WOMEN IN EUROPE. The Remarkable Privileges They Enjoy. Mrs Barry of the American Workingmen's Expedition Tells What She Saw in Foreign Lands. Paris, August 15.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 415, 30 October 1889, Page 6

WOMEN IN EUROPE.

The Remarkable Privileges They Enjoy. Mrs Barry of the American Workingmen's Expedition Tells What She Saw in Foreign Lands. Paris, August 15.

When we landed at Liverpool and wenb to the Adelphi Hotel our unsophisticated eyes /were opened to an unusual extent to 'find all our wants attended to by women instead of men, as we had been accustomed to have in our own land. The whitecapped maid— this term is applied to all ages— answered bells, brought up water, hot or cold, lunch or whatever was required. We actually expected to have her bring up °ur luggage, but a male porter fortunately did this. Our stay in Liverpool being very short, we had nob much time for observation, but as we advanced everything seemed to us | very strange. Ice water, that American luxury, is a thing rarely used by the English people, and such a thing as a man behind a bar isunheardof. Maids, selected, I was informed, for their beauty as much as any other consideration, attend the bar of every hotel, and, although we American women look upon this with peculiar feelings, in old England it is a custom, and the position is regarded as respectable as any other a woman may occupy in service. At the hotels there are no housekeepers in the sense we use the word. The first chamber-maid takes most of the responsibilities of euch a position, while the actual labour is shared by the under chambermaids. The scrubbing, and cleaning and dusting is done by housemaids. Covenb Market in London presents a panorama well worth seeing. Vegetables, fruit and flowers in abundance are disposed of with a great deal of noise and clatter, the vendors being mostly women, who drive a bargain with a shrewdness unequalled elsewhere in the busy marts of London. Especially was this fact shown in answer to some of the prying Yankees, whose inquisitivcness broke forth in 'How much is this V • Where is that raised ?' ♦Do you sell by the pound or quart?' • What do you call this V A novel sight was about twenty-five women sitting in a semi-circle shelling peas. Inquiry elicited the fact that they received for this work a penny a quart of shelled peas, and when peas were plenty they could make 3 pence p&r day. Travelling in a railway car over the continent for a month would be a good school for the American who has nob yet learned what bo do with his legs and spreads them out on two or more seats in our American cars. The coache3 here are divided into compartments about five feet wide, with two seats running the width of the car facing each other. Each seat holds five persons. The guard, who crawls along the outside of the coach while it is bowling along at the rate of a mile, a minute, quickly spies a vacancy, so at the next station it is filled if there is a passenger requiring it, and there you must sib, knee to knee, wibh your back to the wall, and no chance to stretch out and take things easy, Yankee fashion. All along the route we saw evidences of women's rights with a vengeance. Women stood manfully side by side with men in the fields and gardens, binding grain, making hay, digging and picking. Finally we saw them yoked into the small carts that haul the produce about the streets. lam sure that at every stage of the journey the women of the expedition were more and more thankful that they were Americans. Mrs Leonor <l M. Barry.