These women and children struggled to keep food production close to
normal, but failed.]
The fact that women were employed in foundries and steel-works, in the
manner stated above, is chiefly remarkable for the evidence furnished
that woman is able to do much of the work for which in the past she has
been thought unsuited, especially if her deficiency in bodily strength
is discounted by the use of machinery. At the Weiss works I was told
that the women doing heavy work with the aid of mechanical energy were
in every respect the equal of the men who had done the same thing before
the war.
The war, then, has demonstrated in Central Europe that the woman is far
less the inferior of man than was held formerly. To that extent the
status of women has been bettered. When a man has seen members of the
frail sex fashion steel into shells he is thereafter less inclined to
look upon that sex as a plaything which an indulgent Scheme provided for
him. Over his mind may then flash the thought that woman is, after all,
the other half of humanity--not only the mother of men, but their equal,
not a mere complement of the human race, but a full-fledged member of
it.
A little later I was the guest of Halideh Edib Hannym Effendi at her
private school in the Awret Basar quarter of Stamboul, Constantinople.
The Turkish feminist and promoter of education had asked me to take a
look at the establishment in which she was training Turkish girls and
boys along the lines adhered to in the Occident. She had arrived at the
conclusion that the _medressi_--Koran school system--was all wrong, for
the reason that it sacrificed the essential to the non-essential. Though
her influence with the Young Turk government and the Sheik-ul-Islam was
great, she had not asked that her experiments with Western education be
undertaken at the expense of the public. Her father is wealthy.
Several teachers had been invited to the tea. Like Halideh Hannym they
were "Young Turk" women, despite the fact that most of them still
preferred the non-transparent veil--_yashmak_--to the transparent silk
_büründshük_.