Mrs. GLADYS BING, a well-known and forthright Social Credit speaker and writer of England, had this to say, among other things, to the Women's Section of the New Europe Group, London, in October last year:
"The vicious Puritan view of life has taken possession of the home. Most wives now sweat and strive trying to do two jobs, one at home and one outside, because the husband's income is not only small, but is taxed and is not to any useful extent spendable at all.
"We find ourselves in what I call the Instead Society. We can either buy a new gas stove or a new fur coat, but never both — even though shopkeepers are on their knees to us to buy both... This Instead Society is gall and wormwood to women. For women like buying.
"They enjoy spending money on acquiring things, jolly things, joyous and beautiful things; amusing things as well as those that are merely useful. Now it is a provable case for economic reform that the world is so bad, so poverty stricken and so full of lunatic politicians, daft university lecturers and nit-wit press and radio publicity men because women have never realised their appointed economic function.
"They have allowed themselves to be deflected from their proper sphere as consumers, and have tried to muscle in behind men as producers. Women are producers chiefly in the supreme sense: they produce men and women. And in the very doing of this almighty job their overriding need is to consume, consume, consume. They not only need lashings of food, clothes and furniture to make homes, but they need schools, cars, hotels for holidays, and everything that encompasses the act of real living, to luxury liners for cruises — and on ad infinitum.
"I hope you get the picture I am trying to paint. It is a long way from the kitchen sink where you need another packet of soap powder but cannot have it because you used the money on a pot scourer.
"But my picture of what women need, want and could quite easily have and enjoy... that is not the picture you are told to contemplate. The things that women want and need are the things that must be 'cut', taxed, economised upon: things like carpets, tweeds, fine woollens, household labour-saving gadgets.
"All these things are not 'essentials'. Essentials — according to chancellors of exchequers are exports. Exports are the nice things we never get near...
"The other day, the ineffable Lord Toffee Macintosh, Chairman of the National Savings racket, had the impudence to tell us all that 'prosperity has gone to our heads'.
"As we look down at our last year's coat and rather inadequate shoes; as we contemplate our sale-remnant frock, we should, his Lordship thinks, be thankful that our fifteen and eleven penny hat is where our prosperity is.
"The most terrible thing about this phony crisis is that it has all happened before and the so-called economic remedies applied then are the same as those our rulers now seek to apply. And make no mistake about it. Those remedies led to war. And they will do so again.
"History repeats itself because the thing that has shaped history remains constant. The thing that has shaped all history is the use and idea of MONEY.
"It is sheer fiction that money can ever be scarce... The policy of the banking system is to keep us sufficiently short of money so that, eventually, industry is forced to borrow their chits of paper and charge us all high prices to collect the interests on them.
"In the same way governments borrow bank-created credit and charge us taxes to collect the interest... I advocate a system called Social Credit — a system which recognises that we live in a world of wealth that we must ENJOY or perish."
GLADYS BING
(Reproduced from "The New Era")