The Harem and Happiness.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 26, 29 June 1907, Page 33

The Harem and Happiness.

Harem life has always been considered by Western women to be most wretched, a dull, bored enslavement. From this opinion a woman who knows the harem well completely differs. Mrs. Vaka Brown, traveller, student, authoress, and wife of a litterateur, says the happiest women in all the world abide in Turkey —the land of Howers ami dreams, where love is all in all; the land where the life of peace, the thought of purity, and the appreciation of all that is beautiful in nature has found, perhaps, its highest development—the land of the “unspeakable Turk.”

“I have talked and lived,” says Mrs. Brown, “with the wives of Selim Pasha, four in all, and discussed the very problems that arise at onee in the Western mind as soon as this question of the Turkish harem is mooted —they have told me their stories, their hopes, their fears —and they are happy, very, very happy. I have lived in other Turkish households, and everywhere I have found that happiness is the rule, not the exception. In

the West I have lived ten years, and I have seen two really happy women. They

were happy because their husbands were passionately in love with them. Women’s happiness depends on love, you know, an<| on love alone ” “But. Mrs. Brown,” asked a listener, “would you be happy with quarter of a husband?”

“Show me,” she replied, ‘‘the woman who has the whole of a husband.”

“Remember,” she added, in warning, “I do not endorse the harem; neither do I condemn it. I do not give an opinion. I simply tell you what I have seen—what I know —that the Turkish women are equally as intelligent as the Western women: indeed, many of them far more so, and that happiness, great happiness, is the invariable rule.”