WAYS OF BERLIN WOMEN.

Thames Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 14471, 10 March 1913, Page 5

WAYS OF BERLIN WOMEN.

kT THE CAFE IN THE MORNING

AND THE CLUB IN 3?HE AFTERNOON. ;

"I believe that the typical German bauefrau is a myth," said' a NewYork woman who returned the other day from a year's residence in Germany. "I don't see how the average Gterman woman finds any time to be a haugfrau. I sometime^ wondered when the German woman found time to do anything at home.

"I spent eight months in Berlin with my daughter, who was studying music. From 11 to 12 in the morning the cafes were packed with German women, who go out to take theft second breakfast in" Nittie public restaurants, a Wring - unknown in America,

"They take along their sewing or embroidefcy and Sit an hour or two over their cup of coffee or glass of beer. At the concerts., too, they take their work and #pend hours day after day listening to the music. You can spend an afternoon listening to beautiful music, a magnificent orchestra with fine vocal artists, for 16 cents. That is an illustration of the things that help to exile Americans. .

"At three in the afternoon again you will see the cafes crowded with German women taking their afternoon tea. I think American women are more domestic than German, because I never heard, of -American women who left their homes in the evening to pass the time at the club.! A German friend took me one evening to the German women's club. The club has a magnificent suite of apartments, inc&uding auditorium, reading-room, parlour, cafe, and smoking-room.

"When she took me into the last apartment it almost dazed me for the moment. It was blue with smoke C had never before seen a room filled with elegantly-gowned cultivated women all smoking. These were the wealthy society women of Berlin, titled some of them.

"They were cosmopolitan in their Iress and manners, and did not present any striking points of difference from the American woman except in the smoking. It made the occurrence of last summer, when our immigration officials detained-a secondclass passenger, a woman art dealer,, for inquiry into her sanity because she smoked cigarettes, appear very funny in retrespect.

"The German women's clubs, like those of the Bnglish women, are based on the samfe principle as men's clubs ; these are places of social enjoyment and for the convenience of members in taking meals, entertaining friends, and so on. They do not taite up work in study, philanthropy, reform, and so on, like the women's" clubs of America. • •

"But along some lines the German women; ' have doao more than the American. There, is a working girls' club in Berlin with 13,000 members. Its object is to maintain sick benefits and an, employment bureau to secure-better pay and shorter hours, and. otherwise to better the conditions of the members. It is in fact nothing but a labour union, but it was organised and befriended by women of the ' highest sociafc standing, some of them women, of: tfee-.irability. —New-York Letter.