CANADIAN IIOUSEIMEPING.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SM,—Now that so much is being written and done about emigration to Canada, I notice that most of the propaganda is addressed to men. Little, if anything, is said about the women who will accompany their menfolk. With your kind help may I be allowed to put before both men and women some aspects of what the latter have to face when they come here ? I do not mean working women ; they know their work and how to do it, but the gently nurtured do not visualize what their life will be, nor do their husbands. A lady coming out here is told she will have to do her own work and thinks, lightly, that it will be rather fun to do the cooking, and at the back of her mind is the thought that when she wants help she can get it. No,there is no help to be got, no village where one can engage a charwoman—everybody is too busy in their own house to go out and help others. The immigrant must depend entirely upon herself ; she has to cook, wash up, scrub, make beds, dust, and look after the children, if there are any, every day and all day. It is a life of drudgery. How much has she prepared herself before leaving England ? Even a course of domestic economy cannot teach the methodical ways
which make the work comparatively easy to the Canadian born. The latter are content with a far simpler mode of living than an Englishwoman will attempt, at first, to keep up. The Canadian will cheerfully live in her kitchen and keep it spotless, and to her and her husband this is natural, but to English people this is undoubtedly a deterioration, which speedily leads to other carelessness.
It would be a real boon if one of the women's organizations could start a course of Canadian housekeeping methods, where intending immigrants could learn to avoid many mistakes and thus make their lives easier. I must say I am filled with admiration for the Englishwomen who come out here and pluckily face a very hard life, where they are nothing but maids of all work. If a family has a little capital and can keep a Chinaman well and good, but a Chinaman costs at the least 50 dollars a month.
I have been but a short time in this country but have already seen homes where the wife has lost heart and become little short of a slattern. The men mostly like the uncon- ventional life and do not realize the hard work and drudgery their wives have to undergo and I'm afraid many of them get lazy—as they, too, find their own hard work brings them little or no profit—it is no land of promise, whatever may be said by agents and propagandists. I trust that possibly you may see your way to making some use of this letter and that it may suggest to somebody the idea of training in preparation for coming out here and that thus I may in some measure be
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