Spain -- Description and travel; Spain -- History -- Juvenile literature
Recently some Spanish girls have started learning how to be lawyers,
doctors and teachers. These girls, like their brothers, go on to
universities. Some girls also learn shorthand and typing so that they
can work in offices. Before the Civil War there were no girls in
offices, but today they like being secretaries and typists just as girls
in America do. Still, even these modern Spanish girls don't have the
freedom to go to parties or on dates with boys, the way American girls
do, unless they are engaged to be married. When they go out at night for
the paseo or to attend the theater or a movie, they go with other girls
or with their whole family.
A strong family bond unites all Spanish people. Fathers and mothers and
children spend as much time together as they possibly can. If being
together means that children must go with parents into the fields at
harvest time, then they go, even if they only play around and don't
really help. In the evenings when the father and mother go to the paseo
or sit in a cafe to talk with their friends, their children go with
them.
Always the whole family goes to church together. One of the most
important days in a Spanish child's life is the day of confirmation.
Then the family and relatives and friends from miles around come to
celebrate. All over Spain, on a Sunday morning, you'll see the little
girls in their long white dresses with white gloves and veils, looking
proud and happy as they walk to church with their beaming mothers and
fathers for their confirmation. When boys are confirmed, they wear white
suits, with a cape lined in scarlet or blue satin and trimmed with gold
braid. If the family has enough money, they may hire a horse-drawn
carriage. The driver wears a tall black stovepipe silk hat and the
carriage doors and horses' bridles are decorated with white flowers.
The church is very important in Spanish life. The Apostle James himself
came to preach in Spain, and later, after he had been killed in
Palestine, his body was brought back to Spain for burial. His tomb is in
the beautiful Cathedral of Santiago--which is the way Spanish people say
St. James--in Compostela, in northern Spain. For thousands of years
people from all over the world have come as pilgrims to Compostela. Many
little Spanish boys are named Santiago, or perhaps Jaime, another way to
say James in Spanish, for Santiago is the patron saint of all Spain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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