gets up
at daybreak and tends her cows, cooks and serves the family breakfast
and the rest of the meals, keeps her house tidy, does the family sewing
and washing, is her family dressmaker and tailor. She transforms the
main room of the house into a factory in spring, and on her looms turns
into crashes and homespuns the result of a winter's work at the spinning
wheel. When the harvest time comes she does a good share of work in the
fields. A woman parasite is unknown to the peasant family and can have
no place in it. The Russian peasant woman earns her position in life
through honest, wholesome toil by her husband's side. Her reward is the
respect and consideration paid her. She is treated in the family as her
husband's equal. Under special conditions she has a voice in the village
folkmote, and has a right to a share in the village landed property on
equal footing with men. She is not debarred even from holding offices in
the village administration. Peasant women of ability have acted as
preachers and spiritual advisers among the Russian dissenters who do not
recognize the clergy of the established church. Through the woman school
teacher the Russian village girl now begins to learn in a wholesome way
of the wide world outside, and with ambition and means she will evolve
for herself a career full of interest and success. The future of the
Slavic race is the present world problem. It is a problem that becomes
more prominent with each decade. In the solution, whatever it may be, of
that problem the women of Russia will be a factor of tremendous
importance.

CHAPTER XIII

WOMEN OF POLAND

In the great family of the Slavic races the Poles are preeminent by
their ancient civilization, their genius, and their literary and
artistic activity. Their ancient history, like that of most other
nations, is lost in a confused mass of legends, but the rich treasures
of their ancient popular songs reveal to us, largely, their old cultural
status. Especially do many love and marriage songs of ancient origin and
others preserved in Latin versions in old chronicles prove the
conservatism of the mind of the Polish people and their conceptions of
life. The maiden, now as in the olden days, sings before the
all-important act of marriage: "Wreath, delicately bound of roses and
white lilies intertwined, thou shalt for the last time adorn my anxious
brow. Thou art the last of all garlands that I wound in the spring of
maidenhood! B