A Field Package for a German Soldier.
We went out and saw more trains and more soldiers. A little old lady stood beside us. She was a pale little lady dressed in black. She was so eager. She strained her eyes and watched every face in the crowd. It was bitter cold and she was thinly clad. At 12 o'clock the station master announced that there would be no more trains until morning. The little old lady turned away. I watched her bent figure as she went down the stairs. She was pulling out her handkerchief.
THE WOMEN WORKERS OF BERLIN.
The German women have filled in the ranks made vacant by the men. Nothing is too difficult for them to undertake and nothing is too hard for them to do.
The poor German working women! No one in all the war has suffered like these poor creatures. Their men have been taken from them, they are paid only a few pfennigs a day by the government, and now they must work, work like a man, work like a horse.
The German working woman is tremendously capable in manual labor. She never seems to get tired and she can stand all day in the wet and snow. But as a wife and mother she is becoming spoiled. She is bound to become rough, and she takes the jostlings of the men she meets with good grace, answering their flip remarks, joking with them and giving them a physical blow when she thinks it necessary. Most of the women seem to like this familiarity which working on the streets brings them, and they find it much more exciting than doing housework at home.
All great reforms begin in a violent way, and maybe this is the beginning of emancipation for the German woman, for she is beginning to realize what she can do, and for the first time in the history of the empire she is living an independent existence, dependent upon no man.
A Window Cleaner.
When the war first broke out, women were taken on as ticket punchers on the overground and underground railways, and Frau Kneiperin, or "Mrs. Ticket-puncher," sits all day long out in the open, punching tickets. In summer this job is very pleasant, but in winter she gets very, very cold even if she does wear a thick heavy overcoat and thick wooden shoes over her other shoes. She can't wear gloves for she must take each ticket in her hand in order to punch the stiff boards. She earns three marks a day.