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When months are cold, placid Donna Rachele Mussolini dwells with her children in Milan; but with approaching spring she moves out to the Mussolini estate at Forli, where, each summer, Il Duce indulges in a brief fit of farm labor which he calls "fighting the battle of the grain." At such times, and during the Christmas and Easter visits of Signor Mussolini to Milan, it is possible that he is persuaded, cajoled, nagged. But he is only known to have yielded once. On this occasion—just prior to the birth of Babe Romano—Donna Mussolini begged and received a decree of amnesty for some arrested antiFascists who hailed from her native village.
Alexandra Sczerbinska Pilsudska is the second wife of Poland's swashbuckling Marshal and benevolent Dictator, Josef Pilsudski.
Since the stirring days when Pilsudski was engaged in clandestine Socialist activities, he has been assisted by the present Madame Pilsudska, a woman of culture, charm and quickening ideas. Gifted with a pliant temperament, she got on excellently well with the Marshal's first wife, the late Maria Litinska Pilsudska, who was her husband's first collaborator in the secret and dangerous work of putting forth a Socialist newspaper Robotnik (The Workman) under the pre-War Tsarist régime in Poland.
The present Mme. Pilsudska dwells principally at rural Sulejowek, 12 miles from Warsaw, where she provides a quiet soothing refuge to which her harassed and moody husband often flees. With her young daughters, Wanda and Hedwig, she assists the Marshal to prune his apple trees and tend his bees.*
Mysterious Madame Stalin is the enigma of Soviet Russian journalism. Her close-mouthed Asiatic husband, Dictator Josef Stalin, was born in what is now the Soviet Republic of Georgia and has all the liking for concealment of his family affairs which would be expected in an Oriental.
Dictator and Wife dwell with their only child in rooms of spartan simplicity within the frowning, huge-walled Kremlin. No Soviet news organ, magazine or book is permitted to reveal personal news of this seclusive Caesar's wife.
The Divorced Wives of Dictator Mustafa Kemal Pasha of Turkey are: first the great Halide Edib Hanoum, foremost Turkish feminist; and secondly the plump and pretty Latife Hanoum, winsome, vivacious, rich.
Kemal was, of course, the second husband of Halide Edib. She perhaps kindled the first elemental spark of his present passion for Occidentalizing Turkey. But long before the fire burned, Kemal and Halide had parted. She divorced him when he proposed to take a second wife under the old polygamous law of Turkey. Paradoxically he turned to this same old law when he wished to divorce his second wife, and accomplished the deed simply by repeating three times the traditional formula: "I divorce you." Shortly thereafter the new Turkish code, containing Occidentally stringent divorce laws, came into effect.
The Seven Wives and 23 concubines of Marshal Chang Tso-lin, picturesque and barbaric Dictator of North China, recently included a thoroughgoing English woman and a slim young person from the U. S. The majority of Chang's wives and concubines are Chinese, but there are two Opposition factions made up of Japanese and Russians. Of late Dictator Chang is said to have paid more attention to opium than to his parliament of wives.