Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/62

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54
THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

the right of a woman to file a petition for divorce; education for women and the training of them to act on their own initiative and to take upon themselves responsibilities. The Young Turk has, however, disappointed the watching world, and in nothing so much as in his throwing over the women and closing upon them the door of the harem.

The Mohammedan woman of the lower classes is free to come and go as she pleases; but she is the chattel of her husband, and the hard and sustained labour which fills her days has made her, in many respects, little better in intelligence and capacity than a four-footed beast of burden. English and American women are actively interesting themselves in the Mohammedan women, and seeking to let some rays of light into the thickly curtained chambers of the harem. The freeing of Turkish women is only a matter of time. When once the charm of freedom has been felt by individuals and by nations, every misfortune, every relapse, every backward step for which the unseeing, unthinking majority is responsible, acts to those of quickened intelligence as a spur to attempt greater and still greater things. Turkish fathers should never have sent their daughters to the schools of Western Europe if they did not mean the new ideas there gained to find expression in the national life. Turkish