Women's World The Maori Women's Welfare League by J. C. Sturm Since its beginning in September 1951, the Maori Women's Welfare League has become an organisation well-known to Maori and European alike for its vigour in attacking the social welfare problems of the contemporary Maori, and its attempts to teach its members the secrets of certain arts and crafts which would otherwise be lost to us with the passing of an older generation. In the Spring issue of 1953, To Ao Hou reports on ‘Another Successful M.W.W.L. Conference’, and only a glance at this is necessary to convince the reader that the League may be as important to the Maori of today and tomorrow as the Young Maori Party was to the Maori of fifty years ago. But perhaps the biggest job that the League is tackling is to foster a deeper and wider understanding between Maori and European, and to encourage the Maori individual to take his place in out European society, not with feelings of inferiority and reluctance, but with confidence, realising that as well as being a Maori he is also a New Zealander, and as such has rights and claims on the community similar to those of the Pakeha. Keeping in mind this side of the League's work, it is not surprising to find that although the League is a Maori organisation working principally for the benefit of Maoris, it is modelled in nearly every detail on similar European organisations. The saying that necessity is the mother of invention is so well-known and has been used so often that it has almost lost the full force of its meaning. However, no one phrase could describe more accurately the beginnings of the M.W.W.L. For many years, Maori women have felt the need for an organisation in all respects their own, where they could air their common problems without fear of embarrassment, and to which they could turn for support and encouragement in any endeavours to better their position. And many of them did, and still do, wish to improve the standard of their living. Immediately the question arises, why did they not join the Women's Institute of the Women's Division, both of them, as we shall see, organisations very alike in nature to the M.W.W.L.? Could they not have found there the help they sought? The answer is, that a few of them did become members of European organisations, but these few were Maori adapted in some degree to European life, and with some point of contact with the Pakeha women in their community; friendship, education, or a Pakeha background to their upbringing. But the rest, and that means the majority, who had no such point of contact, felt too diffident or self-conscious to confess the inadequacies of their homes to a group of Pakeha women, who were in most cases sympathetic or at least interested but who had no