GERMAN WAR WOMEN.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 288, 29 June 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

GERMAN WAR WOMEN.

A MILLION AMAZONS. By FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE, Late Berlin Correspondent of "The Daily Mail." War has worked many wonders in Germany as in England, but hone more revolutionary .than the recognition which women have won for themselves as indispensable members' of industrial society. It is barely 20 years since the Prussian Statute-books barred women, along with children and lunatics, from the right even to attend political meetings !

Women began filling men's jobs in Germany considerably earlier than their unimagined talents were discovered in war-time Britain. They mounted the conductors' platforms of the tramwaycars, for instance, almost simultaneously with the mobilisation order of July 31, 1914.

At first these Kriegsfrauen (war women) were ony the wives of men called up, who took up the work more in the keep-the-home-fires-burning spirit thki|n out of utilitarian motives Germanio women, of course, were not Grangers to manual labour uf arduous .sort. In Austria-Hungary nearly half of the nation's women were professional wage-earners. In Germany they did scavenger work for years before tne war, and it did not outrage the susceptibilities of German "gentlemen" to see a woman harnessed to a dog, pulling carts and vans. Indeed, when I first arived in Berlin, now nearly .sixteen veal's ago, an animated discu i sion was raging round a "scientific" pamphlet entitled "Ist das Weib ein Mensch?" (Is woman a human being?)

EVERY TRADE INVADED. IJo-dny a- report just issued by the German women's trade unfons proclaims boldly that without women neither "Germany's munitions no r food eould'possibly have "field out." There is not a trade, however strenuous t< physical exactions, that German women have not invaded wholesale and effectively. They are making steel and building warships. They are Supplanting men on the farms and doing the work of navvies. The iron industry is full of them. In blast-furnaces, with its soulbreaking demands en the stronge t men. three German women are accomplishing the work of two men —sometimes one woman does all any man did. In a Silesian foundry forty women are earning tneir living as stokers. At Krupps, who employ ten-; of thousands of women and girls, they are engaged on such responsible .and dangerous work as te ting shell-fuses —at 4Jd. an hour and subject to Od. fine for every mistake they make! A total of 30,000 women is engaged on mining operations in Prussia —exactly ten times the ber employed before the war. No pit work his proved too hard for them. Between -15,0:10 and 50,000 women are on the State railways—some have attained to official positions. In the building trades there were nearly 10,000 women at the end of 1916, most of them on nii'itiiry wrrks.

Tin- I oo'.c-printing trade has been invaded for the first time by women. By agreement with the typographical unions they are Substituting for men, for the duration of the war onlv. at both the "<a>e "and the linotype. Another new field, of particularly arduous character, now enlist? the services nl many women—the glass-blowing furnace's of the porcelain industry, where women make no objection to labouring in lOOdeg. of beat. It is announced by General Crniier, the German Director of National Service, that women are now to become repj K>iegs.frauen—to do duty in the iictual war zone, where they will relieve at bases men needed in tile tren-h----,s. Figures are not av„ihil le, but it iolivioir; that in addition to the uncounted ho is of German men whom the Allies arc ghtillg they are opposed by a legion of women whose numbers cannot lie"fn. r from a round million.