_THE GREATEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD_
I saw her first in a great base hospital in the north of England.
Her ward was filled with wounded British soldiers. In writing of her
one hesitates to use the only word in the language of our race that
expresses the adoration of those young heroes as their eyes companioned
her from cot to cot. One hesitates to use the word because it has been
associated with so many small and trifling things, because it has
become such a commonplace. But it is the only word: they _worshipped_
her.
What I saw in their eyes that day I have seen in my mother's eyes as
she arose from prayer; I saw it once in the eyes of a battle-widow
kneeling before a shrine in Paris; I caught a glimpse of it in the eyes
of my son when, leaning against the cradling embrace of his mother's
arms, he looked for an instant with a baby's questioning into his
mother's face; I beheld it in supernatural glory near the fortress city
of Toul when a soldier of my country, a lad in years but a veteran in
sacrifice, in the delirium of his suffering whispered that name which
is above all other names in the vocabulary of the dying. It is not the
tribute of either sex exclusively, nor of any particular age; it is
the supreme testimony of the human soul, and to those who behold it a
fleeting glimpse of the things that are "hid with Christ in God."
This woman was not old, and she was not young. Her hair was white, and
her cheeks were the vivid hue of her native land. She was not beautiful
by the artist's test, but it is seldom given to any one to study a more
attractive face. A stranger would always see first and remember last
her eyes and her mouth; why, I cannot say, for as I write I find it
impossible to describe them. She was just above the medium in height,
athletic of figure; and she moved about with the unhurried swiftness of
the born nurse.
But the impression she left upon me was not the impression of one who
deftly, tenderly cares for the sick and the injured. When my eyes
fell upon her, and as they followed her, and when I turned away from
the great hospital, I thought of my own mother. Now, although I am
writing of her, the face that rises before me is not her face; it is my
mother's face.
She stopped presently by a bed that held a fearfully broken lad from
London's great East Side. In half a dozen places the shrapnel had
sought his vitals, and quite as many times the kindly cruel scalpel of
the surgeon had searched out the creeping poison. The foot of the bed
was raised so that the bandaged head was inches below the level of
the tired feet. When she touched the boy, he smiled. He could not see
her,--his eyes were covered,--and he could not move his head. Even the
smile must have cost him pain. But I never knew before that a man's
mouth could be so beautiful. It was as if the lips had responded to
something electric in that white-gowned woman's touch; it was as if
her fingers had healing in them, as if her hands bore the same divine
ministries that the hands of the Galilean carried to the halt and lame
and blind nineteen hundred years before. I found myself whispering,
"And the child was cured from that very hour."
I saw her next in France and not far behind the lines, and I saw,
in the eyes of the men she ministered to there, what I had seen in
England. I never learned her story. Somehow I never cared to know it;
I never inquired. Once when a chaplain started to tell me, I stopped
him. I knew that it would be brave and beautiful; but the war has
many stories, and we must save our dreams. I prefer to remember her
in the spirit of the words of one her hands were laid upon: "I wonder
what she did before she went to war--for she has gone to war as truly
as any soldier. I am sure in the peaceful years she must have loved
and been greatly loved. Perhaps _he_ was killed out there. Now she is
ivory-white with over-service, and spends all her days in loving. She
will not spare herself. Her eyes,--ah! her eyes,--they have the old
frank, comprehending look of her yesterdays; but they are ringed with
being weary. Only her lips hold a touch of the old color. Over dying
men she stoops, and is to them the incarnation of their mother or of
the woman, had they lived, they would have loved."
I saw her first in England and then in France. I shall not see her
again. In the air a winged monster paused and let loose his fury.
_She is not dead, but gone to her coronation._ She lives to-day in
the hearts of ten times ten thousand women and thousands more, this
greatest mother in the world.
* * * * *
I came one bitter night in February into the crowded, dirty station at
Toul. One of my travelling companions was a lieutenant of the "Rainbow
Division," who hailed from Marion, O., and who talked a lot about his
wife and baby. His head was clean-shaven, "because," he said, "kerosene
was expensive and hard to procure!"
On the same train with us were a dozen Red Cross nurses transferring to
a new base hospital. They were wonderful girls. Until morning brought
the cars that were to carry them on to their destination nearer the
line they sat on their blanket-rolls. While they waited, they sang
"Keep the Home Fires Burning," "Over There"; and they sang the old
songs, "Kentucky Home," "Swanee River," "Tenting To-night on the
Old Camp-Ground"; and they sang some of the hymns that have body and
distinction and that last, "Rock of Ages," "Nearer, My God, to Thee,"
"Lead, Kindly Light"; the "Marseillaise" was sung again and again,
while we all stood, and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The night rang with
their voices.
During the informal concert a French troop-train pulled in, and the
poilus tumbled out. They heard the singing; and, although they could
not understand the words of the songs, they caught the spirit of the
singers. Like statues they stood leaning upon their long guns and
listening to those women of a far land brought near by the ministry of
a common pain. About us were the high-piled sand-bags that re-enforced
the abris (shelters) conveniently placed for a quick retreat in case
of an air raid. Only a few very faint lights were shown. But the faces
of those French soldiers seemed to build a warming fire on the station
platform, and the choir lighted a candle that did not burn out. It was
a night never to be forgotten.
* * * * *
Wonderful is woman, this woman of war!
"The bravest battle that ever was fought,
Shall I tell you where and when?
On the maps of the world you will find it not;
'Twas fought by the mothers of men."
And this woman of war is the woman of work. As, in the brave days of
old, woman, free of spirit as she was free of limb, carried the extra
weapons of her mate into the heart of the conflict, and inspired him to
superhuman deeds, bearing equal share with him in the front of battle,
so the woman of to-day, for the first time in long generations given
equal freedom with man to do the world's work, has sprung to the side
of her mate. In the factories of England, in the fields of Russia,
in the mills and mines of France, on the firing line itself, and in
the Red Cross behind every bloody trench of the war-mad world, she
is giving herself, body, mind, and soul, for the preservation of the
institutions of her people.
I have seen her pushing her cart through the streets of Rennes and
Tours, bearing great loads down the highways of Brittany, tilling
fields with the first glimpse of spring, close behind the lines. She is
in all places, for her tasks are the tasks of the universal need.
But England gave me my best opportunity to study carefully the woman
of work. A girl sold me my ticket at Liverpool; another took it.
A girl gathered the baggage together at the Paddington station in
London. Young women were at the desk of the hotel--not a man in sight
anywhere. Women are conductors on the London trams and guards as well
as ticket-sellers in the tubes. I saw them doing the heaviest labor
of canal-boats and harbor tugs. They were ploughing in the country
and driving munition-vans in the cities. In one of the greatest
shell-factories I saw scores of young women at lathes, and other scores
managing intricate machinery with deftness and precision. What price
the next generation will pay for these strained bodies--some of the
loads are necessarily heavy ones--I do not know, but womanhood asks no
questions when the voice of sacrifice calls.
One is impressed by the number of wedding-rings worn by the women of
work; thousands of wives, yes, and widows, of soldiers are serving
Britain in these new ways. Many must add their earnings to the scant
home store, and so the babies are cared for by grandparents or public
nurseries while the mothers labor for the cause the father fights for
or may have died for. In munition-factories matrons are provided who
look after the interests of the younger girls. Of course, grave moral
problems are arising from these new and complicated relations of women
to the world that has for so long been man's world exclusively. These
problems will not be solved in a day.
After three years of war 4,766,000 women were employed in England,
or 1,421,000 more than were employed in 1914. The number of women
workers is increasing at the rate of 18,000 every week. The Minister of
Munitions announces that from "sixty to eighty per cent of the machine
work on shells, fuses, and trench-warfare supplies is now performed by
women. They have been trained in aëroplane-manufacture, gun-work, and
in almost every other branch of manufacture."
In a statement made later, in the House of Commons, the Minister of
Munitions referred to the fact that nearly one thousand large guns
were destroyed or captured, and between four and five thousand machine
guns destroyed or captured, in the great German offensive which began
on the twenty-first of March, 1918, and that in this same period the
ammunition lost amounted to about the total production of from one to
three weeks. But he declared that the loss had been more than made up
in less than one month, and that nine-tenths of the huge output of
shells which was then sufficient for the continuation of an intensive
battle throughout the summer was due to the labor of three-quarters of
a million women.
I heard a great iron-merchant say: "Ah! sir, the women are saving the
country. When I myself urged a holiday upon them,--and not in a year
have they taken one,--they said: 'What will our men at the front do
when we stop? Will the Germans sit back and rest too? We will have our
holiday when the war is over and the lads come home.'"
She was just a slip of a girl; but she smiled at the baby boy in her
arms, and said, "His father is in France." She continued: "This is
my first day with him in ten months. He is asleep when I get home at
night, and he is asleep in the morning when I leave for the shop."
And she smiled again as she added: "O, he is a fine sleeper, sir, and
the ladies at the church [referring to the nursery] have no trouble
with him. It is good, though, to have him in my arms with his eyes
open." And, though I blinked my eyes hard as I looked at this brave
English girl having an enforced vacation from shell-making because of
"back-strain," she had no tears in her eyes.
And in excess of all that her hands find to do, as when Spartan mothers
sent their sons away and with the same spirit, Democracy's woman of
work is giving her flesh and her blood to be food for the carrion-birds
of countries she has never seen, while still beneath her heart she
carries the developing life that is the hope of the future.
I saw a great parade in London, one hundred thousand women marching in
a vast demonstration after the triumph of suffrage--mothers, wives,
sisters, and sweethearts, little daughters dressed in white, and
gray-haired battle-widows of the Crimea. The faces of the marchers were
inspiring, but my eyes did not rest upon them. I looked longest at the
black masses of men and boys crowding close against the lines that
kept the street open for the parade. To the eternal credit of manhood
let it be said that the faces of the men were generally faces of old
men and that the faces of the boys were the faces of children.
But I saw more than the crowd of men and boys. On those faces I saw the
light of discovery, and I seemed to hear a voice, a voice that speaks
down through the years from a Roman cross, "Behold thy mother." The
clamor of the unparalleled conflict has been the quiet in which for
the first time woman's cry for justice has been really heard and fully
understood.
Great Britain, the butt of our jokes because of her stolid slowness
and stubbornness in an opinion or tradition, saw her window-smashers
turn to munition-makers, saw her social butterflies don the garb of Red
Cross nurses, saw her women rise to help win the war; and Great Britain
was convinced.
And what have we found this "new woman," this woman of war, to be?
First of all, we have discovered that she is not new; that she is the
woman of old, the woman of yesterday, to-day, and forever.
But, while woman has not changed, her times have; and with intelligent
heroism she is fighting against fearful odds, to adjust the machinery
of society to meet modern needs. One has declared that already
three-fourths of woman's former sphere has slipped away from her. Back
at the beginnings of the race she was in all things partner of the man.
She not only bore children and reared them; she was armor-bearer as
well, tent-maker, planter, tender, and reaper of the harvests.
But gradually changes came. Men no longer spent all of their time
in fighting or preparing to fight. They began to relieve women
in the fields and to assume more and more the heavier portion of
building-operations. Women found more time for the nursery and kitchen,
for the loom and spinning-wheel.
As civilization progressed, still fewer men went away to battle, and
war became less frequent. Minds with leisure became inventive, and
machinery simplified household labors. Even the nursery was invaded;
for the cry was no longer, "Give me sons, many sons," but, "Give me fit
sons," and the honor in mere numbers in childbearing gave way to the
distinction of quality as well.
Then, too, the home itself reached out beyond the pioneer clearing
which formerly held all of its activities, until its interests became
identified with all the problems of a society no longer bounded by
family, village, tribal, or even racial lines. It is as unreasonable to
insist that women in their social and political relations to-day remain
as they were before the advent of the public bakery, the tailor-shop,
the candy-kitchen, the public school, and the legalized saloon as it
would be to insist that they go back to the spinning-wheel or that they
assume again as a normal occupation the hod-carrying of the builder.
Civilization faces a female ultimatum to-day. Ah, more than that,
it is a racial ultimatum; for effete women produce their kind, and
final racial standards are fixed in the womb. This is the ultimatum:
_Parasite or partner?_
Woman must be admitted on equal terms to participation in all
activities of modern society, or she must occupy an ever-narrowing
sphere that will crowd her at last to the soft couch of voluptuous
idleness, where Roman splendor waned and Grecian greatness died.
Do you say that woman's sphere is in the home? Because I so believe I
am intensely concerned that she shall find no barred doors anywhere
that open to knowledge and power which will make her more competent in
her paramount task of motherhood. For the sake of the future we must
not consent to send woman into the social arena short of being fully
armed.
Woman is to-day following the unerring sex instinct that warns her to
keep always by the side of her mate. Her cry for political freedom is a
plea for and a movement toward a fuller understanding, a more blessed
helpfulness, between husband and wife, mother and son, male and female.
_Those who grow not together, grow apart._
I have seen towering trees fall before the joined cuttings of two
axe-men who, working together, with blow following blow, hewed to the
heart of the monarch of the forest. I have seen a giant workman laying
the bricks of a city pavement, with his left and right hands toiling in
perfect unison and with almost incredible rapidity. In the crash of a
great line drive on the gridiron I have felt the swaying of the human
mass in deadlock, and then the impact of the reserve from the back
field that has destroyed the balance and forced the ball over the line.
Just as the tree falls slowly before the attack of a single axe-man,
just as the paving waits on a "one-handed" layer of bricks, just as the
gridiron struggle remains undecided until it has felt the drive of the
reserve back, so society waits to-day on the fulness of the strength of
womanhood.
For the times that are to come with the close of the war we must now
prepare; for the reforms that will be possible then, for that mighty
new dispensation of social justice, we must doubly arm ourselves.
No resources of power available for the world programme of peace,
sobriety, economic freedom, and democracy, dare be overlooked. Hear the
female ultimatum to the race: _a drag or a lift, a plaything or a mate,
a parasite or a partner_.