Woman Seeks Job as Homestead’s Fireman; Volunteers With Men for New Department

Special to The New York Times

HIGHTSTOWN, N.J., March 6. —Will a woman make a good “fireman”? is the question that is bothering the men in the newly organized volunteer fire department at Jersey Homesteads, the Federal cooperative colony for garment workers near here.

During the last few months this project has grown into a collage of 75 families, or about 300 population. A civic association with Philip Goldstein as president, is trying to function as a municipal governing body. One of its first acts has been to organize a volunteer fire company.

When volunteers were called for, a few evenings ago, Mrs. Augusta Chasan, wife of a homesteaders, stepped forward with about twenty men and announced that she was ready to take whatever oath a volunteer fireman should take and was eager to fight fires along with the men.

Some of the men protested that “a woman’s place is in the home.”

“Even during a fire?” Mrs. Chasan asked. “You mean you want me to stay in during a fire, perhaps in my own home, and yell out a third-story window, ‘Fireman save my child!’ I think several of the homestead women would like to belong, if you ask me.”

Irving Plunging, chosen as fire chief, was inclined to agree with Mrs. Chasan and told her that she could appear for fire drill Sunday morning, when the question of her fitness as a fire fighter would be discussed.

Mrs. Chasan, wife of Morris Chasan who drives the factory truck, formerly resided across the street from a firehouse, at 2,007 Newbold Avenue, the Bronx, and learned to distinguish a signal for that company on the first tap, she says.

Sheriff George Roberts of Monmouth County—the project tis in his county—said that the idea of having a woman fireman was something he had never heard of before, but was highly in favor of it. “Of course a woman can fight fire,” he said. “Why not? They fight everything else. We have many volunteer fire companies in the county and most of them have ladies’ auxiliaries, but not another one has an actual member.”

“But what, after all is going to burn in Jersey Homesteads?” demanded Alfred Kastner, architect of the houses. “Everything is concrete or steel and the village is fireproof. Only haystacks or some of the woodland can catch fire.

Apparatus of the newly formed fire-fighting organization includes a mounted 100-pound chemical tank which requires two men to pull, a few fifty-pound tanks, some hand extinguishers and several thousand feet of hose.