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Show WOMEN IN GERMANY. Everywhere in Continental Europe there is a contempt for and an oppression of woman. Everywhere there is laid on her the menial drudgery that must be done but which men will not assist in doing, now for the performance of which will they provide mechanical appliances as American men do. Everywhere she is robbed of a proper compensation for her labor. The country was in the perfection of are midsummer beauty as we journeyed through it. Eight-tenths of all the agricultural laborers were women. They were hoeing the immense sugar-beet fields, or, on their hands and knees, were weeding, where a hoe could not be safely used. Staggering under heavy loads of manure which they brought from a distant place of deposit, they distributed it as it was needed. They were mowing, raking, pitching the hay on carts, or loading it as it was pitched. They were reaping and stacking the grain in the fields, or hearing it home on their heads and shoulders, which had been so loaded that we scrutinized long and closely, before we discovered the motive power of the peripatetic grain-stacks marching away. In fields where the first crop had been removed, women were driving the ox or cow to plough-for we saw no ploughing with a yoke of oxen-or the ox or cow was dispensed with and one woman drew the plough while another held it. If there was extra hard work to be done, loaded carts to be hauled away, or heavy wheelbarrow loads removed, the work was assigned to women, who bent themselves to the task with patient and persistent energy, while men looked on, smoking their eternal pipes, without so much as lifting a finger in help. Scantily dressed, generally bare headed in the blazing sun, quite as often bare-footed and bare-legged, they were bronzed in complexion, thin of flesh, bent and inelastic in figure, without joy in their work, or hope in their faces. For the work of a day, twelve hours long, when these women board themselves, they are paid an average of twenty-five cents. When they are boarded by their employers, their wages average ten and twelve cents a day. Men doing the same work, working side by side with these women, receive nearly twice as much. Hard as is this farm work women prefer it to house service, when they have the strength for it, as the great majority of house servants work of board and clothing, and very meagre bread and clothing at that. When we went to the German cities we saw what was more repellant. Women, bare footed, or wearing modern clogs, were at work everywhere in the streets, with brooms of rods and stiff brushes, with hoes and shovels and hand carts, directing the floods of the gutters clearing them of debris, shovelling it into carts, and repairing whatever damage the heavy ram had wrought. We took an early drive through Munich before the city had awakened. Early as was the hour, the sun only just touching the lips of the majestic Bavaria, women were astir everywhere. They were collecting the offal and refuse from houses and stores, sweeping yesterday's dirt from the streets into piles, which other women shovelled into hand carts, clearing the tracks of the train-cars from obstructions, harnessed into bakers' and milk carts, and distributing their supplies to their customers, scrubbing the floors of shops, moving to all directions to prepare for the business of the day, that men might not only find their breakfast ready, on rising, but the streets [unreadable] Wandering among the architectural wonders of Vienna, where everything old and ?? is being displaced by modern and beautiful structures, we halted beside a magnificent building in process of erection to study its design. Immediately we came upon women mixing mortar, and far above us at a dizzy height, saw other women climbing ladders bearing on their heads and shoulders hods of brick, stone and mortar, for the use of masons. We spent a day in the picture gallery at Dresden. I stepped out on the street, and found myself launched in a stream of women, all bending under the loads of the baskets strapped to their backs each of which is made to carry sixty pounds. Some were young but many were past middle age, and some were white haired, tottering under their load, their sad eyes looking into mine wearily and hopelessly. In some of the towns of Wurtemburg there are brigades of women water carriers attached to the fire departments. They buy their own equipment of fire costume and tin water pail, and at stated times are drawn up in line before the district inspector, to go through a drill and sham fire, to test their efficiency. IN short, there is no sort of menial work that is not done by German women, and Austrian women as well. I have seen them sawing and splitting wood on the streets, and then carrying it on their backs up several stories ?? houses. I have seen them moulding brick unloading freight cars at depots, building the road beds of railroads, getting stone out of quarries; yoked with dogs, cows and oxen, pulling heavy loads along the highways, making and mending the roads, repairing the embankments of canals dredging rivers and small streams for the sake of the fertilizing mud; doing any drudgery that men are glad to be rid of. The German universities, to which we send our sons, each of which numbers its students by thousands and its eminent professors by hundreds, are not for German women. Hardly is a "higher education for women" thought of in Germany. The German woman is completely subordinate to the German man, who treats her as his intellectual inferior and evidently so regards her. He is willing she should share the beer garden with him, and the theatre but not the university nor the field of literature.-Mrs. Livermore, in The Woman's Journal. |