independent life, self-support, self-expression, they will have it and
without any advice from the worldly-wise; it is as driving an impulse
as the reproductive instinct in those who are more liberally sexed.
And these last are still in the majority, no doubt of that. Therefore,
far better they marry and have children in their youth. They, above
all, are the women whose support and protection is the natural duty of
man, and while it is one of life's misfortunes for a girl to marry
simply to escape life's burdens, without love and without the desire
for children, it is by far the lesser evil to have the consolation of
home and children in the general barrenness of life than to slave all
day at an uncongenial task and go "home" to a hall bedroom.
These views were so much misunderstood when they appeared in magazine
form that I have felt obliged to emphasize the differences between the
still primitive woman and the woman who is the product of the higher
civilization. One young socialist, who looked quite strong enough to
support a family, asked me if I did not think it better for a girl to
support herself than to be the slave of a man's lust and bear
innumerable children, whether she wished for them or not, children to
whose support society contributed nothing. But why be a man's slave,
and why have more children than you can support? We live in the
enlightened twentieth century, when there is precious little about
anything that women do not know, and if they do not they are such
hopeless fools that they should be in the State Institutions. The time
has passed for women to talk of being men's slaves in any sense,
except in the economic. There are still sweatshops and there is still
speeding up in factories, because society is still far from perfect,
but if a woman privately is a man's slave to-day it is because she is
the slave of herself as well.
VI
Personally, although nothing has ever tempted me to marry a second
time, I am very glad I married in my early youth, not only because
matrimony enables a potential writer to see life from many more
viewpoints than if she remains blissfully single, but because I was
sheltered from all harsh contacts with the world. No one was ever less
equipped by nature for domesticity and all the responsibilities of
everyday life, and if circumstances had so ordered that I had not
blundered into matrimony before twenty-four-or-five, no doubt I never
should have married at all.
But at that time--I was home on a vacation from boarding-school, and
had had none of that illuminating experience known as being "out," I
did no reasoning whatever. On the other hand I was far too mentally
undeveloped and arrogant to be capable at that tender age of falling
deeply in love. My future husband proposed six times (we were in a
country house). I was flattered, divided between the ambition to
graduate brilliantly and to be an author with no further loss of time,
and wear becoming caps and trains to my frocks. On the other hand I
wanted neither a husband particularly nor to go back to school, for I
felt that as my grandfather had one of the best libraries in
California nothing could be more pleasant or profitable than to finish
my education in it undisturbed. Nevertheless, quite abruptly I made up
my mind and married; and, if the truth were known, my reasons and
impulses were probably as intelligent as those of the average young
girl who knows the world only through books and thinks it has little
more to teach her. My life had been objective and sheltered. If forced
to earn my living at sixteen no doubt the contacts impossible to
escape would soon have given me a real maturity of judgment and I
should have grown to love, jealously, my freedom.
That is to say, if I had been a strong girl. As a matter-of-fact I was
extremely delicate, with a weak back, a threat of tuberculosis, and
very bad eyes. Most of this was the result of over-study, for I had
been a healthy child, but I loved books and was indifferent to
exercise and nourishment. No doubt if I had been turned out into the
world to fare for myself I should have gone into a decline. Therefore,
it was sheer luck that betrayed me into matrimony, for although my
mental energies were torpid for several years my first child seemed to
dissipate the shadows that lay in my blood, and at twenty-five I was
a normally strong woman. We lived in the country. My husband looked
after the servants, and if we were without a cook for several days he
filled her place (he had learned to cook "camping out" and liked
nothing better) until my mother-in-law sent a woman from San
Francisco. I read, strolled about the woods, storing up vitality but
often depressed with the unutterable ennui of youth, and haunted with
the fear that my story-telling faculty, which had been very
pronounced, had deserted me.
When my husband died I had but one child. I left her with her two
adoring grandmothers and fled to New York. I was still as callow as a
boarding-school girl, but my saving grace was that I knew I did not
know anything, that I never would know enough to write about life
until I had seen more of it than was on exhibition in California.
But by that time my health was established. I felt quite equal to
writing six books a year if any one would publish them, besides
studying life at first hand as persistently and deeply as the present
state of society will permit in the case of a mere woman. For that
reason I shall always be sorry I did not go on a newspaper for a year
as a reporter, as there is no other way for a woman to see life in all
its phases. I had a letter to Charles Dana, owner of the New York
_Sun_, and no doubt he would have put me to work, but I was still too
pampered, or too snobbish, and, lacking the spur of necessity, missed
one of the best of educations. Now, no matter who asks my advice in
regard to the literary career, whether she is the ambitious daughter
of a millionaire or a girl whose talent is for the story and whose
future depends upon herself, I invariably give her one piece of
advice: "Go on a newspaper. Be a reporter. Refuse no assignment. Be
thankful for a merciless City Editor and his blue pencil. But, if you
feel that you have the genuine story-telling gift, save your money and
leave at the end of a year, or two years at most."
As for myself, I absorbed life as best I could, met people in as many
walks of life as possible. As I would not marry again, and, in
consequence, had no more children, nor suffered from the wearing
monotonies of domestic life, I have always kept my health and been
equal to an immense amount of work.
But the point is that I had been sheltered and protected during my
delicate years. No doubt it was a part of my destiny to hand on the
intensely American qualities of body and mind I had inherited from my
Dutch and English forefathers, as well as to do my share in carrying
on the race. But I got rid of all that as quickly as possible, and
struck out for that plane of modern civilization planted and furrowed
and replenished by daughters of men.
III
THE REAL VICTIMS OF "SOCIETY"
I
There is nothing paradoxical in affirming that while no woman before
she has reached the age of thirty-five or forty should, if she can
avoid it, compete with men in work which the exigencies of
civilization (man-made civilization) have adapted to him alone, still,
every girl of every class, from the industrial straight up to the
plutocratic, should be trained in some congenial vocation during her
plastic years. Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it
was a thousand years ago. Socialism might solve the problem if it were
not for the Socialists. Certainly no man or body of men has yet arisen
with the proper amount of imagination, selflessness, brains and
constructive genius, necessary to plan a social order in which all men
shall work without overworking and support all women during the best
years of the child-bearing and child-rearing span. If men had been
clever enough to make even an imperfect attempt to protect women
without independent means from the terrors of life, say by taxing
themselves, they would not be pestered to-day with the demand for
equal rights, see themselves menaced in nearly all of the
remunerative industries and professions, above all by the return of
the Matriarchate.
It is Life that has developed the fighting instinct in woman, bred the
mental antagonism of sex. Nature did not implant either. Nor has she
ever wavered a jot from the original mix compounded in her immemorial
laboratory. Man is man and woman is woman to-day, even to the superior
length of limb in the male (relative to the trunk) and the greater
thickness of hairs in the woman's eyelashes. In England women of the
leisure class showed during the years of the sports craze a tendency
to an unfeminine length of limb, often attaining or surpassing the
male average. But Nature avenged herself by narrowing the pelvis and
weakening the reproductive organs. Free trade drove the old sturdy
yeoman into the towns and diminished the stature and muscular power of
their descendants, but ten months of trench life and Nature laughed at
the weak spot in civilization. The moment false conditions are removed
she claims her own.
Women to-day may prove themselves quite capable of doing, and
permanently, the work of men in ammunition and munition factories, but
it is patent that when human bipeds first groped their way about the
terrifying Earth, she was not equal to the task of leveling forests,
killing the beasts that roamed them, hurling spears in savage warfare,
and bearing many children for many years. She played her part in the
scheme of things precisely as Nature had meant she should play it:
she cooked, she soothed the warrior upon his return from killing of
man or beast, and she brought up her boys to be warriors and her girls
to serve them. There you have Nature and her original plan, a bald and
uninteresting plan, but eminently practical for the mere purpose
(which is all that concerns her) of keeping the world going. And so it
would be to-day, even in the civilized core, if man had been clever
enough to take the cue Nature flung in his face and kept woman where
to-day he so ingenuously desires to see her, and before whose
deliverance he is as helpless as old Nature herself.
Man obeyed the herding instinct whose ultimate expression was the
growth of great cities, invented the telegraph, the cable, the school,
the newspaper, the glittering shops, the public-lecture system; and,
voluntarily or carelessly, threw open to women the gates of all the
arts, to say nothing of the crafts. And all the while he not only
continued to antagonize woman, proud and eager in her awakened
faculties, with stupid interferences, embargoes and underhand
thwartings, but he permitted her to struggle and die in the hideous
contacts with life from which a small self-imposed tax would have
saved her. Some of the most brilliant men the world will ever know
have lived, and administered, and passed into history, and the misery
of helpless women has increased from generation to generation, while
coincidentally her intelligence has waxed from resignation or
perplexity through indignation to a grim determination. Man missed
his chance and must take the consequences.
Certainly, young women fulfill their primary duty to the race and,
incidentally, do all that should be expected of them, in the bringing
forth and rearing of children, making the home, and seeing to the
coherence of the social groups they have organized for recreation or
purely in the interest of the next generation.
Perhaps the women will solve the problem. I can conceive the time when
there will have developed an enormous composite woman's brain which,
combining superior powers of intuition and sympathy with that high
intellectual development the modern conditions so generously permit,
added to their increasing knowledge of and interest in the social,
economic, and political problems, will make them a factor in the
future development of the race, gradually bring about a state of real
civilization which twenty generations of men have failed to
accomplish.
But that is not yet, and we may all be dead before its heyday. The
questions of the moment absorb us. We must take them as they arise and
do the best we can with existing conditions. The world is terribly
conservative. Look at the European War.
II
Nowhere are fortunes so insecure as in the United States. The phrase,
"Three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," was not
coined in Europe. But neither does it embrace a great American truth
Many a fortune rises and falls within the span of one generation. Many
a girl reared in luxury, or what passes in her class for luxury, is
suddenly forced out into the economic world with no preparation
whatever. It would be interesting to gather the statistics of men who,
with a large salary, or a fair practice, and indulged family, and a
certain social position to keep up, either vaguely intend to save and
invest one of these days--perhaps when the children are educated--or
carry a large life insurance which they would find too heavy a tax at
the moment.
Often, indeed, a man does insure his life, and then in some year of
panic or depression is forced to sell the policy or go under. Or he
insures in firms that fail. My father insured in three companies and
all failed before he died. In San Francisco the "earthquake clause"
prevented many men from recovering a penny on their merchandise or
investments swept away by the fire. Even a large number of the rich
were embarrassed by that fire, for, having invested millions in Class
A buildings, which were fire-proof, they saw no necessity for
expending huge sums annually in premiums. They never thought of a
general conflagration whose momentum would carry the flames across the
street and into their buildings through the windows, eating up the
interiors and leaving the fire-proof shell. One family lost six
million dollars in a few hours, and emigrated to one of the Swiss
lakes in order to be able to educate their children while their
fortunes slowly recovered with the aid of borrowed capital.
A large number of girls, who, without being rich, had led the
sheltered life before the fire, were obliged to go to work at once.
Some were clever enough to know what they could do and did it without
loss of time, some were assisted, others blundered along and nearly
starved.
Often men who have done well and even brilliantly up to middle life,
are not equal to the tremendous demand upon the vital energies of
beginning life over again after some disastrous visitation of Nature,
or a panic, or an ill-advised personal venture has wrecked their own
business or that of the concern in which they were a highly paid cog.
In the mining States men are dependent upon the world's demand for
their principal product. Farmers and stock-raisers are often cruelly
visited, strikes or hard times paralyze mills and factories; and in
times of panic and dry-rot the dealers in luxuries, including
booksellers--to say nothing of the writers of books as well as the
devotees of all the arts--are the first to suffer. And it is their
women that suffer acutely, because although many of these men may hang
on and recover, many more do not. They have used up their vital
forces. It is not so much a matter of will as of physics. A woman in
the same conditions who had been obliged to tax her vital organs for
an equal number of years would no doubt have lasted as long.
Unless defective, there is not a girl alive, certainly not an
American girl, who is wholly lacking in some sort of ability. The
parasite type (who is growing rare in these days, by the way, for it
is now the fashion to "do things") either fastens herself upon
complacent relatives or friends when deserted by fortune, or drifts
naturally into the half-world, always abundantly recruited from such
as she.
Many girls have a certain facility in the arts and crafts, which, with
severe training, might fit them for a second place in the class which
owes its origin to Heaven-born gifts. If their facility manifests
itself in writing they could be trained at college, or even on the
small local newspaper to write a good mechanical story, constructed
out of popular elements and eminently suited to the popular magazine.
Or they may fit themselves for dramatic or musical criticism, or
advertisement writing, which pays enormously but is not as easy as it
sounds. Or if every school (I am saying nothing about girls' colleges)
would train their promising "composition" writers in reporting, their
graduates would plant their weary feet far more readily than they do
now when they come to a great city and beseech a busy editor to give
them a chance.
Almost anything can be done with the plastic mind. But not always. It
is the better part of wisdom for proud parents to discover just what
their offspring's facility amounts to before spending money on an art
or a musical education, for instance. I had a painful experience, and
no doubt it has been duplicated a thousand times, for Europe before
the war was full of girls (many living on next to nothing) who were
studying "art" or "voice culture," with neither the order of endowment
nor the propelling brain-power to justify the sacrifice of their
parents or the waste of their own time.
Some years ago, finding that a young relative, who was just finishing
her school course, drew and painted in water colors with quite a
notable facility, and the family for generations having manifested
talents in one way or another, I decided to take her abroad and train
her faculty that she might be spared the humiliation of dependence,
nor feel a natural historic inclination to marry the first man who
offered her an alternative dependence; and at the same time be enabled
to support herself in a wholly congenial way. I did not delude myself
with the notion that she was a genius, but I thought it likely she
would become apt in illustrating, and I knew that I could throw any
amount of work in her way, or secure her a position in the art
department of some magazine.
I took her to the European city where I was then living and put her in
the best of its art schools. To make a long story short, after I had
expended some five thousand dollars on her, including traveling
expenses and other incidentals, the net result was an elongated thumb.
I was forced to the conclusion that she had not an atom of real
talent, merely the treacherous American facility. Moreover, she lost
all her interest in "art" when it meant hard work and persistent
application. I was wondering what on earth I was to do with her when
she solved the problem herself. She announced with unusual decision
that she wanted to be a nurse, had always wanted to be a nurse (she
had never mentioned the aspiration to me) and that nothing else
interested her. Her mother had been an invalid; one way or another she
had seen a good deal of illness.
Accordingly I sent her back to this country and entered her, through
the influence of friends, at a hospital. She graduated at the head of
her class, and although that was three or four years ago she has never
been idle since. She elected to take infectious cases, as the
remuneration is higher, and although she is very small, with such tiny
hands and feet that while abroad her gloves and boots had to be made
to order, no doubt she has so trained her body that the strains in
nursing fall upon no particular member.
In that case I paid for my own mistake, and she found her level in
ample time, which is as it should be. Of what use is experience if you
are to be misled by family vanity? As she is pretty and quite mad
about children, no doubt she will marry; but the point is that she can
wait; or, later, if the man should prove inadequate, she can once more
support herself, and with enthusiasm, for she loves the work.
To be a nurse is no bed of roses; but neither is anything else. To be
dependent in the present stage of civilization is worse, and nothing
real is accomplished in life without work and its accompaniment of
hard knocks. Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but
an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per
cent. Nor is it as arduous after the first year's training is over as
certain other methods of wresting a livelihood from an unwilling
world--reporting, for instance. It is true that only the fit survive
the first year's ordeal, but on the other hand few girls are so
foolish as to choose the nursing career who do not feel within
themselves a certain stolid vitality. After graduation from the
hospital course their future depends upon themselves. Doctors soon
discover the most desirable among the new recruits, others find
permanent places in hospitals; and, it may be added, the success of
these young women depends upon a quality quite apart from mere
skill--personality. In the spring of 1915 I was in a hospital and
there was one nurse I would not have in the room. I was told that she
was one of the most valuable nurses on the staff, but that was nothing
to me.
I could not see that any of the nurses in this large hospital was
overworked. All looked healthy and contented. My own "night special,"
save when I had a temperature and demanded ice, slept from the time
she prepared me for the night until she rose to prepare me for the
day, with the exception of the eleven o'clock supper which she shared
with the hospital staff. Being very pretty and quite charming she will
marry, no doubt, although she refuses to nurse men. But there are
always the visiting doctors, the internes, and the unattached men in
households, where in the most seductive of all garbs, she remains for
weeks at a time.
In fact nearly all nurses are pretty. I wonder why?
The hospital nurses during the day arrived at intervals to take my
temperature, give me detestable nourishment, or bring me flowers or a
telephone message. It certainly never occurred to me to pity any of
them, and when they lingered to talk they entertained me with pleasant
pictures of their days off. They struck me as being able to enjoy life
very keenly, possibly because of being in a position to appreciate its
contrasts.
I know the daughter of a wealthy and historic family, whose head--he
is precisely the type of the elderly, cold-blooded, self-righteous,
self-conscious New York aristocrat of the stage--will not permit her
to gratify her desire to write for publication, "for," saith he, "I do
not wish to see my honored name on the back of works of fiction."
I do not think, myself, that he has deprived the world of one more
author, for if she had fiction in her brain-cells no parental dictum
could keep it confined within the walls of her skull; but the point is
that being a young woman of considerable energy and mental activity,
she found mere society unendurable and finally persuaded her father to
make her one of his secretaries. She learned not only stenography and
typewriting but telegraphy. There is a private apparatus in their
Newport home for her father's confidential work, and this she
manipulates with the skill of a professional. If the fortunes of her
family should go to pieces, she could find a position and support
herself without the dismal and health-racking transition which is the
fate of so many unfortunate girls suddenly bereft and wholly
unprepared.
III
The snobbishness of this old gentleman is by no means a prerogative of
New York's "old families." One finds it in every class of American men
above the industrial. In Honoré Willsie's novel, _Lydia of the Pines,_
an American novel of positive value, the father was a day laborer, as
a matter of a fact (although of good old New England farming stock),
earning a dollar and a half a day, and constantly bemoaning the fact;
yet when "young Lydia," who was obliged to dress like a scarecrow,
wished to earn her own pin-money by making fudge he objected
violently. The itching pride of the American male deprives him of many
comforts and sometimes of honor and freedom, because he will not let
his wife use her abilities and her spare time. He will steal or
embezzle rather than have the world look on while "his" wife ekes out
the family income. The determined Frenchwomen have had their men in
training for generations, and the wife is the business partner
straight up to the haute bourgeoisie; but the American woman, for all
her boasted tyranny over the busy male of her land, is either an
expensive toy or a mere household drudge, until years and experience
give her freedom of spirit. This war will do more to liberate her than
that mild social earthquake called the suffrage movement. The rich
women are working so hard that not only do they dress and entertain
far less than formerly but their husbands are growing quite accustomed
to their separate prominence and publicly admitted usefulness. The
same may be said of groups of women in less conspicuous classes, and
when the war is over it is safe to say these women will continue to do
as they please. There is something insidiously fascinating in work to
women that never have worked, not so much in the publicity it may give
but in the sense of mental expansion; and, in the instance of war, the
passion of usefulness, the sense of dedication to a high cause, the
necessary frequent suppression of self, stamp the soul with an impress
that never can be obliterated. That these women engaged in good works
often quarrel like angry cats, or fight for their relief organization
as a lioness would fight for her hungry cub, is beside the point. That
is merely another way of admitting they are human beings; not
necessarily women, but just human beings. As it was in the beginning,
is now, etc. Far better let loose their angry passions in behalf of
the men who are fighting to save the world from a reversion to
barbarism, than rowing their dressmakers, glaring across the bridge
table, and having their blood poisoned by eternal jealousy over some
man.
And if it will hasten the emancipation of the American man from the
thralldom of snobbery still another barrier will go down in the path
of the average woman. Just consider for a moment how many men are
failures. They struggle along until forty or forty-five "on their
own," although fitted by nature to be clerks and no more, striving
desperately to keep up appearances--for the sake of their own pride,
for the sake of their families, even for the sake of being "looked up
to" by their wife and observant offspring. But without real hope,
because without real ability (they soon, unless fools, outlive the
illusions of youth when the conquest of fortune was a matter of
course) always in debt, and doomed to defeat.
How many women have said to me--women in their thirties or early
forties, and with two or three children of increasing demands: "Oh, if
I could help! How unjust of parents not to train girls to do something
they can fall back on. I want to go to work myself and insure my
children a good education and a start in the world, but what can I do?
If I had been specialized in any one thing I'd use it now whether my
husband liked it or not. But although I have plenty of energy and
courage and feel that I could succeed in almost anything I haven't the
least idea how to go about it."
If a woman's husband collapses into death or desuetude while her
children are young, it certainly is the bounden duty of some member of
her family to support her until her children are old enough to go to
school, for no one can take her place in the home before that period.
Moreover, her mind should be as free of anxiety as her body of strain.
But what a ghastly reflection upon civilization it is when she is
obliged to stand on her feet all day in a shop or factory, or make
tempting edibles for some Woman's Exchange, because she cannot afford
to spend time upon a belated training that might admit her lucratively
to one of the professions or business industries.
The childless woman solves the problem with comparative ease. She
invariably shows more energy and decision, provided, of course, these
qualities have been latent within her.
Nevertheless, it is often extraordinary just what she does do. For
instance I knew a family of girls upon whose college education an
immense sum had been expended, and whose intellectual arrogance I
never have seen equalled. When their father failed and died, leaving
not so much as a small life insurance, what did they do? Teach? Write?
Edit? Become some rich and ignorant man's secretary? Not a bit of it.
They cooked. Always noted in their palmy days for their "table," and
addicted to relieving the travail of intellect with the sedative of
the homeliest of the minor arts, they began on preserves for the
Woman's Exchange; and half the rich women in town were up at their
house day after day stirring molten masses in a huge pot on a red-hot
range.
It was sometime before they were taken seriously, and, particularly
after the enthusiasm of their friends waned, there was a time of hard
anxious struggle. But they were robust and determined, and in time
they launched out as caterers and worked up a first-class business.
They took their confections to the rear entrances of their friends'
houses on festive occasions and accepted both pay and tips with lively
gratitude. They educated their younger brothers and lost their
arrogance. They never lost their friends.
Owing to dishonest fiction the impression prevails throughout the
world that "Society" is heartless and that the rich and well-to-do
drop their friends the moment financial reverses force them either to
reduce their scale of living far below the standard, or go to work.
When that happens it is the fault of the reversed, not of the
entrenched. False pride, constant whining, or insupportable
irritabilities gradually force them into a dreary class apart. If
anything, people of wealth and secure position take a pride in
standing by their old friends (their "own sort"), in showing
themselves above all the means sins of which fiction and the stage
have accused them, and in lending what assistance they can. Even when
the head of the family has disgraced himself and either blown out his
brains or gone to prison, it depends entirely upon the personalities
of his women whether or not they retain their friends. In fact any
observant student of life is reminded daily that one's real position
in the world depends upon personality, more particularly if backed by
character. Certainly it is nine-tenths of the battle for struggling
women.
Another woman whom I always had looked upon as a charming butterfly,
but who, no doubt, had long shown her native shrewdness and
determination in the home, stepped into her husband's shoes when he
collapsed from strain, abetted by drink, and now competes in the
insurance business with the best of the men. But she had borne the
last of her children and she has perfect health.
Galsworthy's play, _The Fugitive_, may not have been good drama but it
had the virtue of provoking thought after one had left the theater.
More than ever it convinced me, at least, that the women of means and
leisure with sociological leanings should let the working girl take
care of herself for a time and devote their attention to the far more
hopeless problem of the lady suddenly thrown upon her own resources.
No doubt this problem will have ceased to exist twenty years hence.
Every girl, rich or poor, and all grades between, will have
specialized during her plastic years on something to be used as a
resource; but at present there are thousands of young women who find
the man they married in ignorance an impossible person to live with
and yet linger on in wretched bondage because what little they know of
social conditions terrifies them. If they are pretty they fear other
men as much as they fear their own husbands, and for all the "jobs"
open to unspecialized women, they seem to be preeminently unfitted. If
the rich women of every large city would build a great college in
which every sort of trade and profession could be taught, from nursing
to stenography, from retouching photographs to the study of law,
while the applicant, after her sincerity had been established, was
kept in comfort and ease of mind, with the understanding that she
should repay her indebtedness in weekly installments after the college
had launched her into the world, we should have no more such ghastly
plays as _The Fugitive_ or hideous sociological tracts as _A Bed of
Roses_.
IV
ONE SOLUTION OF A GREAT PROBLEM
I
The world is willing and eager to buy what it wants. If you have goods
to sell you soon find your place at the counter, unless owing to some
fault of character your fellow barterers and their patrons will have
none of you. Of course there is always the meanest of all passions,
jealousy, waiting to thwart you at every turn, but no woman with a
modicum of any one of those wares the world wants and must have need
fear any enemy but her own loss of courage.
The pity is that so many women with no particular gift and only minor
energies are thrust into the economic world without either natural or
deliberate equipment. All that saves them in nine cases out of ten is
conserved energies, and if they are thrust out too young they are
doubly at a disadvantage.
A good deal has been written about the fresh enthusiasm of the young
worker, as contrasted with the slackened energies and disillusioned
viewpoint of middle life. But I think most honest employers will
testify that a young girl worker's enthusiasm is for closing time, and
her dreams are not so much of the higher skilfulness as of the
inevitable man. Nature is inexorable. She means that the young things
shall reproduce. If they will not or cannot that is not her fault; she
is always there with the urge. Even when girls think they sell
themselves for the adornments so dear to youth they are merely the
victims of the race, driven toward the goal by devious ways. Nature,
of course, when she fashioned the world reckoned without science. I
sometimes suspect her of being of German origin, for so methodical and
mechanical is her kultur that she will go on repeating "two and two
make four" until the final cataclysm.
I think that American women are beginning to realize that American men
are played out at forty-five; or fifty, at the most. There are
exceptions, of course, but with the vast majority the strain is too
great and the rewards are too small. They cannot retire in time. I
have a friend who, after a brilliant and active career, has withdrawn
to the communion of nature and become a philosopher. He insists that
all men should be retired by law at forty-five and condemned to spend
the rest of their days tilling the soil gratis for women and the
rising generation. The outdoor life would restore a measure of their
dissipated vitality and prolong their lives.
This may come to pass in time: stranger things have happened. But, as
I remarked before, it is the present we have to consider. It seems to
me it would be a good idea if every woman who is both protected and
untrained but whose husband is approaching forty should, if not
financially independent, begin seriously to think of fitting herself
for self-support. The time to prepare for possible disaster is not
after the torpedo has struck the ship.
A thousand avenues are open to women, and fresh ones open yearly. She
can prepare secretly, or try her hand at first one and then another
(if she begins by being indeterminate) of such congenial occupations
as are open to women of her class, beyond cooking, teaching, clerking.
Those engaged in reforms, economic improvements, church work, and
above all, to-day, war relief work, should not be long discovering
their natural bent as well as its marketable value, and the particular
rung of the ladder upon which to start.
Many women whose energies have long been absorbed by the home are
capable of flying leaps. These women still in their thirties, far from
neglecting their children when looking beyond the home, are merely
ensuring their proper nourishment and education.
Why do not some of the public spirited women, whose own fortunes are
secure, form bureaus where all sorts of women, apprehensive of the
future, may be examined, advised, steered on their way? In this they
would merely be taking a leaf from the present volume of French
history its women are writing. It is the women of independent means
over there who have devised so many methods by which widows and girls
and older spinsters tossed about in the breakers of war may support
themselves and those dependent upon them. There is Mlle. Thompson's
École Feminine, for instance, and Madame Goujon's hundred and one
practical schemes which I will not reiterate here.
Women of the industrial class in the United States need new laws, but
little advice how to support themselves. They fall into their natural
place almost automatically, for they are the creatures of
circumstances, which are set in motion early enough to determine their
fate. If they do hesitate their minds are quickly made up for them by
either their parents or their social unit. The great problem to-day is
for the women of education, fastidiousness, a certain degree of ease,
threatened with a loss of that male support upon which ancient custom
bred them to rely. Their children will be specialized; they will see
to that. But their own problem is acute and it behooves trained and
successful women to take it up, unless the war lasts so long that
every woman will find her place as inevitably as the working girl.
II
For a long time to come women will be forced to leave the
administering of the nation as well as of states and cities to men,
for men are still too strong for them. The only sort of women that men
will spontaneously boost into public life are pretty, bright, womanly,
spineless creatures who may be trusted to set the cause of woman back
a few years at least, and gratify their own sense of humorous
superiority.
Women would save themselves much waste of energy and many humiliations
if they would devote themselves exclusively to helping and training
their own sex. Thousands are at work on the problems of higher wage
and shorter hours for women of the industrial class, but this problem
of the carefully nurtured, wholly untrained, and insecurely protected
woman they have so far ignored. To my mind this demands the first
consideration and the application of composite woman's highest
intelligence. The industrial woman has been trained to work, she
learns as she grows to maturity to protect herself and fight her own
battles, and in nine cases out of ten she resents the interference of
the leisure class in her affairs as much as she would charity. The
leaders of every class should be its own strong spirits. And the term
"class consciousness" was not invented by fashionable society.
There is another problem that women, forced imminently or
prospectively to support themselves, must face before long, and that
is the heavy immigration from Europe. Of course some of those
competent women over there will keep the men's jobs they hold now, and
among the widows and the fatherless there will be a large number of
clerks and agriculturists. But many réformés will be able to fill
those positions satisfactorily, and, when sentiment has subsided,
young women at least (who are also excellent workers) will begin to
think of husbands; and, unless the war goes on for many years and
reduces our always available crop, American girls of the working class
will have to look to their laurels both ways.
III
Here is the reverse of the picture, which possibly may save the too
prosperous and tempting United States from what in the end could not
fail to be a further demoralization of her ancient ideals and
depletion of the old American stock:
No matter how many men are killed in a war there are more males when
peace is declared than the dead and blasted, unless starvation
literally has sent the young folks back to the earth. During any war
children grow up, and even in a war of three years' duration it is
estimated that as against four million males killed there will be six
million young males to carry on the race as well as its commerce and
industries. For the business of the nation and high finance there are
the men whose age saved them from the dangers of the battlefield.
There will therefore be many million marriageable men in Europe if the
war ends in 1917. But they will, for the most part, be of a very
tender age indeed, and normal young women between twenty and thirty do
not like spring chickens. They are beloved only by idealess girls of
their own age, by a certain type of young women who are alluded to
slightingly as "crazy about boys," possibly either because men of
mature years find them uninteresting or because of a certain vampire
quality in their natures, and by blasée elderly women who generally
foot the bills.
Dr. Talcott Williams pointed out to me not long since that after all
great wars, and notably after our own Civil War, there has been a
notable increase in the number of marriages in which the preponderance
of years was on the wrong side. Also that it was not until after our
own war that the heroine of fiction began to reverse the immemorial
procedure and marry a man her inferior in years. In other words,
anything she could get. This would almost argue that fiction is not
only the historian of life but its apologist.
It is quite true that young men coming to maturity during majestic
periods of the world's history are not likely to have the callow
brains and petty ideals which distinguished the average youth of
peace. Even boys of fourteen these days talk intelligently of the war
and the future. They read the newspapers, even subscribing for one if
at a boarding-school. In the best of the American universities the men
have been alive to the war from the first, and a large proportion of
the young Americans who have done gallant service with the American
Ambulance Corps had recently graduated when the war broke out. Others
are serving during vacations, and are difficult to lure back to their
studies.
Some of the young Europeans of eighteen or twenty will come home from
the trenches when peace is declared, and beyond a doubt will compel
the love if not the respect of damsels of twenty-five and upward. But
will they care whether they fascinate spinsters of twenty-five and
upward, or not? The fact is not to be overlooked that there will be as
many young girls as youths, and as these girls also have matured
during their long apprenticeship to sorrow and duty, it is not to be
imagined they will fail to interest young warriors of their own
age--nor fail to battle for their rights with every device known to
the sex.
Temperament must be taken into consideration, of course, and a certain
percentage of men and women of unbalanced ages will be drawn together.
That happens in times of peace. Moreover it is likely that a large
number of young Germans in this country either will conceive it their
duty to return to Germany and marry there or import the forlorn in
large numbers. If they have already taken to themselves American wives
it is on the cards that they will renounce them also. There is nothing
a German cannot be made to believe is his duty to the Fatherland, and
he was brought up not to think. But if monarchy falls in Germany, and
a republic, socialistic or merely democratic, rises on the ruins, then
it is more than likely that the superfluous women will be encouraged
to transfer themselves and their maidenly dreams to the great
dumping-ground of the world.
Unless we legislate meanwhile.
V
FOUR OF THE HIGHLY SPECIALIZED
There are four other ways in which women (exclusive of the artist
class) are enjoying remunerative careers: as social secretaries, play
brokers, librarians, and editors; and it seems to me that I cannot do
better than to drop generalities in this final chapter and give four
of the most notable instances in which women have "made good" in these
highly distinctive professions. I have selected four whom I happen to
know well enough to portray at length: Maria de Barril, Alice Kauser,
Belle da Costa Greene, and Honoré Willsie. It is true that Mrs.
Willsie, being a novelist, belongs to the artist class, but she is
also an editor, which to my mind makes her success in both spheres the
more remarkable. To edit means hours daily of routine, details,
contacts; mechanical work, business, that would drive most writers of
fiction quite mad. But Mrs. Willsie is exceptionally well balanced.
I
MARIA DE BARRIL
A limited number of young women thrown abruptly upon their own
resources become social secretaries if their own social positions
have insensibly prepared them for the position, and if they live in a
city large enough to warrant this fancy but by no means inactive post.
In Washington they are much in demand by Senators' and Congressmen's
wives suddenly translated from a small town where the banker's lady
hobnobbed with the prosperous undertaker's family, to a city where the
laws of social precedence are as rigid as at the court of the
Hapsburgs and a good deal more complicated. But these young women must
themselves have lived in Washington for many years, or they will be
forced to divide their salary with a native assistant.
The most famous social secretary in the United States, if not in the
world, is Maria de Barril, and she is secretary not to one rich woman
but to New York society itself. Her position, entirely self-made, is
unique and secure, and well worth telling.
Pampered for the first twenty years of her life like a princess and
with all her blood derived from one of the oldest and most relaxed
nations in Europe, she was suddenly forced to choose between sinking
out of sight, the mere breath kept in her body, perhaps, on a pittance
from distant relatives, or going to work.
She did not hesitate an instant. Being of society she knew its needs,
and although she was too young to look far ahead and foresee the
structure which was to rise upon these tentative foundations, she
shrewdly began by offering her services to certain friends often
hopelessly bewildered with the mass of work they were obliged to
leave to incompetent secretaries and housekeepers. One thing led to
another, as it always does with brave spirits, and to-day Miss de
Barril has a position in life which, with its independence and
freedom, she would not exchange for that of any of her patrons. She
conducted her economic venture with consummate tact from the first.
Owing to a promise made her mother, the haughtiest of old Spanish
dames as I remember her, she never has entered on business the houses
of the society that employs her, and has retained her original social
position apparently without effort.
She has offices, which she calls her embassy, and there, with a staff
of secretaries, she advises, dictates, revises lists, issues thousands
of invitations a week during the season, plans entertainments for
practically all of New York society that makes a business of pleasure.
Some years ago a scion of one of those New York families so much
written about that they have become almost historical, married after
the death of his mother, and wished to introduce his bride at a
dinner-dance in the large and ugly mansion whose portals in his
mother's day opened only to the indisputably elect.
The bridegroom found his mother's list, but, never having exercised
his masculine faculties in this fashion before, and hazy as to whether
all on that list were still alive or within the pale, he wrote to the
social ambassadress asking her to come to his house on a certain
morning and advise him. Miss de Barril replied that not even for a
member of his family, devoted as she was to it, would she break her
promise to her mother, and he trotted down to her without further
parley. Moreover, she was one of the guests at the dinner.
Of course it goes without saying that Miss de Barril has not only
brains and energy, but character, a quite remarkably fascinating
personality, and a thorough knowledge of the world. Many would have
failed where she succeeded. She must have had many diplomatists among
her ancestors, for her tact is incredible, although in her case Latin
subtlety never has degenerated into hypocrisy. No woman has more
devoted friends. Personally I know that I should have thrown them all
out of the window the first month and then retired to a cave on a
mountain. She must have the social sense in the highest degree,
combined with a real love of "the world."
Her personal appearance may have something to do with her success.
Descended on one side from the Incas of Peru, she looks like a Spanish
grandee, and is known variously to her friends as "Inca," "Queen," and
"Doña Maria"--my own name for her. When I knew her first she found it
far too much of an effort to pull on her stockings and was as haughty
and arrogant a young girl as was to be found in the then cold and
stately city of New York. She looks as haughty as ever because it is
difficult for a Spaniard of her blood to look otherwise; but her
manners are now as charming as her manner is imposing; and if the
bottom suddenly fell out of Society her developed force of character
would steer her straight into another lucrative position with no
disastrous loss of time.
It remains to be pointed out that she would have failed in this
particular sphere if New York Society had been as callous and devoid
of loyalty even in those days, as the novel of fashion has won its
little success by depicting it. The most socially eminent of her
friends were those that helped her from the first, and with them she
is as intimate as ever to-day.
II
ALICE BERTA JOSEPHINE KAUSER
Credit must be given to Elisabeth Marbury for inventing the now
flourishing and even over-crowded business of play broker; but as she
was of a strongly masculine character and as surrounded by friends as
Miss de Barril, her success is neither as remarkable nor as
interesting as that of Alice Kauser, who has won the top place in this
business in a great city to which she came poor and a stranger.
Not that she had; grown up in the idea that she must make her own way
in the world. Far from it. It is for that reason I have selected her
as another example of what a girl may accomplish if she have character
and grit backed up with a thorough intellectual training. For, it must
never be forgotten, unless one is a genius it is impossible to enter
the first ranks of the world's workers without a good education and
some experience of the world. Parents that realize this find no
sacrifice too great to give their children the most essential of all
starts in life. But the extraordinary thing in the United States of
America is how comparatively few parents do realize it. Moreover, how
many are weak enough, even when with a reasonable amount of
self-sacrifice they could send their children through college, to
yield to the natural desire of youth to "get out and hustle."
Miss Kauser was born in Buda Pest, in the United States Consular
Agency, for her father, although a Hungarian, was Consular Agent. It
was an intellectual family and on her mother's side musically gifted.
Miss Kauser's aunt, Etelka Gerster, when she came to this country as a
prima donna had a brief but brilliant career, and the music-loving
public prostrated itself. But her wonderful voice was a fragile
coloratura, and her first baby demolished it. Berta Gerster, Miss
Kauser's mother, was almost equally renowned for a while in Europe.
Mr. Kauser himself was a pupil of Abel Blouet at the Beaux Arts, but
he fought in the Revolution of 1848 in Hungary, and later with
Garibaldi in the Hungarian Legion in Italy.
Miss Kauser, who must have been born well after these stirring events,
was educated by French governesses and Polish tutors. Her friends tell
the story of her that she grew up with the determination to be the
most beautiful woman in the world, and when she realized that,
although handsome and imposing, she was not a great beauty according
to accepted standards, she philosophically buried this callow ambition
and announced, "Very well; I shall be the most intellectual woman in
the world."
There are no scales by which to make tests of these delicate degrees
of the human mind, even in the case of authors who put forth four
books a year, but there is no question that Miss Kauser is a highly
accomplished woman, with a deep knowledge of the literature of many
lands, a passionate feeling for style, and a fine judgment that is the
result of years of hard intellectual work and an equally profound
study of the world. And who shall say that the wild ambitions of her
extreme youth did not play their part in making her what she is
to-day? I have heard "ambition" sneered at all my life, but never by
any one who possessed the attribute itself, or the imaginative power
to appreciate what ambition has meant in the progress of the world.
Miss Kauser studied for two years at the École Monceau in Paris,
although she had been her father's housekeeper and a mother to the
younger children since the age of twelve. Both in Paris and Buda Pest
she was in constant association with friends of her father, who
developed her intellectual breadth.
Financial reverses brought the family to America and they settled in
Pensacola, Florida. Here Miss Kauser thought it was high time to put
her accomplishments to some use and help out the family exchequer.
She began almost at once to teach French and music. When her brothers
were older she made up her mind to seek her fortune in New York and
arrived with, a letter or two. For several months she taught music and
literature in private families. Then Mary Bisland introduced her to
Miss Marbury, where she attended to the French correspondence of the
office for a year.
But these means of livelihood were mere makeshifts. Ambitious,
imperious, and able, it was not in her to work for others for any
great length of time. As soon as she felt that she "knew the ropes" in
New York she told certain friends she had made that she wished to go
into the play brokerage business for herself. As she inspires
confidence--this is one of her assets--her friends staked her, and she
opened her office with the intention of promoting American plays only.
Her trained mind rapidly adapted itself to business and in the course
of a few years she was handling the plays of many of the leading
dramatists for a proportionate number of leading producers. When the
war broke out, so successful was she that she had a house of her own
in the East Thirties, furnished with the beautiful things she had
collected during her yearly visits to Europe--for long since she had
opened offices in Paris and London, her business outgrowing its first
local standard.
The war hit her very hard. She had but recently left the hospital
after a severe operation, which had followed several years of
precarious health. She was quite a year reestablishing her former
strength and full capacity for work. One of the most exuberantly
vital persons I had ever met, she looked as frail as a reed during
that first terrible year of the war, but now seems to have recovered
her former energies.
There was more than the common results of an operation to exasperate
her nerves and keep her vitality at a low ebb. Some thirty of her male
relatives were at the Front, and the whole world of the theater was
smitten with a series of disastrous blows. Sixteen plays on the road
failed in one day, expensive plays ran a week in New York. Managers
went into bankruptcy. It was a time of strain and uncertainty and
depression, and nobody suffered more than the play brokers. Miss
Kauser as soon as the war broke out rented her house and went into
rooms that she might send to Hungary all the money she could make over
expenses, and for a year this money was increasingly difficult to
collect, or even to make. But if she despaired no one heard of it. She
hung on. By and by the financial tide turned for the country at large
and she was one of the first to ride on the crest. Her business is now
greater than ever, and her interest in life as keen.
III
BELLE DA COSTA GREENE
This "live wire," one of the outstanding personalities in New York,
despite her youth, is the antithesis of the two previous examples of
successful women in business, inasmuch as no judge on the bench nor
surgeon at the Front ever had a severer training for his profession
than she. People who meet for the first time the young tutelar genius
of Mr. Morgan's Library, take for granted that any girl so fond of
society, so fashionable in dress and appointments, and with such a
comet's tail of admirers, must owe her position with its large salary
to "pull," and that it is probably a sinecure anyway.
Little they know.
Belle Greene, who arrests even the casual if astute observer with her
overflowing _joie de vivre_ and impresses him as having the best of
times in this best of all possible worlds, is perhaps the "keenest on
her job" of any girl in the city of New York. Let any of these
superficial admirers attempt to obtain entrance, if he can, to the
Library, during the long hours of work, and with the natural masculine
intention of clinching the favorable impression he made on the young
lady the evening before, and he will depart in haste, moved to a
higher admiration or cursing the well-known caprice of woman,
according to his own equipment.
For Miss Greene's determination to be one of the great librarians of
the world took form within her precocious brain at the age of thirteen
and it has never fluctuated since. Special studies during both school
and recreation hours were pursued to the end in view: Latin, Greek,
French, German, history--the rise and spread of civilization in
particular, and as demonstrated by the Arts, Sciences, and Literature
of the world. When she had absorbed all the schools could give her,
she took an apprenticeship in the Public Library system in order
thoroughly to ground herself in the clerical and routine phases of the
work.
She took a special course in bibliography at the Amherst Summer
Library School, and then entered the Princeton University Library on
nominal pay at the foot of the ladder, and worked up through every
department in order to perfect herself for the position of University
Librarian.
While at Princeton she decided to specialize in early printing, rare
books, and historical and illuminated manuscripts. She studied the
history of printing from its inception in 1445 to the present day. It
was after she had taken up the study of manuscripts from the
standpoint of their contents that she found that it was next to
impossible to progress further along that line in this country, as at
that time we had neither the material nor the scholars. She has often
expressed the wish that there had been in her day a Morgan Library for
consultation.
When she had finished the course at Princeton she went abroad and
studied with the recognized authorities in England and Italy. Ten
years, in fact, were spent in unceasing application, what the college
boy calls "grind," without which Miss Greene is convinced it is
impossible for any one to succeed in any vocation or attain a
distinguished position. To all demands for advice her answer is,
"Work, work, and more work."
She took hold of the Morgan Library in its raw state, when the
valuable books and MSS. Mr. Morgan had bought at sales in Europe were
still packed in cases; and out of that initial disorder Belle Greene,
almost unaided, has built up one of the greatest libraries in the
world. Soon after her installation she began a systematic course in
Art research. She visited the various museums and private collections
of this country, and got in touch with the heads of the different
departments and their curators. She followed their methods until it
was borne in upon her that most of them were antiquated and befogging,
whereupon she began another course in Europe during the summer months
in order to study under the experts in the various fields of art;
comparing the works of artists and artisans of successive periods,
applying herself to the actual technique of painting in its many
phases, studying the influence of the various masters upon their
contemporaries and future disciples.
By attending auction sales, visiting dealers constantly and all
exhibitions, reading all art periodicals, she soon learned the
commercial value of art objects.
Thus in time she was able and with authority to assist Mr. Morgan in
the purchase of his vast collections which embraced art in all its
forms. With the exception of that foundation of the library which
caused Mr. Morgan to engage her services, she has purchased nearly
every book and manuscript it contains.
Another branch of the collectors' art that engaged Miss Greene's
attention was the clever forgery, a business in itself. She even went
so far as to buy more than one specimen, thus learning by actual
handling and examination to distinguish the spurious from the real.
Now she knows the difference at a glance. She maintains there is even
a difference in the smell Mr. Morgan bought nothing himself without
consulting her; if they were on opposite sides of the world he used
the cable.
Naturally Miss Greene to-day enjoys the entrée to that select and
jealously guarded inner circle of authorities, who despise the
amateur, but who recognize this American girl, who has worked as hard
as a day laborer, as "one of them." But she maintains that if she had
not thoroughly equipped herself in the first place not even the great
advantages she enjoyed as Mr. Morgan's librarian could have given her
the peculiar position she now enjoys, a position that is known to few
of the people she plays about with in her leisure hours.
She has adopted the mottoes of the two contemporaries she has most
admired: Mr. Morgan's "Onward and Upward" and Sarah Bernhardt's "Quand
Même."
IV
HONORÉ WILLSIE
Honoré Willsie, who comes of fine old New England stock, although she
looks like a Burne-Jones and would have made a furore in London in the
Eighties, was brought up in the idea that an American woman should
fit herself for self-support no matter what her birth and conditions.
Her mother, although the daughter of a rich man, was brought up on the
same principles, and taught school until she married. All her friends,
no matter how well-off, made themselves useful and earned money.
Therefore, Mrs. Willsie was thoroughly imbued while a very young girl
with the economic ideal, although her mother had planted with equal
thoroughness the principle that it was every woman's primary duty to
marry and have a family.
Mrs. Willsie was educated at Madison, Wisconsin, beginning with the
public schools and graduating from the University. She married
immediately after leaving college, and, encouraged by her husband, a
scientist, and as hard a student as herself, she began to write. Her
first story followed the usual course; it was refused by every
magazine to which she sent it; but, undiscouraged, she rewrote it for
a syndicate. For a year after this she used the newspapers as a sort
of apprenticeship to literature and wrote story after story until she
had learned the craft of "plotting." When she felt free in her new
medium she began writing for the better magazines; and, compared with
most authors, she has had little hard climbing in her upward course.
Naturally, there were obstacles and setbacks, but she is not of the
stuff that ten times the number could discourage.
Then came the third stage. She wrote a novel. It was refused by many
publishers in New York, but finally accepted as a serial in the first
magazine that had rejected it.
This was _The Heart of the Desert_. After that followed _Still Jim_
which established her and paved the way for an immediate reception for
that other fine novel of American ideals, _Lydia of the Pines_.
It was about two years ago that she was asked to undertake the
editorship of the _Delineator_, and at first she hesitated, although
the "job" appealed to her; she had no reason to believe that she
possessed executive ability. The owner, who had "sized her up,"
thought differently, and the event has justified him. She ranks to-day
as one of the most successful, courageous, and resourceful editors of
woman's magazines in the country. The time must come, of course, when
she no longer will be willing to give up her time to editorial work,
now that there is a constant demand for the work she loves best; but
the experience with its contacts and its mental training must always
have its value. The remarkable part of it was that she could fill such
a position without having served some sort of an apprenticeship first.
Nothing but the sound mental training she had received at home and at
college, added to her own determined will, could have saved her from
failure in spite of her mental gifts.
Mrs. Willsie, like all women worth their salt, says that she never has
felt there was the slightest discrimination made against her work by
publishers or editors because she was a woman.
THE END
ADDENDUM
NOTE.--_Six months ago I wrote asking Madame d'Andigné to send me
notes of her work before becoming the President of Le Bien--Être du
Blessé. She promised, but no woman in France is busier. The following
arrived after the book was in press, so I can only give it
verbatim.--G.A._
At the time this gigantic struggle broke out I was in America. My
first thought was to get to France as soon as possible. I sailed on
August 2nd for Cherbourg but as we were pursued by two German ships
our course was changed and I landed in England. After many trials and
tribulations I reached Paris. The next day I went to the headquarters
of the French Red Cross and offered my services. I showed the American
Red Cross certificate which had been given to me at the end of my
services at Camp Meade during the Spanish-American War. As I had had
practically little surgical experience since the course I took at the
Rhode Island Hospital before the Spanish-American War I asked to take
a course in modern surgery. I was told that my experience during that
war and my Red Cross certificate was more than sufficient. After
serious reflection I decided that I could render more service to
France by getting in the immense crops that were standing in our
property in the south of France than by nursing the wounded soldiers.
Far less glorious but of vital importance! So off I went to the south
of France. By the middle of October thousands of kilos of cereals and
hay and over 20,000 hectoliters of wine were ready to supply the army
at the front. I then spent my time in various hospitals studying the
up-to-date system of hospital war relief work. It was not difficult
to see the deficiencies--the means of rapidly transporting the wounded
from the "postes de secours" to an operating table out of the range of
cannons--in other words auto-ambulances--impossible to find in France
at that time. So I cabled to America. The first was offered by my
father. It was not until January that this splendid spacious
motor-ambulance arrived and was offered immediately to the French Red
Cross. Presently others arrived and were offered to the Service de
Santé. These cars have never ceased to transport the wounded from the
Front lines to hospitals in the War Zone. I heard of one in the north
and another in the Somme. This work finished, I took up duty as
assistant in an operating room in Paris to get my hand in. I next went
to a military hospital at Amiens. This hospital was partly closed soon
afterward, and, anxious to have a great deal of work, I went to the
military hospital at Versailles.
The work in the operating room was very absorbing, as it was there
that that wonderful apparatus for locating a bullet by mathematical
calculation was invented and first used. There, between those four
white walls I have seen bullets extracted from the brain, the lungs,
the liver, the "vesicule biliaire," etc., etc.
From there I was called to a large military hospital at the time of
the attack in Champagne in September, 1915. Soon I was asked to
organize and superintend the Service of the Mussulman troops. At first
it was hard and unsatisfactory. I spoke only a few words of Arabic and
they spoke but little French. I had difficulty in overcoming the
contempt that the Mussulmans have for women. They were all severely
wounded and horribly mutilated, but the moral work was more tiring
than the physical.
However, little by little they got used to me and I to them. We became
the best of friends and I never experienced more simple childlike
gratitude than with these "Sidis." I remember one incident worth
quoting. I was suffering from a severe grippy cold--they saw that I
was tired and felt miserable. I left the ward for a few moments. On
returning I found that they had pushed a bed a little to one side in a
corner and had turned down the bed-clothes and placed a hot-water jug
in it (without hot water). The occupant was a Moroccan as black as the
ace of spades; he was trepanned but was allowed up a certain number of
hours a day. "Maman,"--they all called me Maman--"toi blessée, toi
ergut (lie down) nous tubibe (doctor) nous firmli (nurse)." And this
black, so-called savage, Moroccan took up his post beside the bed as I
had often done for him. I explained as best as I could that I would
have to have a permission signed by the Medecin-Chef, otherwise I
would be punished; and the Medecin-Chef had left the hospital for the
night. He shook his wise black head, "Maman blessée, Maman blessée!"
One called me one day and asked me what my Allah was like. I told him
I thought he was probably very much like his. Well! if my Allah was
not good to me, theirs would take care of me, they would see to that.
In May, 1916, I was asked to organize a war relief work[H] at the
request of the Service de Santé. This work was to provide the "grands
blessés et malades" with light nourishing food, in other words,
invalid food. The rules and regulations of the French military
hospitals are not sufficiently elastic to allow the administering of
such food. In time of war it would be easier almost to remove Mt.
Blanc than to change these rules and regulations. There was just one
solution--private war relief work.
[H] Le Bien--Être du Blessé.
So, with great regret, I bade good-bye to these children I never would
have consented to have left had it not been for the fact that I knew
from experience how necessary was the war relief work which was forced
upon me, as I had seen many men die from want of light nourishing
food.