The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-04-16
|9OO,OOO WOMEN AT WORK IN BERLIN Have Taken Places of Men
 to Amazing Degree FOUND EVERYWHERE Are Not as Efficient, However, as 
FOUND EVERYWHERE
Are Not as Efficient, However, as Men and Break More Early Under Strain = Will Be Complex
 Problem at End of War

Berlin. April 10.--(Correspondence of the Associated Press )-Nearly 900,0ct women are now at one kind of work or another in Berlin. They have swarmed into almost every field of ac- tivity, no matter how difficult; they are earning more money than they ever had before; many have lost their own bread winners and are for all time dependent upon their own efforts. The probable unwillingness of the women to go back to their homes after the war is being more and more anticipated by the labor leaders who say the women must go in favor of the men when the time comes.
 By far the largest proportion of the women now employed in Berlin are un- skilled workers-perhaps 6oo0Oe of the
 900 600. Of the remaining 3O0,O0O skilled workers, only small part are custom
 arily so employed. They have done
 wonderfully well, even in such difficult and strenuous occupations as metal
 work, but they are not, because of physi- ca. handicaps, the equal of their male predecessors.
  Just how large will be the number of widows, or of women left with crippled husbands, after the war, the labor lead CTS do not attempt as yet to estimate These, on the one hand, constitute, how ever, but part of the problem. Fully as puzzlng is the question of what to dc with those women who, though they later will have other means of support are expected deliberately to ballz at re- tiring to a nonproductive life again. The employer who is able to hire women more cheaply than men, will be loath to change to the old method, ano for a time is not going to be able tc afford it. A not inconsiderable degree of diplomacy combined with a judicial use of compulson is going to be neces- sary, labor leaders feel before the prob lem can be adjusted
 There is hardly an occupation int which women have not crowded during the past year. The employment oi ready an old and familiar condition, and women .'motormen'' have become moro or less familiar sights even in the busy downtown streets of Berlin. The first woman taxicab chauffeur was noted early last summer, and she has multiplied somewhat since then. The construction company build- ing the new tube under the Friedrich Strasse connecting the northern and southern sections of the city has for months employed feminine ''huskies young and old, in shovelling out the
 sandy underpinning of the street.
 CLEAN THE STREETS Two years ago the streets of the capital were cleaned by men of mili- tary age. Their places were taken by boys, and now women are being in. ftroduced as fast as the youths grow ul i to military age and enter the army 1 It is a common sight on any street tc see coal being carried into residences from teams by women instead of men The underground railway companies 1 of Berlin months ago installed womer as ticket choppers, and then intro duced them as guards. When it was found that their dresses frequently got caught in doors, the companies did moi go back to male help, but ordered the women to don bloomers, and today there are more of them to be seen than men.
 Even Germans, accustomed to see 1 ing women performing heavy duties gasped a little when they heard that the steam railroads, in addition to in- stalling women at the stations for
 
 track walkers, switch tenders and track layers. Yet the Prussian rail- ways today have large number ot women now in their employ It is almost universally admitted that the women do not adequately sub- stitute for the men, Women conduc- tors, for instance, are said to be about 50 per cent as efficient as their male predecessors, and only about half oi those who go to work as conductors are able to stand the strain. There has been notable increase in certain women's diseases resulting directly from this work.
 Few of the trades are harder or more strenuous than metal work which just now, of course, is booming because of the need of ammunition Yet there are thousands of women thus employed today, who do not seem .tc mind the heavy work and who are
 earning, relatively, a great deal of money.