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Show WHERE WOMEN RULE Fine Sight for Suffragists at Cancale in France. Feminine Police Keep Order and Feminine Fem-inine Labor Carries on the Oyster Industry That Makes the Place Famous. Cancale, France. In these days ot ulscussions of suffragist movements, women's rights and feminine business acumen, anyone in search of an example exam-ple of an unusual sort might drop in upon this French channel port of some 15,000 souls when they are all at home and see a truly woman run town. There is no woman mayor, no woman wom-an in the town council. The offices are left as a mere matter of form to the men, who are seldom there to fill them, but the women are a law unto themselves; they make up the whole town, transact all the business, police the place, maintain order and strict saaitary conditions, manage the schools, and at the same time carry on the most famous oyster industry of France, doing the entire cultivating and selling and transporting the product prod-uct of the ocean beds, even loading and unloading the seagoing ships that come and go at the port. And what is still more interesting to theirsisters in other parts of the world, the girls of Cancale are the first to be married of all the girls of north and central France. Ask a French sailor where of all ports excepting ex-cepting of course out of chivalry his own native town the most beautiful of French fisher girls are to be found and he will tell you at Cancale. You will believe him, too, when you walk along the quays and the narrow streets and see the pretty faces and neat trim figures set off to the best advantage ad-vantage in the Breton dress and clean white caps, or watch the little groups in the shade of the street in the afternoon after-noon or within the deep set stone i-- ( ( ; Oyster Girls of Cancale. doorways mending nets and gossip-ping gossip-ping as fast as their French tongues can wag. The conditions that make this a woman run town come about in the most natural way in the world. All the men are fishers and they spend the greater part of the year at sea. They are good sailors and they man ; the craft that venture across the At-I At-I lantic to the French fishing grounds along the Newfoundland coast. It was their rights that used to come up frequently fre-quently for adjustment by fishery commissions, and it is the loss of their vessels that almost every year brings sorrow to Cancale and the neighboring neighbor-ing coast. When the men do return they find that the town has been managed so well in their absence and the thrift of the women has been so well exercised that they are content not to meddle and to let things go on as they have been going. There are proportionately proportionate-ly more widows, and young widows, too, in Cancaie than in any other town of France. A fisherman's bride waits Tor four years after she has heard that the boat her husband sailed away upon has not been reported and then she puts on her mourning. It is this uncertainty as to the fate of the men, thrown helpless and homeless upon the fear that at any time they may be their own resources, that makes the women of Cancale self-reliant and that leads them early to seek some means of their own for an honest livelihood. live-lihood. For the men that remain in the town the women do not seem to entertain en-tertain the greatest respect. Most of them have become incapacitated for work or are shiftless and idle. So the women run matters themselves. The thrift that the conditions mentioned men-tioned inspire is something of a passion pas-sion among the women. It seems that there is a constant struggle with each one of them to make more money than the man who goes to sea. They frequently accomplish this, too, for the returning fisherman finds frequently fre-quently that his yearly gain of $150 or $200 got after a hard battle from the sea is more than equalled by the patient pa-tient and careful housewife that he '.eft at home. |