There are almost thirty million Turkish women, the masses of whom move upon a very low level of culture. This cannot, however, be said of all, for many of the upper classes and of the court are well educated, though the branches or subjects they are taught are not varied. Foreign governesses are often employed to teach the girls French, German, and English, which they can, in many cases, speak fluently. Language and literature furnish a large part of their education. A change is gradually coming over the Turkish people in this matter of the development of its women, and this, notwithstanding, the fear in many minds that a better educated woman will be a less manageable woman; a creature dissatisfied with her lot. A recent writer of acute observation of Turkish affairs has said of efforts on the part of American philanthropists to instil the spirit of the American public school into the minds of the Turks: "The general opinion seemed to be that the female sex had no intellectual capacity. The first efforts of the Americans to make the women sharers in intellectual progress and refinement were met with opposition, and often with derisive laughter. They created a new public sentiment in favor of the education of women. This is shown by the interest taken in the schools established by Americans for the education of girls. Pashas, civil and military officers of high rank, the ecclesiastics and wealthy men of all the different nationalities attend the examinations, and express their hearty approval of the efforts made by the Americans for improving the conditions of the women of Turkey." The tendency of these influences is to win for women a greater respect from fathers, husbands, brothers; greater freedom in choice of their life partners; to defer the marriageable age from twelve years to fifteen or twenty; to secure for mothers greater respect from their children; and to elevate womanhood in every relation of life. Turkish women who are still living under the patriarchal system--and in no small part of the empire does this ancient system prevail--develop under a different environment from that prevailing in the other parts of the realm. Under a patriarchate the mother yields to the grandmother and the great-grandmother. The wife holds not only a subservient place in the family, which often contains as many as forty persons, but she is often, literally, a slave to the mother-in-law, and her children are trained by almost everybody else but herself. The patriarchal system is gradually yielding, however; and more and more, even in the conservative regions of the world, newly married people are forsaking father and mother and cleaving to one another, setting up their own homes and developing the parental character, and training their young in their own sweet way.