FRENCH PEASANTS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 124, 26 May 1923, Page 20

FRENCH PEASANTS

HARD LIFE FOR THE WOMEN CHANGING DAYS IN THE PROVINCES ■i "• i ■ • , It is a little difficult to judge of afterwar institutions in France, to determine that is to say, .whether they are really French- or whether they are foreign imports, with very little root and a propensity to die. Lending libraries, for. instance, established by benevolent foreigners after the war in the country districts and left to the inhabitants have in many cases faded away for want of money. The playgrounds schemes show rather more life. Possibly athletics show moafc clearly the war contact of the French with. Ando-Saxon habits and customs, declares Muriel Harris, in the "Manchester Guardian." When, therefore, proposals are Made for the formation of clubs for the wives of farmers and of peasants in France, it is necessary to consider, not the impetus from outside which has been supplied _ by America.or other countries, but juss what needs such a scheme would meet in jiresent-day France.

The feminist movement is increasing, but it still remains a movement due rather to outside pressure than to inward impulse,,except on the part of the few v It counts: for. something, however, in 1-the effort towards making more possible, the life of rural feminine France. A more powerful reason is the instinct towards the land which finds expression in the rewarding of peasaais for , staying in the same place for several? hundred years. The anxiety of France more than ever to be selfrsupporting,,and thus restore her depreciated currency, continues''to grow, and with this anxiety she has to remember all the time her depleted man-power. Women took the place,of men on the land during the war. They have always, taken at least a halfshare in farming. • It is therefore to women that France must look 'to a considerable. degree to keep alive the fields of France.

But.even in tha slow province? and in spite of the call of the "little property," dissatisfaction with their existence has crept in. here and. there amone the peasant. women. For the life is incredibly hard. The housing in thousands of cases is.appalling and devoid of every convenience; ;■ women still take their washing down to the river and kneel in the wet in. any kind of weather. They do hard'manual work in the fields, and it is only necessary to look at the faces of old, old women, as it would seem, and to realise probable they are only between forty.and fifty still, to see how French peasant life takes its toll of its women, who, through all the work, bear and bring up la-rsre families of children. The absence of any form of pleasure is equally marked—pleasure, that is to say, as (it is known to-day. Many women never CO outside their own villages,' and the lonn. desolate straggling villages, at least of Northern France, are too woll known, to 'Englishmen to neod description. Of sanitation there is hone, and quite often only a restricted supply of drinking water. Peasant women, who during the war got a tflimpse of other .possibilities, no longer find their all-in-all in remain'injr on the land.

For this reason the various proposals for' and establishments of more rural clubs seem likely to bear fruit. During the war women farmers, properly trained in agriculture, worked farms, it is true, against continuous opposition on the part of the countryside, ,who approve of the working but not the management by women. The need for some sort of combination among women at once became apparent, and such combinations are being urged to-day by deputies and foreigners and peasant women alike. It is held that a meeting-place in which business could be transacted, 'decisions taken, diversions planned, would be an inestimable boon to the women of peasant France, hitherto entirely inarticulate. It would form a centre for combinations of all kinds, including, besides the direct agricultural or pleasurable objects, that of hygiene, of care of children, of mutual help. .Farther, it would certainly do very much to train women quite unconsciously ,in the political way which they will certainly eventually follow and' make them feel that though they may be on the land, doing the hardest possible work, yet they are no longer in the backwater in which they have hitherto lived.

It is improbable, in spite o the encouragement which the movement is meeting from all the theorists that it will go forward very rapidly. For one thing, it is a breacli in the entrenched fortress of French privacy—a sense of privacy which builds, high walls, and. bars and bolts and watches more perhaps than ny other nation in the world. At the same time the need for the work of French women on the land is so urgent; and the danger of their defection so menacing that this of itself will probably bear down opposition, at least to a certain extent. And if, as is hoped by the promoter of such schemes, the founding of the club in rural France leads also to a strong co-operative movement among women farmers and peasants, the advantages will far more than outweigh the local prejudices, however strong.