FAR FROM SECLUDED

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 42, 21 January 1944, Page 2

FAR FROM SECLUDED

CHINESE WOMEN'S PART

RESISTING AND REBUILDING

Chinese women, traditionally more secluded than their sisters in the Western nations., have been undergoing for six years an ordeal such as women anywhere; have never known before. They work at the front, behind the Japanese lines and in China's two-edged war of "resistance and reconstruction." Some of the nurses of China, girls of 18 years of age. are assigned to "hospitals on muleback," hospitals which can pack up and move from one camouflaged peasant hut to another as the fighting progresses. And in addition to thos:e front line nurses there are Chinese women warriors and guerilla fighters who have faced the Japanese within their own lines. The main job of most of China's women to-day is reconstruction work, tn south-west Szejhwan a women's production unit has developed a silk centre where large quantities of improved cocoonsi and mulhtrry trees on which the l silk worms feed, are produced. The women trained in improved agriculture .at this centre go to other districts to teach the new methods'. Many of China's alert young wartime college girls have gone into the rural work of the Women's Advisory Committee. Their work is a newly developed, type of wartime

social service. The girls teach the people health and sanitation. They teach farm women and girls, to read —more than 100,000 of them since the beginning of the war. They tell them of improved ways to raise the quantity and quality of their crops. And to-day more than 20/KlO war orphans are being cared v for by the women of China in. the 45 orphanages scattered throughout Free China. !