THE HAREM AND HAPPINESS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 183, 2 August 1907, Page 2

THE HAREM AND HAPPINESS.

Harem life has always been* considered by Western women to be most wretched, a dull, bored enslavement. From this opinion a woman who knows the harem well completely differs. Mrs. Vaka Brown, traveller, student, authoress, and wife of a litterateur, says the happiest women in all the world abide in Turkey —the land of flowers and dreams, where love is all in all; the land where the life of peace, the thought of purity, and the appreciation of all that is beautiful in nature has found, perhaps, its highest development—the land of the "unspeakable Turk."

i "I have talked and lived," says Mrs. . Brown, "with the wives of Selim Pasha, I four in all, and discussed the very prob- '_ lems that arise at once- in the Western . mind, as soon as this question of the i Turkish harem is mooted—they have told ' mc their stories, their hopes, their feais \ —and they are happy, very, very happy. i I have lived in other Turkish households, 1 and everywhere I have found that happij ness is the rule, not the exception. In , the West. J have lived ten years, and I have seen two really happy women. Xhey ■ were' happy" because their husbands ■tfere I passionately in love with them. Women's i happiness depends on love, you know, • and on love alone-" 1 "But, Mrs. Brown," asked a listener, j "would you be happy with quarter of a > husband?" •, "Show mc," she replied, "the woman !! who has the whole of a husband." "Remember," she added, in warning, I "I do not endorse the harem ; neither do E I condemn it. I do not give an opinion. l I simply tell you what I have seea ! what I know —that the Turkiah women t are equally as intelligent as the Western • -women; indeed, many of them far more ; so, and that happiness, great happiness, i is the invariable rule." i