HER COUNTRY’S CALL
One Thousand Women Wanted! You may read it on a great canvas sign
that stretches across an industrial establishment in lower Manhattan.
The owner of this factory who put it there, only knows that it is an
advertisement for labour of which he finds himself suddenly in need.
But he has all unwittingly really written a proclamation that is a sign
of the times.
Across the Atlantic I studied that proclamation in Old World cities.
Women Wanted! Women Wanted! The capitals of Europe have been for four
years placarded with the sign. And now we in America are writing it on
our sky line. All over the world see it on the street-car barns as on
the colleges. It is hung above the factories and the coal mines, the
halls of government and the farm-yards and the arsenals and even the
War Office. Everywhere from the fireside to the firing line, country
after country has taken up the call. Now it has become the insistent
chorus of civilisation: Women Wanted! Women Wanted!
But yesterday the great war was a phenomenon to which we in America
thrilled only as its percussions reverberated around the world. Now
our own soldiers are marching down Main Street. But their uniforms
still are new. Wait. Soon here too one shall choke with that sob in the
throat. Oh, I am walking again in the garden of the Tuileries on a day
when I had seen war without the flags flying and the bands playing. It
was dead men and disabled men and hospitals full and insane asylums
full and cemeteries full. “You have to remember,” said a voice at my
side, “that all freedoms since the world began have had to be fought
for. They still have to be.”
So I repeat it now for you, the women of America, resolutely to
remember. And get our your Robert Brownings! Read it over and over
again, “God’s in his heaven.” For there are going to be days when it
will seem that God has quite gone away. Still He hasn’t. Suddenly in
a lifting of the war clouds above the blackest battle smoke, we shall
see again His face as a flashing glimpse of some new freedom lights for
an instant the darkened heavens above the globe of the world. Already
there has been a Russian revolution which may portend the end of a
German monarchy. In England a new democracy has buckled on the sword of
a dead aristocracy. And a great Commoner is at the helm of state. But
with all the freedoms they are winning, there is one for which not the
most decorated general has any idea he’s fighting. I am not sure but
it is the greatest freedom of all: when woman wins the race wins. The
new democracy for which a world has taken up arms, for the first time
since the history of civilisation began, is going to be real democracy.
There is a light that is breaking high behind all the battle lines!
Look! There on the horizon in those letters of blood that promise of
the newest freedom of all. When it is finished—the awful throes of this
red agony in which a world is being reborn—there is going to be a place
in the Sun for women.
Listen, hear the call, Women Wanted! Women Wanted! Last Spring the
Government pitched a khaki colored tent in your town on the vacant lot
just beyond the post office, say. How many men have enlisted there?
Perhaps there are seventy-five who have gone from the factory across
the creek, and the receiving teller at the First National Bank, and the
new principal of the High School where the children were getting along
so well, and the doctor that everybody had because they liked him so
much.
And, oh, last week at dinner your own husband had but just finished
carving when he looked across the table and said: “Dear, I can’t stand
it any longer. I’m going to get into this fight to make the world
right.” You know how your face went white and your heart for an instant
stopped beating. But what I don’t believe you do know is that you are
at this moment getting ready to play your part in one of the most
tremendous epochs of the world. It is not only Liège and the Marne
and Somme, and Haig and Joffre and Pétain and Pershing who are making
history to-day. Keokuk, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Mich., and Little Falls,
N. Y., are too—and you and the woman who lives next door!
THE NEW WOMAN MOVEMENT
Every man who enlists at that tent near the post office is going to
leave a job somewhere whether it’s at the factory or the doctor’s
office or the school teacher’s desk, or whether it’s your husband. That
job will have to be taken by a woman. It’s what happened in Europe.
It’s what now we may see happen here. A great many women will have
a wage envelope who never had it before. That may mean affluence to
a housefull of daughters. One, two, three, four wage envelopes in a
family where father’s used to be the only one. You even may have to
go out to earn enough to support yourself and the babies. Yes, I know
your husband’s army pay and the income from investments carefully
accumulated through the savings of your married life, will help quite
a little. But with the ever rising war cost of living, it may not be
enough. It hasn’t been for thousands of homes in Europe. And eventually
you too may go to work as other women have. It’s very strange, is it
not, for you of all women who have always believed that woman’s place
was the home. And you may even have been an “anti,” a most earnest
advocate of an ancient régime against which whole societies and
associations of what yesterday were called “advanced” women organised
their “suffrage” protests.
To-day no one any longer has to believe what is woman’s place. No
woman even has anything to say about it. Read everywhere the signs:
Women Wanted! Here in New York we are seeing shipload after shipload of
men going out to sea in khaki. We don’t know how many boat loads like
that will go down the bay. But for an army of every million American
men in Europe, there must be mobilised another million women to take
their places behind the lines here 3,000 miles away from the guns, to
carry on the auxiliary operations without which the armies in the field
could not exist.
In the department store where you shopped to-day you noticed an
elevator girl had arrived, where the operator always before has been
a boy! Outside the window of my country house here as I write, off
on that field on the hillside a woman is working, who never worked
there before. At Lexington, Mass., I read in my morning paper, the
Rev. Christopher Walter Collier has gone to the front in France and
his wife has been unanimously elected by the congregation to fill the
pulpit during his absence. Sometimes women by the hundred step into
new vacancies. The Æolian Company is advertising for women as piano
salesmen and has established a special school for their instruction. A
Chicago manufacturing plant has hung out over its employment gate the
announcement, “Man’s work, man’s pay for all women who can qualify,”
and within a week two hundred women were at work. The Pennsylvania
railroad, which has rigidly opposed the employment of women on its
office staffs, in June, 1917, announced a change of policy and took on
in its various departments five hundred women and girls. The Municipal
Service Commission in New York last fall was holding its first
examination to admit women to the position of junior draughtsmen in the
city’s employ. The Civil Service Commission at Washington, preparing to
release every possible man from government positions for war service,
had compiled a list of 10,000 women eligible for clerical work in
government departments.
Like that it is happening all about us. This is the new woman movement.
And you’re in it. We all are. I know: you may never have carried a
suffrage banner or marched in a suffrage procession or so much as
addressed a suffrage campaign envelope. But you’re “moving” to-day just
the same if you’ve only so much as rolled a Red Cross bandage or signed
a Food Administration pledge offered you by the women’s committee of
the Council of National Defence. All the women of the world are moving.
“Suffrage _de la morte_,” a Senator on the Seine has termed the vote
offered the French feminists in the form of a proposition that every
man dying on the field of battle may transfer his ballot to a woman
whom he shall designate. And the French women have drawn back in
horror, exclaiming: “We don’t want a dead man’s vote. We want only our
own vote.” Nevertheless it is something like this which is occurring.
And we may shudder, but we may not draw back. It is by way of the
_place de la morte_, that women are moving inexorably to-day into
industry and commerce and the professions, on to strange new destinies
that shall not be denied.
There on the firing line a bullet whizzes straight to the mark. A man
drops dead in the trenches. Some wife’s husband, some girl’s sweetheart
who before he was a soldier was a wage earner, never will be more. Back
home another woman who had been temporarily enrolled in the ranks of
industry, steps forward, enlisted for life in the army of labour.
Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the feminists have asked.
But this is not our woman movement. This is His woman movement, who
moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. We may not know. And we
do not understand. But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were
in the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way that is opening
for women throughout the world. It is westward to us that this star of
opportunity has taken its course directly from above the battlefields
of Europe.
A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY LOOKS ON
Women Wanted! Women Wanted! I am hearing it again over there. Outside
the windows of my London hotel in Piccadilly, a shaft of sharp white
light played against the blackness of the London sky. Down these beams
that searched the night for enemy Zeppelins, a woman’s figure softly
moved. And as I looked, the close drawn curtains of my room, it
seemed, parted and she stepped lightly across the window sill. She was
gowned in a quaint, old-time costume. “They’re not wearing them to-day,”
I smiled.
She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with the broad arrows of
Holloway jail. There were women, you know, who suffered and died in
that prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to be the way of the
cross for the woman’s cause.
“You ought to see the new styles,” I said. “Governments are getting out
so many new decorations for women.”
“Tell me,” she answered. “Up in heaven we have heard that it is so. And
I have come to see.”
So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette and I, to look on
the Great Push of the new woman movement that is swinging down the
twentieth century in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of the road
and all the gates ahead are open wide. No ukase of parliament or king
halts it. No church dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises
it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans do not mob it. No,
indeed! The applauding populace that’s crying “_Place aux dames_” would
not tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I don’t think
there’s any one left in the world who would want to so much as pull out
a hairpin of this triumphant processional.
You see, it’s so very different from the woman movement of yesterday.
That was the crusade of the pioneers who gave their lives in the
struggling service of an unpopular ideal. Who wanted feminists free to
find themselves? Even women themselves came haltingly as recruits. But
this is a pageant, with Everywoman crowding for place at her country’s
call. And who would not adore to be a patriot? It is with flying
colors, albeit to the solemn measures of a Dead March that the new
columns are coming on.
It is the Woman Movement against which all the parliaments of men shall
never again prevail. Majestically, with sure and rhythmic tread, it is
moving, not under its own power of propaganda, but propelled by fearful
cosmic forces. At the compulsion of a sublime destiny accelerated under
the ægis of a war office press bureau, suffragists pro and anti alike
are gathered in. Theirs no longer to reason why. For see, they are
keeping step, always keeping step with the armies at the front!
There is a new offensive on the Somme. There is a defeat at the Yser, a
victory at Verdun or Marne. The dead men lie deep in the trenches! The
war office combs out new regiments to face the hell-fire of shrapnel
and the woman movement in all nations joins up new recruits to fill the
vacant places from which the men, about to die, are steadily enlisted.
See the sign of the times. I point it out to My Suffragette: “Women
Wanted.” With each year of war the demand becomes more insistent. Women
Wanted! Women Wanted!
“But they didn’t used to be,” she gasps in amazement.
And of course, I too remember when the world was barricaded against
everywhere a woman wanted to go beyond the dishpan and the wash tub and
the nursery. It all seems now such a long while ago.
“Dear old-fashioned girl,” I reply, “women no longer have to smash a
way anywhere. They’ll even be sending after you if you don’t come.”
When the militants of England signed with their government the truce
which abrogated for the period of the war the Cat and Mouse Act with
which they had been pursued, it was the formal announcement to the
world of the cessation of suffrage activities while the nations settled
other issues. From Berlin to Paris and London, feminists acquiesced in
the decision arrived at in Kingsway. It seemed indeed that the woman’s
cause was going to wait. But is it not written: “Whoso loseth his
life,” etc., “shall find it.”
Women Wanted! Women Wanted! “Listen,” I say to the Soul of a
Suffragette, as we stand in the Strand. “You hear it? And it’s like
that in the Avenue de l’Opéra and in Unter den Linden and in Petrograd
and now in Broadway. To every woman, it is her country’s call to
service.”
I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the
door of the Doll’s House opened. She who stood at the threshold where
the tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to lines of
gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then the clock on her mantel
ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries that only God himself
had planned. The force primeval that had held her in bondage, this it
was that should set her free. As straight as ever she went before to
the altar and the cook stove and the cradle, she stepped out now into
the wide wide world, the woman behind the man behind the gun.
“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “not all the political economists from
John Stuart Mill to Ellen Key could have accomplished it. Not even
your spectacular martyrdom was able to achieve it. But now it is done.
For lo, the password the feminists have sought, is found. And it is
Love—not logic!”
There are, the statisticians tell us, more than twenty million men
numbered among the embattled hosts out there at the front where the
future of the human race is being fought for. Modern warfare has most
terrible engines of destruction. But with all of these at command,
there is not a brigade of soldiers that could stand against their foes
without the aid of the women who in the last analysis are holding the
line.
Who is it that is feeding and clothing and nursing the greatest armies
of history? See that soldier in the trenches? A woman raised the grain
for the bread, a woman is tending the flocks that provided the meat for
his rations to-day. A woman made the boots and the uniform in which he
stands. A woman made the shells with which his gun is loaded. A woman
will nurse him when he’s wounded. A woman’s ambulance may even pick him
up on the battlefield. A woman surgeon may perform the operation to
save his life. And somewhere back home a woman holds the job he had to
leave behind. There is no task to which women have not turned to-day to
carry on civilisation. For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned
men to their most ancient occupation—and women to every other.
“All the suffrage flags are furled?” questions My Suffragette
incredulously, as we pass through the streets where once her banners
waved most militantly. “Gone with your broad arrows of yesterday,” I
affirm. “And you should see our modern styles.”
NEW COSTUMES FOR NEW WOMEN
When women stood at the threshold listening breathlessly that August
day, there was one costume ready and laid out by the nations for their
wear in every land. Coronets and shimmering ball gowns, cap and gown in
university corridors and plain little home made dresses in rose bowered
cottages were alike exchanged for the new uniform and insignia. And the
woman who set the sign of the red cross in the centre of her forehead
appeared in her white gown and her flowing white head dress all over
Europe as instantaneously as a new skirt ever flashed out in the pages
of a fashion magazine. To her, every country called as naturally, as
spontaneously as a hurt child might turn to its mother. She it is
who has worn the red cross to her transfiguration in this new Woman
Movement with one of the largest detachments in hospital service. See
her on the sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Dardanelles,
insisting on “wounded soldiers first” as she passes her charges to
safety, and waiting behind herself goes quietly under the water. And
with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before
the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium
who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been
breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her
country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried
to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter
began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman’s place was
going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. Even as the troops
buckled on sword and pistol and the departing regiments began to move,
it was made sure that she should be waiting for them on their return.
In Germany in the first month of the war, no less than 70,000 women of
the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein, trained in first aid to the injured,
had arrived at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for Red
Cross service.
I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood at Cecilienhaus in
Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus with its crèche and its maternity care and
its folks kitchens and its workingmen’s gardens, was devoted to the
welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein of the nation
was engaged. Frau Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all these
social activities. Then she looked away down the Berliner Strasse and
said: “But when war comes—” Had I heard aright? That you know was in
May, 1914. But she repeated: “When war comes we are going to be able
to take care of seventy-five soldiers in this dining-room and in that
maternity ward we shall be able to have beds for a dozen officers.”
All over Germany the half million women of the Vaterlandischer
Frauenverein planning like that, “when war comes,” had taken a first
aid nurse’s training course. They were as ready for mobilisation as
were their men. France, viewing with alarm these preparations across
the border, had her women also in training. The Association des Dames
Français, the Union des Femmes de France and the Société Secours aux
Blessés Militaires, at once put on the Red Cross uniform and brought
to their country’s service 59,500 nurses. In England the Voluntary
Aid Detachments of the Red Cross had 60,000 members ready to serve
under the 3,000 trained nurses who were registered for duty within a
fortnight of the outbreak of war. Similarly every country engaged in
the conflict, taking inventory of its resources, eagerly accepted the
services of the war nurse. The same policy of state actuated every
nation as was expressed by the Italian Minister of War who announced:
“By utilising the services of women to replace men in the military
hospitals, we shall release 20,000 soldiers for active duty at the
front.”
The Red Cross of service to the soldier is the most conspicuous
decoration worn by women in all warring countries. Everywhere you
meet the nurses’ uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was
the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Charing Cross station
where nightly under cover of the soft darkness the procession of grim
grey motor ambulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are coming
like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, at the Potsdam station in
Berlin, and up in Petrograd. In each ambulance between the tiers of
stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the figure of a woman
silhouetted faintly against the dim light of the railroad station as
she bends to smooth a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a
cigarette for a maimed man who never can do that least service for
himself again. She may be a peeress of the realm, or she may be a
militant on parole granted the amnesty of her government that needs her
more these days for saving life than for serving jail sentence. But
look, and you shall see the Red Cross on her forehead!
The grey ambulances like this coming from the railroad stations long
ago in every land filled up the regular military hospitals through
which the patients are passed by the thousands every month. And other
women taking the Red Cross set it above the doorways of historic
mansions opened to receive the wounded. In Italy, Queen Margherita and
Queen Elena gave their royal residences. In Paris Baroness Rothschild
has made her beautiful house with its great garden behind a high yellow
wall a Hôpital Militaire Auxiliaire. And many private residences
like this are among the eight hundred hospitals in France which are
being operated under the direction of one woman’s organisation alone,
the Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires.
[Illustration:
MRS. H. J. TENNANT
Director of the Woman’s Department of National Service in England.
Like this in all lands, women have been called to government councils.
]
Here in London, in Piccadilly, at Devonshire House, desks and filing
cabinets fill the rooms once gay with social functions. And hospital
messengers go and come up and down the marvellous gold and crystal
staircase. The Duchess of Devonshire has turned over the great
mansion as the official headquarters for the Red Cross. Nearby, in
Mayfair, Madame Moravieff, whose husband is connected with the Russian
diplomatic service, is serving as commandant for the hospital she has
opened for English soldiers. Lady Londonderry’s house in Park Lane is a
hospital. By the end of the first year of war, like this, no less than
850 private residences in England had been transformed into Voluntary
Aid Detachment Red Cross Hospitals.
In hospital financiering the American woman in Europe has led all the
rest. Margaret Cox Benet, the wife of Lawrence V. Benet in Paris,
braved the perils of the Atlantic crossing to appeal to America for
contributions to the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly. It is
equalled by only one other war hospital in Europe, the splendidly
equipped hospital of the American women at Paignton, England, initiated
by Lady Arthur Paget, formerly Mary Paran Stevens of New York. Lady
Paget, who is president of the American Women’s War Relief Fund, has
just rounded out the first million dollars of the fund which she has
personally raised for war work.
You see how these also serve who are doing the executive and
organisation work that makes it possible for the woman in the front
lines to wear her red cross even to her transfiguration. Accelerated
by the activities of women like these behind the lines, the Red Cross
battalions are leading the Great Push of the new woman movement. The
woman in the nurse’s uniform is not exciting the most comment, however.
It is by reason of her numbers, the thousands and thousands of her that
she commands the most attention. But she was really expected.
WHERE YOU FIND THE MILITANTS TO-DAY
For the amazing figure that has emerged by magic directly out of the
battle smoke of this war, see the woman in khaki! Khaki, I explain to
My Suffragette, is one of the most popular of government offerings for
women’s wear. The material has been found most serviceable in a war
zone either to die in or to live in, while you save others from dying.
It is sometimes varied with woollen cloth preferred for warmth. But the
essential features of the costume are preserved: the short skirt, the
leather leggings, the military hat and the shoulder straps with the
insignia of special service. When governments have called for unusual
duty that is difficult or disagreeable or dangerous, it is the woman
in khaki who responds: “Take me. I am here.” She will, in fact, do
anything that there’s no one else to do.
Stick-at-nothings, the London newspapers have nicknamed the women’s
Reserve Ambulance Corps of 400 women who wear a khaki uniform with
a green cross armlet. With white tunics over these khaki suits, a
detachment of green cross girls at Peel House, the soldiers’ club in
Westminster, does house-maid duty from seven in the morning until
eight at night. They are making beds and waiting on table, these young
women, who, many of them, in stately English homes have all their lives
been served by butlers and footmen. I saw a Green Cross girl at the
military headquarters of the corps in Piccadilly making to Commandant
Mabel Beatty her report of another phase of war work. She was such a
young thing, I should say perhaps eighteen, and delicately bred. I know
I noticed the slender aristocratic hand that she lifted to her hat
in salute to her superior officer: “I have,” she said, “this morning
burned three amputated arms, two legs and a section of a jaw bone. And
I have carried my end of five heavy coffins to the dead wagon.” That’s
all in her day’s work. She’s a hospital orderly. And it’s one of the
things an orderly is for, to dispose of the by-products of a great war
hospital.
See also, these ambulances that bring the wounded from Charing Cross.
They are “manned” by a woman outside as well as the nurse within.
There is a girl at the wheel in the driver’s seat. The Motor Transport
Section of the Green Cross Society accomplishes an average weekly
mileage of 2,000 miles transporting wounded and munitions. Like this
they respond for any service to which the exigencies of war may call.
There was the time of the first serious Zeppelin raid on London when
amid the crash of falling bombs and the horror of fire flaming suddenly
in the darkness, the shrieks of the maimed and dying filled the night
with terror and the populace seemed to stand frozen to inaction at the
scene about them. Right up to the centre of the worst carnage rolled
a Green Cross ambulance from which leaped out eight khaki clad women.
They were, mind you, women of the carefully sheltered class, who sit in
dinner gowns under soft candle light in beautifully appointed English
houses. And they never before in all their lives had witnessed an evil
sight. But they set to work promptly by the side of the police to pick
up the dead and the dying, putting the highway to order as calmly as
they might have gone about adjusting the curtains and the pillows to
set a drawing-room to rights. “Thanks,” said the police, when sometime
later an ambulance arrived from the nearest headquarters, “the ladies
have done this job.” Since then the Woman’s Reserve Ambulance Corps is
officially attached to the “D” Division of the Metropolitan Police for
air raid relief.
That girl in khaki who is serving as a hospital orderly, you notice,
wears shoulder straps of blue. She comes from the great military
hospital in High Holborn that is staffed entirely by women. We may walk
through the wards there where we shall see many of her. Above her in
authority are women with shoulder straps of red. These are they who
wear the surgeon’s white tunic in the operating theatre, who issue the
physician’s orders at the patient’s bedside. Now the door at the end
of the ward opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands there, whom
every wounded patient able to lift his right arm, salutes as if his
own military commander had appeared. “But it’s my doctor, my doctor,”
exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday.
And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in fact the unofficial
post of first aid physician to the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Frequently she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to attend
some militant picked up cut and bleeding from the missiles of the
mobs or released faint and dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor
herself did her bit in the old days. The Government had her in Holloway
jail for six weeks. Well, to-day they have her as surgeon in command of
this war hospital with the rank of major. She’s so well fitted for the
place, you see, by her earlier experience.
But, visibly agitated, My Suffragette again plucks at my sleeve: “Are
you quite sure,” she asks, “that Scotland Yard won’t take her?”
Poor dear lady of yesterday. They’re not doing that to-day. Your woman
movement was militant against the Government. This woman movement is
militant with the Government. There’s all the difference in the world.
And the woman in khaki has found it. Militancy of the popular kind
has come to be most exalted in woman. Besides a woman doctor is too
valuable in these days to be interfered with. She is no longer sent
as a missionary physician to the heathen or limited to a practice
exclusively among women and children. She is good enough for anywhere.
One issue of the _Lancet_ advertises: “Women doctors wanted for forty
municipal appointments.” Women doctors wanted, is the call of every
country. This military hospital in London of which Dr. Louisa Garrett
Anderson, major, is in command, is entirely staffed with women. Paris
has its war hospital with Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangin, major in command.
Dr. Clelia Lollini, sub-lieutenant, is operating surgeon at a war
hospital in Venice. In Russia one of the most celebrated war doctors is
the Princess Gurdrovitz, surgeon in charge of the Imperial Hospital at
Tsarkoe Selo.
Oh, the khaki costume I think we may say is admired of every war
office. It has found a vogue among all the allies. It has appeared the
past year in America, where it has been most recently adopted. But the
model for whom it was particularly made to measure was the militant
suffragette of England. Nearly everybody who used to be in Holloway
jail is wearing it. It’s the best fit that any of them find to-day in
the shop windows of government styles. And it’s so well adapted to
women to whom all early Victorian qualities are as foreign as hoop
skirts. You would not expect one inured to hardship by alternate
periods of starvation and forcible feeding to be either a fearsome or
a delicate creature. And the courage that could horsewhip a prime
minister or set off a bomb beneath a bishop’s chair, is just the kind
that every nation’s calling for in these strenuous times. It’s the kind
that up close to the firing line gets mentioned in army orders and
decorated with all crosses of iron and gold and silver.
You will find the woman who has put on khaki at the front in all the
warring countries. The Duchess of Aosta is doing ambulance work in
Italy. The Countess Elizabeth Shouvaleff of Petrograd commanded her own
hospital train that brought in the wounded. But it is the British woman
in khaki who has gone farthest afield. The National Union’s “Scottish
Women’s Hospitals,” as they are known, are right behind the armies.
Staffed from the surgeons to the ambulance corps entirely by women,
they go out to any part of the war zone where the need is greatest.
See the latest “unit” that is leaving Paddington Station. The equipment
they are taking with them includes every appliance that will be
required, from a bed to a bandage, and numbers just 1,051 bales and
cases of freight. The entire unit, forty-five women, have had their
hair cut short. For sanitary reasons, is the euphemistic way of
explaining it. For protection against the vermin with which patients
from the trenches will be infested, if you ask for war facts as they
are. Units like this have gone out to settle wherever by army orders a
place has been made for them, in a deserted monastery in France that
they must first scrub and clean, in a refugee barracks in Russia, in a
tent in Serbia where they themselves must dig the drainage trenches.
Their surgeons have stood at the operating table a week at a stretch
with only an hour or two of sleep each night. Their doctors have
battled with epidemics of typhoid and plague. Their ambulance girls
have brought in the wounded from the battlefield under shell-fire.
Hospitals have been conducted under bombardment with all the patients
carried to the cellar. Hospitals have been captured by the enemy.
Hospitals have been evacuated at command with the patients loaded on
trains or motor cars or bullock wagons for retreat with the army. There
were forty-six British women who shared in the historic retreat of the
Serbian army three hundred miles over the Plain of Kossovo and the
mountains of Albania. Men and cattle perished by the score. But the
women doctors, freezing, starving, sleeping in the fields, struggling
against a blinding blizzard with an amazing physical endurance and a
dauntless courage, all came through to Scutari. Out on the far-flung
frontiers of civilisation, the woman in khaki who has done these things
is memorialised. At Mladanovatz, the Serbians have erected a fountain
with the inscription: “In memory of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and
their founder, Dr. Elsie Inglis.”
SUFFRAGISTS LED ALL THE REST
When the great call, “Women wanted,” first commenced in all lands,
there were those who stood with reluctant feet at the threshold simply
because they did not know how to step out into the new wide world
of opportunity stretching before them. In this crisis it was to the
suffragists that every government turned. Who else should organise?
These women, like My Suffragette, had devoted their lives to assembling
cohorts for a cause! The Assoziazione per la Donna in Italy, as the
Conseil National des Femmes Françaises in France, promptly responded by
offering their office machinery as registration bureaus through which
women could be drafted into service. It was the suffrage association at
Budapest, Hungary, that filled the order from the city government for
five hundred women street sweepers. The Vaterlandischer Frauenverein
assembled 25,000 women in Berlin alone to take the course of training
arranged for _helferinnen_, assistants in all phases of relief work.
But it was in England where the woman movement of yesterday had
reached its highest point in organisation that the woman movement for
to-day was best equipped to start. Britain counted among the nation’s
resources no less than fifty separate suffrage organisations, one of
which alone, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was able
to send out its instructions to over 500 branches! And the mobilisation
of the woman power of a nation was under way on a scale that could have
been witnessed in no other era of the world.
The woman who has been enlisted in largest numbers in England as
in other lands is the woman who at her country’s call hung up the
housewife’s kitchen apron in plain little cottages to put on a new
uniform with a distinctive feature that has been hitherto conspicuously
missing from women’s clothes. It has a pocket for a pay envelope.
“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “you would not know her at all, now,
would you?”
She came marching through the streets of London on July 17, 1915, in
one of the most significant detachments mustered for the new woman
movement, 40,000 women carrying banners with the new device: “For
men must fight and women must work.” And industry, in which she was
enlisting, presented her with a new costume. The Ministry of Munitions
in London got out the pattern. Employers of labour throughout the world
are now copying it. There isn’t anything in the chorus more attractive
than the woman who’s walked into the centre of the stage in shop and
factory wearing overall trousers, tunic and cap. Some English factories
have the entire woman force thus uniformed and others have adopted only
the tunic. Here are girl window cleaners with pail and ladder coming
down the Strand wearing the khaki trousers. The girl conductor of the
omnibus that’s just passed has a very short skirt that just meets at
the knees her high leather leggings. The girl lift operators at the
stores in Oxford Street are in smart peg-top trousers. In Germany the
innovation is of course being done by imperial decree, a government
order having put all the railway women in dark grey, wide trousers. In
France the new design is accepted slowly. The girl conductor who swings
at the open door of the Paris Metro with a whistle at her lips, wears
the men employé’s cap but she still clings to her own “_tablier_.”
That July London procession organised by the suffragists, led in
fact by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, in response to labour’s call, “Women
wanted,” is the last suffrage procession of which the world has heard.
And it is the most important feminist parade that has ever appeared in
any city of the world. For it was a procession marching straight for
the goal of economic independence. It was the vanguard of the moving
procession of women that in every country is still continuously passing
into industry. Germany in the first year of war had a half million
women in one occupation alone, that of making munitions. France has
400,000 “munitionettes.” Great Britain in 1916 had a million women who
had enlisted for the places of men since the war began. In every one of
Europe’s warring countries and now in America, women are being rushed
as rapidly as possible into commerce and industry to release men. In
Germany nearly all the bank clerks are women. The Bank of France alone
in Paris has 700 women clerks. In England women clerks number over
100,000. And the British Government is steadily advertising: Wanted,
30,000 women a week to replace men for the armies.
“Who works, fights,” Lloyd George has said, in the English Parliament.
English women enlisting for agriculture have been given a government
certificate attesting: “Every woman who helps in agriculture during the
war is as truly serving her country as is the man who is fighting in
trenches or on the sea.”
“But,” protests the bewildered woman from only the other day, “they
told us that women didn’t know enough to do man’s work, that she wasn’t
strong enough for much of anything beyond light domestic duty like
washing and scrubbing and cooking and raising a family of six or eight
or ten children.”
“Nothing that anybody ever said about women before August, 1914,” I
answer, “goes to-day. All the discoveries the scientists thought they
had made about her, all the reports the sociologists solemnly filed
over her, all the limitations the educators laid on her and all the
jokes the punsters wrote about her—everything has gone to the scrap-heap
as repudiated as the one-time theory that the earth was square
instead of round. Everything they said she wasn’t and she couldn’t and
she didn’t, she now is and she can and she does.”
IT IS UNIVERSAL SERVICE
Even women who do not need to work for pay are working without it and
adding to the demonstration of what women can do. See the colonel’s
lady taking the place of Julie O’Grady at the lathe for week-end work
in the munition factories to release the regular worker for one day’s
rest in seven. Lady Lawrence in a white tunic and wearing a diamond
wrist watch is in charge of the canteen at the Woolwich Arsenal,
supervising the serving of kippers and toast at the tea hour for the
2,000 women employés. Lady Sybil Grant, Lord Rosebery’s daughter, is
the official photographer to the Royal Naval Air Service at Roehampton.
The Countess of Limerick, assisted by fifty women of title, among them
Lady Randolph Churchill, is running the Soldiers’ Free Refreshment
Buffet at the London Bridge Station. The Marchioness of Londonderry,
directing the Military Cookery Section of the Women’s Legion, has given
to her nation the woman army cook who has recently replaced 5,000
men. Women of world-wide fame have cheerfully turned to the task that
called. Beatrice Harraden, celebrated author of “Ships That Pass in
the Night,” is in the uniform of an orderly at the Endell Street War
Hospital, where she has done a unique service in organising the first
hospital library for the patients. May Sinclair, whose recent book,
“The Three Sisters,” is one of the great contributions to feminist
literature, is enrolled as a worker at the Kensington War Hospital
Supply Department. She has invented the machine used there to turn out
“swabs” seven times faster than formerly they were made by hand.
There is the greatest diversity in war service. One of the first calls
answered by the suffragists was for an emergency gang of 300 women
from the metropolis to supervise the baling of hay for the army. Lloyd
George has been supplied with a woman secretary and a woman chauffeur,
the latter a girl who was a celebrated hunger striker before the
war. In the royal dockyards and naval establishments there are 7,000
women employed. Through the Woman’s National Land Service Corps 5,000
university and other women of education have been recruited to serve as
forewomen of detachments of women farm labourers. The army last spring
was asking for 6,000 women at the War Office to assist in connection
with the work of the Royal Flying Corps. Oh, the list of what women are
doing to-day is as indefinitely long as everything that there is to be
done.
And the woman movement sweeps on directly toward the gates of
government. See the woman war councillor who recently arrived in 1916.
She came into view first in Germany, where Frau Kommerzienrat Hedwig
Heyl of Berlin is a figure almost as important as is the Imperial
Chancellor. The daughter of the founder of the North German Lloyd Line,
herself the president of the Berlin Lyceum Club and the manager of
the Heyl Chemical Works, in which she succeeded her late husband as
president, Frau Heyl knows something of organisation. And she it is
who has been responsible more than any other of the Kaiser’s advisers
for the conservation of the food supply which keeps the German armies
strong against a world of its opponents. The second day after war was
declared, in conference with the Minister of the Interior, she had
formulated the plan that by night the Government had telegraphed to
every part of Germany: there was formed the Nationaler Frauendien
to control all of the activities of women during the war. She was
placed at the head of the Central Commission. It was the Nationaler
Frauendien that made the suggestions which the Government adopted for
the conservation of the food supply. And it was they who were entrusted
with organising the food supplies of the nation and educating the
women in their use to the point of highest efficiency. As a personal
contribution to this end, Frau Heyl has published a War Cook Book,
arranged an exhibit of substitute foods for war use, and has turned
one section of her chemical works into a food factory from which she
supplies the government with 6,000 pounds of tinned meat a day for the
army.
After all, who are the real food controllers of a nation? Could a
minister of finance, for instance, bring up a family on, say, 20
shillings a week? Yet there were women in every nation doing that
before they achieved fame on the firing line and in the making
of munitions. Last spring, as the food question became a gravely
determining factor in the war, it began to be more and more apparent
that the feminine mind trained to think in terms of domestic economy,
might have something of value to contribute to questions of state. Why
let Germany monopolise this particular form of efficiency? And England
in 1917 called to its Ministry of Food two women, Mrs. Pember Reeves,
one of its radical suffragists, and Mrs. C. S. Peel, the editor of a
woman’s magazine and a cook book.
About the same time each of the warring nations decided that the
mobilised women forces everywhere could be most efficiently directed
by women. Germany appointed as an attaché for each of the six army
commands throughout the empire a woman who is to serve as “Directress
of the Division for Women’s Service.” From Dr. Alice Salomon in the
Berlin-Potsdam district to Fraulein Dr. Gertrude Wolf in the Bavarian
War Bureau, each of these new appointees is a feminist leader from that
woman movement of yesterday. In France the enrolment of French women
is under the direction of Mme. Emile Boutroux and Mme. Emile Borel.
In England the highest appointment for a woman since the war is the
calling of Mrs. H. J. Tennant, the prominent suffragist, to be Director
of the Woman’s Department of National Service. America, preparing to
enter the great conflict in the spring of 1917, at the very outset
organised a Woman’s Division of the National Defence Council and called
to its command Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the great suffrage leader.
It’s a long way back to the Doll’s House, isn’t it, with woman’s place
to-day in the workshop and the factory, the war hospital, the war zone
and the war office? And now they are calling women to the electorate.
Russia has spoken, England has spoken. America is making ready. Doesn’t
Mr. Kipling want to revise his verses: “When man gathers with his
fellow braves for council, he does not have a place for her”?
It really has ceased to be necessary for woman any longer to plead her
cause. Every government’s doing it for her. The woman movement now is
both called and chosen. And the British Government is the most active
feminist advocate of all. The greatest brief for the woman’s cause that
ever was arranged is a handsome volume on “Women’s War Work,” issued by
the British War Office, as a guide to employers of labour throughout
the United Kingdom. This famous publication lists exactly ninety-six
trades and 1,701 jobs which the Government says women can do just as
well as men, some of them even better. A second publication issued in
London with the approval of the War Office, sets forth in more literary
form “Women’s Work in Wartime,” and is dedicated to “The Women of the
Empire, God save them every one.”
It was in 1916 that I talked with a German gentleman who is near
enough to the Kaiser to voice the point of view from that part of the
world. “Women from now on are going to have a more important place
in civilisation than they ever have held before,” affirmed Count von
Bernstorff as we sat in his official suite at the Ritz Hotel in New
York. “In the ultimate analysis,” he spoke slowly and impressively, “in
the ultimate analysis,” he repeated, “it is the nation with the best
women that’s going to win this war.”
“Do you know what I think?” says the Soul of a Suffragette as we stand
before the Great Push. “I think that whoever else wins this war, woman
wins.”
Her country’s call? Listen: there is a higher overtone—her man’s call.
Is it not the woman behind the man behind the gun who has achieved her
apotheosis?