WOMEN IN JAPAN.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 135, 4 December 1909, Page 11

WOMEN IN JAPAN.

The "Code of Morals for Women"' in Japan (says a writer in the Sydney Morning Herald) includes such rales as:— The wife must obey her husband in all that he orders her to do, and when he is angry she must not resist, but obey. All womou Bhall think their husbands to be heaven, so they must not resist their husbands and incur the punishment of heaven." And, again, "Women ore stupid, therefore they must be humble and obedient to their husbands." And so for many generations the Japanese woman was crushed from her once proud position to a place of selfeffaoement and slavishness. But once moro a change is working through the country, and for the last forty years women have bean gradually striving to loosen the chains which have bound them so long. In 1871 several girls wont to American colleges to receive a modern training, and the work of those pioneers has borne good fruit. For every year now an increasing mnnber of women find their way to tho colleges and universities of Europe and America, and by their ' means tho broader education is • spreading through their country. Tho men of tho country, having come into contact with educated and intelligent Western women, are anxious that their own wives and daughters should equal them, and so the facilities for advance are every day becoming greater. Many professions aro now opened to them, and wherever they are allowed 1 to enter they quickly go. As in most countries, teaching and nursing are the two favourite professions amongst the Japanese women ; but there are also women doctors from three of the medical schools ; women reporters on daily papers, telephone girls, .girls engaged in printing offices, as well as many in the industi-ies which bring so much prosperity to the country So far she has not obtained the suffrage ; but evidently that is only a question of time, for already demands are being made for the vote, and the cause ifi being championed by the newly-formed Labour Party. And judging by the trend of affairs it seems as if the time is not far distant when the Japanese woman will cease to be the gentle, doll-like creature we now know, but will develop iuto the likeness of those glorious ancestresses of bygone years.

The Southland Daily News congratulates Miss Daisy Donnelly, to whom belongs the credit of being the first certificated teacher of Pitman's shorthand in Invercargill. The examination was held some months ago under the supervision of an approved committee. The certificates came to hand by last mail. Miss Kathenne I. Williams, of Bristol University, formerly assistant to Sir William Ramsay, >vas prominent among 1 tho twenty-four women chemists, from Franco, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Russia, the United States, and Great Britain, who were members of the recent congress of^ applied chemistry in London. Miss Williams (the Argonaut adds) makes a special study of the chemietrv of cooked foods, and finite her publisbod works to be more popular in . America than ia England,