BULGARIA’S NEW WOMEN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVII, Issue 91, 17 December 1913, Page 4

BULGARIA’S NEW WOMEN.

Miss Grace Saunders, a lady who before her Balkan war experiences spent twelve months in Sofia working among the eight hundred odd girl students in that city, gives an interesting account of the new women of Bulgaria who have to make the best of the crippled and embittered national life following on the hitter strife hardly yet ended. Miss Saunders states that most of the students are very poorthirty years ago this was a nation of peasants,—hut they get their education for nothing, and university fees do not amount to more than £3 a year. So, as there is still a great demand for women teachers pud new high schools are constantly being opened, naturally they invade the capital, where the conditions cf their life are rather dangerous. The older women of Bulgaria have been brought up in almost Turkish seclusion, not being allowed to go about by themselves, and being kept closely to domestic tasks, so" they know nothing of the 1 world, and their daughters, already filled with new ideas at school, go up to the university when they are only sixteen or seventeen, find their own lodgings, make new friends, and get what pleasure they can in their new freedom, unhampered by any wise maternal advice or by such traditions as

govern English girls. The university exercises no disciplinary powers or Supervision, and since the first examination in the four years’ course is not add till the end of the second year the students are not disposed to take

their first year very seriously, liuljrarian schoolgirls know nothing about gdines, and one of Miss Saunders’s i •micerus is to teach them basket-ball,

the pleasures of .tobqgggnjng, and am other wholesome gnvu§empnt,that Engish frjenc}s ( can help them There •ve very, few : openings. iori joducjtffti ’vomen in Bulgaria. Some have become , doctors, and a good many are Very successful as dentists, but opb'b'rtitftities' are' limitedj and in th;> ration of farmers women have not yet bought of agricultural colleges. The fncen is a trained nurse, but nursing s a profession v)as held in such low

steeai that- at the beginning.of.,the., , Hr there . were only .seventy. rfses among six million people,-., it s hoped, that,their . war experigncps.q ill persuade many girls to take up. 1 arsing as a profession. Of course.,-j

e position of women in the country been materially altered by lie : rrible death-roll. Hitherto there i ve iieen few unmarried women in vulgar ia, where both boys and girls i the peasant class were often marred

the age of sixteen or seventeen

>w there are thousands of women

10 must he independent