THE HAREM AND HAPPINESS

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2128, 10 July 1907, Page 1

THE HAREM AND HAPPINESS

Huron lifo has always been considered by Western women to be irnist wretched, a dull, bored enslavement. From this opinion a woman who knows the harem will completely differ. Mrs. Vaka Brown, traveller, student, authoress, and wife of a litterateur, says the happiest women in all tbe world abide m Turkey—the land of (lowers and dreams, where love is all in all; the land where tbo life of peace, tbo thought of purity, and the appreciation of all that is beautiful in nature has-found, perhaps, its highest development—the land of th 0 “unspeakable Turk.” “I have talked and lived,” says Mrs. Brown, “with the wives of Selim Pasha, four in all, and discussed the very problems that arise at once i 1 the Western mind as soon as this question of the Turkish harem is mooted —they have told me their stories, their hopes, their fears —and they are happy, very, verv happy. I have lived in other Turkish households, and everywhere I have found that happiness is the rule, not the exception. In the West I have lived ten years, and I have seen two really happy women. They were happy because their husbands were passionately in love with them. Women’s happiness depends on love, you know, and on love alone.” “But, Mrs. Brown,” asked a listener, “would you be happy with a quarter of a husband?” “Remember,” she added, in warning. “I do not endorse the harem ; neither do I condemn it. Ido not give an opinion. I simply tell you what I have seen—what I know — that the Turkish women are equally in intelligent as the Western’women ; indeed, many of them far more so, and that happiness great happiness, is the invariable rule.”