the war. Her brothers were early volunteers in Kitchener's Army. They
were in the trenches and she longed for the sensation of bearing a
burden of hard work. She went to Woolwich Arsenal and toiled twelve
hours a day. She broke under the strain, recuperated, and took up
munition work again. She became expert, and was in time an overseer told
off to train other women. But she was never satisfied, and always
anxious to be nearer the great struggle. She broke away one day and went
to Southampton for a Waac examination, and found herself one of a group
of a hundred and fifty gentlewomen all anxious to enter active service
and all prepared for some definite work. They stood their tests, and
Dolly--that's the little niece's pet name, given to her because she is
so tiny--is now working as an "engine fitter" just behind the fighting
lines. Dainty Dolly, whom we have always treated as a fragile bit of
Sèvres china, clad in breeches and puttees, under the booming of the
great guns, is fitting patiently, part to part, the beating engine which
will lift on wings some English boy in his flight through the blue skies
of France.
But it must not be supposed that the magnificent service of British
women, devoted, efficient and well-organized from top to bottom,
realized itself without friction, any more than it will here. There were
certainly two wars going on in Great Britain for a long time, and the
internal strife was little less bitter than the international conflict.
The most active center of this contest of which we have heard so little
was in industry, and the combatants were the government, trade unions
and women. The unions were doing battle because of fear of unskilled
workers, especially when intelligent and easily trained; the government,
in sore need of munition hands, was bargaining with the unskilled for
long hours and low pay. Finally the government and the unions
reluctantly agreed that women must be employed; both wanted them to be
skillful, but not too skillful, and above all, to remain amenable. It
has been made clear, too, that women enter their new positions "for the
war only." At the end of hostilities--international hostilities--women
are to hand over their work and wages to men and go home and be content.
Will the program be fulfilled?
The wishes of women themselves may play some part. How do they feel?
Obviously, every day the war lasts they get wider experience of the
sorrows and pleasures of financial independence. Women are called the
practical sex, and I certainly found them in England facing the fact
that peace will mean an insufficient number of breadwinners to go around
and that a maimed man may have low earning power. The women I met were
not dejected at the prospect; they showed, on the contrary, a spirit not
far removed from elation in finding new opportunities of service. After
I had sat and listened to speech after speech at the annual conference
of the National Union of Women Workers, with delegates from all parts of
the country, presided over by Mrs. Creighton, widow of the late Bishop
of London, there was no doubt in my mind that British women desired to
enter paid fields of work, and regarded as permanent the great increase
in their employment. No regrets or hesitations were expressed in a
single speech, and the solutions of the problems inherent in the new
situation all lay in the direction of equality of preparation and
equality of pay with men.
The strongest element in the women's trade unions takes the same stand.
The great rise in the employment of women is not regarded as a "war
measure," and all the suggestions made to meet the hardships of
readjustment, such as a "minimum wage for all unskilled workers, men as
well as women," are based on the idea of the new workers being permanent
factors in the labor market.
The same conclusion was reached in the report presented to the British
Association by the committee appointed to investigate the "Replacement
of Male by Female Labor." The committee found itself in entire
disagreement with the opinion that the increased employment of women was
a passing phase, and made recommendations bearing on such measures as
improved technical training for girls as well as for boys, a minimum
wage for unskilled men as well as women, equal pay for equal work, and
the abolition of "half-timers." But while it was obvious that the
greatest asset of belligerent nations is the labor of women, while
learned societies and organizations of women laid down rules for their
safe and permanent employment, the British Government showed marked
opposition to the new workers. If the Cabinet did not believe the war
would be brief, it certainly acted as if Great Britain alone among the
belligerents would have no shortage of male industrial hands. At a time
when Germany had five hundred thousand women in munition factories,
England had but ten thousand.
There is no doubt that the country was at first organized merely for a
spurt. Boys and girls were pressed into service, wages were cut down for
women, hours lengthened for men. Government reports read like the
Shaftesbury attacks on the conditions of early factory days. We hear
again of beds that are never cold, the occupant of one shift succeeding
the occupant of the next, of the boy sleeping in the same bed with two
men, and three girls in a cot in the same room. Labor unrest was met at
first by the Munitions War Act prohibiting strikes and lockouts,
establishing compulsory arbitration and suspending all trade-union rules
which might "hamper production." Under the law a "voluntary army of
workers" signed up as ready to go anywhere their labor was needed, and
local munition committees became labor courts endowed with power to
change wage rates, to inflict fines on slackers, and on those who broke
the agreements of the "voluntary army."
To meet the threatening rebellion, a Health of Munition Workers
Committee under the Ministry of Munitions was appointed to "consider and
advise on questions of industrial fatigue, hours of labor and other
matters affecting the physical health and physical efficiency of workers
in munition factories and workshops." On this committee there were
distinguished medical men, labor experts, members of parliament and two
women, Miss R.E. Squire of the Factory Department and Mrs. H.J. Tennant.
The committee was guided by a desire to have immense quantities of
munitions turned out, and faced squarely the probability that the war
would be of long duration. Its findings, embodied in a series of
memoranda, have lessons for us, not only for war times, but for peace
times, for all time.
On a seven day week the verdict was that "if the maximum output is to be
secured and maintained for any length of time, a weekly period of rest
must be allowed." Overtime was advised against, a double or triple shift
being recommended.
In July, 1916, the committee published a most interesting memorandum on
experiments in the relation of output to hours. In one case the output
was increased eight percent by reducing the weekly hours from
sixty-eight to fifty-nine, and it was found that a decrease to fifty-six
hours per week gave the same output as fifty-nine. It need hardly be
said that there was no change in machinery, tools, raw material or
workers. All elements except hours of work were identical. Twenty-seven
workers doing very heavy work increased their output ten percent by
cutting weekly hours from sixty-one to fifty-five. In a munition plant
employing thirty-six thousand hands it was found that the sick rate
ranged from five to eight percent when the employees were working
overtime, and was only three percent when they were on a double shift.
The war has forced Great Britain to carry out the findings of this
committee and to consider more seriously than ever before, and for both
men and women, the problem of industrial fatigue, the relation of
accidents to hours of labor, industrial diseases, housing, transit, and
industrial canteens. The munition worker is as important as the soldier
and must have the best of care.
While the friction in the ranks of industrial women workers was still
far from being adjusted, the government met its Waterloo in the contest
with medical women. The service which they freely offered their country
was at first sternly refused. Undaunted, they sought recognition outside
the mother country. They knew their skill and they knew the soldiers'
need. They turned to hospitable France, and received official
recognition. On December 14, 1914, the first hospital at the front under
British medical women was opened in Abbaye Royaumont, near Creil. It
carries the official designation, "Hôpital Auxiliaire 301." The doctors,
the nurses, the cooks, are all women. One of the capable chauffeurs I
saw running the ambulance when I was in Creil. She was getting the
wounded as they came down from the front. The French Government
appreciated what the women were doing and urged them to give more help.
At Troyes another unit gave the French army its first experience of
nursing under canvas.
After France had been profiting by the skill of British women for
months, Sir Alfred Keogh, Medical Director General, wisely insisted that
the War Office yield and place a hospital in the hands of women. The
War Hospital in Endell Street, London, is now under Dr. Flora Murray,
and every office, except that of gateman, is filled by women. From the
doctors, who rank as majors, down to the cooks, who rank as
non-commissioned officers, every one connected with Endell Street has
military standing. It indicated the long, hard road these women had
traveled to secure official recognition that the doctor who showed me
over the hospital told me, as a matter for congratulation, that at night
the police brought in drunken soldiers to be sobered. "Every war
hospital must receive them," she explained, "and we are glad we are not
passed over, for that gives the stamp to our official standing."
It was a beautiful autumn day when I visited Endell Street. The great
court was full of convalescents, and the orderlies in khaki, with veils
floating back from their close-fitting toques, were carefully and
skillfully lifting the wounded from an ambulance. I spoke to one of the
soldier boys about the absence of men doctors and orderlies, and his
quick query was, "And what should we want men for?" It seems that they
always take that stand after a day or two. At first the patient is
puzzled; he calls the doctor "sister" and the orderly "nurse," but ends
by being an enthusiastic champion of the new order. Not a misogynist did
I find. One poor fellow who had been wounded again and again and had
been in many hospitals, declared, "I don't mean no flattery, but this
place leaves nothink wanting."
The first woman I met on my last visit to England upset my expectation
of finding that war pushed women back into primitive conditions of toil,
crushed them under the idea that physical force rules the world, and
made them subservient. I chanced upon her as she was acting as
ticket-puncher at the Yarmouth station. She was well set-up, alert,
efficient, helpful in giving information, and, above all, cheerful.
There were two capable young women at the bookstall, too. One had lost a
brother at the front, the other her lover. I felt that they regarded
their loss as one item in the big national accounting. They were
heroically cheerful in "doing their bit."
Throughout my stay in England I searched for, but could not find, the
self-effacing spinster of former days. In her place was a capable woman,
bright-eyed, happy. She was occupied and bustled at her work. She jumped
on and off moving vehicles with the alertness, if not the
unconsciousness, of the expert male. She never let me stand in omnibus
or subway, but quickly gave me her seat, as indeed she insisted upon
doing for elderly gentlemen as well. The British woman had found herself
and her muscles. England was a world of women--women in uniforms; there
was the army of nurses, and then the messengers, porters, elevator
hands, tram conductors, bank clerks, bookkeepers, shop attendants. They
each seemed to challenge the humble stranger, "Superfluous? Not I, I'm a
recruit for national service!" Even a woman doing time-honored womanly
work moved with an air of distinction; she dusted a room for the good of
her country. Just one glimpse was I given of the old-time daughter of
Eve, when a ticket-collector at Reading said: "I can't punch your
ticket. Don't you see I'm eating an apple!"
One of the reactions of the wider functioning of brain and muscle which
struck me most forcibly was the increased joyfulness of women. They were
happy in their work, happy in the thought of rendering service, so happy
that the poignancy of individual loss was carried more easily.
This cheerfulness is somewhat gruesomely voiced in a cartoon in _Punch_
touching on the allowance given to the soldier's wife. She remarks,
"This war is 'eaven--twenty-five shillings a week and no 'usband
bothering about!" We have always credited _Punch_ with knowing England.
Truth stands revealed by a thrust, however cynical, when softened by
challenging humor.
There was no discipline in the pension system. No work was required. The
case of a girl I met in a country town was common. She was working in a
factory earning eleven shillings a week. A day or two later I saw her,
and she told me she had stopped work, as she had "married a soldier, and
'e's gone to France, and I get twelve and six separation allowance a
week." Never did the strange English name, "separation allowance," seem
more appropriate for the wife's pension than in this girl's story.
Little wonder was it that in the early months of the war there was some
riotous living among soldiers' wives!
And the comments of women of influence on the drunkenness and waste of
money on foolish finery were as striking to me as the sordid condition
itself. The woman chairman of a Board of Poor Law Guardians in the north
of England told me that when her fellow-members suggested that
Parliament ought to appoint committees to disburse the separation
allowances, she opposed them with the heroic philosophy that women can
be trained in wisdom only by freedom to err, that a sense of
responsibility had never been cultivated in them, and the country would
have to bear the consequences. In reply to my inquiry as to how the
Guardians received these theories, I learned that "they knew she was
right and dropped their plan."
The faith of leading women that experience would be the best teacher for
the soldier's wife has been justified. A labor leader in the Midlands
told me that an investigation by his trade union showed that only one
hundred women in the ten thousand cases inquired into were mis-spending
their allowances. And when I was visiting a board school in a poor
district of London, and remarked to the head teacher that the children
looked well cared for, she told me that never had they been so well fed
and clothed. There seemed no doubt in her mind that it was best to have
the family budget in the hands of the mother. In the sordid surroundings
of the mean streets of great cities, there is developing in women
practical wisdom and a fine sense of individual responsibility.
Perhaps of greater significance than just how separation allowances are
being spent is the fact that women have discovered that their work as
housewives and mothers has a value recognized by governments in hard
cash. It makes one speculate as to whether wives in the warring nations
will step back without a murmur into the old-time dependence on one man,
or whether these simple women may contribute valuable ideas towards the
working out of sound schemes of motherhood pensions.
The women of Great Britain are experiencing economic independence, they
are living in an atmosphere of recognition of the value of their work as
housewives and mothers. Women leaders in all classes give no indication
of regarding pensions or remuneration in gainful pursuits as other than
permanent factors in social development, and much of the best thought of
men as well as women is centered on group experiments in domestic
coöperation, in factory canteens, in municipal kitchens, which are a
natural concomitant to the wider functioning of women.
Great Britain is not talking about feminism, it is living it. Perhaps
nothing better illustrates the national acceptance of the fact than the
widespread amusement touched with derision caused by the story of the
choleric gentlemen who, on being asked at the time of one of the
government registrations whether his wife was dependent upon him or not,
roared in rage, "Well, if my wife isn't dependent on me, I'd like to
know what man she is dependent on!"
Only second to Britain's lesson for us in the self-reliance of its
women, and the thorough mobilization of their labor-power and executive
ability, is its lesson in protection for all industrial workers. It
stands as one people against the present enemy, and in its effort does
not fail to give thought to race conservation for the future.
[Footnote 2: Through the courtesy of the Editors of _The Outlook_, I am
at liberty to use in this and the following chapter, some of the
material published in an article by me in _The Outlook_ of June
28, 1916.]
IV
MOBILIZING WOMEN IN FRANCE
Compared with the friction in the mobilization of woman-power in Great
Britain, the readjustment in the lives of women in France was like the
opening out of some harmonious pageant in full accord with popular
sympathy. But who has not said, "France is different!"
It is different, and in nothing more so than in its attitude toward its
women. Without discussion with organizations of men, without hindrance
from the government, women filled the gaps in the industrial army. It
was obvious that the new workers, being unskilled, would need training;
the government threw open the technical schools to them. A spirit of
hospitality, of helpfulness, of common sense, reigned.
[Illustration: The French poilu on furlough is put to work harrowing.]
And it was not only in industry that France showed herself wise. I found
that the government had coöperated unreservedly with all the
philanthropic work of women and had given them a wide sphere in which
they could rise above amateurish effort and carry out plans calling for
administrative ability.
When the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises inaugurated its work to
bring together the scattered families of Belgium and northern France,
and when the Association pour l'Aide Fraternelle aux Évacués
Alsaciens-Lorrains began its work for the dispersed peoples of the
provinces, an order was issued by the government to every prefect to
furnish lists of all refugees in his district to the headquarters of the
women's societies in Paris. It was through this good will on the part of
the central government that these societies were able to bring together
forty thousand Belgian families, and to clothe and place in school, or
at work, the entire dispersed population of the reconquered districts of
Alsace-Lorraine.
Nor did these societies cease work with the completion of their initial
effort. They turned themselves into employment bureaus and with the aid
and sanction of the government found work for the thousands of women who
were thrown out of employment. They had the machinery to accomplish
their object, the Council being an old established society organized
throughout the country, and the Association to Aid the Refugees from
Alsace-Lorraine (a nonpartisan name adopted, by the way, at the request
of the Minister of the Interior to cover for the moment the patriotic
work of the leading suffrage society) had active units in every
prefecture.
One of the admirable private philanthropies was the canteen at the St.
Lazarre station in Paris. I am tempted to single it out because its
organizer, Countess de Berkaim, told me that in all the months she had
been running it--and it was open twenty-four hours of the day--not a
single volunteer had been five minutes late. The canteen was opened in
February, 1915, with a reading and rest room. Six hundred soldiers a day
have been fed. The two big rooms donated by the railway for the work
were charming with their blue and white checked curtains, dividing
kitchen from restaurant and rest room from reading room. The work is no
small monument to the reliability and organizing faculty of
French women.
It was in France, too, that I found the group of women who realized that
the permanent change which the war was making in the relation of women
to society needed fundamental handling. Mlle. Valentine Thomson, founder
of La Vie Féminine, held that not only was the war an economic struggle
and not only must the financial power of the combatants rest on the
labor of women, but the future of the nations will largely depend upon
the attitude which women take toward their new obligations. Realizing
that business education would be a determining factor in that attitude,
Mlle. Thomson persuaded her father, who was then Minister of Commerce,
to send out an official recommendation to the Chambers of Commerce to
open the commercial schools to girls. The advice was very generally
followed, but as Paris refused, a group of women, backed by the
Ministry, founded a school in which were given courses of instruction in
the usual business subjects, and lectures on finance, commercial law and
international trade.
Mlle. Thomson herself turned her business gifts to good use in a
successful effort to build up for the immediate benefit of artists and
workers the doll trade of which France was once supreme mistress.
Exhibitions of the art, old and new, were held in many cities in the
United States, in South America and in England. The dolls went to the
hearts of lovers of beauty, and what promised surer financial return, to
the hearts of the children.
To do something for France--that stood first in the minds of the
initiators of this commercial project. They knew her people must be
employed. And next, the desire to bring back charm to an old art
prompted their effort. Mlle. Thomson fully realizes just what "Made in
Germany" signifies. The peoples of the world have had their taste
corrupted by floods of the cheap and tawdry. Germany has been steadily
educating us to demand quantity, quantity mountains high. There is
promise that the doll at least will be rescued by France and made worth
the child's devotion.
In industry, as well as in all else, one feels that in France there has
not been so much a revolution as an orderly development. Women were in
munition factories even before the war, the number has merely swelled.
The women of the upper and lower bourgeois class always knew their
husband's business, the one could manage the shop, the other could
bargain with the best of them as to contracts and output. Women were
trained as bookkeepers and clerks under Napoleon I; he wanted men as
soldiers, and so decreed women should go into business. And the woman of
the aristocratic class has merely slipped out of her seclusion as if
putting aside an old-fashioned garment, and now carries on her
philanthropies in more serious and coördinated manner. We know the
practical business experience possessed by French women, and so are
prepared to learn that many a big commercial enterprise, the owner
having gone to the front, is now directed by his capable wife. That is
but a development, too, is it not? For we had all heard long ago of Mme.
Duval, even if we had not eaten at her restaurants, and though we had
never bought a ribbon or a carpet at the Bon Marché, we had heard of the
woman who helped break through old merchant habits and gave the world
the department store.
But nothing has been more significant in its growth during the war than
the small enterprises in which the husband and wife in the domestic
munition shop, laboring side by side with a little group of assistants,
have been turning out marvels of skill. The man is now in the trenches
fighting for France, and the woman takes command and leads the
industrial battalion to victory. She knows she fights for France.