FROM HERE AND THERE

Ladies' Mirror, Volume I, Issue 8, 1 February 1923, Page 12

FROM HERE AND THERE

Tl/TLLE Nadejda Standoff, eldest TX daughter of the Bulgarian Minister in London, has been appointed First Secretary to the Bulgarian Legation in Washington. She is a tall, dark woman with large, smiling eyes. Mile. Standoff is twenty-seven and speaks six languages. She was secretary interpreter at the Paris Peace Conference and the Genoa Conference. Other women diplomats are:—Lady Surma D'Mar Shimum, plenipotentiary of the Assyrian tribe in London; Miss Clothilde Luisi, attache to the Uruguayan Legation at Brussels; Miss Henrietta Hoegh, First _ Secretary at the Norwegian Legation in Mexico. In Great Britain, women are barred from filling diplomatic posts by a regulation issued last year, which reserves all' posts in the British diplomatic and consular services for men.

"DY ploughing five acres of ground -"-* in a nine-hours day with a motor-tractor, Miss Frances Brown, of Cookham, Berkshire, has set up what is claimed as a record. She holds the distinction of reaping 22 acres of corn in one day. She frequently teaches tractor work to men.

HPHE increasing modernity of China -*- is exemplified in the case of Mupia Ju, daughter of Director Ju Cho Man, of the South China Government. Mupia Ju is a regular member of the air forces of South China, and in the present disturbed condition of things takes her turn with the men pilots in the flying patrol.

"FORMERLY headmistress of Clap--1 - ham, S.W., High School, Miss Agnes Paul, M.A., has been nominated to fill the vacancy on the Senate of the University of London caused by the death of Sir Albert Kaye Rollit. There are several women members of the Senate, including Miss Tuke, Principal of Bedford College for Women. Dr. Sophie Bryant, who died near Chamonix, France, recently, was also a member.

IyTRS. Harriet de Kraft Woods, who was recently appointed superintendent of buildings and grounds of the Congressional Library— a post sometimes known as “housekeeper to the Congressional Library” —is the first woman to hold that feminine position. Mrs. Woods is the daughter of the late Admiral de Kraft, U.S.N., and the widow of Arthur T. Woods, professor of mechanical engineering in the University of Illinois. During her husband’s life she aided him in all his technical writing, and after his death in 1893 became the secretary of a well-known consulting engineer of Chicago. In three years she had become manager of the Chicago office of the Railroad Gazette —of which her husband had at one time been associate editor. Concurrently, she acted as librarian of the Western Railway Club of Chicago. Her library career began twenty-two years ago in the humble capacity of a clerk. When her recent appointment was offered her she was in charge of one of the most important divisions of the coypright office. Her new duties involve the direct supervision of the labouring force — engineers, gardeners, charwomen, etc. —at work in the upkeep of the buildings and grounds of the Congressional Library. IVTME. Daudet, the widow of the celebrated French writer, has just been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. I\/TRS. Emma Tafanelli Korn, of San Francisco, is America’s first veritable Portia, for Mrs. Korn is the only American woman lawyer of Italian descent.

lyrME. Gorki, wife of the great 1 " Russian author, has been appointed a commissary by the Soviet Government and entrusted with the work of disposing abroad of all the art treasures collected by it.

A PORTRAIT of Mme. Clara - ri - Clemens Gabrilowitch, the only surviving child of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), has been painted by the New York artist, Julius Rolshoven, which is said to foreshadow a revival of Gainsborough, as BurneJones made the Italian masters a nineteenth century fad. Mme. Gabrilowitch is a frequent writer on musical themes, and possesses a welltrained contralto voice.

r PHE foremost business woman in x the British Empire, Lady Rhondda, who holds that "women should be able to get everything eventually," and who means to fight for her seat in the Lords' until she gets it, is anything but the strident militant of familiar British suffragette tradition. Her competence is unobtrusive and her personality feminine. She dresses simply, though without any masculine affectation. Lady Rhondda is half Scotch, half Welsh, a heritage possibly accounting for her business and political acumen. Altogether she has three offices, one where she controls the huge mining interests of her millionaire father, the late Lord Rhondda, a second where she sits on the board of directors of Time and Tide, a weekly paper that has been a great success during its two years of existence, and a third the office of the Six Point Group, one of the most active of the women's political bodies in England.

TT would be hard to imagine anyx one more unlike the conventional type of "platform" woman than Miss Margaret Bondfield, who is at present so conspicuous in the councils of the Labour movement in Great Britain. Small, bright-eyed, soft-voiced, gentle-looking, she has a quite remarkable grasp of social and industrial problems and an unerring instinct for getting to the heart of a subject. She has also great organising ability, and there are few speakers in the Labour movement who have _ higher oratorical gifts. Her capacity for handling a crowd is astonishing, and "hecklers," misled by her gentle appearance into the belief that they have "a soft thing" to deal with, invariably get the surprise of

their lives when she opens fire upon them. Miss Bondfield began life as a shop assistant, and it is this personal experience of the shop girls' life that makes her so eloquent an exponent of their grievances. One of _ this interesting woman's many claims to fame is that she once preached in the Church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, with the full approval of the Bishop of London.

ISS 1. A R. Wylie author of - I *- 1 "The Dark House" (Dutton), has had an interesting youthful career. She had no education till she was twelve years old, when she was sent for several years to a "finishing school" in Brussels. After that two years were spent acquiring the "rudiments of an education" at Cheltenham College, England. Another finishing school in Germany literally finished her formal education. Among other remarkable feats, Miss Wylie records that at the age of eleven she had already done several long cycling tours, extending over a week, and done at the rate of fifty miles a day, completely by herself. She stopped where she chose, and paid her own hotel bills out of the lavish allowance supplied by her widowed father, whom Miss Wylie describes as an "extraordinary personality." At fourteen, she toured the fjords of Norway alone. At the age of twenty she decided she needed more liberty, and started out on "her own." She turned to writing, and had remarkable luck in having her early work immediately accepted. Her first novel, written at twenty-two, was accepted in England and America, was serialised in an English magazine, and was subsequently filmed. She was active in war work at the front till her health gave away. She has been a "violent" suffragist. Miss Wylie is an Australian girl, and is in her early thirties.

A BEAUTIFUL tribute to her JrX brother, Neil Primrose, who was killed in the war, is the theme of one of the poems in the new volume ("The End of the Day," Hodder and Stoughton. 2s. 6d.) which has just been published by Lady Sybil Grant, the brilliant daughter of Lord Rosebery. Lady Sybil, who was born in 1879, married, in 1893, Mr. (now Colonel) Charles Grant. There are few women in Society who have had a fuller life or possess a more versatile talent. Her poetical gifts have _ already been referred to. In addition, she is an artist of considerable ability, an expert photographer, a member of the Aero Clubshe has done a good deal of flying at Roehampton and elsewherea very knowledgable person concerning dogs—her kennel of Pyrenean mountain dogs is famous —and an extremely witty conversationalist. .One of the most quoted of her sayings was prompted by seeing her father seated between the Duchess of Cleveland and Mrs. Asquith. "Look at papa," she said, "sitting between the last century and the next

TN her presidential address at the -*■ National Council of Women at Cambridge, Lady Frances Balfour said that whenever she took up a newspaper she saw the unexpected in women. The Everest Expedition did not seem one where women would be singing “Excelsior!” yet, reading of that great ascent, and the deeds performed by the porters, she found singled out the prowess of a Tibetan woman, who carried a tent weighing 1601 b., in which all the men lived, and plunged with it through t;.: long, snowy passes with the best of the porters. Women were first in butter-making in Devonshire, first for breeding dogs, calves, and hacks, and first in sheepdog trials. Two young women in

Buckinghamshire, by scientific methods on their allotment, won every prize from the sixteen county houses round them, and again, most unexpectedly, she saw a woman appearing as the winner of the Calcutta Sweepstakes. (Laughter).

IVriSS Getrude Lowthian Bell, who - LA was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1917 for services in the East, is probably the only woman who has ever been an Assistant Political Officer under the British Government, a post she held at Bagdad. Miss Bell took a first-class in history when she was up at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, whose Founder's Medal she was given in 1918. Her mind turns to literature as well as travel, and among the books she has written that have been inspired in the East there is a little volume of "Poems From the Divan of Hafiz," published seventeen years before the war, in which she shows a knowledge of the Mesopotamian Arabs that was to prove of such valuable service to her country.

'"PHE earnest endeavour of one Eng--1 - lish M.P. to make certain styles of hairdressing compulsory for girls under sixteen makes one smile pityingly. One almost wishes this suggestion could become law, if only to see the authorities struggling with the young people most concerned in disobeying it. What possibilities are involved in the idea! Would the police stop girls to ask their ages, and would they be required to carry about with them birth certificates to prove that they were entitled to bob or to put up their hair? What about girls m factories, where long floating hair is a danger, because of the machinery? But that is only one drawback to a plan, which, no doubt, to a man appears very feasible. So much for a man; but it was a woman who brought forward at a recent meeting of women from various parts of the world the happy notion that women police should control the dress worn by their sex, especially to enforce a proposed law that no one should wear a skirt more than two inches off the ground. Incidents such as these greatly cheer us on our way— imagine the mentality of the lady who made the quaint proposal!

r FHE Princess Jolanda di Savoia, x daughter of King Victor Emmanuel 111 of Italy, and fiancee of Crown Prince Leopold of Belgium, was born at the Quirinal Palace, Rome, June 1, 1901. She is what the Italians call a "fervida sportswoman," which may account for the fact that the Prince of Wales found her a good pal. She generally accompanies her father on his hunting and shooting excursions, and thus keeps up the traditions of the chase in the House of Savoy. The Princess is fond of riding to hounds, and takes delight in the fox hunts of the Campagna, but San Rossore and Castel Porziano are the places where she prefers to ride for the glory of motion. What makes her a complete horsewoman is the fact that she is fond of horse racing, and takes great interest in horse breeding. She is extremely charitablea trait she evidently inherits from her mother, Queen Elena.

QUEEN Mary recently visited Aberdeen, where she received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. On the same afternoon she opened the Rowctt Institute in Animal Research, Bankhead, the principal benefactor of which is Mr. John Quiller Rowett, who was mainly responsible for financing the Shacklcton-Rowett Expedition to the Antarctic.