WOMEN IN SWITZERLAND AND BAVARIA.

Thames Star, Volume XV, Issue 4946, 15 November 1884, Page 4

WOMEN IN SWITZERLAND AND BAVARIA.

In .many cases ploughing is done with cows hitched up like oxen. A horae and a cow hitched together is not an uncommon sight. In Switzerland and Bavaria women work harder than men; they always do half the work in the fields. It is not uncommon to see women pitching hay to their husbands on high atacks, and carrying mortar up high ladders on their backs. The women always work barefooted and a handkerchief pinned tightly over their heads. Men, the lords of the creation,' wear wooden shoes, but their wives never.

Women on farms in Switzerland and Bavaria have no social duties ; they never reed; the newspaper is unknown. They have no toilets to make. Theirs is a life of brutal work. No slave in the South ever lived so. far down in the scale of civilization.

As Bavaria joins Switzerland, I give the essence of a little talk which I had with a Bavarian farmer and his wife, between Geneva and Munich. They were both in the field reaping wheat with a sickle. A barefooted woman was picking up straw in the next field.

" What do you get a month for such work ?" I asked.

" We get, both of us together, 32 marks (8dols)," said the man. " And your board, too ?" " Yes, our food, too."

"What do you eat everyday?" I asked. "We have flour soap for breakfast, potatoes, bread, and noddles for dinner, and sonp and noodles for supper. Twice a week we have salt pork. (Noodles are made of black fl mr scalded and dried.") •'Do you have cofiee and su^ar ?" " None !" they both said shaking their

heads. The bread they eat is made of rye. In the villages the Bame bread is fed to the horses. It is a common thing to see a man and horse eating from the same ioaf. Girls, working as servants in cities, get about Sdols a month; and so it is with ail the laboring people on farms in Switzer land, France, Germany, and Bussia. flow should I like to hare tbese poor, over worked women see au American farmer's wife in her sweet home, beautifully carpeted, surrounded with books and papers, and eating meat and cake, and pies three limes a day ! The market gardener near Munich and Dresden uses barefooted women to draw his vegetables to market in waggons over the etoces. Women become beasts of burden ; ■till, they do not grumble; they do not smile, either—they simply exist. The only liberty they have is liberty to work ; the.:only rest they have is sleep. The existence of a cow or a sheep is a per> ; petaal heaven while theirs is a perpetual %ell. Poor European women.

Smeaton'fl famous Eddystone Ligbthouse.after defying the storms of a century, has been rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe. '• What is a lake ?" asked the teacher. A bright little boy raised his baud. "Well \ what is it ?" " Sure, it's a hole in the ' kittle.