Women Workers in Paris.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 483, 25 June 1890, Page 6

Women Workers in Paris.

In Baris women divide with men the work of street-cleaning and collecting offal. It is oftenesta woman, and a woman advanced in years, her grey, uncombed locks straggling from under a handkerchief, that is seen wielding a broom made of twigs, and washing the streets with a liberal supply of hydrant water, for the bitumen is as thoroughly scrubbed as a house floor every morning. It is women, women, everywhere. One may travel from one end of a Paris street to another and scarcely see a man in any of the shops except those where groceries or meat are sold. At fcfce markets it is the same ; there are only men at the butchers’ stalls. At the fish markets, especially at that of the Central Market, which is immense and admirably supplied and kept, there is not a man to be seen. There is no doubt these fish women have, like Shakspere’s shrew, ‘ a tongue with & tang,’ bub unless there is some extraordinary cause for excitement everything is as ; calm as a summer’s morning. It needed a London fish market to enrich the language with the expressive w.ord, ‘Billingsgate.’ It is only women that keep those convenient chalets seen along the quays in all the public places of the city. Half the restaurants of Paris are served by bonnes in pretty caps, who, no matter how assiduously they perform their duties, always have an eye open for an conquest among the male patrons. In Paris, nurses, though they come more or less from all Darts of the country, are principally supplied by Brittany and Auvergne, both of which are, like Scotland, good countries to emigrate from. It was for the nounous or nurse of Auvergne that the melody was written which afterwards became so celebrated in the Boulangist campaign under the name of the 4 Pionpions of Auvergne.’ One who sees the nurses with their tender charges in the Champs Elysees . or the Luxembourg jardin on a fine spring day would hardly suspect,what is a solemn fact, that the population of France is at a standstill.