United States or São Tomé and Príncipe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the first month of the war the Frauendienst opened work-rooms in all great centers; machinery was installed by magic and through the six work-rooms in Berlin alone twenty-three thousand women were given paid employment in one week. Such efforts could not, of course, absorb the surplus labor, for unemployment was very great.
The work of Ulrich von Lichtenstein, for instance, in his "Frauendienst," is full of the most absurd performances, which any sensible lady would have been justified in repudiating.
Gertrud Baumer visited the Ministerium des Innern, and on August 1 she issued a call for the mobilization of women for service to the Fatherland in the Nationale Frauendienst. Under the aegis of the government, with the national treasury behind her, Dr. Baumer summoned the women of the Empire.
By order, every woman and every organization of women was to fall in line under the Frauendienst in each village and city for "the duration of the war." In each army district, the government appointed a woman as directress, and by order to town and provincial authorities made the Frauendienst part of local executive affairs.
The minnesong is the literary expression of the social convention known as "Frauendienst," the term "minne" connoting the code which prescribed the nature of the relation existing between the lover and his lady; the dominant principle was a reverence for womanhood as such, and in this respect the German minnesang is inspired by a less selfish spirit than the Provençal troubadour poetry.
One result of this was that the children of the poor were surer of obtaining milk than before the war, as the women of the Frauendienst and social workers saw to it that each child had its share. The third winter of the war, owing to a breakdown of means of transportation and want of laborers, coal became very scarce.
Eighty percent of the women's hat-makers and milliners were out of work, seventy-two percent of the workers in glass and fifty-eight percent in china. The Frauendienst investigated two hundred and fifty-five thousand needy cases, and in Berlin alone found sixty thousand women who had lost their employment. Charity had to render help.
Among the immediate duties laid upon the Frauendienst by the authorities was the task of registering all needy persons, of providing cheap eating places, opening workrooms, and setting up nurseries for children, especially for those who were motherless and those whose fathers had fallen at the front and whose mothers were in some gainful pursuit.
Here, again, it is an example of the alertness of the organization and its close connection with the government that the Berlin magistracy deputed to twenty-three Hilfscommissionen from the Frauendienst the work of giving advice and charity relief to the unemployed.
On the Bellevuestrasse, Frau von Ihne, wife of the great architect, founded a home for blinded soldiers. In this home soldiers were taught to make brooms, brushes, baskets, etc. German women who had country places turned these into homes for the convalescent wounded. But perhaps the most noteworthy was the National Frauendienst or Service for Women, organised the first day of the war.
Word Of The Day