Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/66

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THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

the improvement of the education of girls in these countries, well knowing that education is the beginning of better things, and the most effective stimulus to self-respect and lawful ambition. The better-educated women flock into the teaching profession. The women of leisure and culture have founded women's clubs which, in Servia, it is said, have nearly twenty thousand members. The position of the women of Bulgaria is much better than that of the Galician women. They are so far advanced as to recognise the value of the vote, and have organised themselves into woman suffrage associations. In this country fifty-six women are practising as fully-qualified physicians.

The condition of women in Bohemia compares very favourably with the position of women in other parts of Eastern Europe. At one time, indeed as late as 1906, a limited number of property-owning Bohemian women held votes for the Imperial Parliament, but with the extension of the franchise to all adult males in that year, this much-prized voting power of a minority of women was withdrawn. This was a challenge to the free-spirited women of Bohemia, who are now patiently waiting the fulfilment of the Government's promise to bring in a woman's suffrage measure. The tax-paying women of Bohemia vote, by proxy it is true, for the provincial