While the condition of Negro education in the Southern States is by no means perfect, the Negro, and particularly the Negro woman, has some advantages which are so far beyond the reach of the peasant girl in Sicily that she has never dreamed of possessing them. For example, every Negro girl in America has the same opportunities for education that are given to Negro boys. She may enter the industrial school, or she may, if she choose, as she frequently does, go to college. All the trades and the professions are open to her. One of the first Negro doctors in Alabama was a woman. Every year there are hundreds and, perhaps, thousands of Negro girls who go up from the farming districts of the Southern States to attend these higher schools, where they have an opportunity to come under the influence of some of the best and most cultivated white people in the United States. In the country villages, I venture to say, not one girl in a hundred ever learns so much as to read and write.
I was much impressed, as I went about in Sicily, with the substantial character of the buildings and improvements, such as they were. Everything is of stone. Even the most miserable house is built as if it were expected to last for centuries, and an incredible amount of labour has been spent everywhere throughout the country in erecting stone walls.
One reason for this is that there is almost no wood to be had for building. Everything is necessarily built of stone and tiles. Another reason, I suspect, why Sicilian people build permanently is because they never expect any change in their condition. If one asks them why they have built their villages on the most inconvenient and inaccessible places, they do not know. They know only that these towns have always been there and they haven't the least idea but what they will remain always where they are. As a matter of fact, in order to find an explanation for the location of these towns, students, I learned, have had to go back several centuries before Christ to the time when the Greeks and the Phœnicians were contending for the possession of the island. At that time the original population took refuge in these mountain fastnesses, and through all the changes since, these towns, with, perhaps, some remnants of the race that originally inhabited the island, have remained.
Everywhere in Sicily one is confronted with the fact that he is among a people that is living among the ruins and remains of an ancient civilization. For example, in seeking to understand the difference in the position of women in Sicily from that of other parts of Europe I learned that one had to go back to the Greeks and the Saracens, among whom women held a much lower position and were much less free than among the peoples of Europe. Not only that, but I met persons who professed to be able to distinguish among the women Greek and Saracen types. I remember having my attention called at one time to a group of women, wearing very black shawls over their heads, who seemed more shrinking and less free in their actions than other women I had seen in Sicily. I was informed that these women were of the Saracen type and that the habit of wearing these dark shawls over their heads and holding them tight under their chins was a custom that had come from the Arabs. The shawls, I suppose, took the place in a sort of way of the veils worn by Oriental women.
Now all these ancient customs and habits, and all the quaint superstitions with which life among the ignorant classes is overgrown, have, I suppose, the same kind of interest and fascination as some of the ancient buildings. But very few people realize, I am convinced, to what degree these ancient customs weigh upon the people, especially the women, and hinder their progress.
In the midst of these conditions the Sicilian women, who are looked upon by the men as inferior creatures and guarded by them as a species of property, live like prisoners in their own villages. Bound fast, on the one hand, by age-long customs, and on the other surrounded by a wall of ignorance which shuts out from them all knowledge of the outer world, they live in a sort of mental and moral slavery under the control of their husbands and of the ignorant, and possibly vicious, village priests.
For this reason, the journey to America is for the woman of Sicily a real emancipation. In fact, I do not know of any more important work that is going on for the emancipation of women anywhere than that which is being done, directly and indirectly, through the emigration from Sicily and Italy to the United States, in bringing liberty of thought to the women of Southern Italy.