Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/226

 presses our national spirit in this war. The Sokols have every year thousands of lectures, every local society has a large library, and many social gatherings are held under their auspices. In all the work of this national body, women take an equal part with the men.

The spirit pervading this unusual organization is expressed in the democratic form of address used by the members, and by the fact that every one is known as brother or sister. This usage persists in the Czechoslovak Army, where a private will address the offiicer as “brother colonel,” while the officer will address the private simply as “brother.” This is but one of the many manifestations of the democratic spirit which pervades the nation.

The full equality of women is carried out in workingmen’s organizations, and especially in the two Socialist parties, the National Socialists and the Socialist Democracy. The working women are organized in units like the men; they have as much to say as the men in educational and co-operative societies; and they have rep resentation on the political committee of the two parties.

The leading share in the work for full social and political rights of women has been taken by the Prague Women’s Club, which led the movement for woman suffrage, held many conventions, invited English workers in the cause to Prague, and spread its agitation throughout the Czech lands by means of lectures, educational courses, etc. The aim is to enable women to take their part legally and practically, in social and legislative reforms. Since the war this club has started first aid courses and others to prepare women for their tasks. The members have also publicly taken part in the work for the liberation of the Czechoslovak nation. The first big manifesto issued by writers and societies in the spring of 1917, before amnesty and deputies to make declarations, contained the names of student and women organizations.

It was also a woman, Dr. Alice G. Masaryk, who organized, in 1910, a “Sociological Section” in connection with the Czech University of Prague, for which she obtained the sanction of the Minister of Education in Vienna. She gained her experience in her work in the Chicago University Settlement and others in the United States. The Sociological Section conducted practical social work, as well as theoretical sociological instructions. Dr. Masaryk’s aim is to develop this section into a scientific and practical sociological institute.

All this work brought important results, so that today Bohemia, from the point of view of women’s rights, is the most ad vanced country in Central Europe. Instead of the German moto “Kirche, kueche, kinder,” the men of Bohemia allow their women free activity in all branches of political, social and educational life, and the Czech University of Prague preceded the German University in admitting women to academic degrees.

Equal rights for women in the Czechoslovak lands are denied today only by the Austrian authorities, by the anachronisms of the AustrianConstitutionAustrian Constitution [sic], and by the dislike of the bureaucracy.

Woman has been active in the textile, but ton-making, and weaving industries. In the country, the women work in the fields with the men; at home, they work on laces and splendid embroideries. In the Slovak lands they even decorate the walls of their homes and paint their crockery and house furniture. Their art and appreciation of colors are very largely superior to those of men. Since the war their tasks have in creased. Men up to 50 years of age were called into the army. The woman has to cultivate the fields, while her husband is gone, or perhaps in the Czechoslovak Army, and she has to learn his business. Thousands of them are exposed to persecutions of the government which confiscates the small property of a woman whose husband fell in the Austrian Army, and whose son is fightigfighting [sic] in the Czechoslovak Army. It quarters upon these poor women refugees from districts occupied by enemy forces or wounded Magyar and German soldiers. In some places the government takes the children away from the mother, under the pre text that she cannot support them, and puts them in charge of unknown Magyar and German families so that they may be lost, both to their mother and to their nation. The Austrian government has also with drawn the textbooks from the Czech public schools, and replaced them by new ones containing historic and other lies, in order to Germanize the new generation. This is also the means of punishing our nation