POUR LA PATRIE
In one of the most widely read of French magazines I came across a
story which illustrates the wonderful spirit and loyalty of the French
mother. She loves her children with a devotion unsurpassed anywhere.
But more deeply and more deathlessly she loves France.
The story was contained in an article written by a French correspondent
who witnessed the repatriation at Evian-les-Bains of a large number of
women and children long held prisoners by the Germans. Among them was a
woman and her two little boys, Jean, aged five, and Gilbert, three. The
mother was in the last stages of tuberculosis, and she had just managed
to live long enough to get her children to Evian. Then she died. But
before she died she said to the French Red Cross representative who had
promised to care for the little ones: “I want you to make workmen of
them. The country will so much need skilled workers.”
This heroic mother, who with her last breath dedicated her children
to the rebuilding of France, was a simple, plain woman of the people.
It is hardly likely that she had ever said a single word about
patriotism. She lived it, and so do all French women. And there, I
verily believe, is the secret of the vitality and the unconquerable
strength of the French nation. At their mother’s knee the men of France
learn that the first love and allegiance of their hearts and lives are
due their country. They never forget that lesson.
I do not know who ever invented the fiction that French women are not
maternal. It is true that they do not, as a rule, have many children,
but that is easily understood when one studies the French economic and
social conditions. In all families outside the wage earning class the
girl children must be provided with dowries. It is the custom, and a
dowerless girl has a difficult time getting married. Also, under French
law, all children inherit equally their parents’ estate. Land holdings,
as a rule, are very moderate, and if there were many children it would
be impossible to educate and equip them for life.
It has never been the custom, as with us, for girls of the middle
classes to earn their living. Until very recently the _jeune fille_,
the young, unmarried girl, hardly ever went out unescorted. The
prototype of our American college bred, tennis playing, independent,
self-supporting girl did not exist in France. The one ideal of the
gently reared French girl was marriage and a home. And in the home she
became a real power.
Theoretically all women are powers in their homes. The power of the
French wife and mother is not theoretical, it is real, it is legalized.
A Frenchman who does not consult his wife in every business matter is
the exception. A son who does not refer all his affairs to his mother’s
consideration is a bad son. Under French law the family council, which
includes near relatives as well as fathers and mothers, settles most
questions involving minor children. It is in the family council where
marriages are arranged and marriage contracts agreed upon.
Women rule these family councils to a very great extent. Their voices
in all domestic matters are listened to with respect. You will see
bearded men give up a cherished project, even a love match, because
_Maman_ could not be persuaded of its wisdom. A man can not legally
marry without his mother’s consent until he is twenty-five years old.
Because of their great power in the home French women have not left
the domestic life to the same extent that English and American women
have done. They have not insisted on entering all the trades and
professions. They have not demanded the vote. But the war has brought
great changes into French life, and the women of France will never
again be as they were before. They, too, must go out and work. They
must accept the responsibilities of political life. They must socialize
their maternal love. They are doing it already.
When the Germans invaded northern France in 1914, when most of the men
were swept away into the fighting, the women assumed the burden not
only of family life but of community life as well. Often the German
commander, entering a town or village and demanding the presence of the
mayor, would be met by a stout, gray-haired matron who would calmly
announce, “I am the mayor.”
So she was, and had been since _monsieur le maire_ had been mobilized,
or perhaps murdered by the invading Huns. Many a French town and
village with its hapless population has been saved from utter
annihilation by the intrepid courage and determination of a woman in
authority. More than once the woman was a nun.
France knows better than ever of what stuff its women are made, and
the future status of the women is absolutely theirs to decide. There
is plenty of evidence that they will decide on more independence and a
wider range of activities.
I visited French munitions works, including the famous Citroen factory
in Paris, where shells for France’s celebrated 75’s are turned out. I
sat down at luncheon in the vast canteen of the factory with thousands
of workers, fully half of them women. Before the war most of those
women would have been engaged in sewing work at home, at very low
wages. Seclusion of women went with family self-respect.
Now the girls were working in a shell factory. They were in overalls,
some of them, and they were doing men’s work. All through this
tremendous establishment I met girls driving motor shell carriers at
high speed. I saw them working in the flaming forge rooms. I saw them
cutting through steel bars with acetylene torches. I saw them at
lathes shaping shells. I saw them making bullets. They work ten hours a
day, where eight had been the legal limit before the war. They do not
complain. It is for France, _pour la patrie_.
There has not been, as there was in England, a great pouring into
industry of the women of the middle classes. The women workers were
recruited from the home workers and from the luxury trades, so-called.
There were many more of these in France, which was the finery mine for
all the world, than in other countries. Thousands of girls and women
who made clothes and hats and _bijoux_ were thrown out of work and were
easily transferred to the munitions trades.
They seem to like the change. They are a much more coquettish class
than the English workers. They do not wear any hats, as a rule, but
they spend a good part of their wages on their hair. Even in the
factory a girl in overalls working at a forge has her black hair
elaborately coiffured and shining with brilliantine. Usually her hair
is dressed with bright pins and sidecombs. What the French working
girls would do if the war lasts long enough to exhaust the world’s
supply of rhinestone combs I really do not know.
The French woman who escorted me through the Citroen factory deplored
the fact that the working girls are beginning to wear dressy clothes
and high heeled boots. It did not used to be so, she said. I pointed
out that the girls formerly hadn’t the money to buy these things, and
that the evils of democracy were cured only by more democracy. Women
can’t learn, all at once, how to spend wisely.
The women of the French middle classes and those of the old aristocracy
have gone into war work, if not into war industries. The advent of so
many more women in factory work brought a new sense of responsibility
to the more fortunately placed women. They have done a great deal for
the workers to keep them in health and strength, to take care of the
children of married workers, and even to raise wages.
The Citroen factory is such a model establishment that it has been
written about in half a dozen American papers and magazines. It pays
very good wages, and the minimum for piece work, eight francs a
day--about a dollar and forty-five cents--is shared by men and women
alike. Most of the workers average ten and twelve francs a day.
In this factory an excellent noon meal is served at cost, about thirty
cents, with wine extra. The meal is prepared by professional cooks in
spotless kitchens and it is well served. But not every factory has a
canteen, and many have been established and are maintained by women
of wealth for the benefit of the workers. I visited one of these in
company with the principal founder, formerly a woman of the exclusive
“great world,” but now a hard and indefatigable worker.
“These girls must have good food,” she said. “It is a tradition in
France, and if we lose it we lose something national. We who have time
must feed those who have no time except for toil.”
The luncheon served at this canteen was as dainty, and it was perhaps
even more carefully composed, than an expensive repast in a Fifth
avenue tea room. The rich lady and her American guest sat down and
ate it with the girls from the munitions factory a block away, and we
enjoyed it as much as they did.
Every American woman knows the beautifully embroidered French
underwear, which over here is rather expensive but in France could once
be purchased for very little. The Paris “white sales” before the war
was the trade event of the year for women. But what few women took into
consideration when buying this lovely underwear so cheaply was that the
women who made the garments received appallingly low wages for their
work.
The underwear was made by women working at home. Pride kept them from
leaving home, and besides, there were often young children to care for.
So the home workers toiled far into the night, sewing and embroidering
the dainty things that were to adorn the soft bodies of richer women.
For their long toil they often received less than a franc a day.
I met the woman who was chiefly responsible for the alleviation of this
great blot on the civilization of France. Her name is Madame Viollet,
and she has devoted her life to the problems of the poor, in much the
same wholehearted way as Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Lillian Wald and
other well-known American women have. Like them she lives with her poor.
The problem of the home worker was long her chief province, and since
the war she has succeeded in having a minimum wage law passed through
the French Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, giving to the women who
work at home four or five times as much as they ever received before.
“I do not wish all women to work in factories,” she said to me.
“Expectant mothers, women with young children, delicate women, ought
to stay at home. And, since they must earn, it is the business of the
state to see that they are not cheated.”
Not only did Madame Viollet secure for the home workers a minimum wage,
she organized them into a _syndicat_, or union, to enforce the law, and
to raise their own status in various ways. This was a remarkable thing
to do, because French women are totally unused to the idea of trade
unions. The men rarely admit them to their unions, and the strong woman
labor leader of England and the United States is practically unknown.
But the home workers are organized now, and after the war we shall pay
more for our French embroidered underwear.