WOMEN: Ladies of Leisure

Junior Leaguers prefer double beds, and like to eat their breakfasts in them. Last week hostesses in Seattle, Wash., where 330 Junior Leaguers gathered for their annual conference, learned these and other means of making Junior Leaguers happy.

After breakfast, and at the convention hall, Junior Leaguers were all business. Principal topics for discussion were: 1) social welfare, 2) “Is the Lady of Leisure a Vanishing American?” They even sat and listened to Charity Worker Sidney Hollander tell them what he thought of them. According to Mr. Hollander, whose expenses they had paid from Baltimore, Md.

The Junior League has a spineless program; it overrates the importance of its 35,000 membership (“More than that number attend a Joe Louis fight”); the League is nothing but a prep school for the Daughters of the American Revolution; Leaguers play around the fringes of social work; they spend at one party what many a family lives on for a whole year; they could be criticized for not cleaning up politics, for not working for birth control, for not admitting Negroes as members; he never saw them anywhere except on Florida beaches or at dog shows.

Several in Mr. Hollander’s audience cried “Bravo.” Many another got up and left, or stayed and hissed “Communist.” Pretty incoming President Mrs. George V. Ferguson of Winnipeg took a deep breath, rose and said graciously: “Thank you, Mr. Hollander. You have given us much to think about and we will talk about it long.”