brings us up at attention. She may be solving the problem of adjustment
of home and work so puzzling to women. There are just such domestic
shops dotted all over the map of France; in the Paris district alone
there are over eighteen hundred of them. The conditions are so
excellent and the ruling wages so high, that the minimum wage law passed
in 1915 applied only to the sweated home workers in the clothing trade,
and not to the domestic munition shops.
A commission which included in its membership a trade unionist, sent by
the British government in the darkest days to find why it was that
France could produce so much more ammunition than England, found these
tiny workshops, with their primitive equipment, performing miracles. The
output was huge and of the best. The woman, when at the head, seemed to
turn out more than the man, she worked with such undying energy. The
commission said it was the "spirit of France" that drove the workers
forward and renewed the flagging energies. But even the trade unionist
referred to the absence of all opposition to women on the part of
organizations of men. Perhaps the spirit of France is undying because in
it is a spirit of unity and harmony.
It seemed to me there was one very practical explanation of the
unmistakable energy of the French worker, both man and woman. The whole
nation has the wise custom of taking meal time with due seriousness. The
break at noon in the great manufactories, as well as in the family
workshop, is long, averaging one hour and a half, and reaching often to
two hours. The French never gobble. Because food is necessary to animal
life, they do not on that account take a puritanical view of it. They
dare enjoy it, in spite of its physiological bearing. They sit down to
it, dwell upon it, get its flavor, and after the meal they sit still and
as a nation permit themselves unabashed to enjoy the sensation of hunger
appeased. That's the common sense spirit of France.
Of course the worker is renewed, hurls herself on the work again with
ardor, and losing no time through fatigue, throws off an
enormous output.
Wages perform their material share in spurring the worker. Louis Barthou
says that the woman's average is eight francs a day. Long ago--it seems
long ago--she could earn at best five francs in the Paris district. She
works on piece work now, getting the same rate as men. And think of
it!--this must indeed be because of the spirit of France--this woman
does better than men on the light munition work, and equals, yes, equals
her menfolk on the heavy shells. I do not say this, a commission of men
says it, a commission with a trade union member to boot. The coming of
the woman-worker with the spirit of win-the-war in her heart is the same
in France as elsewhere, only here her coming is more gracious. Twelve
hundred easily take up work on the Paris subway. They are the wives of
mobilized employees. The offices of the Post, the Telegraph and
Telephone bristle with women, of course, for eleven thousand have taken
the places of men. Some seven thousand fill up the empty positions on
the railways, serving even as conductors on through trains. Their number
has swollen to a half million in munitions, and to over half that number
in powder mills and marine workshops; in civil establishments over three
hundred thousand render service; and even the conservative banking world
welcomes the help of some three thousand women.
[Illustration: Has there ever been anything impossible to French women
since the time of Jeanne d'Arc? The fields must be harrowed--they have
no horses.]
Out on the land the tally is greatest of all. Every woman from the
village bends over the bosom of France, urging fertility. The government
called them in the first hours of the conflict. Viviani spoke
the word:--
"The departure for the army of all those who can carry arms, leaves the
work in the fields undone; the harvest is not yet gathered in; the
vintage season is near. In the name of the entire nation united behind
it, I make an appeal to your courage, and to that of your children,
whose age alone and not their valour, keeps them from the war.
"I ask you to keep on the work in the fields, to finish gathering in the
year's harvest, to prepare that of the coming year. You cannot render
your country a greater service.
"It is not for you, but for her, that I appeal to your hearts.
"You must safeguard your own living, the feeding of the urban
populations and especially the feeding of those who are defending the
frontier, as well as the independence of the country, civilization
and justice.
"Up, then, French women, young children, daughters and sons of the
country! Replace on the field of work those who are on the field of
battle. Strive to show them to-morrow the cultivated soil, the harvests
all gathered in, the fields sown.
"In hours of stress like the present, there is no ignoble work.
Everything that helps the country is great. Up! Act! To work! To-morrow
there will be glory for everyone.
"Long live the Republic! Long live France!"
Women instantly responded to the proclamation. Only the old men were
left to help, only decrepit horses, rejected by the military
requisition. More than once I journeyed far into the country, but I
never saw an able-bodied man. What a gap to be filled!--but the French
peasant woman filled it. She harvested that first year, she has sowed
and garnered season by season ever since. Men, horses, machinery were
lacking, the debit yawned, but she piled up a credit to meet it by
unflagging toil.
With equal devotion and with initiative and power of organization the
woman of leisure has "carried on." The three great societies
corresponding with our Red Cross, the Société de Secours aux Blessés,
the Union des Femmes de France, and the Association des Dames
Françaises, have established fifteen hundred hospitals with one hundred
and fifteen thousand beds, and put forty-three thousand nurses in active
service. Efficiency has kept pace with this superb effort, as is
testified to by many a war cross, many a medal, and the cross of the
Legion of Honor.
Up to the level of her means France sets examples in works of human
salvage worthy the imitation of all nations. The mairie in each
arrondissement has become no less than a community center. The XIV
arrondissement in Paris is but the pattern for many. Here the wife of
the mayor, Mme. Brunot, has made the stiff old building a human place.
The card catalogue carrying information about every soldier from the
district, gives its overwhelming news each day gently to wife or mother,
through the lips of Mme. Brunot or her women assistants. The work of Les
Amis des Orphelins de Guerre centers here, the "adopted" child receiving
from the good maire the gifts in money and presents sent by the
Americans who are generously filling the role of parent. The widows of
the soldiers gather here for comfort and advice.
And the mairie holds a spirit of experiment. It houses not only courage
and sympathy, but progress. The "XIV" has ventured on a Cuisine
Populaire under Mme. Brunot's wholesome guidance. And so many other
arrondissements have followed suit that Paris may be regarded as making
a great experiment in the municipal feeding of her people. It is not
charity, the food is paid for. In the "XIV" fifteen hundred persons eat
a meal or two at the mairie each day. The charge is seventy-five
centimes--fifteen cents, and one gets a soup, meat and a vegetable,
and fruit.
The world seems to be counselling us that if we wish to be well and
cheaply fed we must go where there are experts to cook, where buying is
done in quantity, and where the manager knows about nutritive values.
If a word of praise is extended to the maire of the XIV arrondissement
for his very splendid work, an example to all France, he quickly urges,
"Ah, but Mme. Brunot!" And so it is always, if you exclaim, "Oh, the
spirit of the men of France!" and a Frenchman's ears catch your words,
he will correct, "Ah, but the women!"
And the women do stand above all other women, they have had such
opportunity for heroism. Whose heart does not beat the faster when the
names Soisson and Mme. Macherez are spoken! The mayor and the council
gone, she assumes the office and keeps order while German shells fall
thick on the town. And then the enemy enters, and asks for the mayor,
and she replies, "Le maire, c'est moi." And then do we women not like to
think of Mlle. Deletete staying at her post in the telegraph office in
Houplines in spite of German bombardments, and calmly facing tormentors,
when they smashed her instruments and threatened her with death.
One-tenth of France in the enemy's hands, and in each village and town
some woman staying behind to nurse the sick and wounded, to calm the
population when panic threatens, to stand invincible between the people
and their conquerors!
It is very splendid!--the French man holding steady at the front, the
French woman an unyielding second line of defense. But what of France?
Words of praise must not swallow our sense of obligation. Let us with
our hundred millions of people face the figures. The death rate in
France, not counting the military loss, is twenty per thousand, with a
birth rate of eight per thousand. In Paris for the year ending August,
1914, there were forty-eight thousand nine hundred and seventeen births;
in the year ending in the same month, 1916, the births dropped to
twenty-six thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. The total deaths for
that year in all France were one million, one hundred thousand, and the
births three hundred and twelve thousand.
France is profoundly, infinitely sad. She has cause. I shall never
forget looking into the very depths of her sorrow when I was at Creil. A
great drive was in progress, the wounded were being brought down from
the front, troops hurried forward. Four different regiments passed as I
sat at déjeuner. The restaurant, full of its noonday patrons, was a
typical French café giving on the street. We could have reached out and
touched the soldiers. They marched without music, without song or word,
marched in silence. Some of the men were from this very town; their
little sons, with set faces, too, walked beside them and had brought
them bunches of flowers. The people in the restaurant never spoke above
a whisper, and when the troops passed were as silent as death. There was
no cheer, but just a long, wistful gaze, the soldiers looking into their
eyes, they into the soldiers'.
But France can bear her burden, can solve her problem if we lift our
full share from her bent shoulders. Her women can save the children if
the older men, relieved by our young soldiers, come back from the
trenches, setting women free for the work of child saving. France can
rebuild her villages if her supreme architects, her skilled workers are
replaced in the trenches by our armies. France can renew her spirit and
save her body if her experts in science, if her poets and artists are
sent back to her, and our less great bare their breasts to the Huns.
V
MOBILIZING WOMEN IN GERMANY
The military mobilization of Germany was no more immediate and effective
than the call to arms for women. On August 1, 1914, the summons went
out, and German women were at once part of the smooth running machine of
efficiency.
The world says the Kaiser has been preparing for war for forty years.
The world means that he has been preparing the fighting force. The sword
and guns were to be ready. But the military arm of the nation, the
German government believes, is but the first line of attack; the people
are the second line, and so they, too, in all their life activities,
were not forgotten. The military aristocracy has never neglected the
function of women in the state. The definition of their function may
differ from ours, but that there is a function is recognized, and it is
related to the other vital social organs.
Slowly, through the last half of the nineteenth century, there had grown
up clubs among German women focusing on a definite bit of work, or
crystallizing about an idea. Germany even had suffrage societies.
Politics, however, were forbidden by the government; women were not
allowed to hang on the fringe of a meeting held to discuss men's
politics. But the women of the Fatherland were free to pool their ideas
in philanthropic and hygienic corners, and venture out at times on
educational highways. The Froebel societies had many a contest with the
government, for to the military mind, the gentle pedagogue's theories
seemed subversive of discipline as enforced by spurs and bayonets.
These clubs, covering every trade and profession, every duty and every
aspiration of women, were dotted over the German Empire. At last they
drew together in a federation. The government looked on. It saw a
machine created, and believing in thorough organization, no doubt gave
thought to the possibilities of the Bund deutscher, Frauenvereine. At
the outbreak of war, Dr. Gertrud Baumer was president of the Bund. She
was a leader of great ability, marshalling half a million of women. No
other organization was so widespread and well-knit, except perhaps Der
Vaterlandische Frauenverein with its two thousand one hundred and fifty
branches. It was evangelical and military. The Empress was its patron.
Its popular name is the "Armée der Kaiserin."
There the two great national societies stood--one aristocratic, the
other democratic, one appealing to the ruling class, the other holding
in bonds of fellowship the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural,
the professional and the industrial woman.
Every belligerent president or premier has faced exactly the same
perplexity. What woman, what society, is to be recognized as leader? The
question has brought beads of perspiration to the foreheads of
statesmen.
France solved the difficulty urbanely. It said "yes" to each and all. It
promised coöperation and kept the promise. By affably--always affably
and hospitably--accepting this service from one society, and suggesting
another pressing need to its competitor, it sorted out capabilities, and
warded off duplication. Perhaps this did not bring the fullest
efficiency, but the loss was more than made up, no doubt, by a free
field for initiative. Britain ignored all existing organizations of
women, and after a year and a half of puzzlement created a separate
government department for their mobilization. America struck out still
another course. It took the heads of several national societies, bound
them in one committee, to which it gave, perhaps with the idea of
avoiding any danger of friction, neither power nor funds.
Germany faced the same critical moment for decision. The government
wanted efficient use of woman-power on the land, in the factory, in the
home, and that quickly. It made use of the best existing machinery. Dr.
Gertrud Baumer visited the Ministerium des Innern, and on August 1 she
issued a call for the mobilization of women for service to the
Fatherland in the Nationale Frauendienst. Under the aegis of the
government, with the national treasury behind her, Dr. Baumer summoned
the women of the Empire. By order, every woman and every organization of
women was to fall in line under the Frauendienst in each village and
city for "the duration of the war." [3]
In each army district, the government appointed a woman as directress,
and by order to town and provincial authorities made the Frauendienst
part of local executive affairs.
Among the immediate duties laid upon the Frauendienst by the authorities
was the task of registering all needy persons, of providing cheap eating
places, opening workrooms, and setting up nurseries for children,
especially for those who were motherless and those whose fathers had
fallen at the front and whose mothers were in some gainful pursuit. With
these duties went the administrative service of coöperating with the
government in "keeping up an even supply of foodstuffs, and controlling
the buying and selling of food."
Germany anticipated as did no other belligerent the unemployment which
would follow a declaration of war, and prepared to meet the condition. A
great deal of army work, such as tent sewing, belts for cartridges,
bread sacks, and sheets for hospitals, was made immediately available
for the women thrown out of luxury trades. In the first month of the war
the Frauendienst opened work-rooms in all great centers; machinery was
installed by magic and through the six work-rooms in Berlin alone
twenty-three thousand women were given paid employment in one week.
Such efforts could not, of course, absorb the surplus labor, for
unemployment was very great. Eighty percent of the women's hat-makers
and milliners were out of work, seventy-two percent of the workers in
glass and fifty-eight percent in china. The Frauendienst investigated
two hundred and fifty-five thousand needy cases, and in Berlin alone
found sixty thousand women who had lost their employment. Charity had to
render help. Here, again, it is an example of the alertness of the
organization and its close connection with the government that the
Berlin magistracy deputed to twenty-three Hilfscommissionen from the
Frauendienst the work of giving advice and charity relief to the
unemployed. Knitting rooms were opened, clothing depots, mending rooms,
where donated clothing was repaired, and in one month fifty-six thousand
orders for milk, five hundred thousand for bread, and three hundred
thousand for meals were distributed for the city authorities.
The adjustment to war requirements went on more quickly in Germany than
in any other country. Before a year had passed the surplus hands had
been absorbed, and a shortage of labor power was beginning to be felt.
And now opens the war drama set with the same scene everywhere. Women
hurry forward to take up the burden laid down by men, and to assume the
new occupations made necessary by the organization of the world for
military conflict. To tell of Germany is merely to speak in bigger
numbers. Women in munitions? Of course, well over the million mark.
Trolley conductors? Of course, six hundred in Berlin alone before the
first Christmas. Women are making the fuses, fashioning the big shells,
and at the same heavy machines used by the men. That speaks volumes--the
same heavy machines. Great Britain and France have in every case
introduced lighter machinery for their women. But, whatever the
conditions, in Germany the women are handling high explosives, sewing
heavy saddlery, operating the heaviest drill machines. Women have been
put on the "hardest jobs hitherto filled by men." In the
German-Luxemburg Mining and Furnace Company at Differdingen, they are
found doing work at the slag and blast furnaces which had always
required men of great endurance. They work on the same shifts as the
men, receive the same pay, but are not worked overtime "because they
must go home and perform their domestic duties."
One feels the weight of the German system. Patient women shoulder double
burdens. They always did.
In the Post and Telegraph department there is an army of fifty thousand
women. The telephone service is entirely in their hands, and running
more smoothly than formerly. Dr. Käthe Schirmacher declares comfortingly
in the _Kriegsfrau_ that "one must not forget that these women know many
important bits of information--and keep silent." Women have learned to
keep a secret!
One hundred and eighty nurses, experts with the X-ray, were in the front
line dressing stations in the early days of the war, and before a week
of conflict had passed women were in the Field Post, and Frau Reimer,
organizer of official chauffeurs, was on the western line of attack.
Agriculture claims more women than any occupation in Germany. They were
always on the farm, perhaps they are happier there now since they
themselves are in command. It is said that "the peasants work in the
boots and trousers of their husbands and ride in the saddle." War has
liberated German women from the collar and put them on horseback!
But strangest and most unexpected of all is the professional and
administrative use of women. The government has sent women architects
and interior decorators to East Prussia to plan and carry through
reconstruction work. Over a hundred--to be exact, one hundred and
sixteen at last accounts--have taken the places of men in
administrative departments connected with the railways. Many widows who
have shown capacity have been put in government positions of importance
formerly held by their husbands. Women have become farm managers,
superintendents of dairy industries, and representatives of landed
proprietors.
The disseminating of all instruction and information for women on war
economies was delegated to the League of Women's Domestic Science Clubs.
The Berlin course was held in no less a place than the Abgeordnetenhaus,
and the Herrenhaus opened its doors wide on Rural Women's Day when
Agricultural Week was held at the capital.
When the full history of the war comes to be written, no doubt one
reason for Germany's marvelous power to stand so long against the world
will be found in her use of every brain and muscle of the nation. This
has been for her no exclusive war. Her entire people to their last ounce
of energy have been engaged.
And this supreme service on the part of German women seeks democratic
expression. From them comes the clearest, bravest word that has reached
us across the border. The most hopeful sign is this manifesto from the
suffrage organizations to the government: "Up to the present Germany
has stood in the lowest rank of nations as regards women's rights. In
most civilized lands women already have been given a large share in
public affairs. German women have been granted nothing except within the
most insignificant limits. In New Zealand, Australia and most American
States, and even before the war in Finland and Norway, they had been
given political rights; to-day, Sweden, Russia and many other countries
give them a full or limited franchise. The war has brought a full
victory to the women of England, Canada, Russia and Denmark, and large
concessions are within sight in France, Holland and Hungary.
"Among us Germans not only the national but even the commercial
franchise is denied, and even a share in the industrial and commercial
courts. In the demand for the democratization of German public life our
legislators do not seem even to admit the existence of women.
"But during the war the cooperation of women in public life has
unostentatiously grown from year to year until to-day the number of
women engaged in various callings in Germany exceeds the number of men.
"The work they are doing includes all spheres of male activity; without
them it would no longer be possible to support the economic life of the
people. Women have done their full share in the work of the community.
"Does not this performance of duty involve the right to share in the
building up and extension of the social order?
"The women protest against this lack of political rights, in virtue both
of their work for the community and of their work as human beings. They
demand political equality with men. They demand the direct, equal and
secret franchise for all legislative bodies, full equality in the
communes and in legal representation of their interests.
"This first joint pronouncement on women's demands will be followed by
others until the victory of our cause is won."
[Footnote 3: "Die Frauenvereine jeder Stadt verbinden sich für die Dauer
des Krieges zur Organization Nationaler Frauendienst die zu Berlin am
1ten August begründet wurde."]
VI
WOMEN OVER THE TOP IN AMERICA
American women have begun to go over the top. They are going up the
scaling-ladder and out into All Man's Land. Perhaps love of adventure
tempts them, perhaps love of money, or a fine spirit of service, but
whatever the propelling motive, we are seeing them make the venture.