefly interested, including those of international relations, public welfare, citizenship, the American home, fine arts, legislation and a junior department which catered ior the interests of the younger members. One of the most far-reaching programmes which, the federation had yet dealt with was that of cancer control, said Mrs Brooker. In this, the clubs were working closely with the cancer crusade. It was the most democratic organisation of its kind.