WOMEN IN GERMANY.

Patea Mail, 10 February 1882, Page 1 (Supplement)

WOMEN IN GERMANY.

Everywhere in Continental Europe there is a contempt for and an oppression of women. Everywhere there is laid on her the menial drudgery that must be done, but which men will not assist in doing, nor for the performance of which will they provide mechanical applicances as American men do. Everywhere she is robbed of a proper compensation for her labour. But Germany, the land of literature, science, scholarship, music, art, culture —to whose universities we send our sons for thorough mental equipment —the land that boasts of its advanced civilization this Germany leads in mean treatment of women, and has a pre-eminence in that kind of civilisation which leaves nothing undone to exalt man, but is content to regard and treat woman as a serf.

The country was in the perfection of its mid-summer beauty as we journeyed through it. But I could not enjoy its beauty, for here, as in Virginia years and years ago, women were forced into employment unsuited to them, degraded to extreme mental service, and robbed of all that makes life worth living to a woman.

Eight-tentns of all the agricultural labourers were women. They were hoeing the immense sugar-beet fields, or, on their hands and knees, were weeding, where a how could not be safely used. Staggering under heavy loads of manure, which they brought from a distant place of deposit, they distributed it as it was needed. They were mowing, raking, pitching the hay on carts, or loading it as it was pitched. They were reaping, and stacking the grain in the fields, or bearing it home on their heads and shoulders, which had been so loaded that we scrutinized long and closely before we discovered the motive power of the peripatetic grain stacks marching away. In fields where the first crop had been removed, women were driving the os or cow to plough-forwe saw no ploughing with a yoke of oxen —or the ox or cow was dispensed with, and one woman drew the plough while another held it.

If there was extra hard work to be done, loaded carts to be hauled away, or heavy wheelbarrow loads removed, the work was assigned to women, who bent themselves to the task with patient and persistent energy, while men looked on, smoking their eternal pipes, without so much as lifting a finger to help. Scantily dressed, generally bare-headed in the blazing sun, quite as often bare-footed and bare-legged, they were bronzed in complexion, thin of flesh, bent and inelastic in figure, without joy iu their work or hope in their faces. For the work of a day, twelve hours long, when these women board themselves, they are paid an average of twenty-five cents. When they are boarded by their employers their wages average ten and twelve cents a day. Men doing the same work, working side by side with these women, receive nearly twice as much. Hard as is this farm work, women prefer it to house-service, when they have the strength for it —as the great majority of house servants work for board and clothing, and very meagre board and clothing at that. When we went to the German cities we saw what was more repellant! Women, bare-footed, or wearing modern clogs, were at work everywhere iu the streets, with brooms of roads, and stiff brushes, with hoes and shovels and hand-carts, directing the floods of the gutters, clearing them of debris, shovelling it into carts, and repairing whatever damage the heavy rain had wrought. We took an early drive through Munich, before the city had awakened. Early as was the hour, the sun only just touching the lips of the majestic Bavaria, women were astir everywhere. They were collecting the offal and refuse from houses and stores ; sweeping yesterday’s dirt from the streets into piles, while other women shovelled into hand-carts; clearing the tracks on the tram-cars from obstructions ; .harnessed into bakers’ and milk carts, and distributing their supplies to their customers: scrubbing the floors of shops ; moving in all directions to prepare for the business of the day, that men might not only find their breakfast ready on rising, but the streets and the shops in tidiness and order. Wandering among the architectural wonders of Vienna, where everything old and ugly is being displaced by modern and beautiful structures, we halted beside a magnificent building in process of erection, to study its design. Immediately, we came upon women mixing mortar, and far above us, at a dizzy height, saw other women climbing ladders, bearing on their heads and shoulders hods of bricks, stone, and mortar for the use of the masons.

We spent a day in the picture gallery at Dresden; I stepped out on the street and found myself launched in a stream of women, all bending under the loads of the baskets strapped

to their backs, each of which is made to carry sixty pounds. Some were young, but many were past middle age, and some were white-haired, tottering under their load, their sad eyes looking into mine wearily and hopelessly. In some of the towns of Wurtemberg there are brigades of water-carriers attached to the fire departments. They buy their own equipment of fire costume and tin water-pail, and at stated times are drawn up in line before the District Inspector, to go through a drill and sham fire, to test their efficiency. In short, there is no sort of menial work that is not done by German women, and Austrian women as well. I have seen them sawing and splitting wood on the streets, and then carrying it on their backs up several stories into houses. I have seen them moulding brick ; unloading freight cars at depots; building the roadbeds of railroads; getting stone out of quarries; yoked with dogs, cows, and oxen, pulling heavy loads along the highways ; making and mending the roads ; repairing the embankments of canals ; dredging rivers and small streams for the sake of the fertilizing mud ; doing any drudgery that men are glad to be rid of.

The German universities, to which we send our sous, each of which numbers its students by thousands, and its eminent professors by hundreds, are not for German women. Hardly is a “ higher education for women ” thought of in Germany. The German woman is completely subordinate to the German man, who treats her as his intellectual inferior, and evidently so regards her. He is willing she should share the beer garden with him and the theatre, but not the university nor the field of literature.—^ -Mrs Livermore, in the Woman's Journal,