AT HOME AND ABROAD.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 123, 26 May 1928, Page 17

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

A bill providing for sterilisation of the feeble-minded has been passed by the Alberta Legislature. • • • • It is reported from Finland that women may now enter the Diplomatic Service without restriction. • * * »' France has admitted women to the Diplomatic Service, but not at present as actual members of the Diplomatic Corps. * * * • The Argentine Women's Club is organising the Third International Women's Congress to take place in Buenos Aires on November 22 this year. The programme covers every field of women's interest. • • • • In the United States there are 126 women in the State Legislatures of the different States for 1928, being two more than for 1927. Virginia has the first woman negro member, Mrs. E. Howard Harper. • * * » Austria has now admitted women to the Commercial Exchange in Vienna, but the Stock Exchange still excludes them. Fran Emmy Freundlich is at present the only woman on the League of Nations Economic Committee, as she was also the only woman on the preparatory committee for the Economic Conference last year. She is president of the International Co-operative Women's Guild.

Miss Florence Balgarnfe, the wellknown lecturer on soeial subjects, has died in Florence, at the age of 70, after an exhausting journey with friends through Sicily. To promote woman suffrage, liberalism, total abstinence, university extension and various other reforms, Miss Balgarnie travelled ceaselessly through Great Britain, and she also undertook successful lecture tours in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and India.

One of the most important technical departments of the great Creusot ironworks in France, where most of the guns and munitions for the French Army are made, is now managed by a woman, Mile. Nourit, who was previously on the metallurgical staff of the works (states an exchange). She has many men under her control, and is frequently entrusted with official information of the most confidential nature concerning munitions. ♦ » * #

Society women have of late been taking sun baths in order to peel off the skin on their backs and put on a new one, owing to the craze for low-necked evening wear. One West End masseur told me that fashionable women are now spending as much time on treatments to make the skin on their backs flawless, as they formerly did on facelifting and permanent rouging.

There will be an International Press Exhibition at Cologne between May and October, 1928. This great Press exhibition is to have a special section, "Woman and the Press," which will be a unique record of the evolution of woman's part in current Press literature, as well as an exhibition of the present extent of her participation, and at which outstanding women journalists of New Zealand will be represented.

* » * * The death of Mrs. Anna Bugge-Wick-sell at the end of February following an operation, removed the only woman member of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, she having been appointed in 1921. She had also represented Sweden as a substitute delegate at the Assembly of the League every year since its foundation. She was a pioneer feminist and the woman's movement will greatly feel her loss.