German Women.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 2, 10 July 1912, Page 70

German Women.

“But I reckon, madam, there are two things I should not care to be in this country, and those are a woman or a dog." The speaker was an American. He was on a tour through Germany, and, being ignorant of the language, welcomed the presence in the railway carriage of two English ladies as a favourable, opportunity of unburdening himself ot some of the impressions he had gathered. No doubt his judgment was unduly severe —he came from the land of the “new chivalry"—but there was at least a grain of truth in it. The German woman has often been praised by her menfolk as a pattern of the domestic virtues, but the eulogy contained the implication that she was lacking in the other ones. If the truth must be told, she was not given many chances of exercising them. To illustrious lips is credibly ascribed the saying that the cardinal points of a woman’s horizon are “the four K’s—Kirche, Kinder, Kuche, and Kleider —and that all her duties and pleasures should lie on or between these. This was undoubtedly the traditional notion of a German woman’s sphere. In society she was treated with an exaggerated appearance of deference. But behind there lurked in the mind of the average German male the solid conviction that Women were inferior beings, unfitted for the .really serious business of life, and that the only proper work for them was to bear and rear him children to sew on his buttons, and to cook his meals. Until a couple of years ago it was, in most of the German States, illegal for a woman even to participate in a political meeting. But silently and

persistently the German woman has been working out her own emancipation, and an exhibition which a month or two back drew its tens of thousands at Berlin showed how far she has already progressed towards it. This exhibition, which wore the name “Woman, Domestic and Professional,” was an eloquent testimony to feminine capacity, activity, and power of organisation.