What eight million women want — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
What eight million women want
John Stuart Mill · en
Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them reference
books, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of
the traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases have
been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that
they want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over a
thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago, in
getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement
their work. Western States--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho--have supplied
reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.
One interesting special library is circulated in Massachusetts and Rhode
Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something like forty
of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of
tuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty complete
tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs
of each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which
local health problems are discussed. The Health Department of the
General Federation is working to establish these health libraries and
exhibits in every State.
Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, have
women associated themselves together with the object of reforming what
seems to them social chaos. In practically every civilized country in
the world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central organization
to which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions and
objects send delegates. In the United States the council is made up of
the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like the
National Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the American
Revolution. More than a million and a half American women are
affiliated.
Four hundred and twenty-six women's organizations belong to the council
in Great Britain. In Switzerland the council has sixty-four allied
societies; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it has
thirty-five. Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council.
In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councils
send delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countries
as far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa, and
every country in Europe. The council, indeed, has no formal organization
in Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia.
But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council.
Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they hoped soon to ask
for admission. The President of the International Council of Women is
the Countess of Aberdeen. Titled women in every European country belong
to their councils. The Queen of Greece is president of the Greek
council.