*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 68257 ***

Transcriber’s Notes

Hyphenation has been standardised.

Changes made are noted at the end of the book.




    WOMEN WANTED

    MABEL POTTER DAGGETT




    WOMEN WANTED

    _The story written in blood red
    letters on the horizon of the
    Great World War_


    BY
    MABEL POTTER DAGGETT
    AUTHOR OF “IN LOCKERBIE STREET,” ETC.


    _Illustrated_


    NEW YORK
    GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




    COPYRIGHT, 1918,
    BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


    COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918,
    BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY


    PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




    TO MY FRIEND

    KATHERINE LECKIE

    THE ILLUMINATION OF
    WHOSE PERSONALITY HAS
    LIGHTED MY PATHWAY TO
    TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS
    AFFECTIONATELY
    DEDICATED




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                        PAGE

    I    GLIMPSING THE GREAT WORLD WAR              13

    II   CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES                  48

    III  HER COUNTRY’S CALL                         82

    IV   WOMEN WHO WEAR WAR JEWELRY                115

    V    THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE                     147

    VI   THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE                 201

    VII  TAKING TITLE IN THE PROFESSIONS           239

    VIII AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT                280

    IX   THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY                308

    X    THE RING AND THE WOMAN                    338

[Illustration:

  _Page 106_

 MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE

 When she led 40,000 English women through the streets of London in
 July, 1915. This procession is the vanguard in the march of all the
 women of the world to economic independence.
]




ILLUSTRATIONS


    MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE THE
    MARCH OF THE ENGLISH WOMEN INTO
    INDUSTRY                               _Frontispiece_

                                                       PAGE

    THE STAFF OF THE WOMEN’S WAR HOSPITAL, ENDELL
    ST. W. C., LONDON                                   64

    MRS. H. J. TENNANT OF LONDON                        96

    VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY OF PARIS IN
    THE RED CROSS SERVICE                              120

    LADY RALPH PAGET, CELEBRATED WAR HEROINE           128

    MRS. KATHERINE M. HARLEY OF LONDON, WHO DIED
    AT THE FRONT                                       136

    MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE OF NEW YORK            202

    MLLE. SANUA AT THE HEAD OF THE PARIS SCHOOL OF
    COMMERCE FOR WOMEN                                 224

    DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON, ENGLAND’S FIRST
    WOMAN PHYSICIAN                                    256

    MISS NANCY NETTLEFORD OF LONDON                    264

    MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG OF PARIS, FAMOUS LAWYER      272

    DR. ROSALIE S. MORTON OF NEW YORK                  276

    MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON           290

    MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER OF PARIS                   298

    DR. SCHISKINA YAVEIN OF PETROGRAD                  304

    HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH               320




WOMEN WANTED




CHAPTER I

GLIMPSING THE GREAT WORLD WAR


“Who goes there?”

I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war offices of Europe.
Automatically my hand slides over my left hip. But to-day my tailored
skirt drapes smoothly there.

The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As
regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to
buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my side
and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to be
thoughtful like that when you’re carrying credentials on which at any
moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As faithfully
as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them over: my
letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my
passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all the
rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way. Ah, they
were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to
my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done.

The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. “Who goes there?”
These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their belts
and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows and rows
of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of them! I
still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the other.
This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I jump at the
sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling something’s
going to catch you if you don’t watch out. Well, you have it like
that for a long time after you’ve been in the war zone. Will it be a
submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel?

It was on a summer’s day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of the
_Pictorial Review_. “Look!” I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his
desk. “See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the
battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!”

He brushed aside the magazine “lay out” before him, and lifted his eyes
to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the feminists of New
York he has been known as the man with the vision. “Yes,” he agreed,
“you are right. It is the wonder that is coming. Will you go over there
and find out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation means to
the woman’s cause?”

And he handed me my European commission. The next morning when I
applied for my passport I began to be written down in the great books
of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep to-day. Hear
the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in full. I must
clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must be
able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene between the
Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was born. They
want to know the colour of my husband’s eyes. They will ask for all
that is on my grandfather’s tombstone. They must have my genealogy
through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it
glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the block in Europe,
you see, without meeting some military person who must know.

Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to
proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is
the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with
a look, and he charges: “You’re not a suffragist, are you? Well,” he
goes on severely, “they don’t want any trouble over there. I don’t know
what they’ll do about you over there.” And his voice rises with his
disapproval: “I don’t at all know that I ought to let you go.”

But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me the pen
with which to “sign on the dotted line.” It is the required documentary
evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser and I wouldn’t
speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all governments demand
to know very particularly who goes there when it happens to be a
woman. You’re wishing trouble on yourself to be a suffragist almost
as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an alien enemy.
There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over from say 1908 —that
you may break something, if it is only a military rule. Why are you
wandering about the world anyhow? You’ll take up a man’s place in the
boat in a submarine incident. You’ll be so in the way in a bombardment.
And you’ll eat as much sugar in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted
lines as you’re told.

They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away
and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing
event in any day’s work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time
that I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having
finished the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I
lay my troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy
magazine assignment. “There’s going to be some risk,” the editor of the
_Pictorial Review_ said to me that day in his office, with just a note
of hesitation in his voice. “I’ll take it,” I agreed.

The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting adrift from the American
shore. Standing at the steamship’s rail, I am gazing down into faces
that are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through the ocean’s
mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes that look back love into mine?

I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to fade from the great
adventure on which I am embarked. We are steaming steadily out to sea.
Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought for every to-morrow,
that is with a war zone traveller even in his dreams. A cold October
wind whips full in my face. I shiver and turn up my coat collar. But is
it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can no longer see the New York
sky line for the tears in my eyes. And I turn in to my stateroom.

       *       *       *       *       *

There on the white counterpane of my berth stretches a life-preserver
thoughtfully laid out by my steward. On the wall directly above the
wash-stand, a neatly printed card announces: “The occupant of this
room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the starboard side.” It makes quite
definitely clear the circumstances of ocean travel. This is to be no
holiday jaunt. One ought at least to know how to wear a life-preserver.
Before I read my steamer letters, I try mine on. It isn’t a “perfect
36.” “But they don’t come any smaller,” the steward says. “You just
have to fold them over so,” and he ties the strings tight. Will they
hold in the highest sea, I wonder.

The signs above the washstands, I think, have been seen by pretty
nearly every one before lunch time. When we who are taking the Great
Chance together, assemble in the dining-room, each of us has glimpsed
the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot house. We all
earnestly hope it will be the captain who will take us across the
Atlantic. But we know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the
boatman Charon who will take us silently across the Styx.

Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be always
going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present sensation.
I don’t know just how many of my fellow travellers go to bed at night
with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their lips. But I
know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old:

    Now I lay me down to sleep
    I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
    And should I die before I wake,
    I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in
this same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of
inspection to one’s personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish
to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean
over the steamship’s rail to look for the great letters four feet high
and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea
German craft to notice that this is the neutral _New Amsterdam_ of the
Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its most
savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: “Now that makes
us quite safe, don’t you think?” And somebody answers as promptly as
expected. “Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t sink us when they see that sign.”
And no one speaks the thought that’s plain in every face: “But Huns
make ‘mistakes.’ And remember the _Lusitania_.”

We always are remembering the _Lusitania_. I never dress for dinner at
night without recalling: And they went down in evening clothes. We play
cards. We dance on deck. But never does one completely while away the
recurring thought: Death snatched them as suddenly as from this my next
play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe that the band is just
beginning.

We read our Mr. Britlings but intermittently. The plot in which we
find ourselves competes with the best seller. Subconsciously I am
always listening for the explosion. If the Germans don’t do it with a
submarine, it may be a floating mine that the last storm has lashed
loose from its moorings.

What is this? Rumour spreads among the steamer chairs. Everybody
rises. Little groups gather with lifted glasses. And—it is a piece of
driftwood sighted on the wide Atlantic. That thrill walks off in about
three times around the deck.

But what is that, out there, beyond the steamer’s path? Right over
there where the fog is lifting? Surely, yes, that shadowy outline.
Don’t you see it? Why, it’s growing larger every minute. I believe it
is! Oh, yes, I’m sure they look like that. Wait. Well, if it were, it
does seem as if the torpedo would have been here by now. Ah, we shall
not be sunk this time after all! Our periscope passes. It is clearly
now only a steamship’s funnel against the horizon.

Then one day there is an unusual stir of activity on deck. The sailors
are stripping the canvas from off the lifeboats. The great crane is
hauling the life rafts from out the hold. Oh, what is going to happen?
The most nervous passenger wants right away to know. And the truthful
answer to her query is, that no one can tell. But we are making ready
now for shipwreck. In these days, methodically, like this it is done.
It has to be, as you approach the more intense danger zone of a mined
coast. You see you never can tell.

I go inside once more to try the straps of my life-preserver. But we
are sailing through a sunlit sea. And at dinner the philosopher at our
table—he is a Hindu from Calcutta—says smilingly, “Now this will do
very nicely for shipwreck weather, gentlemen, very nicely for shipwreck
weather.” It is the round-faced Hollander at my right, of orthodox
Presbyterian faith, who protests earnestly, “Ah, but please no. Do not
jest.” The next day when the dishes slide back and forth between the
table racks, none of us laugh when the Hollander says solemnly, “See,
but if God should call us now.” Ah, if he should, our life boats would
never last us to Heaven. They would crumple like floats of paper in
Neptune’s hand. Eating our dessert, we look out on the terrible green
and white sea that licks and slaps at the portholes and all of us are
very still. The lace importer from New York at my left, is the most
quiet of all.

For eight days and nights we have escaped all the perils of the deep.
And now it is the morning of the ninth day. You count them over like
that momentously as God did when he made the world. What will to-morrow
bring forth? Well, one prepares of course for landing.

I sit up late, nervously censoring my note book through. The nearer
we get to the British coast, the more incriminating it appears to be
familiar with so much as the German woman movement. I dig my blue
pencil deep through the name of Frau Cauer. I rip open the package of
my letters of introduction. What will they do to a person who is going
to meet a pacifist by her first name? That’s a narrow escape. Another
letter is signed by a perfectly good loyal American who, however,
has the misfortune to have inherited a Fatherland name from some
generations before. Oh, I cannot afford to be acquainted with either
of my friends. I’ve got to be pro-ally all wool and yard wide clear to
the most inside seams of my soul. I’ve got to avoid even the appearance
of guilt. So, stealthily I tiptoe from my stateroom to drop both
compromising letters into the sea.

Like this a journalist goes through Europe these days editing oneself,
to be acceptable to the rows of men in khaki. So I edit and I edit
and I edit myself until after midnight for the British government’s
inspection. I try to think earnestly. What would a spy do? So that I
may avoid doing it. And I go to bed so anxious lest I act like a spy
that I dream I am one. When I awake on the morning of the tenth day,
all our engines are still. And from bow to stern, our boat is all
a-quiver with glad excitement. We have not been drowned! There beside
us dances the little tender to take us ashore at Falmouth.


FACING THE STEEL LINE OF INQUIRY

The good safe earth is firm beneath our feet before the lace importer
speaks. Then, looking out on the harbor, he says: “On my last business
trip over a few months since, my steamship came in here safely. But the
boat ahead and the next behind each struck a mine.” So the chances of
life are like that, sometimes as close as one in three. But while you
take them as they come, there are lesser difficulties that it’s a great
relief to have some one to do something about. At this very moment I
am devoutly glad for the lace importer near at hand. He is carrying my
bag and holding his umbrella over me in the rain. For, you see, he is
an American man. The more I have travelled, the more certain I have
become that it’s a mistake to be a woman anywhere in the world there
aren’t American men around. In far foreign lands I have found myself
instinctively looking round the landscape for their first aid. The
others, I am sure, mean well. But they aren’t like ours. An Englishman
gave me his card last night at dinner: “Now if I can do anything for
you in London,” he said, and so forth. It was the American man now
holding his umbrella over me in the rain, who came yesterday to my
steamer chair: “It’s going to be dark to-morrow night in London,” he
said, “and the taxicabs are scarce. You must let me see that you reach
your hotel in safety.” And I felt as sure a reliance in him as if we’d
made mud pies together or he’d carried my books to school. You see, you
count on an American man like that.

But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as
you go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my
passport hard. It has been removed from its usual place of secure
safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of being a woman abroad
in war-time. Men have pockets, easy ones to get at informally. I have
among my “most important credentials”—they are in separate packages
carefully labelled like that—a special “diplomatic letter” commending
me officially by the Secretary of State to the protection of all
United States embassies and consulates. When they handed it to me
in Washington, I remember they told me significantly: “We have just
picked out of prison over there, two American correspondents whose
lives we were able to save by the narrowest chance. We don’t want any
international complications. Now, do be careful.”

I’m going to be. The Tower of London and some modern Bastille on the
banks of the Seine and divers other dark damp places of detention over
here are at this minute clearly outlining themselves as moving pictures
before my mind. I earnestly don’t want to be in any of them.

We have reached the temporary wooden shack through which governments
these days pass all who knock for admission at their frontiers. Inside
the next room there at a long pine table sit the men with pistols in
their belts and swords at their sides, whose business it is to get
spies when they see them. We are to be admitted one by one for the
relentless fire of their cross-questioning. They have taken “British
subjects first.” Now they summon “aliens.”

To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at once like some sort
of a charge. You never were convicted of this before. And it seems
like the most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. Besides, I am
every moment becoming more acutely conscious of my mission. The rest
of these my fellow travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. For
a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring
person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But
in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war-times one has
to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier
upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a
most harmless, pleasant person?

From the decision the other side of that door, there will be no appeal.
The men in khaki there have authority to confiscate my notes—or me! And
they are so particular about journalists. One friend of mine back from
the front a month ago had his clothes turned inside out and they ripped
the lining from his coat. Then there is the lemon acid bath, lest you
carry notes in invisible writing on your skin. They do it, rumor says,
in Germany. But who can tell when other War Offices will have adopted
this efficiency method? Oh, dear, what is the use not to have been
drowned if one must face an inquisition? And they may turn me back
on the next boat. My thoughts are with the lemon acid bath. How many
lemons will it take to fill the tub, I am speculatively computing, when
“Next,” says the soldier. And it is I.

A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I am face to face with my
first steel line. The words of the British consul again ring warningly
in my ears, “I don’t at all know what they’ll do about you over there.”

No one ever does know these days. It’s the tormenting uncertainty that
keeps you literally guessing from day to day whether you’re going or
coming. And on what least incidents does human judgment depend. Perhaps
they’d like me better if my hat were blue instead of brown. Thank
heaven I didn’t economise on the price of my travelling coat. I step
bravely forward when the officer at the head of the table reaches out
his hand for my passport.

In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department
of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they
affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal
information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my
face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller
looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the
very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I!

“Now what have you come over here for?” he inquires in a tone of voice
that seems to say, “Nobody asked you to England. We’re quite too busy
about other things to entertain strangers.”

I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed “To Whom it may
Concern.” Signed by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_, it states
that I am delegated to study the new position of women due to the war.
Will he want me to? He may be as sensitive as the British consul in New
York about the woman movement. He may prefer that it should not move at
all.

I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I
tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of
my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that.
Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must
carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with
gentlemen in khaki all over Europe.

Well, what is he going to do about me? I get out my letters of social
introduction. There are 84! I strew them on the table for him to read.
There is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, the search
and the confiscation and the lemon acid bath? I wonder, and I wonder.
But I try to stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar the
decision that is forming in the officer’s mind. I am watching alertly
for his expression. But there isn’t any. I can’t tell at all whether
he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up
behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind
that I am a spy. He has read only four letters——

And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in
New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the
line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: “She’s all right. Let
her go.”

I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment
like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to “Our Duchess” has done
it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo
Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes
all opposition!

The soldier at the other end of the room opens a little wooden door in
a wooden wall that lets me into England. My baggage is already being
chalk marked “passed.” I am here! I clutch my passport happily and
convulsively in my hand. You have to do that until you can restore it
to the safer place. It’s the most important item in what the French
call your “_pieces de identité_.” At any moment a policeman in the
Strand, a gendarme in the Avenue de l’Opéra may tap an alien on the
shoulder with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you?


THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY

London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the
black pall of darkness in which the cities over here have enveloped
themselves against war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night,
every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. Over there on the
horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their
great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of
destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every
building is tightly shuttered. The street lamps with their globes
painted three-quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid
beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must develop a protective sense
that enables them to find their way at night as a cat does in the dark.
“I’m sorry,” says an apologetic English voice, and before you know it,
you have bumped against another passerby. There is another sudden jolt.
And you are scrambling for your balance the other side of the curb you
couldn’t see was there. If you are familiar with the door knob where
you’re going to stop, you will be so much the surer where you’re at.

Looking out on this darkest London from Paddington railway station at
midnight I sit on my trunk and wait. Do you remember the popular song,
There’s a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? Oh, I hope there is.

I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is the card of the Englishman
politely ready to look after me in London. It is the American man who
is out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer a taxicab. Somehow
he has done it. At last the cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur
to take us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk.

A small green light within the hooded entrance, picks the Ritz Hotel
out of the Piccadilly blackness. Inside, after the gloom through which
we have come, I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly
in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people still live here!
Right then at the hotel register, the voice of Scotland Yard speaks for
the War Office. And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me refuge
from the night, I must answer. The “registration blank” presented for
me to fill in, demands certain definite information: “(1) Surname. (2)
Christian names. (3) Nationality. (4) Birthplace. (5) Year of birth.
(6) Sex. (7) Full residential address: Full business address. (8)
Trade or occupation. (9) Served in what army, navy or police force.
(10) Full address where arrived from. (11) Date of signing. (12)
Signature.” And a little below, “(13) Full address of destination. (14)
Date of departure. (15) Signature.” A last line in conspicuous italics
admonishes: “Penalty for failing to give this information correctly 100
pounds or six months imprisonment.” Well, of course a threat like that
will make even a woman tell her age as many times as she is asked. But
I do it rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. For the
“registration blank” was made in Germany. I remember it before the war,
at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.

I must sign now on the dotted line before I can even go to bed. I
arrange my clothing carefully on a chair within reach of my hand. You
rest that way in a warring city, always ready to run. The Zeppelins
may come so swiftly. In London you know your nearest cellar. In France
you have selected your high vaulted entrance arch under which to take
refuge when the sirens go screaming down the street, “_Gardez vous,
Gardez vous._”

The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in the first darkness of
London was not gone when I closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw
it off. You may not be of those who are wearing crêpe. But you cannot
escape the woe of the world which will enfold you like a garment.

In the morning the ordinary business of living has become one of
strenuous detail. The law requires that an alien shall register with
the police within 24 hours of arrival. When I have thus established
a calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go out into
Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on parole. And I face
an environment strung all over with barbed wire restrictions on my
movements. Every letter that comes for me from America will be read
before I receive it, marked “Opened by the Censor.” If I wish to go
away from this country, I must ask the permission of the Foreign
Office, the consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed and
my own consulate before I can so much as purchase a ticket. I may not
leave London for any “restricted area” where there has been an Irish
revolution or a German bombardment without the consent of Scotland
Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz Hotel, which is registered as my
official place of residence, for more steam-heat at the Savoy, without
notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure and the Bow Street
Station of my arrival. The Defence of the Realm and the Trading with
the Enemy Acts and others in a land at war are lying around like bombs
all over the place. Have a care that you don’t run into them!

I am alone one evening at the International Suffrage Headquarters in
Adam Street, deep lost in a sociological study of carefully filed
data. Do you believe in subconscious warnings? Anyhow, I am bending
over a box of manila envelopes when suddenly, out of the silence of
this top floor room, I am impressed with a sense of danger. It is as
plain and clear as if a voice over my shoulder said “Look out.” I do
look up quickly. And there on the wall before my eyes, I read Order
4 from the Defence of the Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over
London, I discover later. But this is the first time I have seen it. It
reads: “The curtains of this room must be drawn at sundown.” And from
two windows with wide open curtains, my brilliant electric light is
streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as far as Trafalgar Square
for all the German Zeppelins and Scotland Yard to see! Just for an
instant I am paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand finds
the electric button and I hastily switch myself into the protecting
darkness. Somehow I grope my way through the hall and down the
staircase. And I slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the police
arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward
I read one day of an earl’s daughter even, who had been arrested and
fined 25 pounds for “permitting a beam of light to escape from her
window.”

The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not
put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even
the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free
speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise,
“Silence.” In France they put it most picturesquely, “Say nothing. Be
suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open.” Absolutely the only
safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody’s doing
it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest
of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military
orders, the rule is absolute. And you’ve no idea how many people are
under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I
begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to
have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of
a visé. Wouldn’t a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to
be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw
her? Even the girl conductor on the ’bus this morning, when I essayed
to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for,
how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a
frightened rabbit.

So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though
I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the
Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my
life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain
information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do?

Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one’s self personally
conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine
contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival
here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to
bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary
and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked
them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to
France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should
a journalist do?

Well, evidently a journalist should get in good standing with a war
office which alone can press the button to everywhere she wants to
go. The short cut to a war office is through a press bureau. But a
press bureau modestly shrinks from the publicity that it purveys.
You do not find it on Main Street with a lettered signboard and a
hand pointing: “Journalists, right this way.” And you can’t run right
up the front steps of a war office and ring the bell. It would be
a what-do-you-call-it, a _faux pas_ if you did. Even for a private
residence it would be that. There isn’t anywhere that I know of over
here even in peace time that as soon as you reach town you can call a
hostess up on the telephone and have her say, “Oh, you’re the friend
of Sallie Smith that she’s written me about. Come right along up to
dinner.” Why, the butler would tell you her ladyship or her grace or
something like that was not at home. It just can’t be done like that
outside of America. You don’t rush into the best English circles that
way, much less the English government. Absolutely your only way around
is through a formal correspondence.

One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down bed-quilt at the Ritz and
spread out my letters of introduction to choose a journalistic lead.
There are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and a lovely rose
velvet carpet on the floor and heavy rose silk hanging at the windows.
But there isn’t any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds six or
it may be seven coals—you see why Dickens always writes of “coals” in
the plural—and you put them on delicately with things like the sugar
tongs. It isn’t good form to be warm in England. The best families
aren’t. It’s plebeian and American even to want to be.

My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am trying to determine
which letter. This to Sir Gilbert Parker was the 84th letter handed me
by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_ as I stepped on the boat. It is
the one I now select first, quite by chance, without the least idea of
where it is to lead me. The next evening at 6 o’clock I am on my way to
Wellington House. “Sir Gilbert,” speaks the attendant in resplendent
livery. And I find myself in a stately English room. There, down the
length of the red velvet carpet beneath the glow of a red shaded
electric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from his chair. “Do
you know where you are?” he asks with a smile, glancing at the letter
of introduction on his desk that tells of my mission. “This,” he says,
“is the headquarters of the English government’s press bureau for the
war and I am in charge of the American publicity.” Who cares for Lord
Northcliffe now! Or even the King of England! Of all the inhabitants
of this land, here was the man a journalist would wish to meet. The
man who has written “The Seats of the Mighty” sits in them. From his
desk here in the red room he can touch the button that will open all
the right doors to me. He can’t do it immediately, in war-time. One
has to make sure first. I must come often to Wellington House. There
are days when we talk of many things, of life and of New York. He is
less and less of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. He
is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might have belonged to the
Authors’ League up on Forty-second Street. I half suspect he does. “I
do know my America rather well,” he says at length. “I married a girl
from Fifty-seventh Street. And I have a brother who lives in St. Paul.”

It is the way his voice thrills on “my America.” I am sure any American
correspondent hearing it would have been ready even in the fall of
1916 to clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American compact to
win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune with the American temperament.
He doesn’t wear a monocle. And he says to a woman “Now, what can I do
for you?” in just the tone of voice that an American man would use
when everything is going to be all right. I remember the red room
just before he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me at this
moment: “I have confidence in Mr. Vance, your editor. I know him,”
reflects the man who is deciding. “But—are you in ‘Who’s Who’?” Just
for the lack of a line in a book, a government’s good favour might
have been lost! But he reached for the copy above his desk. “Any more
credentials?” he asks. I cast desperately about in my mind—and drop a
Phi Beta key in his hand. “I won’t take that up on you,” he says with a
smile. And my cause is won.


THE WAY IT IS DONE

Long important envelopes lettered across the top “On His Majesty’s
Service” begin to arrive in my mail. All the government offices will be
“at home” and helpful—when a personal interview has further convinced
each that I am clearly not at all a German person nor the dangerous
species of the suffragist. Where are the slippers that will match this
gown? And which are the beads that will be best? Mine is a hazardous
undertaking, you see, that requires all of the art at the command of
a woman: I must so state the mission on which I have come that _my_
woman movement may seem pleasing in the eyes of a man—why, possibly a
man whose country house even may have been burned in behalf of votes
for women! Clearly I must mind my phrases, to get my permits. And if
you’re a journalist in war-time, you need the permit as you do your
daily bread.

To get it, you write about it and call about it and write about it some
more. And then it comes like this:

  FOREIGN OFFICE, Nov. 6, 1917.

  _Dear Mrs. Daggett_:—

 If you will call to-morrow Wednesday at 3 o’clock at the main entrance
 to Woolwich Arsenal and ask for Miss Barker, presenting the attached
 paper, you will find that arrangements have been made for your visit.

  Yours very truly,

  G. S. B.

Or it comes like this:

  HEADQUARTERS, LONDON DISTRICT,
  Horse Guards, S.W., Nov. 7, 1917.

  MRS. M. P. DAGGETT,
  Room 464 Ritz Hotel,

  _Dear Madam_:—

 I have pleasure in informing you that under War Office instructions
 I have arranged with the officer commanding 3rd London General
 Hospital, Wandsworth Common, S.W., for you to visit his hospital at 11
 A. M. on Friday next, the 9th instant.

 I am, dear Madam

  Yours faithfully,

  O. ——
  COLONEL D.A.D.M.S.
  London District.


England in war-time is open for my inspection. I am getting my data
nicely when one day there develops the dilemma of getting away with
it. I open the _Times_ one morning to read a new law: “On and after
Dec. 1,” the newspaper announces, “no one may be permitted to take out
of England any photograph or printed or written material other than
letters.” I have a trunkful. Clearly I can’t get by any khaki line with
that concealed about my person. Sir Gilbert walks twice, three times up
and down the red room. “I’ll see what I can do about it,” he says. “I
don’t know. But I’ll try.” A few days later my data begins to go right
through all the laws.

“First consignment,” I cabled across the Atlantic, “coming on the _St.
Louis_, if it doesn’t strike a mine.” I follow it with a registered
letter to the editor: “I hope God and you will always be good to
Gilbert Parker. And now if I don’t get back—” And I give him exact
directions about the material on the way. For it is no idle imagining
that I may not reach home.

I am facing France and the Channel crossing. Here in London it is so
long since the Zeppelins have been heard from that we are almost lulled
into a sense of security that they will not come again. If they do high
government circles usually hear in advance. A friend whose cousin’s
brother-in-law is in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds
out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and death plans must go
into the discard. For you see I am changing my danger back again from
Zeppelins to submarines.

Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports now that about four
out of six boats are getting across. I may get one of the four. On
the night train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer-rug in the
unheated compartment. Travelling is not what you might say encouraged.
This journey to Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will
now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will anywhere connect. There
are as many difficulties as can possibly be arranged. Governments
don’t want you doing this every day in the week. And there is always a
question whether you will be permitted to do it at all. At Southampton
I must meet the steel line with the challenge, “Who goes there?”

Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at his belt and a
sword at his side. He looks a second time at my passport: “You want to
go all sorts of places you’ve no business to,” he says sharply.

“Not all of them now,” I answer humbly, “only France.” “Well, why
even France?” he persists testily. I try to tell him. I present for
a second consideration one of my “most important credentials.” It is
a personal letter from the French consul in New York specially and
cordially recommending me to the “care and protection of all the civil
and military authorities in France.” At last he tosses the letter
inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to say, “Oh, well, if they
want her over there?” It comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the
last man, and a visé in purple ink lets me through to the boat.

Shall I remember the _Sussex_? You don’t so much after you’ve lived
daily with death for a while. Some time during the night I am drowsily
conscious that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has taken
the wheel to guide us in and out among mines placed perilously as a
protection against German submarines. Our lives are coming through
dangerous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. The next steel
line, here, is French. And with the letter from the consul at New York
in my hand I am literally and cordially and politely bowed into France.

At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the
dinner table the next day is just about to sail, “going back to God’s
country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the
Pacific Coast,” he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment
that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a
year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate
as he says it. “Cheer up,” he urges. “You just have to remember to take
a Frenchman’s promises as lightly as they’re made. They always aim to
please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner
to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only
more promises. But you’re an American woman. You’ll dig through. Good
luck,” he says. And a taxicab takes him.


WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT

Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and
Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time
a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the
niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in
world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited
in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we
pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue
Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden
wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her
child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in
her eyes and the dead man’s picture in the locket at her throat.

They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the
locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most.
There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their ’teens just now
coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as
the pictured locket! There will be no man’s face to fill it! Love that
would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood
that’s falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay!

How far off now seems that summer’s day I walked through 39th Street,
my pulses throbbing pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this
commission! I wonder if ever life can look like that again. The heavens
arched all blue above New York and the sunshine lay all golden on the
city pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I had heard about war,
even as have you and your next door neighbour. War was battle dates
that had to be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of tiresome
pages in history it should mobilise before our eyes, why, of course it
would be flags flying, bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down
Fifth Avenue!

And now I have seen war. Every way I turn I am looking on men with
broken bodies and women with broken hearts. War is not merely the hell
that may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a day or a night
that ends in death. War is worse. War is that big strong fellow with
eyes burned out when he “went over the top,” whom I saw learning to
walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the Home for the Blind
in London. They’re teaching him now to make baskets for a living! War
is that boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in Regents
Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life! War is that peasant
from whom to-day I inquired my way in one of the little _banlieues_ of
Paris. There was the _Croix de Guerre_ in his coat lapel. But he had to
set down on the ground his basket of vegetables to point down the Quai
de Bercy with his remaining arm. You know how a Frenchman just has to
gesture when he talks? The stump of the other arm twitched a horrible
accompaniment as he indicated my direction!

Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their
native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their
countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their
legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair.
And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces!
So long as they shall live, in every one’s eyes into which they look,
they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass
their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces!
The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day making faces to be
fastened on.

Like this you’ve got to go through Europe these days with a sob in the
throat. I turn to the difficult details of living for relief from the
awful drama of existence. In Paris there is the nicest United States
ambassador that ever was sent in a black frock coat to represent his
country abroad. In the course of my travels there are embassies I have
met who are about as useful to the wayfaring American in a foreign
land as a Rogers plaster group on a parlour table. But you arrive at
Mr. Sharpe’s embassy in the Rue de Chaillot and it doesn’t matter at
all if it happens to be perhaps 4:33 and his reception hour closed
at, say, 4:31. He says, “Come right in.” Yes, he talks like that, not
at all in the tone of royalty. “When’d you get in town?” he asks as
genially as if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. By this
time you’re sitting in a chair drawn up to his desk and discussing the
last Democratic victory. “How’s Charlie Murphy standing now with the
administration?” perhaps he asks, and then pretty soon, “But what can I
do for you in Paris?”

And he does it. You don’t have to call his secretary a week later
to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And
the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that
there’s an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the
street. That’s not Mr. Sharpe’s way. Within ten minutes he had handed
me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France.
He laughed as he passed it to me. “Honestly, I’d hate to hand any
one a gold brick,” he said. “That document looks imposing enough and
important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to
take you to the front at 9 A. M. to-morrow. But nothing like
that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries.
And an American can’t.”

You can hear that in every foreign language. It was a spectacled Herr
Professor in Berlin who once said to me severely, “You Americans, this
hurry it is your national vice.” I feel that foreign governments have
duly disciplined me in this direction during the past few months. So
much of my job in serving the _Pictorial Review_ in Europe seems to be
to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. At the Maison
de la Presse, 3 Rue François 1st, in the Service de l’Information
Diplomatique, whither my Briand letter leads me, I seem to spend hours.

They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can be, to take me to the
front. And the days pass and the days pass. “Ah, but you see, for a
lady journalist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must be
specially arranged.” And the weeks go by. And M. Polignac is so polite
and polite and polite—just that and nothing more.

One day he says to me: “And, Mme. Daggett, how long is it you will
be in Paris?” “Why,” I falter, “I hadn’t expected to winter here.
I’m waiting, you know, just waiting until I can go to the front.”
“And how much longer now could you wait?” he inquires. “Oh,” I answer
desperately, “I’ll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn’t stay
longer than that.”

So in the course of the next few days there comes a letter telling me
how it pains the French government that they should not be able to
“take that trip in hand” before the 29th. And of course if I must leave
them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, they so much regret, etc.,
etc.

If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I must dig through! And
in my room at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in
hand.

To “Maison de la Presse, Service de l’Information Diplomatique,” I
write: “Gentlemen, your favour of the 26th inst. with your regrets
just received. And I hasten to write you that I cannot, for the sake
of France, accept your decision as final, without presenting to your
attention a situation with which you may not be familiar. You see,
gentlemen, in the country from which I come, we have a feminism that
is neither an ideal nor a theory, but a working reality. In America,
there were when I left, four million women citizens, and the State
legislatures every little while making more. These are, gentlemen,
four million citizens with a vote, whose wishes must be consulted by
Congress at Washington in determining the war policy of the United
States. Their sympathies help to determine the amount of the war relief
contributions that may come across the Atlantic. These are four million
women who count, gentlemen, please understand, exactly the same as four
million men.

“Other American publications may offer Maison de la Presse other
facilities for reaching the American public. But none of them can
duplicate the facilities presented by the _Pictorial Review_, the
leading magazine to champion the feminist cause. It is the magazine
that is read by the woman who votes. Is not France interested in what
she shall read there?

“Believe me, gentlemen, the opportunity for propaganda that I offer you
is unparalleled. I beg you therefore to reconsider. I earnestly desire
to go to the front this week. Can you, I ask, permit me to leave this
land without granting the privilege? For the sake of France, gentlemen!
Awaiting your reply, I remain,” etc.

That letter was posted at 11 o’clock at night. Before noon the next
day Maison de la Presse was on the telephone and speaking English. In
France they do not hurry. It is not customary to use the telephone. And
it is at this time against the law to speak English on it. But listen:
“Will Mme. Daggett find herself able to accept the invitation of the
French government to go to the front on Thursday?” inquires the voice
on the wire.




CHAPTER II

CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES


“It is going to be perhaps a dangerous undertaking,” says the French
army officer the next day in the reception room at Maison de la Presse.
He is speaking solemnly and impressively. “Do you still wish to go?” he
asks, addressing me in particular. I look back steadily into his eyes.
“_Oui, Monsieur._” Then his glance sweeps inquiringly the semicircle
of faces. There are six journalists and a munitions manufacturer
from Bridgeport, Connecticut. And they all nod assent. The room is
singularly silent for an instant, the officer just standing quietly,
his left hand resting on his sword-hilt. Then he turns and passes
to each of us the official Permis de Correspondent de la Presse aux
Armees, for our journey to Rheims the next day. And we all sign on the
dotted line.

Before I retire that night I rip the pink rose from off my hat and
lay out the long dark coat which is to envelop me from my neck to my
heels. It is the camouflage which, in accordance with the army orders,
blends one with the landscape as a means of concealment from the German
gunners’ range. Rheims is under bombardment. It was fired on yesterday.
It may be to-morrow. There must not be, the army officer has assured
us, even the flower on the lady’s hat for a target.

My electric light winks once. Two minutes later it winks twice, and
is gone, according to the martial law which puts out all lights in
Paris from 11:30 at night until 8 o’clock in the morning. I grope my
way to bed in the darkness and at 6 o’clock the next morning, I dress
by candle light. I count carefully the “_pieces de identité_” in the
chamois safety bag that hangs over my left hip and place in my hand bag
my passport and my French _permis_, both of which must be presented at
the railway station before I can purchase a ticket. I look to make sure
that the inside pocket of my purse still contains my business card with
its pencilled request: “In case of death or disaster kindly notify the
_Pictorial Review_, New York City.” And as I pass the porter’s desk at
the hotel entrance I leave with the sleepy concierge one other last
message: “If Mme. Daggett has not returned by midnight, will the hotel
management kindly communicate with her friend Mlle. Marie Perrin, 12
Rue Ordener?” All these are precautions that you take lest you be lost
in the great European war.

The Gare l’Est is crowded always with throngs of soldiers arriving
and departing for the front. It is necessary that our party assemble
as early as seven o’clock to get in line at the ticket window for
the eight o’clock train, for every traveller’s credentials must be
separately and carefully read and inspected. At Epernay, where we
alight at 10:30, the station platform is densely packed with French
soldiers in the sky blue uniforms that have been so carefully matched
with the horizon color of France. A debonnair French captain has
been appointed by the French government to receive us. He is in full
uniform, splendid scarlet trousers and gold braided coat, with his
left breast ornamented with the _Croix de Guerre_ and the _Médaille de
Honneur_. After the formal salutations are over, however, his orderly
envelops all of the captain’s splendour too in the long sky blue coat
for camouflage against the Germans. And we start for Rheims in the
convoy of three luxuriously appointed “_camoens_,” the limousines
placed at our disposal by the government. They, too, are painted blue
grey to blend with the landscape, and each flies a little French flag.

“_Ou allez vous, Monsieur?_” the sentry at the bridge of Epernay
challenges our chauffeur. And the French captain himself leans from
the window to answer, “_À Rheims. Une mission de la gouvernement._”
So we pass sentry after sentry. It is 15 miles to Rheims. This is the
Department of the Marne, with the vineyards that have produced the
most famous wines of the world. The “smiling countryside of France,”
the poets have termed it. In September, 1914, history changed it to
the grim field of carnage running red with the blood of civilisation
that here made its stand against the onrushing Huns. Right across
that valley see the battlefield of the Marne. Along this road the
German army passed. From this little village that we are entering,
all the inhabitants fled before their approach. The enemy now is not
far away. Over there, just against that horizon, lie the trenches they
now occupy. See this roadside along which we are driving, how it is
curiously hung with linen curtains? They are strung on wires fifteen
feet high. For miles we ride behind them. It is the camouflage, the
French captain says, that hides us from German view. We have just
emerged from the forest at the edge of the Mountain of Rheims when,
hark! Hear it—the sharp, distinct sound of an explosion! What is it?
Where is it? The captain lays his hand reassuringly on my arm: “It is,
I think, a tire that has burst on the rear car.”

“Captain,” I say, “no automobile tire I ever heard sounded exactly like
that.”

“You are not nervous?” he asks. I shake my head. “Well,” he admits, “it
is sometimes that the Germans do take a chance shot at this road.”

But at Rheims when we arrive, I notice that all our automobile tires
are quite intact. We enter the city through the great bronze gate, the
finishing ornaments of which have been nicked off by German shells.
We stand in the midst of a scene of desolation that looks like the
ruins of some long ago civilisation. Once, before this world that men
had builded began to go to pieces, even as the blocks that children
pile tumble to a nursery floor, here was a populous busy city of some
120,000 souls. Now our footsteps echo through deserted streets. Not
a man or woman or child is in sight. The grass is growing in the
pavement there between the street-car tracks. The Hotel de Ville is
only a shell of a building with the outer walls standing. This shop
is shuttered tight. The next has the entire front gone, blown away in
a bombardment. There are empty houses from which the occupants have
months ago fled. Here stands the skeleton of a pretentious residence,
the roof gone and the front riddled: we look directly in on the
second-story room with a dresser and a bed in disarray. There a curtain
from a deserted little front parlour flaps dismally through a shattered
window-pane almost in our faces. Here above the cellar-grating of a
house in ruins, there arises a sickening odour. We look at each other
in questioning horror; perhaps the military with the pick and spade
assigned to disinterment duty after some bombardment did not dig deep
enough here. But the captain does not wish to understand and hurries us
along to the next street.


A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION

In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once Rheims, at last
there is a sound of life. Down the Rue de la Paix, the street of
peace, an army supply-wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how
pleasant can be the sound even of noise.

Then across the way appears a milk-woman, pushing her cart with four
tin cans and jingling a little bell. There are a few people, it seems,
still left, employés in the champagne industry, who cling to their
homes even though they must live in the cellar. Now the devastation
increases and the houses begin to be mere rubbish heaps of brick and
mortar as we approach the Place de la Cathédrale.

At length we stand before the famous Cathedral of Rheims itself. I know
of no more impressive place to be in the closing days of the year 1916
than here at the front of the terrible world war.

In this edifice is symbolised all that civilisation of ours that
culminated in the Twentieth Century, now to be razed to the ground.
For lo, these seven hundred years, even as the two great towers above
us have lifted the infinite beauty of their architectural lace-work
against the blue-domed sky, some thirty generations of the human soul
have sent their aspirations heavenward on the incense of prayer. Over
these very stones beneath our feet, king after king of France has
walked, to receive the crown of Charlemagne and to be anointed before
this altar from “_le sainte ampouli_.” And now here to-day is history
in no dead and musty pages but in the making, white-hot from the anvil
of the hour! Only a little over a mile away are the German guns that
from day to day shower the shell-fire of their destruction on the city.
This spot upon which we stand is their particular objective point of
attack. Hear! There is a rumbling detonation. We wait hushed for an
instant. But the sound is not repeated. You see, already there have
been some 30,000 shells poured on Rheims. Twelve hundred fell in one
day only. At any moment there may be more.

“If the bombardment should begin,” we had been instructed at Maison de
la Presse, “you would rush for the nearest cellar.” I think we all have
listening ears. Every little while there is certainly repeated that
desultory firing on the front.

But nothing is dropping on us. And reassured, we turn to examine
the great shell hole in the pavement not five yards distant. The
Archbishop’s Palace, immediately adjoining the church, is flat on the
ground in ruins. The cathedral itself is slowly being wrecked. But in
the public square directly before it, look here! See Joan of Arc on
her horse triumphantly facing the future! In her hand she is waving
the bright flag of France. Amid the débris of the great war piling up
about her, the famous statue stands absolutely untouched. Here at the
very storm centre of the attack on civilisation, with the hell-fire of
the enemy falling in a rain of thousands of shells about her, she seems
as secure, as safe under God’s heaven as when the people passed daily
before her to prayer. Shall we not call it a miracle?

“See,” says the captain, his head reverently uncovered, his eyes
shining, “our Maid of Orleans. No German shall ever harm her!” And
since the war began, it is true, no German ever has. Not a statue
of the famous girl-warrior anywhere in France has been so much as
scratched by the enemy. Her name was the password on the day of the
Battle of the Marne and there are those who think it was the shadowy
figure of a girl on a horse that led the troops to that victory. Oh,
though cathedrals may crumble and cities be laid waste and fields be
devastated, some time again it shall be well with the world. For the
faith of the people of France in Joan of Arc shall never pass away.

That we realize, as we look on the rapt face of the captain who leads
us now within the great church itself, where for three years all
prayers have ceased. The marvellous stained glass from the thirteenth
century, which made the religious light of the beautiful windows, now
hangs literally in tatters like torn bed-quilts blowing in the wind.
That great jagged hole in the roof was torn by a shell at the last
bombardment. There are fissures in the side walls. The rain comes
in, and the birds. Doves light there on the transept rail. Amid the
rubbish of broken saints with which the floor is littered, there yet
stands here and there a sorrowful statue hung with the garland of faded
flowers reminiscent of some far-off fête day. And _Requiescat in pace_,
you may read the legend cut in the stone of the eastern wall above the
tomb of some Christian Father.

In the nearby Rue du Cardinal de Lorraine, in a garden saying his
rosary, walks an old man in a red cap, one of the few remaining
residents who will not leave the city. He is the venerable Mgr. Lucon,
Cardinal of Rheims. Always he is praying, praying to God to spare the
cathedral. And God does not. “I do not understand. I suppose that He
in His wisdom must have some purpose in permitting the church to be
destroyed,” says the Cardinal of Rheims. “I do not understand,” he
always adds humbly.

“One may not understand,” repeats the captain. And he takes us
to luncheon at the Lion d’Or, the little inn where the wife of
the proprietor still stays to serve any “mission of the French
_gouvernement_.” Then he shows us the famous champagne cellars of the
_Etablissement Pommery_. Here one hundred feet below the ground, in the
chalk caves built a thousand years ago by the Romans, are twelve miles
of subterranean passageways with thirteen million bottles of the most
celebrated champagne in the making.

The superintendent pours out his choicest brand: “_Vive la France_ and
the Allies,” he says, lifting his glass. He talks more English than the
captain can. He is telling us of when the Germans entered Rheims. “Four
officers,” he says, “came riding ahead of the army. And I met them by
chance just as they arrived in the market place of Rheims.”

“What did you do?” asks the New York correspondent of the _London
Daily Mail_. “I wept,” says the Frenchman, simply and impressively.
“Gentlemen,” he adds solemnly and sadly, “I hope you may never meet
some day four conquering Chinamen riding up Broadway.”

I find myself catching my breath suddenly at that. And I am glad when
the captain hums a gay little French tune and holds out his glass a
second time: “Give us again ‘_Vive la France_.’”

The sun is dipping red in the west when we turn to leave Rheims and
Joan of Arc bravely flying the French flag before its crumbling
cathedral. There is the rumble of guns once more at the front. Then
the winter dusk rapidly envelops the road along which we are speeding.
It is the same road to Epernay. But now it is alive with traffic. Under
the protecting cover of the soft darkness, all sorts of vehicles are
passing. The headlights of our car flash on a continuous procession
of motor lorries, munition-wagons, army supply-wagons, tractors, and
peasants’ carts carrying produce to market. So we arrive at Epernay for
a lunch of red wine and war bread at the little station. By ten o’clock
we are safely within the walls of Paris. We have escaped bombardment!

It is two days later before the French official _communiqué_ in the
daily papers begins again recording: “At Rheims toward six o’clock last
night, after a violent attack with trench mortars, the Germans twice
stormed our advance posts. But these two attempts completely failed
under our machine-gun fire and grenade bombing.”


DIFFICULT DAYS IN THE WAR ZONE

It isn’t what happens necessarily. It’s what’s always-going-to-happen
that keeps one guessing between life and death in a war zone. And
there are special torments of the inquisition devised for journalists.
Ordinary civilians are occupied only with saving their lives.
Journalists must save their notes.

At half-past eleven o’clock that night of my return from Rheims, there
is dropped in the mail box on my hotel room door, a cablegram from
America: “Steamship _St. Louis_ here. Your material from London not on
it.” The room in which I stand, the Hotel Regina, and the city of Paris
all reel unsteadily for an instant. Has the British Government eaten
up all my journalistic findings so preciously entrusted to Wellington
House? I grasp the brass foot rail of the bed and bring myself
upstanding. If they have, it is no time for me to lose my head.

Jacques with the empty coat sleeve and the _Croix de Guerre_ on his
breast, who operates the elevator, I am sure thinks it a woman demented
who is going out in the streets of Paris alone at midnight. But “an
_Americaine_,” one can never tell what “an _Americaine_” will do.
“Pardon,” he says hesitatingly as I step out, “madame knows the hour?”
Yes, madame knows the hour. But an alien may not send a telegram
without presenting a passport, the document that never for an instant
goes out of one’s personal possession. No messenger can do this errand
for me.

Five minutes later I am in a taxicab tearing down the Rue Quatre
Septembre to the cable office in the Bourse. My appeal for help to Sir
Gilbert Parker in London is being counted on the blue telegraph blank
by the operator at the little window, when suddenly I remember I have
forgotten. My hand feels helplessly over my left hip where there is
concealed a letter of credit for three thousand dollars. But I falter,
“I haven’t any money, that is, where I can get at it.”

“I have,” speaks a voice over my shoulder. I look around into a man’s
cheerful countenance. “What’s the damage?” he says again in pleasant
Manhattan English. I hesitate only for an instant. “It’s sixteen francs
I need.”

He promptly pulls out his bank-roll. I ask for his card, of course, to
return the loan the next day with many thanks for his courtesy. He,
however, has no security that I will. As he puts me in my taxicab and
lifts his hat beneath the faint war-dimmed light of the street lamps in
the dark Rue Vivienne, he only knows that I am his country-woman. And
he is an American man. The Lord seems to send them when you need them
most.

Three days later the awful silence in which I am suffering all the
fears there are for a journalist in war-time, is broken by a reply from
London: “Material only delayed. Sailed steamship _New York_ instead
of _St. Louis_.” After another two weeks of fitful nights in which I
dream of men in khaki who confiscate journalistic data, there comes
the message from New York that is like hearing from Heaven: “Your
consignment of material safely arrived.” Meanwhile, before I may be
permitted to take a line out of this country, Maison de la Presse must
pass on my French data. I am feverishly editing it for their approval
when there is a knock at my door. The maid is there with more letters
than the little brass mail box will hold. I eagerly open my American
mail to find it filled with holiday greetings. So, it can still be
Christmas somewhere in the world! I am standing at the window with a
Christmas card in my hand, thinking pleasant thoughts of the far-away
city called New York where there is still peace on earth, good-will
to men, when down the Rue de Rivoli passes a motor lorry piled high
with black crosses. There are fields in France that are planted with
black crosses, acres and acres of them. After each new push on the
front, more are required, black crosses by the cartload! I glanced at
my calendar. Why, to-day is Christmas! I had quite forgotten. You see,
over here all joy-making occasions seem to have been such a long while
ago, like the stories of once upon a time.

I turn once more to the task of making ready my data for Maison de la
Presse. Here a too colourful sentence must be rejected. There is a too
flagrantly feministic document that will be safest in the waste basket.
It is the martial mind that I must meet. A press bureau, you see, is
prepared to pass promptly propaganda on the battles of the Somme.
But dare one risk, say, a pamphlet on the breast feeding of infants?
Propaganda about the rising value of a baby! Dear, dear, it might, for
all a man could tell, be treason, seditious material calculated to give
aid and comfort to the enemy! Already to my inquiries about maternity
measures in Paris, have I not been answered suspiciously: “But why do
you ask? This matter it is not of the war.”

My emasculated data at last are ready for review by _le chef du service
de la presse_. He stamps it all over with his signature in red ink. It
is done up in packages and officially sealed in red wax with the seal
of the state of France. At the Post Office in the Rue Etienne Marcel,
I register it and mail it, committing it with a sigh to the mercies of
the great Atlantic.


DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT

Having crossed the Channel once alive, it seems like tempting fate
to try it again. I draw in my breath as one about to plunge into a
cold bath in the morning, and go out to secure from three governments
the necessary permission that will allow me to return to England.
From the police alone it sometimes takes eight days to secure this
concession. But at the Prefecture of Police, they read my letter of
introduction from the French consul in New York. And I have only to
leave my photograph and sign on the dotted line. In five minutes they
have given my passport the necessary visé. The American consul easily
enough adds his. All my journey apparently is going as pleasantly as
a summer holiday planned by a Cook’s Agency, when at length I come up
with a bump against the British Control office in the Rue Cheveaux
Lagarde. And the going away from here requires some negotiations. The
British lieutenant in charge reads my nice French letter and without
comment tosses it aside. “You wish to go to London?” he asks in great
surprise. “Now, why should you wish to go to London?” He gives me
distinctly to understand this is not the open season for tourists in
England. “We don’t care to have people travelling,” he says in a tone
of voice as if that settles it. “Why have you come over here in these
difficult and dangerous times, anyhow?” he asks querulously and a
trifle suspiciously. “The best thing you can do is to go home directly.
And America is right across the water from here.”

“But, Lieutenant,” I gasp, “my trunk is in England and I’ve got to have
a few clothes.”

“No,” he says, “personal reasons like that don’t interest the British
Government. Neither am I able to understand a journalistic mission
which should take a woman travelling in these days of war.” He looks at
me. “The New Position of Women! It is not of sufficient interest to the
British Government that I should let you go,” he says with finality.

“I know, Lieutenant,” I agree. “But surely you are interested in the
Allies’ war propaganda for the United States?” The light from the
window shines full on his face and I can see a faint relaxation about
the lines of his mouth. “Now I wish to go to England so that I may tell
the story of the British women’s war work. The readers of _Pictorial
Review_ are four million women who vote.” The lieutenant stirs visibly.
His sword rattles against the rounds of his chair.

Well, my request hangs in the balance like this for a week. At length
one day he says, “I’m thinking about letting you go. I shall have to
consult with my superior officer. I don’t at all know that he will
consent.”

There is the day that I have almost given up hope. I am waiting again
before the lieutenant’s desk. He has gone for a last consultation
with the superior officer. Will he never come back? I stare at his
empty chair. The clock on the mantel ticks and ticks. The fire in the
grate snaps and snaps. Other people at the next desk who get easier
visés than mine, come and go—a Red Cross nurse, two French sisters of
charity, a little French boy returning to school. I have counted the
pens in the lieutenant’s glass tray. I know every blot on his desk-pad.
The clock has ticked thirty-five minutes of suspense for me before the
little French soldier in red trousers opens the door and the lieutenant
is here.

“Well,” he says, “we have decided. You are to be permitted to go, but
on one condition.” And he visés my passport, “No return to France
during the period of the war.”

It has taken nearly two weeks to win my case. Two days later at 6
A. M., when the gardens of the Tuileries are outlined dimly
against the faint rays of dawn, my taxicab is reeling through the
streets of Paris to the Gare St. Lazare. It is noon before the train
reaches Havre. The Red Cross nurse, the London newspaper correspondent
and the Belgian air-man all file out of our compartment and the Irish
major from Salonica is last. He turns to me with a frank Irish smile:
“Your bag can just as well go along with my military luggage. And
they’ll never even open it.”

At eight o’clock that night in Havre, my passport and the letter from
the French consul in New York are handed down the steel line of ten
men at a table. Each looks up with the same curious smile when his
glance arrives at the last visé: “Who put that on your passport?” asks
the officer at the head of the line. “The British Control Office?” he
says with heat. “It’s none of their business.” In an inner room, four
more men examine my documents. “Did the British officer see this letter
from the French consul?” I am asked. I nod assent. A laugh goes round
the room. “Pardon, madame,” says the man with the most gold braid, “the
British Control Office does not control France. You are welcome to
France, madame, welcome to France any time you choose to come.”

That is the War Office that speaks. So, with the French Government’s
cordial invitation ringing pleasantly in my ears, I go on board the
Channel boat. But I have no intention of returning to France right
away, gentlemen. I lay out my life-preserver with a feeling of great
relief that if I survive this crossing, it will not have to be done
over again. And once more the boat in the darkness steals safely and
silently across the Channel.

In the morning, in Southampton, the major from Salonica hands me his
card: “Letters,” he says, a trifle wistfully, “will always reach me at
that address.” I look at the card here before me on my desk as I write
and I wonder. The major with his Irish smile may now be lying dead on
the field of battle somewhere on the front. In the midst of life we are
in death almost anywhere in the world to-day.

[Illustration:

 THE STAFF OF THE GREAT WOMEN’S WAR HOSPITAL IN ENDELL STREET, LONDON

 This is the shining citadel that marks the capitulation the world over
 of the medical profession to the new woman movement.
]


IN COLDEST ENGLAND

I have again “established my residence” with the police in London. I
feel on terms of the most intimate acquaintance with the London police.
So many of them have my photograph and are conversant with all the
biographical and genealogical details of my life. You have to do it,
register at a police station, every time you change your hotel. I have
moved so often, I am nervous lest I seem like a German spy. But at the
Bow Street Station, the officer in charge just nods genially: “Oh,
that’s quite all right. Looking for more heat, aren’t you? I know. You
Americans are all alike.”

Have you ever shivered in London in January? Then you don’t know what
it is to be cold, not even when the thermometer drops to zero and New
York’s all snowed in but the subway, and the street cleaning department
has to spend a million dollars to dig you out of the drifts. Yes, I
know about the Gulf Stream. It does pleasantly moderate the outdoor
climate so that it is never really winter in England. But the Gulf
Stream does not get into their houses. I was a luncheon guest the
other day at a residence with a crest on its note-paper. The hostess
put on a wrap to pass down the staircase from the drawing-room to the
dining-room, and with my bronchitis—all Americans get it in London—I
was simply unable to remove my coat at all. This mansion, English
ivy-covered, and mildewed with ages of aristocracy, has never had
a real fire within its walls. There are only the tiny grate fires
which are, as it were, mere ornaments beneath the mantelpiece. The
drawing-room fire is lighted only just before the guests arrive: the
men with lifted coat-tails back up to it, their hands crossed behind
them spread to the blaze; the dog and the cat draw near to the fender;
conversation about the fire becomes general in the tone of voice,
well, in which one might admire a rare sunset. The dining-room fire,
likewise, is lighted only just before the butler announces luncheon.
And in all this grand mansion you discover there isn’t any place to be
warm, unless perchance the cook in the kitchen may have it.

Well, English hotels strive to be as coldly correct as this English
high life. And I have suffered cold storage in Piccadilly at the
rate of ten dollars a day as long as my bronchitis will bear it. I
ought to be ill in bed at this moment. But I can’t be. There isn’t
a hospital bed in Europe without a wounded soldier in it. Schools,
orphanages, monasteries, country residences, castles and many hotels
have been turned into hospitals, all of them full of soldiers. A
civilian who may be ill literally has not where to lay his head. So I
set out desperately to find heat in London. I think I have searched
every hotel from Mayfair to Bloomsbury Square. As a special concession
to American patronage a few of them have put steam-heat on their
letter heads, “central heat,” they call it. But all European radiators,
when there are any, are as reluctant as their elevators. “Lifts” move
under groaning protest and if they go up, they let you know they do
not expect to come down. The radiators are equally as sullen about
radiating. They don’t want to at all. English radiators are such toy
affairs as to be incapable of any real action. They are so small they
get lost behind the furniture. At the Hyde Park Hotel, the clerk and I
hunted all over the place: “I’m sure we used to have them,” he said.
At last our search was rewarded. We found the one that was to keep me
warm. It was behind the dresser and such a miniature affair, you’d
surely have guessed Santa Claus must have left it for the children at
Christmas time.

Some one advised me that English hotels really didn’t do steam heat
well and the best way to be warm was to go to Brown’s, which is famous
for its grate fires. The Queen of Holland and the English nobility
always stop at Brown’s. So I tried Brown’s. I bought all the “coals”
the management would sell at one time and tipped the maid liberally to
start the fire in my room. To maintain the temperature anything above
fifty, I had to sit by the grate and keep putting on the coals myself.
In the bathroom there was no heat at all. “Oh, yes, there was,” the
management argued; “didn’t the hot-water pipe for the bath come right
up through the floor?” No, they insisted, there couldn’t be any fire in
the grate in the bathroom—because there never had been since Brown’s
began. Why, probably the hotel would burn up with so much heat as that.

So I moved on and on. At last I came in the Strand to the Savoy,
where all Americans eventually arrive. It is the only hotel in
England with real steam-heat. Just pull out your dresser and your
wash-stand. Concealed behind each you will discover a radiator, warm,
real, life-size! Eureka! It is the only modern-comfort temperature in
London. I am able to remove sundry clothing accessories of Shetland
wool accumulated at Selfridge’s Department Store in Oxford Street.
And for the first time since my arrival on these shores I am sitting
in my hotel room unwrapped in either a rose satin down bed-quilt or a
steamer-rug. My soul once more uncurls itself for work. It is wonderful
to be warm to-day, even if one must be drowned by the Germans to-morrow.


GREATEST DRAMA IN HISTORY

It begins to look gravely as if one may be. Out there in the yellow
fog beyond my window, more and more ominous are the posters that
come hourly drifting down the Strand from Fleet Street. Germany has
announced to the world that she is going to do her worst. And she
begins to tune her submarines for the sink-on-sight frightfulness
more terrible than any that has preceded. The Dutch boats stop. The
Scandinavian boats stop. The American boats stop. The entire ocean is
now blanketed in one danger zone.

All the world’s a stage of swift-moving events, the greatest and
most terrible spectacle that has ever been put on since civilisation
began. And we in London are spectators before a drop-curtain tight
buttoned down at the corners! It is lifted now and then by the hand of
the censor to reveal only what the Government decides is good for the
people to see. The plain citizen in London has no means of knowing how
much it is that he does not know. It was six months after the Battle of
Ypres had occurred before the English newspapers got around to mention
the event. So you see with what a baffling sense of futility it is that
one scans the newspapers here now while history is making so fast that
a new page is turned every day. I am hungry for a real live paper,
bright yellow from along Park Row. And over my breakfast coffee at the
Savoy I have only the London _Times_, gravely discussing by the column,
“What Is Religion?” and “The Value of Tudor Music,” while the rest of
the world is breathless before a Russian revolution, later to be given
out in London exactly a week old.

But there is news that even the censor is playing up with a lavish
hand. The Strand streams with the posters: “The United States on the
Verge of War.” My official permit from Downing Street to go to Holland
has arrived in the morning’s mail. I cannot get there. I cannot get to
Scandinavia. Can I get home? It is the question that is agitating a
number of Americans abroad. We watchfully wait for a warship to convoy
us. But scan the Atlantic as we may from day to day, there is none
arriving. The folks back home have a way of forgetting that we are
here. Those that do remember are saying it serves us right. We had
no business to come in war-time. Sixteen Americans at the Savoy every
day rush to read the news bulletins that hourly are tacked up in the
lounge. But the wheels of government at Washington move so slowly. The
Senate only debates and debates. And there is nothing said about us!
Will it be possible to flag the attention of Congress? The same idea
occurs simultaneously to Senator Hale in Paris and to several of us in
London. This is the answer to my cabled inquiry to Washington: “Your
request the fifth. Impracticable send warship convoy American liner
bringing Americans back from Europe. Signed, Robert Lansing, Secretary
of State.”

So, that’s settled. The only way for any of us to get away from here
will be just—to go. And I begin to. There is myself to get home, and
my data. Three consignments have already gone over under special
government auspices. But there have been anxious periods of waiting
before a cable, “Stuff safe,” has reached me. I am going to sink or
swim with the remainder of it. Wellington House arranges with the
censor at Strand House. There the material is read and done up in
packages, in each of which is enclosed a letter with the War Office
Stamp: “Senior Aliens Officer. Port of Embarkation. Please allow the
package in which this is enclosed to accompany bearer Mrs. M. P.
Daggett as personal luggage. This package has been examined by the
censorship.” All these data are now packed in a suitcase that stands
in my hotel room awaiting my departure.

When I was caught in the homeward rush of Americans from London in
1914, the steamship offices in Cockspur Street were jammed to the
doors. To-day they are silent, empty, echoing places. In 1917 it is
such a life and death matter to travel, that most people don’t. So
grave is the danger that the Government refuses to permit passports at
all for English women. But for me, this that I am facing is the risk of
my trade in war-time.

To-day I had a letter from my New York office:

“The best thing for you to do is to get home as quick as you can.
Wouldn’t it be safest by way of Spain? Any way of course is taking a
chance and a big one. I wish to the Lord you were here, safe and sound.
But there isn’t a darn thing any of us can do about getting you back.
You have either got to take your life in your hands and take a chance
coming back, or stay in London. And God knows when this war is going to
end now!”

It is “safest by way of Spain.” Ambassador Gerard getting home
from Germany selected that route. But my passport, I remember, is
black-marked, “No return to France.” And I shall have the British
Foreign Office to explain to before I can reach my French friends who
so cordially invited my return. There will be altogether some four
steel lines to pass that way. I’d rather face the submarines. The
Spanish boats are small, only about 4,000 tons, which would be like
crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub. I’d rather be drowned than seasick.
I think I shall make sure of comfort by a British boat.

And then—the posters in the Strand begin to announce, “Seven ships sunk
to-day.” Four Dutch boats trying for their home port, are submarined in
English waters. The _Laconia_ goes down. The Anchor liner _California_
meets her fate. It’s real, I tell you, on this side where they’re daily
bringing in the survivors. About nine hours in the open boats is the
usual experience for the rescued. Do you see the deterring, dampening
effect that this might have on one’s enthusiasm for departure?


FACING LIFE OR DEATH?

This is the month of March. Oh, wouldn’t it be well to wait until
the water is warmer? It’s a disquieting sensation to wake up in the
night and meditate on whether, say, a week or ten days from now, you
may find yourself at the bottom of the Atlantic. In this state of
low depression, you decide to live a little longer. And so to-morrow
you select a little later date for your sailing. Then the arrival of
American mail proves that at least one more boat has run the blockade
and escaped the submarines. Yours might.

So I take my courage in both hands, and my passport, too, and buy my
ticket. When I have done this, a nice, quiet calm possesses me. It
is as if I had been a long time dying. Now it is over and finished.
I have nothing more to do about it. I pack my trunk just curiously
wondering, shall I ever wear this gown again? Or shall I not? Oh, well,
it is such a relief to be going away from all this Old World grief. Are
the war clouds gathering over New York, too? But I still can see the
city all golden in the sunlight beneath the clear blue sky.

Last night I was awakened at twelve o’clock by the sounds of a gay
supper party’s revelry in some room down my corridor. Which of the
staid American gentlemen at this hotel is celebrating? Listen. They are
singing, evidently with lifted glasses: “Hail, hail, the gang’s all
here.” Not to the national anthem could my heart thrill more than to
Tammany’s own classic refrain. New York! New York! Not all the Kaiser’s
submarines can stop me from starting.

I may not send word of the steamship or the date of my departure. But I
cable my home office: “If I do not succeed in reporting to you myself,
apply for the latest information of my movements, to the International
Franchise Club, 9 Grafton Street, London.” You see, if I should get the
last Long Assignment....

There are only sixteen first class passengers for this trip on the
_Carmania_ in her grim grey warpaint. Two of us are women, at whom
the rest stare with curious interest. Each of us as we step aboard is
handed a lifeboat ticket. Mine reads: “R. M. S. _Carmania_. Name, Mrs.
M. P. Daggett, Boat No. 5.”

I think I know now how a person feels who is going to his execution.
We who walk up this steamship gangway are under sentence of death by
the German Government. The old Latin proverb flashes into my mind:
“_Morituri te salutamus._” It is we who may be about to die who salute
each other here on the _Carmania_ and then we are facing the steel
line. Four British officers with swords at their sides and pistols in
their belts wait for us in the drawing-room. All the other passengers
go easily by but the New York Jewish gentleman with the German name. At
last he, too, clears. But the British Government is not yet finished
with a journalist. The Tower of London and its damp dark dungeons is
again materialising clearly for me.

The lieutenant has been questioning me for half-an-hour. “I’m sorry,”
he says, “but I think I shall have to have you searched. This suitcase
of journalistic data, you say that there is inside each package a note
stating that the material has been passed by the Government? Why isn’t
that note on the outside of the package?”

“I don’t know,” I answer earnestly. “It’s the question I asked in vain
at Strand House. The censor said that it had to be this way. I assure
you the note is there. But if you break the outside seal to find out,
my government guarantee is gone. And if this boat by any chance goes to
Halifax, how are they to know there that I’m not a German spy?”

The lieutenant’s eyes are on my face. I think he believes I am telling
the truth. “Well,” he orders his corporal, “go to her stateroom with
her and have a look at her luggage.” The corporal is very nice. He
finds a blank note book in my trunk. “You aren’t supposed to have
this,” he says. And there is a package of business correspondence.
“Did you tell him out there about these letters? Well, you needn’t.
And I won’t.” At the suitcase with the magic seals he gives only one
glance. To his superior officer, when we return, the corporal reports:
“Everything’s quite all right. Stuff’s stamped all over with the seal
of the War Office.”

The lieutenant looks at his watch. “I had breakfast at seven. It’s now
one o’clock. That’s lunch time.”

“Don’t let me detain you,” I suggest pleasantly. He shakes his head.
“I’ve got to put this job through.”

I am this job. But the lieutenant has smiled. The conversation eases
up. “Pretty good suffrage data down at the Houses of Parliament,” he
himself suggests. “Do you know, I’m almost willing now that women
should vote. I didn’t used to be. But the war has changed my mind.”

“By the way,” he asked suddenly, “you’re not mixed up with any of those
militants, are you?” I explain that I am not a suffragette, just a
plain suffragist. “Because I think those militants ought to be shot,”
he adds. I can only bite my tongue. Has the lieutenant no sense of
humour? No militant in Holloway Jail was ever more militant than he is
with his sword and pistol at this moment.

“There’s a question I’d like to ask,” he goes on. “In your country
where women have the franchise, do you find that they all vote alike?”
“No more than all the men,” I answer. “Then that’s all right,” he says
in a relieved tone. “I’ve been afraid that if we let women vote, they
might all vote against war.”


SHALL WE GO DOWN OR ACROSS?

“You really aren’t a militant, are you?” he says again, thoughtfully.
“Well, I’ll let you go.” So that’s my last steel line.

The boat begins to move in the Mersey. And the ship’s siren sounds
shrilly. It is the summons to shipwreck drill. We assemble quickly in
the lounge on the top deck, every one wearing a life-preserver. At a
second call of the siren, we file out following the captain’s lead, to
stand by our boats in which the crew are already clambering to their
oars.

So now we know how for the moment of disaster. The whole steamship
waits for it. This is a weird voyage that we begin. Mine-sweepers
out there ahead of us are cleaning up the seas. A Scandinavian boat
has just been sowing mines all over the water. The _Baltic_, here
beside us, poked her nose out yesterday, scented danger and returned
to the river. We wait now in the Mersey twenty-four hours before the
mysterious signal is given that it is the propitious moment for our
boat to get away. We steal softly to sea under cover of a dense fog
and a white snow-storm. The sea-gulls are screaming shrilly above us
like birds of prey. And we who look into each other’s eyes are facing
we know not whither, it may be America or the Farthest Country of all.

Three men pace the wind-swept captain’s bridge, scanning the horizon,
and there are always two clinging in the crow’s nest in the icy gale.
This boat is manned by a pedigreed crew. From the captain to the last
cabin-boy, everybody has been torpedoed at least once. The Marconi
operator never smiles. He sits at his instrument with a grey, drawn
look about his young boyish mouth. He was on the _Lusitania_ when she
went down. He was the last man off the _Laconia_ the other day. The
wrinkled suit he’s wearing is the one they picked him up in out of the
sea.

For two days out, we have the little destroyers with us, and then we
are left to our luck and the gun in front and the watching men aloft.
The lifeboats are always swung out on their davits for the siren’s
sudden call. The doors of the upper deck stand open, waiting beside
each a preparedness exhibit, boxes of biscuit, flasks of brandy, and a
pile of blankets we are to seize as we run. We two women have filled
the pockets of our steamer-coats with safety-pins, hairpins and a comb,
first aid that no one remembers to bring when they pick you up from the
open boat. My fellow traveller is huddling very close to her six-foot
husband, to be tucked safely under his arm at the emergency moment. It
is good that we are having rough weather. When the waves are tossing
high, the periscopes may not find us.

We are sixteen people who wander like disembodied spirits from the gay
days of old through these great empty rooms that once rang with the
joy of hundreds of tourists on their pleasure-jaunts over the world.
There are no games. There is no dancing. There is no band. There are no
steamerchairs on deck. At sundown we are closed in tight behind iron
shutters. No one may so much as light a cigaret outside.

In the ghastly silence of the days that pass, there is only the strain
and quiver of the ship, and the solemn boom, boom of the sea. Death
is so near that it seems fitting the glad activities of life should
cease, as when a corpse is laid out in the front room of a house. For
a while there is a tendency to whisper, as if we were at a funeral, or
as if, perchance, the Germans in the sea could hear. But soon we find
ourselves functioning quite normally. Not until the sixth day out,
it is true, does any one venture to take a bath. You don’t want to
be rushed like that, you know, to your drowning. But we are sleeping
regularly at night. We eat bacon and eggs for breakfast as usual. We
are pleased when there is turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner. One
does not maintain an agony of suspense forever. For most of us, I think
it began to end when we had committed ourselves to the decision of
this voyage. After that, the issue rests with God or with destiny,
according to one’s religion.

There is no attempt at dressing for dinner on the _Carmania_. Evening
dress and all the time dress is life-preservers. We do not take them
off even at night for a while. We sleep in them. With the new styles,
of which there are many, you can. Mine is a garment that buttons up
exactly like a man’s vest. Next to the lining is a padded filling, an
Indian vegetable matter that will keep one afloat like cork. To-day one
desires the latest modern devices against death. A life-preserver costs
anywhere from five to fifteen dollars. You carry yours with you as you
do your toothbrush and your steamer-rug.

Time ticks off the minutes to life or to death to-morrow. We walk
the decks and scan a nearly deserted ocean. Only twice do we sight a
steamship on the horizon. At table we discuss as one does usually, oh,
immortality and Christian Science and woman suffrage. The Englishman
says, “Votes for women are really impossible, don’t you know. Why, if
the British women had voted twelve years ago, there might not have been
any battleships in 1914. And then where would England have been to-day?”

“But if the German women too had voted twelve years ago, have you
thought how much happier the world might be to-day?” I ask. The
Englishman does not see the point but the American at my left says,
“Guess you handed him one that time.”

On April sixth the _Cunard Bulletin_, the wireless newspaper, is
laid beside our plates at breakfast with the announcement that’s
thrilled around a world, “The United States has declared for war.” The
Englishman next me says, “That must be a great relief for you.” And I
cannot answer for the choking in my throat. My country, oh, my country,
too, at the gates of hell to go in regiment by regiment!

On Sunday the English clergyman reads the service including the phrases
in brackets: “God save the King (and the President of the United
States). Vanquish their enemies and preserve them in felicity.” Down
beneath the sea the Germans in their submarines too are praying like
that to the same God. But one hopes, oh, one earnestly hopes, that God
will not hear them.

After the sixth day out, we have probably escaped the submarines. The
American men are no longer kindly asking me in anxious tone, “You’re
not nervous, are you?” On the eighth day they get out the shuffleboard.
Two mornings later when we awake, the sea is a beautiful blue, all
dimpling with sparkling points of golden light. It is real New York
sunlight again! The captain comes down from the pilot house smiling:
“Well, we got away this time,” he says.

The Statue of Liberty is rising on the horizon. The Manhattan sky-line
etches itself against the heavens. Do you know, I’d rather be a
door-keeper here at Ellis Island, than a lady-in-waiting anywhere in
Europe. The _Carmania_ warps into dock in sight of the Metropolitan
Tower. Was Fourteenth Street ever cheap, common, sordid? As my
taxicab rolls across town, see how beautiful, oh, see how beautiful
is Fourteenth street, a little landscape cross-section right out of
Paradise! Nobody here is blinded, nobody maimed, nobody in crêpe,
nobody broken-hearted—yet. I have escaped from a nightmare of the
Middle Ages. I lift my face to the sunlight again.

I know I am tired, terribly tired of doing difficult things and saving
my life from day to day. But I have not realised how near collapse I
am until I drop in a chair before the Editor’s deck in the office of
the _Pictorial Review_. I, who have been so crazy to get to the country
where there is still free speech, that I had insanely hoped to stand in
Broadway and shout, have suddenly lost my voice. I can only report in a
whisper!

My chief looks at me in concern. “For God’s sake, girl,” he says, “go
somewhere and go to bed!”




CHAPTER III

HER COUNTRY’S CALL


One Thousand Women Wanted! You may read it on a great canvas sign
that stretches across an industrial establishment in lower Manhattan.
The owner of this factory who put it there, only knows that it is an
advertisement for labour of which he finds himself suddenly in need.
But he has all unwittingly really written a proclamation that is a sign
of the times.

Across the Atlantic I studied that proclamation in Old World cities.
Women Wanted! Women Wanted! The capitals of Europe have been for four
years placarded with the sign. And now we in America are writing it on
our sky line. All over the world see it on the street-car barns as on
the colleges. It is hung above the factories and the coal mines, the
halls of government and the farm-yards and the arsenals and even the
War Office. Everywhere from the fireside to the firing line, country
after country has taken up the call. Now it has become the insistent
chorus of civilisation: Women Wanted! Women Wanted!

But yesterday the great war was a phenomenon to which we in America
thrilled only as its percussions reverberated around the world. Now
our own soldiers are marching down Main Street. But their uniforms
still are new. Wait. Soon here too one shall choke with that sob in the
throat. Oh, I am walking again in the garden of the Tuileries on a day
when I had seen war without the flags flying and the bands playing. It
was dead men and disabled men and hospitals full and insane asylums
full and cemeteries full. “You have to remember,” said a voice at my
side, “that all freedoms since the world began have had to be fought
for. They still have to be.”

So I repeat it now for you, the women of America, resolutely to
remember. And get our your Robert Brownings! Read it over and over
again, “God’s in his heaven.” For there are going to be days when it
will seem that God has quite gone away. Still He hasn’t. Suddenly in
a lifting of the war clouds above the blackest battle smoke, we shall
see again His face as a flashing glimpse of some new freedom lights for
an instant the darkened heavens above the globe of the world. Already
there has been a Russian revolution which may portend the end of a
German monarchy. In England a new democracy has buckled on the sword of
a dead aristocracy. And a great Commoner is at the helm of state. But
with all the freedoms they are winning, there is one for which not the
most decorated general has any idea he’s fighting. I am not sure but
it is the greatest freedom of all: when woman wins the race wins. The
new democracy for which a world has taken up arms, for the first time
since the history of civilisation began, is going to be real democracy.
There is a light that is breaking high behind all the battle lines!
Look! There on the horizon in those letters of blood that promise of
the newest freedom of all. When it is finished—the awful throes of this
red agony in which a world is being reborn—there is going to be a place
in the Sun for women.

Listen, hear the call, Women Wanted! Women Wanted! Last Spring the
Government pitched a khaki colored tent in your town on the vacant lot
just beyond the post office, say. How many men have enlisted there?
Perhaps there are seventy-five who have gone from the factory across
the creek, and the receiving teller at the First National Bank, and the
new principal of the High School where the children were getting along
so well, and the doctor that everybody had because they liked him so
much.

And, oh, last week at dinner your own husband had but just finished
carving when he looked across the table and said: “Dear, I can’t stand
it any longer. I’m going to get into this fight to make the world
right.” You know how your face went white and your heart for an instant
stopped beating. But what I don’t believe you do know is that you are
at this moment getting ready to play your part in one of the most
tremendous epochs of the world. It is not only Liège and the Marne
and Somme, and Haig and Joffre and Pétain and Pershing who are making
history to-day. Keokuk, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Mich., and Little Falls,
N. Y., are too—and you and the woman who lives next door!


THE NEW WOMAN MOVEMENT

Every man who enlists at that tent near the post office is going to
leave a job somewhere whether it’s at the factory or the doctor’s
office or the school teacher’s desk, or whether it’s your husband. That
job will have to be taken by a woman. It’s what happened in Europe.
It’s what now we may see happen here. A great many women will have
a wage envelope who never had it before. That may mean affluence to
a housefull of daughters. One, two, three, four wage envelopes in a
family where father’s used to be the only one. You even may have to
go out to earn enough to support yourself and the babies. Yes, I know
your husband’s army pay and the income from investments carefully
accumulated through the savings of your married life, will help quite
a little. But with the ever rising war cost of living, it may not be
enough. It hasn’t been for thousands of homes in Europe. And eventually
you too may go to work as other women have. It’s very strange, is it
not, for you of all women who have always believed that woman’s place
was the home. And you may even have been an “anti,” a most earnest
advocate of an ancient régime against which whole societies and
associations of what yesterday were called “advanced” women organised
their “suffrage” protests.

To-day no one any longer has to believe what is woman’s place. No
woman even has anything to say about it. Read everywhere the signs:
Women Wanted! Here in New York we are seeing shipload after shipload of
men going out to sea in khaki. We don’t know how many boat loads like
that will go down the bay. But for an army of every million American
men in Europe, there must be mobilised another million women to take
their places behind the lines here 3,000 miles away from the guns, to
carry on the auxiliary operations without which the armies in the field
could not exist.

In the department store where you shopped to-day you noticed an
elevator girl had arrived, where the operator always before has been
a boy! Outside the window of my country house here as I write, off
on that field on the hillside a woman is working, who never worked
there before. At Lexington, Mass., I read in my morning paper, the
Rev. Christopher Walter Collier has gone to the front in France and
his wife has been unanimously elected by the congregation to fill the
pulpit during his absence. Sometimes women by the hundred step into
new vacancies. The Æolian Company is advertising for women as piano
salesmen and has established a special school for their instruction. A
Chicago manufacturing plant has hung out over its employment gate the
announcement, “Man’s work, man’s pay for all women who can qualify,”
and within a week two hundred women were at work. The Pennsylvania
railroad, which has rigidly opposed the employment of women on its
office staffs, in June, 1917, announced a change of policy and took on
in its various departments five hundred women and girls. The Municipal
Service Commission in New York last fall was holding its first
examination to admit women to the position of junior draughtsmen in the
city’s employ. The Civil Service Commission at Washington, preparing to
release every possible man from government positions for war service,
had compiled a list of 10,000 women eligible for clerical work in
government departments.

Like that it is happening all about us. This is the new woman movement.
And you’re in it. We all are. I know: you may never have carried a
suffrage banner or marched in a suffrage procession or so much as
addressed a suffrage campaign envelope. But you’re “moving” to-day just
the same if you’ve only so much as rolled a Red Cross bandage or signed
a Food Administration pledge offered you by the women’s committee of
the Council of National Defence. All the women of the world are moving.

“Suffrage _de la morte_,” a Senator on the Seine has termed the vote
offered the French feminists in the form of a proposition that every
man dying on the field of battle may transfer his ballot to a woman
whom he shall designate. And the French women have drawn back in
horror, exclaiming: “We don’t want a dead man’s vote. We want only our
own vote.” Nevertheless it is something like this which is occurring.

And we may shudder, but we may not draw back. It is by way of the
_place de la morte_, that women are moving inexorably to-day into
industry and commerce and the professions, on to strange new destinies
that shall not be denied.

There on the firing line a bullet whizzes straight to the mark. A man
drops dead in the trenches. Some wife’s husband, some girl’s sweetheart
who before he was a soldier was a wage earner, never will be more. Back
home another woman who had been temporarily enrolled in the ranks of
industry, steps forward, enlisted for life in the army of labour.

Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the feminists have asked.
But this is not our woman movement. This is His woman movement, who
moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. We may not know. And we
do not understand. But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were
in the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way that is opening
for women throughout the world. It is westward to us that this star of
opportunity has taken its course directly from above the battlefields
of Europe.


A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY LOOKS ON

Women Wanted! Women Wanted! I am hearing it again over there. Outside
the windows of my London hotel in Piccadilly, a shaft of sharp white
light played against the blackness of the London sky. Down these beams
that searched the night for enemy Zeppelins, a woman’s figure softly
moved. And as I looked, the close drawn curtains of my room, it
seemed, parted and she stepped lightly across the window sill. She was
gowned in a quaint, old-time costume. “They’re not wearing them to-day,”
I smiled.

She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with the broad arrows of
Holloway jail. There were women, you know, who suffered and died in
that prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to be the way of the
cross for the woman’s cause.

“You ought to see the new styles,” I said. “Governments are getting out
so many new decorations for women.”

“Tell me,” she answered. “Up in heaven we have heard that it is so. And
I have come to see.”

So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette and I, to look on
the Great Push of the new woman movement that is swinging down the
twentieth century in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of the road
and all the gates ahead are open wide. No ukase of parliament or king
halts it. No church dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises
it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans do not mob it. No,
indeed! The applauding populace that’s crying “_Place aux dames_” would
not tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I don’t think
there’s any one left in the world who would want to so much as pull out
a hairpin of this triumphant processional.

You see, it’s so very different from the woman movement of yesterday.
That was the crusade of the pioneers who gave their lives in the
struggling service of an unpopular ideal. Who wanted feminists free to
find themselves? Even women themselves came haltingly as recruits. But
this is a pageant, with Everywoman crowding for place at her country’s
call. And who would not adore to be a patriot? It is with flying
colors, albeit to the solemn measures of a Dead March that the new
columns are coming on.

It is the Woman Movement against which all the parliaments of men shall
never again prevail. Majestically, with sure and rhythmic tread, it is
moving, not under its own power of propaganda, but propelled by fearful
cosmic forces. At the compulsion of a sublime destiny accelerated under
the ægis of a war office press bureau, suffragists pro and anti alike
are gathered in. Theirs no longer to reason why. For see, they are
keeping step, always keeping step with the armies at the front!

There is a new offensive on the Somme. There is a defeat at the Yser, a
victory at Verdun or Marne. The dead men lie deep in the trenches! The
war office combs out new regiments to face the hell-fire of shrapnel
and the woman movement in all nations joins up new recruits to fill the
vacant places from which the men, about to die, are steadily enlisted.
See the sign of the times. I point it out to My Suffragette: “Women
Wanted.” With each year of war the demand becomes more insistent. Women
Wanted! Women Wanted!

“But they didn’t used to be,” she gasps in amazement.

And of course, I too remember when the world was barricaded against
everywhere a woman wanted to go beyond the dishpan and the wash tub and
the nursery. It all seems now such a long while ago.

“Dear old-fashioned girl,” I reply, “women no longer have to smash a
way anywhere. They’ll even be sending after you if you don’t come.”

When the militants of England signed with their government the truce
which abrogated for the period of the war the Cat and Mouse Act with
which they had been pursued, it was the formal announcement to the
world of the cessation of suffrage activities while the nations settled
other issues. From Berlin to Paris and London, feminists acquiesced in
the decision arrived at in Kingsway. It seemed indeed that the woman’s
cause was going to wait. But is it not written: “Whoso loseth his
life,” etc., “shall find it.”

Women Wanted! Women Wanted! “Listen,” I say to the Soul of a
Suffragette, as we stand in the Strand. “You hear it? And it’s like
that in the Avenue de l’Opéra and in Unter den Linden and in Petrograd
and now in Broadway. To every woman, it is her country’s call to
service.”

I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the
door of the Doll’s House opened. She who stood at the threshold where
the tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to lines of
gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then the clock on her mantel
ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries that only God himself
had planned. The force primeval that had held her in bondage, this it
was that should set her free. As straight as ever she went before to
the altar and the cook stove and the cradle, she stepped out now into
the wide wide world, the woman behind the man behind the gun.

“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “not all the political economists from
John Stuart Mill to Ellen Key could have accomplished it. Not even
your spectacular martyrdom was able to achieve it. But now it is done.
For lo, the password the feminists have sought, is found. And it is
Love—not logic!”

There are, the statisticians tell us, more than twenty million men
numbered among the embattled hosts out there at the front where the
future of the human race is being fought for. Modern warfare has most
terrible engines of destruction. But with all of these at command,
there is not a brigade of soldiers that could stand against their foes
without the aid of the women who in the last analysis are holding the
line.

Who is it that is feeding and clothing and nursing the greatest armies
of history? See that soldier in the trenches? A woman raised the grain
for the bread, a woman is tending the flocks that provided the meat for
his rations to-day. A woman made the boots and the uniform in which he
stands. A woman made the shells with which his gun is loaded. A woman
will nurse him when he’s wounded. A woman’s ambulance may even pick him
up on the battlefield. A woman surgeon may perform the operation to
save his life. And somewhere back home a woman holds the job he had to
leave behind. There is no task to which women have not turned to-day to
carry on civilisation. For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned
men to their most ancient occupation—and women to every other.

“All the suffrage flags are furled?” questions My Suffragette
incredulously, as we pass through the streets where once her banners
waved most militantly. “Gone with your broad arrows of yesterday,” I
affirm. “And you should see our modern styles.”


NEW COSTUMES FOR NEW WOMEN

When women stood at the threshold listening breathlessly that August
day, there was one costume ready and laid out by the nations for their
wear in every land. Coronets and shimmering ball gowns, cap and gown in
university corridors and plain little home made dresses in rose bowered
cottages were alike exchanged for the new uniform and insignia. And the
woman who set the sign of the red cross in the centre of her forehead
appeared in her white gown and her flowing white head dress all over
Europe as instantaneously as a new skirt ever flashed out in the pages
of a fashion magazine. To her, every country called as naturally, as
spontaneously as a hurt child might turn to its mother. She it is
who has worn the red cross to her transfiguration in this new Woman
Movement with one of the largest detachments in hospital service. See
her on the sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Dardanelles,
insisting on “wounded soldiers first” as she passes her charges to
safety, and waiting behind herself goes quietly under the water. And
with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before
the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium
who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been
breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her
country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried
to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter
began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman’s place was
going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. Even as the troops
buckled on sword and pistol and the departing regiments began to move,
it was made sure that she should be waiting for them on their return.

In Germany in the first month of the war, no less than 70,000 women of
the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein, trained in first aid to the injured,
had arrived at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for Red
Cross service.

I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood at Cecilienhaus in
Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus with its crèche and its maternity care and
its folks kitchens and its workingmen’s gardens, was devoted to the
welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein of the nation
was engaged. Frau Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all these
social activities. Then she looked away down the Berliner Strasse and
said: “But when war comes—” Had I heard aright? That you know was in
May, 1914. But she repeated: “When war comes we are going to be able
to take care of seventy-five soldiers in this dining-room and in that
maternity ward we shall be able to have beds for a dozen officers.”
All over Germany the half million women of the Vaterlandischer
Frauenverein planning like that, “when war comes,” had taken a first
aid nurse’s training course. They were as ready for mobilisation as
were their men. France, viewing with alarm these preparations across
the border, had her women also in training. The Association des Dames
Français, the Union des Femmes de France and the Société Secours aux
Blessés Militaires, at once put on the Red Cross uniform and brought
to their country’s service 59,500 nurses. In England the Voluntary
Aid Detachments of the Red Cross had 60,000 members ready to serve
under the 3,000 trained nurses who were registered for duty within a
fortnight of the outbreak of war. Similarly every country engaged in
the conflict, taking inventory of its resources, eagerly accepted the
services of the war nurse. The same policy of state actuated every
nation as was expressed by the Italian Minister of War who announced:
“By utilising the services of women to replace men in the military
hospitals, we shall release 20,000 soldiers for active duty at the
front.”

The Red Cross of service to the soldier is the most conspicuous
decoration worn by women in all warring countries. Everywhere you
meet the nurses’ uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was
the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Charing Cross station
where nightly under cover of the soft darkness the procession of grim
grey motor ambulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are coming
like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, at the Potsdam station in
Berlin, and up in Petrograd. In each ambulance between the tiers of
stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the figure of a woman
silhouetted faintly against the dim light of the railroad station as
she bends to smooth a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a
cigarette for a maimed man who never can do that least service for
himself again. She may be a peeress of the realm, or she may be a
militant on parole granted the amnesty of her government that needs her
more these days for saving life than for serving jail sentence. But
look, and you shall see the Red Cross on her forehead!

The grey ambulances like this coming from the railroad stations long
ago in every land filled up the regular military hospitals through
which the patients are passed by the thousands every month. And other
women taking the Red Cross set it above the doorways of historic
mansions opened to receive the wounded. In Italy, Queen Margherita and
Queen Elena gave their royal residences. In Paris Baroness Rothschild
has made her beautiful house with its great garden behind a high yellow
wall a Hôpital Militaire Auxiliaire. And many private residences
like this are among the eight hundred hospitals in France which are
being operated under the direction of one woman’s organisation alone,
the Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires.

[Illustration:

 MRS. H. J. TENNANT

 Director of the Woman’s Department of National Service in England.
 Like this in all lands, women have been called to government councils.
]

Here in London, in Piccadilly, at Devonshire House, desks and filing
cabinets fill the rooms once gay with social functions. And hospital
messengers go and come up and down the marvellous gold and crystal
staircase. The Duchess of Devonshire has turned over the great
mansion as the official headquarters for the Red Cross. Nearby, in
Mayfair, Madame Moravieff, whose husband is connected with the Russian
diplomatic service, is serving as commandant for the hospital she has
opened for English soldiers. Lady Londonderry’s house in Park Lane is a
hospital. By the end of the first year of war, like this, no less than
850 private residences in England had been transformed into Voluntary
Aid Detachment Red Cross Hospitals.

In hospital financiering the American woman in Europe has led all the
rest. Margaret Cox Benet, the wife of Lawrence V. Benet in Paris,
braved the perils of the Atlantic crossing to appeal to America for
contributions to the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly. It is
equalled by only one other war hospital in Europe, the splendidly
equipped hospital of the American women at Paignton, England, initiated
by Lady Arthur Paget, formerly Mary Paran Stevens of New York. Lady
Paget, who is president of the American Women’s War Relief Fund, has
just rounded out the first million dollars of the fund which she has
personally raised for war work.

You see how these also serve who are doing the executive and
organisation work that makes it possible for the woman in the front
lines to wear her red cross even to her transfiguration. Accelerated
by the activities of women like these behind the lines, the Red Cross
battalions are leading the Great Push of the new woman movement. The
woman in the nurse’s uniform is not exciting the most comment, however.
It is by reason of her numbers, the thousands and thousands of her that
she commands the most attention. But she was really expected.


WHERE YOU FIND THE MILITANTS TO-DAY

For the amazing figure that has emerged by magic directly out of the
battle smoke of this war, see the woman in khaki! Khaki, I explain to
My Suffragette, is one of the most popular of government offerings for
women’s wear. The material has been found most serviceable in a war
zone either to die in or to live in, while you save others from dying.
It is sometimes varied with woollen cloth preferred for warmth. But the
essential features of the costume are preserved: the short skirt, the
leather leggings, the military hat and the shoulder straps with the
insignia of special service. When governments have called for unusual
duty that is difficult or disagreeable or dangerous, it is the woman
in khaki who responds: “Take me. I am here.” She will, in fact, do
anything that there’s no one else to do.

Stick-at-nothings, the London newspapers have nicknamed the women’s
Reserve Ambulance Corps of 400 women who wear a khaki uniform with
a green cross armlet. With white tunics over these khaki suits, a
detachment of green cross girls at Peel House, the soldiers’ club in
Westminster, does house-maid duty from seven in the morning until
eight at night. They are making beds and waiting on table, these young
women, who, many of them, in stately English homes have all their lives
been served by butlers and footmen. I saw a Green Cross girl at the
military headquarters of the corps in Piccadilly making to Commandant
Mabel Beatty her report of another phase of war work. She was such a
young thing, I should say perhaps eighteen, and delicately bred. I know
I noticed the slender aristocratic hand that she lifted to her hat
in salute to her superior officer: “I have,” she said, “this morning
burned three amputated arms, two legs and a section of a jaw bone. And
I have carried my end of five heavy coffins to the dead wagon.” That’s
all in her day’s work. She’s a hospital orderly. And it’s one of the
things an orderly is for, to dispose of the by-products of a great war
hospital.

See also, these ambulances that bring the wounded from Charing Cross.
They are “manned” by a woman outside as well as the nurse within.
There is a girl at the wheel in the driver’s seat. The Motor Transport
Section of the Green Cross Society accomplishes an average weekly
mileage of 2,000 miles transporting wounded and munitions. Like this
they respond for any service to which the exigencies of war may call.
There was the time of the first serious Zeppelin raid on London when
amid the crash of falling bombs and the horror of fire flaming suddenly
in the darkness, the shrieks of the maimed and dying filled the night
with terror and the populace seemed to stand frozen to inaction at the
scene about them. Right up to the centre of the worst carnage rolled
a Green Cross ambulance from which leaped out eight khaki clad women.
They were, mind you, women of the carefully sheltered class, who sit in
dinner gowns under soft candle light in beautifully appointed English
houses. And they never before in all their lives had witnessed an evil
sight. But they set to work promptly by the side of the police to pick
up the dead and the dying, putting the highway to order as calmly as
they might have gone about adjusting the curtains and the pillows to
set a drawing-room to rights. “Thanks,” said the police, when sometime
later an ambulance arrived from the nearest headquarters, “the ladies
have done this job.” Since then the Woman’s Reserve Ambulance Corps is
officially attached to the “D” Division of the Metropolitan Police for
air raid relief.

That girl in khaki who is serving as a hospital orderly, you notice,
wears shoulder straps of blue. She comes from the great military
hospital in High Holborn that is staffed entirely by women. We may walk
through the wards there where we shall see many of her. Above her in
authority are women with shoulder straps of red. These are they who
wear the surgeon’s white tunic in the operating theatre, who issue the
physician’s orders at the patient’s bedside. Now the door at the end
of the ward opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands there, whom
every wounded patient able to lift his right arm, salutes as if his
own military commander had appeared. “But it’s my doctor, my doctor,”
exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday.

And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in fact the unofficial
post of first aid physician to the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Frequently she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to attend
some militant picked up cut and bleeding from the missiles of the
mobs or released faint and dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor
herself did her bit in the old days. The Government had her in Holloway
jail for six weeks. Well, to-day they have her as surgeon in command of
this war hospital with the rank of major. She’s so well fitted for the
place, you see, by her earlier experience.

But, visibly agitated, My Suffragette again plucks at my sleeve: “Are
you quite sure,” she asks, “that Scotland Yard won’t take her?”

Poor dear lady of yesterday. They’re not doing that to-day. Your woman
movement was militant against the Government. This woman movement is
militant with the Government. There’s all the difference in the world.
And the woman in khaki has found it. Militancy of the popular kind
has come to be most exalted in woman. Besides a woman doctor is too
valuable in these days to be interfered with. She is no longer sent
as a missionary physician to the heathen or limited to a practice
exclusively among women and children. She is good enough for anywhere.
One issue of the _Lancet_ advertises: “Women doctors wanted for forty
municipal appointments.” Women doctors wanted, is the call of every
country. This military hospital in London of which Dr. Louisa Garrett
Anderson, major, is in command, is entirely staffed with women. Paris
has its war hospital with Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangin, major in command.
Dr. Clelia Lollini, sub-lieutenant, is operating surgeon at a war
hospital in Venice. In Russia one of the most celebrated war doctors is
the Princess Gurdrovitz, surgeon in charge of the Imperial Hospital at
Tsarkoe Selo.

Oh, the khaki costume I think we may say is admired of every war
office. It has found a vogue among all the allies. It has appeared the
past year in America, where it has been most recently adopted. But the
model for whom it was particularly made to measure was the militant
suffragette of England. Nearly everybody who used to be in Holloway
jail is wearing it. It’s the best fit that any of them find to-day in
the shop windows of government styles. And it’s so well adapted to
women to whom all early Victorian qualities are as foreign as hoop
skirts. You would not expect one inured to hardship by alternate
periods of starvation and forcible feeding to be either a fearsome or
a delicate creature. And the courage that could horsewhip a prime
minister or set off a bomb beneath a bishop’s chair, is just the kind
that every nation’s calling for in these strenuous times. It’s the kind
that up close to the firing line gets mentioned in army orders and
decorated with all crosses of iron and gold and silver.

You will find the woman who has put on khaki at the front in all the
warring countries. The Duchess of Aosta is doing ambulance work in
Italy. The Countess Elizabeth Shouvaleff of Petrograd commanded her own
hospital train that brought in the wounded. But it is the British woman
in khaki who has gone farthest afield. The National Union’s “Scottish
Women’s Hospitals,” as they are known, are right behind the armies.
Staffed from the surgeons to the ambulance corps entirely by women,
they go out to any part of the war zone where the need is greatest.

See the latest “unit” that is leaving Paddington Station. The equipment
they are taking with them includes every appliance that will be
required, from a bed to a bandage, and numbers just 1,051 bales and
cases of freight. The entire unit, forty-five women, have had their
hair cut short. For sanitary reasons, is the euphemistic way of
explaining it. For protection against the vermin with which patients
from the trenches will be infested, if you ask for war facts as they
are. Units like this have gone out to settle wherever by army orders a
place has been made for them, in a deserted monastery in France that
they must first scrub and clean, in a refugee barracks in Russia, in a
tent in Serbia where they themselves must dig the drainage trenches.

Their surgeons have stood at the operating table a week at a stretch
with only an hour or two of sleep each night. Their doctors have
battled with epidemics of typhoid and plague. Their ambulance girls
have brought in the wounded from the battlefield under shell-fire.
Hospitals have been conducted under bombardment with all the patients
carried to the cellar. Hospitals have been captured by the enemy.
Hospitals have been evacuated at command with the patients loaded on
trains or motor cars or bullock wagons for retreat with the army. There
were forty-six British women who shared in the historic retreat of the
Serbian army three hundred miles over the Plain of Kossovo and the
mountains of Albania. Men and cattle perished by the score. But the
women doctors, freezing, starving, sleeping in the fields, struggling
against a blinding blizzard with an amazing physical endurance and a
dauntless courage, all came through to Scutari. Out on the far-flung
frontiers of civilisation, the woman in khaki who has done these things
is memorialised. At Mladanovatz, the Serbians have erected a fountain
with the inscription: “In memory of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and
their founder, Dr. Elsie Inglis.”


SUFFRAGISTS LED ALL THE REST

When the great call, “Women wanted,” first commenced in all lands,
there were those who stood with reluctant feet at the threshold simply
because they did not know how to step out into the new wide world
of opportunity stretching before them. In this crisis it was to the
suffragists that every government turned. Who else should organise?
These women, like My Suffragette, had devoted their lives to assembling
cohorts for a cause! The Assoziazione per la Donna in Italy, as the
Conseil National des Femmes Françaises in France, promptly responded by
offering their office machinery as registration bureaus through which
women could be drafted into service. It was the suffrage association at
Budapest, Hungary, that filled the order from the city government for
five hundred women street sweepers. The Vaterlandischer Frauenverein
assembled 25,000 women in Berlin alone to take the course of training
arranged for _helferinnen_, assistants in all phases of relief work.
But it was in England where the woman movement of yesterday had
reached its highest point in organisation that the woman movement for
to-day was best equipped to start. Britain counted among the nation’s
resources no less than fifty separate suffrage organisations, one of
which alone, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was able
to send out its instructions to over 500 branches! And the mobilisation
of the woman power of a nation was under way on a scale that could have
been witnessed in no other era of the world.

The woman who has been enlisted in largest numbers in England as
in other lands is the woman who at her country’s call hung up the
housewife’s kitchen apron in plain little cottages to put on a new
uniform with a distinctive feature that has been hitherto conspicuously
missing from women’s clothes. It has a pocket for a pay envelope.
“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “you would not know her at all, now,
would you?”

She came marching through the streets of London on July 17, 1915, in
one of the most significant detachments mustered for the new woman
movement, 40,000 women carrying banners with the new device: “For
men must fight and women must work.” And industry, in which she was
enlisting, presented her with a new costume. The Ministry of Munitions
in London got out the pattern. Employers of labour throughout the world
are now copying it. There isn’t anything in the chorus more attractive
than the woman who’s walked into the centre of the stage in shop and
factory wearing overall trousers, tunic and cap. Some English factories
have the entire woman force thus uniformed and others have adopted only
the tunic. Here are girl window cleaners with pail and ladder coming
down the Strand wearing the khaki trousers. The girl conductor of the
omnibus that’s just passed has a very short skirt that just meets at
the knees her high leather leggings. The girl lift operators at the
stores in Oxford Street are in smart peg-top trousers. In Germany the
innovation is of course being done by imperial decree, a government
order having put all the railway women in dark grey, wide trousers. In
France the new design is accepted slowly. The girl conductor who swings
at the open door of the Paris Metro with a whistle at her lips, wears
the men employé’s cap but she still clings to her own “_tablier_.”

That July London procession organised by the suffragists, led in
fact by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, in response to labour’s call, “Women
wanted,” is the last suffrage procession of which the world has heard.
And it is the most important feminist parade that has ever appeared in
any city of the world. For it was a procession marching straight for
the goal of economic independence. It was the vanguard of the moving
procession of women that in every country is still continuously passing
into industry. Germany in the first year of war had a half million
women in one occupation alone, that of making munitions. France has
400,000 “munitionettes.” Great Britain in 1916 had a million women who
had enlisted for the places of men since the war began. In every one of
Europe’s warring countries and now in America, women are being rushed
as rapidly as possible into commerce and industry to release men. In
Germany nearly all the bank clerks are women. The Bank of France alone
in Paris has 700 women clerks. In England women clerks number over
100,000. And the British Government is steadily advertising: Wanted,
30,000 women a week to replace men for the armies.

“Who works, fights,” Lloyd George has said, in the English Parliament.
English women enlisting for agriculture have been given a government
certificate attesting: “Every woman who helps in agriculture during the
war is as truly serving her country as is the man who is fighting in
trenches or on the sea.”

“But,” protests the bewildered woman from only the other day, “they
told us that women didn’t know enough to do man’s work, that she wasn’t
strong enough for much of anything beyond light domestic duty like
washing and scrubbing and cooking and raising a family of six or eight
or ten children.”

“Nothing that anybody ever said about women before August, 1914,” I
answer, “goes to-day. All the discoveries the scientists thought they
had made about her, all the reports the sociologists solemnly filed
over her, all the limitations the educators laid on her and all the
jokes the punsters wrote about her—everything has gone to the scrap-heap
as repudiated as the one-time theory that the earth was square
instead of round. Everything they said she wasn’t and she couldn’t and
she didn’t, she now is and she can and she does.”


IT IS UNIVERSAL SERVICE

Even women who do not need to work for pay are working without it and
adding to the demonstration of what women can do. See the colonel’s
lady taking the place of Julie O’Grady at the lathe for week-end work
in the munition factories to release the regular worker for one day’s
rest in seven. Lady Lawrence in a white tunic and wearing a diamond
wrist watch is in charge of the canteen at the Woolwich Arsenal,
supervising the serving of kippers and toast at the tea hour for the
2,000 women employés. Lady Sybil Grant, Lord Rosebery’s daughter, is
the official photographer to the Royal Naval Air Service at Roehampton.
The Countess of Limerick, assisted by fifty women of title, among them
Lady Randolph Churchill, is running the Soldiers’ Free Refreshment
Buffet at the London Bridge Station. The Marchioness of Londonderry,
directing the Military Cookery Section of the Women’s Legion, has given
to her nation the woman army cook who has recently replaced 5,000
men. Women of world-wide fame have cheerfully turned to the task that
called. Beatrice Harraden, celebrated author of “Ships That Pass in
the Night,” is in the uniform of an orderly at the Endell Street War
Hospital, where she has done a unique service in organising the first
hospital library for the patients. May Sinclair, whose recent book,
“The Three Sisters,” is one of the great contributions to feminist
literature, is enrolled as a worker at the Kensington War Hospital
Supply Department. She has invented the machine used there to turn out
“swabs” seven times faster than formerly they were made by hand.

There is the greatest diversity in war service. One of the first calls
answered by the suffragists was for an emergency gang of 300 women
from the metropolis to supervise the baling of hay for the army. Lloyd
George has been supplied with a woman secretary and a woman chauffeur,
the latter a girl who was a celebrated hunger striker before the
war. In the royal dockyards and naval establishments there are 7,000
women employed. Through the Woman’s National Land Service Corps 5,000
university and other women of education have been recruited to serve as
forewomen of detachments of women farm labourers. The army last spring
was asking for 6,000 women at the War Office to assist in connection
with the work of the Royal Flying Corps. Oh, the list of what women are
doing to-day is as indefinitely long as everything that there is to be
done.

And the woman movement sweeps on directly toward the gates of
government. See the woman war councillor who recently arrived in 1916.
She came into view first in Germany, where Frau Kommerzienrat Hedwig
Heyl of Berlin is a figure almost as important as is the Imperial
Chancellor. The daughter of the founder of the North German Lloyd Line,
herself the president of the Berlin Lyceum Club and the manager of
the Heyl Chemical Works, in which she succeeded her late husband as
president, Frau Heyl knows something of organisation. And she it is
who has been responsible more than any other of the Kaiser’s advisers
for the conservation of the food supply which keeps the German armies
strong against a world of its opponents. The second day after war was
declared, in conference with the Minister of the Interior, she had
formulated the plan that by night the Government had telegraphed to
every part of Germany: there was formed the Nationaler Frauendien
to control all of the activities of women during the war. She was
placed at the head of the Central Commission. It was the Nationaler
Frauendien that made the suggestions which the Government adopted for
the conservation of the food supply. And it was they who were entrusted
with organising the food supplies of the nation and educating the
women in their use to the point of highest efficiency. As a personal
contribution to this end, Frau Heyl has published a War Cook Book,
arranged an exhibit of substitute foods for war use, and has turned
one section of her chemical works into a food factory from which she
supplies the government with 6,000 pounds of tinned meat a day for the
army.

After all, who are the real food controllers of a nation? Could a
minister of finance, for instance, bring up a family on, say, 20
shillings a week? Yet there were women in every nation doing that
before they achieved fame on the firing line and in the making
of munitions. Last spring, as the food question became a gravely
determining factor in the war, it began to be more and more apparent
that the feminine mind trained to think in terms of domestic economy,
might have something of value to contribute to questions of state. Why
let Germany monopolise this particular form of efficiency? And England
in 1917 called to its Ministry of Food two women, Mrs. Pember Reeves,
one of its radical suffragists, and Mrs. C. S. Peel, the editor of a
woman’s magazine and a cook book.

About the same time each of the warring nations decided that the
mobilised women forces everywhere could be most efficiently directed
by women. Germany appointed as an attaché for each of the six army
commands throughout the empire a woman who is to serve as “Directress
of the Division for Women’s Service.” From Dr. Alice Salomon in the
Berlin-Potsdam district to Fraulein Dr. Gertrude Wolf in the Bavarian
War Bureau, each of these new appointees is a feminist leader from that
woman movement of yesterday. In France the enrolment of French women
is under the direction of Mme. Emile Boutroux and Mme. Emile Borel.
In England the highest appointment for a woman since the war is the
calling of Mrs. H. J. Tennant, the prominent suffragist, to be Director
of the Woman’s Department of National Service. America, preparing to
enter the great conflict in the spring of 1917, at the very outset
organised a Woman’s Division of the National Defence Council and called
to its command Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the great suffrage leader.

It’s a long way back to the Doll’s House, isn’t it, with woman’s place
to-day in the workshop and the factory, the war hospital, the war zone
and the war office? And now they are calling women to the electorate.
Russia has spoken, England has spoken. America is making ready. Doesn’t
Mr. Kipling want to revise his verses: “When man gathers with his
fellow braves for council, he does not have a place for her”?

It really has ceased to be necessary for woman any longer to plead her
cause. Every government’s doing it for her. The woman movement now is
both called and chosen. And the British Government is the most active
feminist advocate of all. The greatest brief for the woman’s cause that
ever was arranged is a handsome volume on “Women’s War Work,” issued by
the British War Office, as a guide to employers of labour throughout
the United Kingdom. This famous publication lists exactly ninety-six
trades and 1,701 jobs which the Government says women can do just as
well as men, some of them even better. A second publication issued in
London with the approval of the War Office, sets forth in more literary
form “Women’s Work in Wartime,” and is dedicated to “The Women of the
Empire, God save them every one.”

It was in 1916 that I talked with a German gentleman who is near
enough to the Kaiser to voice the point of view from that part of the
world. “Women from now on are going to have a more important place
in civilisation than they ever have held before,” affirmed Count von
Bernstorff as we sat in his official suite at the Ritz Hotel in New
York. “In the ultimate analysis,” he spoke slowly and impressively, “in
the ultimate analysis,” he repeated, “it is the nation with the best
women that’s going to win this war.”

“Do you know what I think?” says the Soul of a Suffragette as we stand
before the Great Push. “I think that whoever else wins this war, woman
wins.”

Her country’s call? Listen: there is a higher overtone—her man’s call.
Is it not the woman behind the man behind the gun who has achieved her
apotheosis?




CHAPTER IV

WOMEN WHO WEAR WAR JEWELRY


There is a new kind of jewelry that will be coming out soon. We shall
see it probably this season or at least within the next few months.
It will take precedence of all college fraternity pins and suffrage
buttons and society insignia and even of the costliest jewels. For it
will be unique. Since no American woman has ever before worn it.

As a _Mayflower_ descendant or a Colonial Dame or a Daughter of the
Revolution, you may have proudly pinned on the front of your dress the
badge that establishes your title perhaps to heroic ancestry. In the
gilt cabinet in the front parlour you may even cherish among curios
of the wide, wide world a medal of honour as your choicest family
heirloom. Who was it who won it, grandfather or great-grandfather or
great-great-grandfather? Anyway, it was that soldier lad of brave
uniformed figure whose photograph you will find in the old album that
disappeared from the centre-table something like a generation ago. We
are getting them out from the attics now, the dusty, musty albums,
and turning their pages reverently to look into the pictured eyes of
the long ago. Some one who still recalls it must tell us again this
soldier-boy’s story. Somewhere he did a deed of daring. Somehow he
risked his life for his country. And a grateful government gave him
this, his badge of courage. It’s fine to have in the family, there in
the parlour cabinet. You are proud, are you not, to be of a brave man’s
race? But blood, they say, will always tell. Heroism and daring may be
pulsing in your veins to-day as once in his.

Have you ever thought how it might be to have your own badge of
courage? Ah, yes, even though you are a woman. No, it is true, there
are no such decorations that have been handed down from grandmother or
great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother. It is not that they did
not deserve them. But their deeds were done too far behind the front
for that recognition. To-day, as it happens, the new woman movement has
advanced right up to the firing line, and it’s different. Every nation
fighting over in Europe is bestowing honours of war on women. There
is no reason to doubt that special acts of gallantry and service on
the part of American women now in action with the hospitals and relief
agencies that have accompanied our troops abroad, shall be similarly
recognised by the War Department. To earn a decoration, you see—not
merely to inherit one—that can be done to-day.

She was the first war heroine I had ever seen, Eleanor Warrender. Over
in London I gazed at her with bated breath—and to my surprise and
astonishment found her just like other women.

Among those called to the colours in England in 1914, she is one of
the specially distinguished who have followed the battle flags to
within sight of the trenches, within sound of the guns. And, somehow,
one will inadvertently think of these as some sort of super-woman.
Before this there have been those who did what they could for their
men under arms. There was one woman who risked her life heroically for
British soldiers. And Florence Nightingale’s statue has been set along
with those of great men in a London public square. In this war many
women are risking their lives. They are receiving all the crosses of
iron and silver and gold. And to the lady of the decoration who wears
this war jewelry, it is a souvenir of sights such as women’s eyes have
seldom or never looked on before since the world began.

I have said that Eleanor Warrender seemed to me just like other women.
And she is at first; other war heroines are. Until you catch the
expression in their eyes, which affords you suddenly, swiftly, the
fleeting glimpse of the soul of a woman who knows. There is that about
all real experience that does not fail to leave its mark. You may get
it in the quality of the voice, in a chance gesture that is merely
the sweep of the hand, or in the subtle emanation of the personality
that we call atmosphere. But wherever else it may register, there are
unveiled moments when you may read it in the eyes of these women who
know—that they have seen such agony and suffering and horror as have
only been approximated before in imaginative writing. The ancient
pagans mentioned in their books that have come down to us, a place
they called Hades, where everything conceivable that was frightful and
awful should happen. The Christians called it Hell.

But nobody had been there. And there were those in very modern days who
said in their superior wisdom that it could not be, that it did not
exist. Now how are we all confounded! For it is here and now. The Lady
with the Decoration has seen it. Look, I say, in her eyes.

For that is where you will find out. She does not talk of what she has
been through.

“My friend Eleanor Warrender,” Lady Randolph Churchill told me, “has
been under shell-fire for three years, nursing at hospitals all along
the front from Furnes to the Vosges Mountains. Sometimes she has spent
days with her wounded in dark cellars where they had to take refuge
from the bombs that came like hail—and the cellars were infested with
rats.”

Eleanor Warrender, when I saw her, came into the Ladies’ Empire Club at
67 Grosvenor Street, London.

High-bred, tall, and slender, she wore the severe tailor-made suit
in which you expect an Englishwoman to be attired. In the buttonhole
of her left coat lapel there was a dark silk ribbon striped in a
contrasting colour from which hung a small bronze Maltese cross. It
is the _Croix de Guerre_ bestowed on her by the French Government
for “conspicuous bravery and gallant service at the front.” She
dropped easily on a chintz-covered lounge before the grate fire in
the smoking-room. A club-member caught sight of the ribbon in the
coat lapel. “I say, Eleanor,” she said eagerly, coming over to examine
it.

Miss Warrender was home on leave. In a few days she would be returning
again to her unit in France. She has been living where one does not
get a bath every day and there are not always clean sheets. One sleeps
on the floor if necessary, and what water there is available sometimes
must be carefully saved for dying men to drink. The Red Cross flag
that floats over the hospital is of no protection whatever. Sometimes
it seems only a menace, as if it were a sign to indicate to the enemy
where they may drop bombs on the most helpless.

There is a slight soft patter at the window-pane and it isn’t rain.
It’s shrapnel. The warning whistle has just sounded. There is the cry
in the streets—“_Gardez vous!_” The taubes are here. A Zeppelin bomb
explodes on contact, so you seek safety in the cellar, which it may
not reach. But a taube bomb, small and pointed, pierces a floor and
explodes at the lowest level reached. So you may not flee from a taube
bomb to anywhere. You just stay with your wounded and wait. Ah, there
is the explosion which makes the cots here in the ward rock and the
men shake as with palsy and turn pale. But, thank God, this time the
explosion is outside and in the garden. Beyond the window there, what
was a flower-bed three minutes ago is an upturned heap of earth and
stone. They are bringing in now four more patients for whom room must
be made besides these from the battlefield that have been operated on,
twenty of them, since nine o’clock this morning. These four who are now
being laid tenderly on the white cots have two of them had their legs
blown off, and two others are already dying from wounds more mortal.

Eleanor Warrender a little later closes their eyes in the last sleep.
She has watched beside hundreds of men like that as they have gone out
into the Great Beyond. And just now she walks into the Ladies’ Empire
Club as calmly as if she had but come from a shopping tour in Oxford
Street. Ah, well, but one can suffer just so much, as on a musical
instrument you may strike the highest key and you may strike it again
and again until it flats a little on the ear because you have become
so accustomed to it. But it is the limit. It is the highest key. There
is nothing more beyond, at least. And that is what you feel ultimately
about these women who have come through the experience that leads to
the decoration. It is one in the most constant danger who arrives at
length at the most constant calm.

[Illustration:

 THE VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY

 Of the old French aristocracy, one of the most conspicuous examples
 that the war affords of noblesse oblige in the Red Cross Service.
]

“I don’t know really why it should be called bravery,” says Eleanor
Warrender’s quiet voice. “You see, a bomb has never dropped on me, so
I have no actual personal experience of what it would be like. Now in
that old convent in Flanders turned into a hospital, Sister Gertrude at
the third cot from where I stood had a leg blown off, and Sister Felice
had lost an arm, and I think it was very brave of them to go right
on nursing in the danger zone afterward. But I—as I have said—no bomb
has ever hit me. And having no experience of what the sensation would
be like, it isn’t particularly brave of me to go about my business
without special attention to a danger of which I have no experience of
pain to remember. As for death,” and Eleanor Warrender looked out in
Grosvenor Street into the yellow grey London fog, “as for death, it is,
after all, only an episode. And what does it matter whether one is here
or there?”

Eleanor Warrender and others have gone out into the great experience
on the borderland with death from quiet and uneventful lives of peace
such as ours in America up to the present have also been. The call
is coming now to us in pleasant cities and nice little villages all
over the United States, and the time is here when we too are summoned
from the even tenor of our ways because the high white flashing moment
of service is come. Eleanor Warrender was called quite suddenly from
a stately career as an English gentlewoman. She kept house for her
brother, Sir George Warrender, afterward in the war Admiral Warrender.
It was a lovely old country house, High Grove, at Pinnar, in Middlesex
County, of which she was the chatelaine. There had been a delightful
week-end party there for which she was the hostess. She stood on a
porch embowered in roses to bid her guests good-bye on an afternoon in
August. And she had no more idea than perhaps you have who have touched
lightly the hand of friends who have gone out from your dinner table
to-night, that the farewell was final. But two days later in a Red
Cross uniform she was on her way to her place by the bedside of the war
wounded. There has been no more entertaining since, and one cannot say
when Eleanor Warrender shall ever again see English roses in bloom.


THE DEMAND DEVELOPS THE CAPACITY

The Viscountess Elizabeth D’Azy had been with her young son passing a
summer holiday at a watering-place in France.

She had just sent the boy back to boarding-school and herself had
returned to her apartment in Paris overlooking the Esplanade des
Invalides. At the moment she had no more intention of becoming a war
heroine than of becoming a haloed plaster saint set in a niche in the
Madeleine. Yet before she had ordered her trunks to be unpacked, the
nation’s call for Red Cross women had reached her.

“It was so sudden,” she has told me, “and I was so dazed, I couldn’t
even remember where I had put my Red Cross insignia. At last my maid
found it in my jewel case beneath my diamond necklace. I hadn’t even
seen it since I had received it at the end of my Red Cross first-aid
course of lectures.” The maid packed a suitcase of most necessary
clothing. Carrying this suitcase, the Viscountess Elizabeth Benoit
D’Azy, daughter of the Marquis de Vogue of the old French aristocracy,
in August, 1914, walked with high head and firm tread out of a
life of luxury and ease into the place of toil and privation and
self-sacrifice at the Vosges front where her country had need of her.

That was, I think, the last time a maid has done anything for her for
whom up to that day in August there had been servants to answer her
least request. Ever since then the Viscountess D’Azy has been doing
things with her own hands for the soldiers of France. It was in the
second year of the war that a gentleman of France, General Joffre,
bent to kiss her small hand, now toil-hardened and not so white as it
used to be. There is a military group in front of a hospital that she
commands and they stand directly before a great jagged hole in the wall
torn there by a German bomb, which, as it fell, missed her by a few
metres. The General is giving her the “accolade,” and on the front of
her white uniform he has pinned the _Croix de Guerre_ of France for
distinguished service. Last year, on behalf of her grateful country,
the Minister of War conferred on her another decoration, the _Médaille
de Vermeil des Epidémies_. I do not know what others may have been
added since to these with which the front of her white blouse sagged
last spring in Paris.

But the woman thus cited for military honours had before this
Armageddon as little expectation of playing any such rôle as have you
to-day who are, say, the social leader of the four hundred in Los
Angeles or the president of a foreign missionary society in Bangor,
Maine. Her one preparation was that two months’ course of Red Cross
lectures. Many women of the leisure class were taking it in 1910.

“I think I will, too,” she had said to her husband. “Some elemental
knowledge of the scientific facts of nursing I really ought to have
when the children are ill.” There were five children, four little
daughters and a son. And the Viscount thought of them and reluctantly
gave his consent.

“Very well, Elizabeth,” he had said. “I think I am willing that you
should hear the lectures. But on this I shall insist, my dear: I cannot
permit you to take the practical bedside demonstration work. I don’t
wish to think of my wife doing that kind of menial service even for
instruction purposes, and I simply could not have you so exposed to all
sorts of infection.”

Like that it happened when Elizabeth, the Viscountess D’Azy, arrived at
the battle front to which she was first called at Gérardmer; she had
had no practical nursing experience. Oh, she got it right away. She
had quite some within twenty-four hours. But up to now, this flashing
white moment of life which she faced so suddenly, she had not so much
as filled a hot-water bag for any one. And she had never seen a man die.

At this military barracks where she took off her hat to don the flowing
white headdress with the red cross in the centre of the forehead, one
hundred and fifty men, some of them delirious with agony, some of them
just moaning with pain, all of them wounded and waiting most necessary
attention, lay on the straw on the floor ranged against the wall.

There weren’t even cots. And there was only herself with one other
woman to assist her in doing all that must be done for these one
hundred and fifty helpless men.

The first that she remembers, a surgeon was calling out orders to
her like a pistol exploding at her head. She got him a basin of
water and some absorbent cotton and she managed to find the ether.
Oh, his shining instruments were flashing horribly in the light from
the window. He was going to cut off a man’s leg. “But, Doctor,” she
exclaimed, “I never had that in my Red Cross training. I don’t know
how.” She went so white that he looked at her and he hesitated. “Go out
in the garden outside,” he commanded, “and walk in the air.” He looked
at his watch. “I’ll give you just three minutes. Come back then and
we’ll do this job.”

They did this job, the Viscountess D’Azy holding the patient’s leg
while they did it. “After that,” she has told me, “I was never nervous.
I was never afraid. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”

And there wasn’t anything she didn’t do. There were always the one
hundred and fifty men to be cared for: as fast as a cot was vacated
for the grave, it was filled again from the battle-line. For six weeks
the Viscountess was on her feet for seventeen hours out of every
twenty-four, carrying water, preparing food, dressing wounds, closing
the eyes of dying men. It took from eight in the morning until five in
the afternoon just to do the dressings alone. Twelve men on an average
died every night and they wrapped them in white sheets for the burial,
the Viscountess D’Azy did, daughter of one of the proudest houses of
France.

One day the message came that the Germans, sweeping through the nearby
village of St. Dié, had denuded the hospital there of all supplies.
Would the Viscountess with her influence, the commandant begged, carry
a report of their need to Paris. She went to Paris and brought back
a truck-load of supplies. She and the driver were three days on the
return journey. German shells were again falling on the road to St. Dié
as they approached. The chauffeur stopped in terror. “Go on!” commanded
the Viscountess. “Go on!” As the car shot forward by her order, a bomb
dropped behind them, tearing up in a cloud of dust the exact spot in
the road where the car had halted.

Word reached military headquarters of Elizabeth D’Azy’s skill in
nursing, of her unflinching coolness in the face of all danger. It
was decided that the war department had need of her at Dunkirk. The
town was under heavy bombardment, receiving between three hundred and
four hundred bombs daily. At the barracks hospital, arranged at the
railway station, there were cots for two hundred wounded. Sometimes a
thousand men were laid out on the floors. One night there were three
thousand. And there was only the Viscountess, who was the commandant,
one trained nurse, and some voluntary untrained assistants. For a
protection against the Zeppelins it was necessary that there should be
only the dimmest candle light even for the performing of operations.
As rapidly as possible patients were evacuated to base hospitals. The
commandant one night was tenderly supervising the lifting into an
American ambulance of an officer whose wounds she had just bandaged.
She leaned over the wheel to admonish “Drive slowly or he cannot live.”
And as she touched the driver’s arm there was an exclamation of mutual
surprise. The driver was A. Piatt Andrews, under secretary of the
treasury in President Taft’s administration. And the last time he had
seen the Viscountess D’Azy he had taken her in to dinner at the White
House in Washington when her husband was an attaché there of the French
Embassy. How long ago was all the gaiety of diplomatic social life at
Washington! A siren sounded shrilly now the cry of danger and death in
an approaching taube raid. And the greeting ended hastily, the hospital
commandant and the ambulance driver hurrying in the darkness to their
respective posts of duty.

The Viscountess has been in charge of a number of hospitals, having
been transferred from place to place at the front. When I saw her, she
was temporarily in command for a few weeks at the hospital which had
been opened at Claridge’s Hotel in Les Champs Elysées in Paris. She
didn’t care about her medals or her own magnificent record. It wasn’t
even the achievements of her husband, the Viscount D’Azy, in command of
the naval battleship _Jauré-guiberry_, of which she spoke most often.
The Viscountess D’Azy’s one theme is her boy. Before the war he was her
little son. Now he is a tall and handsome officer in uniform, at the
age of nineteen, Sub-lieutenant Charles Benoit D’Azy.

He wanted to enlist when she did. But she insisted that he remain at
school until he had finished his examinations in the spring of 1915.
He got into action in time for the great push on the Somme. Here
at the hospital in Les Champs Elysées the Viscountess shows me his
photograph, snapshots that she has taken with her kodak. Last night she
walked unattended and alone three miles through the streets of Paris
at midnight after seeing him off at the Gare de l’Est. He had started
again for the front after his furlough at home. Her one request to the
war department is to be detailed to hospital duty where she may be near
her boy’s regiment. Her pride in the boy is beautiful. When she speaks
his name that look of experience is gone for the moment, and in the
eyes of Elizabeth D’Azy there is only the soft luminous mother-love,
even as it may be reflected in your eyes that have never yet seen
bloodshed.

[Illustration:

 LADY RALPH PAGET OF ENGLAND

 Descendant of American forefathers. She is a war heroine worshipped by
 the entire Serbian nation for her consecrated devotion to their people.
]

“Up to the time of the war,” the Viscountess said in her pretty broken
English as she looked reminiscently out on the broad avenue of Paris,
“I was doing nothing but going to fêtes all day and dancing most of the
nights. But I think there is no reason why a woman who has danced well
should not be able to do her duty as well as she did her pleasure.
_N’est ce pas_?” And from the records of the European war offices, I
think so, too.


THE WOMAN WHOM A NATION ADORES

Among the English war heroines is Lady Ralph Paget, whose name has gone
round the world for her splendid service in Serbia. In that defenceless
little land, exposed so cruelly to the ravages of this terrible war,
she commanded with as efficient executive skill as any of the generals
who have been leading armies, one of the best-managed hospitals that
have faced the enemy’s fire.

Leila Paget had lived all her life in the environment where ladies have
their breakfast in bed and some one does their hair and hands them even
so much as a pocket handkerchief. “Leila going to command a hospital?”
questioned some of her friends, “Leila who has always been so dependent
on her mother?”

She is the daughter, you see, of the Lady Arthur Paget, the beautiful
Mary Paran Stevens of New York, who, ever since her marriage into the
British aristocracy, has been one of the leaders in the Buckingham
Palace set. Leila Paget was, of course, brought up as is the most
carefully shielded and protected English girl in high life. She grew up
in a stately mansion in Belgrave Square. She was introduced to society
in the crowded drawing-room there which has been the scene of her
brilliant mother’s so many social triumphs. But she had no ambition
to be a social butterfly. She was a débutante who did not care for a
cotillion. You see, it was not yet her hour. She was a tall, rather
delicate girl who continued to be known as the beautiful Lady Paget’s
“quiet” daughter. A few seasons passed and she married her cousin, the
British diplomat, Sir Ralph Paget, many years her senior.

She had never known responsibility at all when one day she sat down
in the great red drawing-room in Belgrave Square to make out a list
of the staff personnel and the supplies that would be required for
running a war hospital in Serbia. Her heart at once turned to this
land in its time of trouble because she had for three years lived in
Serbia when Sir Ralph was the British Minister there. They had but
recently returned to England on his appointment as under secretary of
foreign affairs. And now she had determined to go to the relief of
Serbia with a hospital unit. I suppose British society has never been
more surprised and excited about any of the women who have done things
in this war than they were about Leila Paget. This day in the great
red drawing-room Leila Paget found her _metier_. She is the daughter
of a soldier, General Sir Arthur Paget, and what has developed as her
amazing organising and administrative ability is an inheritance from
a line of American ancestors through her beautiful mother. But from
her reserved, retiring manner none of her friends had suspected that
she was of the stuff of which heroines are made. Now, as she laid
her plans for war relief, she did it with an expeditious directness
and a mastery of detail with which some Yankee forefather in Boston
might have managed his business affairs. With a comprehensive glance
she seemed to see the equipment that would be needed. Here in the red
drawing-room she sat, with long foolscap sheets before her on the
antique carved writing desk. She listed the requirements, item by item,
a staff of so many surgeons, so many physicians, so many nurses. Then
she estimated the supplies, so many surgeon’s knives, so many bottles
of quinine, everything from bandages and sheets down to the last box
of pins. And she planned to a pound the quantity of rice and tapioca.
Her hospital ultimately did have jam and tea when all the others were
scouring Serbia in a frantic search to supplement diminishing supplies.
Without any excitement, with an utter absence of hysteria as a woman
ordering gowns for a gay season in Mayfair, Leila Paget gave her
instructions and assembled her equipment. It was, you see, her hour.

She arrived at Uskub in October, 1914, with the first English hospital
on the scene to stem the tide of the frightful conditions that
prevailed toward the end of 1914. After the retreat of the Austrians,
Serbia had been left a charnel house of the dead and dying. Every
large building of any kind—schools, inns, stables—was filled with the
wounded, among whom now raged also typhus, typhoid, and smallpox.
There were few doctors and no nurses, only orderlies who were Austrian
prisoners. At one huge barracks fifteen hundred cases lay on the cots
and under them; at another three thousand fever patients overflowed
the building and lay on the ground outside in their uniforms,
absolutely unattended. Facing conditions like these, Lady Paget opened
her hospital in a former school building. And here in the war zone
she instituted for herself such a régime as probably was never before
arranged for an Englishwoman of title.

She arose at four o’clock in the morning, and when she slipped from
her cot, no one handed her a silk kimono. The regulation “germ
proof” uniform worn by women relief workers in Serbia consisted of a
white cotton combination affair, the legs of which tucked tight into
high Serbian boots. Over this went an overall tunic with a collar
tight about the neck and bands tight about the wrists. There was a
tight-fitting cap to go over the hair. And beneath this uniform, about
neck and arms, you wore bandages soaked in vaseline and petroleum. It
was the protection against the attacking vermin that swarmed everywhere
as thick as common flies. Wounded men from the trenches arrived
infested with lice, and typhus is spread by lice. Lady Paget stood
heroically at her post by their bedsides, with her own hands attending
to their needs. What there was to be done in the way of every personal
service, she did not shrink from. And she unpacked bales of goods. And
she scrubbed floors. And she assisted with the rites for the dying.
There had to be a lighted candle in a dying Serbian soldier’s hand,
and often her own hand closed firmly about the hand too weak to hold
the candle alone. Her wonderful nerve never failed, but there came a
time when her frail physical strength gave out. She still held on,
working for two days with a high fever temperature before she finally
succumbed, herself the victim of typhus. Her husband was telegraphed
for. She was unconscious when he arrived and it was three or four days
before he could be permitted to see her. Her life hung in the balance
for weeks. But finally recovery began and it was planned for her to
return to England for convalescence. She and Sir Ralph were attended
to the railroad station by the military governor of Macedonia, the
archbishop of the Serbian Church, and a guard of honour of Serbian
officers. The Serbian people in their devotion lined the street and
threw flowers beneath her feet and kissed the hem of her dress. At the
station the Crown Prince presented her with the highest decoration
within his gift and the Order No. 1 of St. Sava, a cross of diamonds.
Never before had it been bestowed on any other woman save royalty.
Seldom has any woman in history been so conspicuously the object of an
entire country’s gratitude. The street on which the hospital stood was
renamed with her name. On the Plain of Kossova there stands a very old
and historic church, on the walls of which from time to time through
the centuries, have been inscribed the names of queens and saints.
Leila Paget’s name also has been written there. A nation feels even as
does that common Serbian soldier whom she had nursed back from death,
who afterwards wrote her: “For me only two people exist, you on earth
and God in Heaven.”

Well, Leila Paget stayed with Serbia to the end. After two months’
rest in England, she was back in July at her hospital in Uskub. Sir
Ralph had returned with her, having been made general director of
the British medical and relief work in Serbia, with his headquarters
at Nish. In October the Bulgarians took Uskub. When the city was
under bombardment during the battle that preceded its fall, Sir Ralph
arrived in a motor car to rescue his wife. But four hours later he
had to leave without her on his way in his official capacity to warn
the other hospitals which were in his charge. “Leila, Leila,” he
expostulated in vain. She only shook her head. “My place is here,” she
said, glancing backward where 600 wounded soldiers lay. Lady Paget and
her hospital were of course detained by the enemy when they occupied
the town. She remained to nurse Bulgarians, Austrians and Serbians
alike. And she organised relief work for the refugees, of whom she fed
sometimes as many as 4,000 a day. For weeks and months, it was only by
dint of the utmost exertion that it was possible to extract from the
exhausted town sufficient wood and petrol just to keep fires going in
the hospital kitchen and sterilisers in the operating rooms. “These,”
says Lady Paget, “were strange times and in the common struggle for
mere existence it did not occur very much to any one to consider who
were friends and who were enemies.” In the spring of 1916, in March,
arrangements were made by the German Government permitting the return
to England of Lady Paget and her unit. Her war record reaching America,
the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs selected her as the
recipient of their jewelled medal. It is awarded each year to the woman
of all the world who has performed the most courageous act beyond the
call of duty.


HEROIC SERVICE OF SCOTTISH WOMEN

Woman’s war record in Europe is now starred with courageous acts. That
day in Serbia Sir Ralph, riding on while the people sprinkled their
mountain roads with white powder in token of surrender, came to the
Scottish Women’s Hospitals. These had not even men doctors, as at
Uskub. They were “manned” wholly by women sent out by the National
Union of Women Suffragists in Great Britain. And there was not a man
about the place except the wounded men in the beds. But Dr. Alice
Hutchinson, at Valjevo, and Dr. Elsie Inglis, at Krushevats, with
their staffs, also refused to leave their patients. All three of these
women made the decision to face the enemy rather than desert their
posts of duty. They were all three taken prisoners and required to
nurse the German wounded along with their own. Months afterward they
were released to be returned to England. Dr. Hutchinson, who has been
decorated by the Serbian Government with the order of St. Sava, when
she evacuated her hospital at the order of the Austrians, wrapped the
British flag about her waist beneath her uniform that it might not be
insulted by the invaders. Dr. Inglis had all her hospital equipment
confiscated by the Germans. When she protested that this was in
violation of Red Cross rules, the German commander only smiled: “You
have made your hospital so perfect,” he said, “we must have it.” Dr.
Inglis has been decorated with the Serbian order of the White Eagle.
Since then, at the Russian front with another Scottish hospital, Dr.
Inglis and her entire staff have again been decorated by the Russian
Government.

In London I heard the women of the Scottish hospitals spoken of at
historic St. Margaret’s Chapel as “that glorious regiment of Great
Britain called the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.” And the clergyman who
said it, spoke reverently in eulogy of one of the most distinguished
members of that regiment, “the very gallant lady who in behalf of her
country has just laid down her life.” In the historic chapel, the wall
at the back of the altar behind the great gold cross was hung with
battle flags. Men in khaki and women in khaki listened with bowed
heads. It was the memorial service for Katherine Mary Harley, of whom
the London papers of the day before had announced in large headlines,
“Killed at her post of duty in Monastir.”

[Illustration:

 MRS. KATHERINE M. HARLEY OF LONDON

 One of England’s famous suffragists, a number of whom have died at the
 front in their country’s cause. Mrs. Harley was buried like a soldier
 with her war decoration on the coat lapel of her uniform.
]

In that other world we used to have before the war, Mrs. Harley
was known as one of England’s most distinguished constitutional
suffragists, not quite so radical as Mrs. Despard, her sister, who is
the leader of the Woman’s Freedom League. One of her most notable
pieces of work in behalf of votes for women was the great demonstration
she organised a few years ago in that pilgrimage of women who marched
from all parts of England, addressing vast concourses of people along
the highways and arriving by diverse routes for a great mass meeting
in Hyde Park. You see, Katherine Harley was an organiser of tried
capacity. And she, too, comes of a family of soldiers. She was the
daughter of Captain French, of Kent. Her husband, who died from the
effects of the Boer War, was Colonel Harley, chief of staff to General
Sir Leslie Rindle in South Africa. Her brother is Viscount Sir John
French, former field marshal of the English forces in France. And her
son is now fighting at the front. With all of this brilliant array of
military men belonging to her, it is a curious fact, as her friends in
London told me, that Mrs. Harley did not believe in war. “Katherine was
a pacifist,” one of them said at the International Franchise Club the
night that the announcement of her death was received there in a hushed
and sorrowful silence. But she believed if there must be war, some one
must bind up the wounds of war. And it was with high patriotic zeal
and with the fearless spirit of youth, albeit she was 62 years of age,
that Mrs. Harley in 1914 enlisted with the Scottish Women, taking her
two daughters with her into the service. She went out as administrator
of the hospital at Royaumont. And when that was in successful
operation, she was transferred to Troyes to set up the tent hospital
there. Then she was called to Salonica. It was at Salonica that she
commanded the famous transport flying column of motor ambulances that
went over precipitous mountain roads right up to the fighting line
to get the wounded. She was in charge of a motor ambulance unit with
the Serbian army at Monastir when in March, 1917, at the time of the
regular evening bombardment by the enemy, she was struck by a shell.
They buried her like a soldier and she lies at rest with the _Croix
de Guerre_ for bravery on her breast out there at the front of the
conflict.

Violetta Thurston, you might think, if you met her, a little English
schoolgirl who has just seen London for the first time. Then by her
eyes you would know that she is more, by the wide, almost startled
look in what were meant to be calm, peaceful, English eyes. Violetta
Thurston is the little English nurse decorated by both Russia and
Belgium who in these last years has lived a life that thrills with
the adventures of war. She went out at the head of twenty-six nurses
from the National Union of Trained Nurses who were at work in Brussels
when the Germans arrived. They improvised their hospital in the
fire-station. At last the English nurses were all expelled by German
order and sent to Dunkirk. There Miss Thurston connected with the
Russian Red Cross.

She has written a book, “Field Hospital and Flying Column,” on her
experiences in Russia. There were four days at Lodz that she neither
washed nor had her clothes off. And once she was wounded by shrapnel
and once nearly killed by a German bomb. The last record I have of her
she was matron in charge of a hospital at La Panne in Belgium.


HEROINES OF FRANCE

No girl has, I suppose, lived a more uneventful life than did Emilienne
Moreau up to the time that she became one of the most celebrated
heroines of France. You haven’t if your home is, say, down in some
little mining village of West Virginia or in the coal-fields of
Pennsylvania, where you are going back and forth to school on week days
and to Sunday school every Sunday. Emilienne was like that in Loos. She
was sixteen and so near the end of school that she was about to get out
the necessary papers for taking the examination for _institutrice_,
which is a school teacher in France. Loos was a mining village. The
inhabitants lived in houses painted in the bright colours that you
always used to see in this gay and happy land. It was in one of the
most pretentious houses situated in the Place de la Republique, and
opposite the church, that the Moreau family lived. The large front
room of the house was M. Moreau’s store. He had worked all his life
in the mines and now at middle age, only the past summer, had removed
here with his family from a neighbouring village and he had purchased
the general store. It was with great pride that the family looked
forward to an easier life and a comfortable career for the father as a
“bonneted merchant.” Emilienne was his favourite child, his darling
and his pride, and she in turn adored her father. Often they took long
walks in the woods together. They had just come back from one of these
walks, Emilienne with her arms filled with bluets and marguerites,
when on August 1 a long shriek of the siren at the mines called the
miners from the shafts and the farmers round about from their fields.
Assembling at the Mairie for mobilisation all the men of military age
marched away from Loos.

That night the sun went down in a blood-red glory. All the houses
of Loos were bathed in blood-red. “Bad sign,” muttered an old woman
purchasing chocolate at the store. And it was. Soon the refugees from
surrounding burning villages came flocking by in streams, telling
of the terrible Germans from whom they had escaped. Most of the
inhabitants of Loos joined the fleeing throngs. Of five thousand
people, ultimately only two hundred remained in the village. Among
these were the Moreau family, who, possessing in marked degree that
national trait of love for their home and their belongings, refused to
leave. “But,” said her father to Emilienne, “little daughter, it will,
I fear, be a long time before you will gather flowers again.”

And it was. The Germans were in possession of Loos by October. They
poured petrol on the houses and burned many of them. At the store in
the Place de la Republique, Emilienne, with quick wit, set a bottle of
wine out on the counter and they drank and went away without burning,
although they looted the store of everything of value. During the
year that followed, Loos remained in the hands of the enemy. In the
effort of the French to retake it, it was often fired upon from the
surrounding hills. From the windows in the sloping garret roof,
Emilienne and her father watched many a battle until the bombs began
falling on the garret itself. They were exposed to constant danger.
They had to live on the vegetables they could gather from the deserted
neighbouring gardens. By December her father was ill from privation and
hunger and anxiety, and one night he died. Emilienne, girl as she was,
seems to have been the main reliance of the family, her mother, her
little sister Marguerite, and her little brother Leonard, aged nine.
The morning after her father’s death, Emilienne went to the German
commandant to ask for assistance. How should she get a coffin? How
should it be possible to bury her father? And the German laughed: “One
can get along very well without a coffin!” He finally permitted her
four French prisoners to dig the grave and the curé of Loos, he said,
could say a prayer. But Emilienne was heart-broken at the thought of
putting her father into the ground without a coffin. She and her little
brother made one with their own hands from boards she found at the
deserted carpenter-shop down the street.

By the spring of 1915 the bombardment of Loos increased in violence.
There were days at a time when the whole family, with their black
dog Sultan, did not dare venture out of the cellar. In September,
Emilienne, ascending to the demolished garret, where she lay flat on
her stomach on the rafters, watched a battle in which the strangest
beings she ever saw took part, fantastic creatures of a grey colour who
were throwing themselves on the German trenches. As they advanced, she
noticed that they wore “little petticoats,” and she hurried to tell
her mother that these must be the English suffragettes of whom she had
heard, coming to the rescue of Loos. What they actually were was the
Scottish troops in kilts, the famous “Black Watch,” who a few days
later had driven the Germans from Loos. As they came into the village,
Emilienne, braving a cyclone of shells, and rallying her French
neighbours, ran to meet them, waving the French flag and singing the
“Marseillaise.” Thus, it is said, by her fearless courage, was averted
a retreat that might have meant disaster along the whole front.

But the fighting was not yet over. During the next few days, Emilienne,
with the Red Cross doctor’s assistance, turned her house into a
first-aid station. Some seven of the stalwart Scotsmen in the “little
petticoats,” she herself dragged in to safe shelter when they had been
wounded. Two Germans taking aim at French soldiers she killed with a
revolver she had just snatched from the belt of a dead man. When the
enemy had been finally repulsed, Emilienne Moreau was summoned by the
Government to be given the _Croix de Guerre_.

A little later, her pictured face was placarded all over Paris by the
French newspapers. They wanted her to write her personal story. At
first she shrank from it: “It would be presumption on the part of a
girl. What would my commune think?” But finally she was prevailed upon,
and for two months daily “_Mes Mémoires_” appeared on the front page of
_Le Petit Parisien_ with a double-column headline. Even more honours
have come to Emilienne. Great Britain bestowed on her its order of St.
John of Jerusalem and the King has sent her a personal invitation to
visit Buckingham Palace as soon as the Channel crossing shall be safe.

With it all, you would think Emilienne, if you met her, quite a
normal girl. You see, she is young enough to forget. And it is only
occasionally that in the clear blue eyes you catch a glimpse of
tragedy. Her smooth brown hair she is as interested in having in the
latest mode as are you who to-day consulted the fashion-pages of a
magazine for coiffures. I have seen her on the sands at Trouville with
a group of girls at play at blind man’s buff in the moonlight. And by
her silvery laughter you would not know her from the rest as a heroine.
The next day, when they were in bathing and the body of a drowned man
was washed ashore, one of the other girls fainted. Afterward Emilienne
said, and there was in her eyes a far-away look of old horrors as she
spoke, “Marie, Marie, if your eyes had looked on what mine have, you
would not faint so easily.”

There is another French girl, the youngest war heroine I know who has
been decorated by any government. And the case of Madeleine Danau is
perhaps of special interest, because any girl in the United States
can even now begin to be a heroine as she was. They say in France that
“_la petite Danau_” has served her country even though it was not
while exposed to shot and shell. She lives in the village of Corbeil
and she was only fourteen years old at the time her father, the baker,
was mobilised. A baker in France, it must be remembered, is a most
necessary functionary in the community, for as everybody has for years
bought bread, nobody even knows how to make it at home any more. The
whole neighbouring countryside, therefore, you see, was most dependent
on the baker, and the baker was gone away to war. It was then that
Madeleine proved equal to doing the duty that was nearest to her. She
promptly stepped into her father’s place before the bread-trough and
the oven. She gets up each morning at four o’clock and with the aid of
her little brother, a year younger than herself, she makes each day
eight hundred pounds of bread, which is delivered in a cart by another
brother and sister. The radius of the district is some ten miles, and
no household since war began has missed its daily supply of bread.

One day Madeleine was summoned to a public meeting for which the
citizens of Corbeil assembled at the Mairie. She went in her
champagne-coloured dress of _toile de laine_ and her Sunday hat of
leghorn trimmed with black velvet and white roses. And there before
this public assemblage the _Préfet des Deux-Sèvres_ pinned on Madeleine
the Cross of Lorraine and read a letter from President Poincaré of
France. In it the President presented to Madeleine Danau his sincere
compliments and begged her to accept “this little jewel,” this Cross
of Lorraine, which shall proclaim that the valiant child of the
Deux-Sèvres through her own labour assuring for the inhabitants of the
Commune of Exoudun their daily bread, has performed as patriotic a
service and is as good a Frenchwoman as are any of her sisters of the
Meuse.

The ever-lengthening list of heroic women who have distinguished
themselves in this war in Europe is now so many that it is quite
impossible even to mention any considerable number of them in less than
a very large book. You find their names now in every country quite
casually listed along with those of soldiers in the Roll of Honour
published in the daily newspapers. And it is no surprise to come on
women’s names in any of the lists, “Dead,” “Wounded,” or “Decorated.”
The French Academy out of seventy prizes in 1916 awarded no less than
forty-seven to women “as most distinguished examples of military
courage.” Among these the _Croix de Guerre_ has been given to Madame
Macherez, capable citizeness of Soissons, who has been daily at the
Mairie in an executive capacity, and to Mlle. Sellier who has been in
charge of the Red Cross hospital there during the long months of the
bombardment. The Cross of the Legion of Honor along with the cross of
Christ decorates the front of the black habit of Sister Julie, the nun
of Gerbéviller who held the invading Germans at bay while she stood
guard over the wounded French soldiers at her improvised hospital.

It’s like this in all of the warring countries. And all of these women
with their war jewelery for splendid service, are women like you and
me. But yesterday, and they might have been pleased with a string of
beads to wind about a white throat. Out of every-day feminine stuff
like this shall our war heroines too be made.




CHAPTER V

THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE


The baby had been fretful all that hot summer day. Every time he was
passed over to the eldest little girl, he cried. So Mrs. Lewis had to
keep him herself. All the twenty pounds of him rested heavily on her
slender left arm while she went about the kitchen getting supper. With
one hand she managed now and then to stir the potatoes “warming over”
in the pan on the stove. She put the pinch of tea in the pot and set it
steeping. And she fried the ham. She set on the table a loaf of bread,
still warm from the day’s baking and called to the eldest little girl
to bring the butter. “Aren’t we going to have the apple sauce too?” the
child asked. “Oh, yes, bring it,” the mother had answered pettishly.
“I’m that tired I don’t care how quickly you eat everything up.”

You see she had been going around like this with the heavy baby all day
while she baked, and there were the three meals to cook. And she had
done some of the ironing and there was the kitchen floor that had to be
“washed down.” And the second little girl’s dress had to be finished
for Sunday. And Jimmie, aged nine, whose food was always disagreeing
with him, was in bed with one of his sick spells and called frequently
for her to wait on him in the bedroom at the head of the stairs. And
she had been up with the baby a good deal anyhow the night before. So
you see why Mrs. Lewis was what is called “cross.”

Besides, she was just now facing a new anxiety. When her husband came
in from the shop and hung up his hat and she had dished up the potatoes
and the family sat down to the evening meal, there was just one subject
of conversation. The State of New York was making its preparedness
preparation with the military census that was to begin to-morrow, a
detailed inventory of man power and possessions. Hitherto for America
the war had been over in Europe. Now for the first time it was here for
the Lewis family. And other similar supper tables all over the United
States were facing it too. “But you couldn’t possibly go,” the tired
woman said across the table.

“I may have to,” the man answered.

“Then what’ll happen to me and the children?” she returned desperately.

And he didn’t know. And she didn’t know. Hardly anybody knew. We on
this side of the Atlantic are now beginning to find out.

Mr. Lewis was drafted last week. The rent is paid one month ahead.
You can see the bottom of the coal bin. There’s only half a barrel of
flour. And there are seven children to feed. No, there are none of her
family nor his that want to adopt any of them as war work. Well, there
you are. And there Mrs. Lewis is. In her nervous dread of the charity
that she sees coming, she slaps the children twice as often as she used
to and the baby cries all day.

But, Mrs. Lewis, listen. Don’t even ask the Exemption Board to release
your husband. It’s your chance to be a patriot and let him go. And this
war may not be as bad for you as you think. There are women on the
other side could tell you. Suppose, suppose you never had to do another
week’s baking and you were rested enough to love the last baby as you
did the first, and all the children could have shoes when they needed
them, and there was money enough beside for a new spring hat and the
right fixings to make you pretty once more. So that your man coming
back from the front when the war is won, may fall in love with you
all over again. No, it’s not heaven I’m talking about. It’s here in a
war-ridden world. This is no fairy tale. It’s the truth in Britain and
France, as it’s going to be in the United States.

“Somewhere in England” Mrs. Black, when her country took up arms in
1914, was as anxious and concerned as you are to-day. Her man was
a car-cleaner who earned 22 shillings a week on the Great Western
Railway. That seems appallingly little from our point of view. But
thousands of British working class families were accustomed to living
on such a wage. The Blacks had to. It is true there wasn’t much margin
for joy in it. And when the call to the colours came, it was to Mr.
Black an invitation to a Great Adventure. He enlisted. Well, the
first winter had not passed before it was demonstrated that Mrs. Black
and the children—there were five of them—were not going to experience
any new hardship because of the absence of the head of the family in
Flanders. By January she was saying hopefully one morning across the
fence to her neighbour in the next little smoke-coloured brick house in
the long dingy row: “If them that’s makin’ this war’ll only keep it up
long enough, I’ll be on my feet again.”

To-day you may say that Mrs. Black is “on her feet.” There are
Nottingham lace curtains at her front windows as good as any in the
whole row of Lamson’s Walk. The new chest of drawers she’s needed ever
since she was married is a place to put the children’s clothes. And
it’s such a help to keeping the three rooms tidy. Santa Claus came at
Christmas with a graphophone. And you ought to see Mrs. Black’s fur
coat! Three other women who haven’t got theirs yet were in the night
she wore it home “just to feel the softness of it.” Their hands, do you
know, hands that are hard and grimy with England’s black town soot,
had never so much as touched fur before! And they’re going to wear it
soon, if this war keeps up. For they’re all of them these new women in
industry, like Mrs. Black.

Mrs. Black, to begin with, has her “separation allowance” because her
husband’s at the front. That’s 12 shillings and sixpence per week for
herself, 5 shillings for the first child, three shillings sixpence for
the second and 2 shillings for each subsequent child. Well, with the
five children, that makes 27 shillings a week coming in and there’s
none of it going to the Great Boar’s Head on the corner, which always
used to get a look-in on Mr. Black’s weekly wage envelope before Mrs.
Black did. Now, in addition to this 27 shillings a week, which in
itself is 5 shillings more than the family ever had before, Mrs. Black
is at the factory where she is making 30 shillings a week. That’s 57
shillings a week, which is her household income more than doubled. It’s
why 60,000 fewer persons in London were in receipt of poor relief in
September, 1915, than in 1903, the previous most prosperous year known
to the Board of Trade. In the West End of this town titled families
are counting their “meatless” days. In the East End, families are
celebrating meat days that were never known before the war. The Care
Committee used to have to provide boots for over 300 school children in
this district. This year there was only one family, the mother of which
was ill, that needed boots!


RIGHT THIS WAY, LADIES, INTO INDUSTRY

Mrs. Lewis, this is the answer to your anxious inquiry: it’s prosperity
that’s coming to you. In every warring country there are women of the
working classes who have found it. You are going to be mobilised for
the army of industry as your husband for the other army. Only there is
no draft or conscription necessary. The recruiting station is just
down the street at the factory that recently hung out that sign bright
with new paint, “Women Wanted.” See them arriving at the entrance gate.
Fall in line, Mrs. Lewis, and get measured for your new uniform. Yes,
you are to have one. It’s some form of the things they call trousers.
But I’m sure you won’t mind that. Put it on. Put it on quickly. In it
you will find yourself the real new woman whose coming has hitherto
been only proclaimed or prophesied on the waving banners of suffrage
processions you’ve watched parading on the avenues. You are She for
whom the ages have waited. This new garment they are handing you has
the pocket in it for a pay envelope. You who have been toiling for your
board and the clothes you could get after the rest of the family had
theirs, are now a labourer worthy of hire. Economic independence, the
political economists call it, as they take their pen in hand to make
note of the long lines of you going into industry, later to write their
deductions into scientific treatises about you.

Now, it may not particularly interest you that you are like this, a
phenomenon of the 20th century, but there are plainer terms that I am
sure you will understand. Listen, Mrs. Lewis: Every Saturday night
there is going to be money in your own pocket. The convenience of
this is that never again will you under any circumstances have to go
through any one’s else pockets for it. Do you see? Right across those
portals there where they want you so much that every obstacle that
used to be piled in your pathway has been so surreptitiously carted
away overnight, that you would hardly believe it ever was there, lie
all promised opportunities. Susan B. Anthony pioneered for them. Mrs.
Pankhurst smashed windows for them. Mrs. Catt is even now politically
campaigning for them. And you, Mrs. Lewis, are to enter in. What will
happen to you when you’ve joined up with the new woman movement?

Let us look at the advance columns over on the other side. No one met
them with: “Woman, back to your kitchen!” Or, “This is unscriptural and
your habits of marriage and maternity will interfere with shop routine.”

It was one of the most significant decisions of all time since the
day of the Cave Woman, that morning when Mrs. Black got her aunt to
come in to look after the children and, hanging up her gingham apron,
walked out of the kitchen. Women were doing it all over Europe. They
are to be counted now by the hundreds of thousands. Altogether we
know that they number in the millions although we have not the exact
returns from every country. By 1916 England had enrolled in industry
4,086,000 women and Germany 4,793,472 of whom 866,000 in England and
1,387,318 in Germany had never before been gainfully employed outside
their own homes. France, Italy, Russia all have similar battalions. And
the important fact is that these new recruits are going into industry
differently. Women before had to push their way in. Women now are
invited in.

Heretofore there were all the reasons in the world why a woman should
not work outside her own home. Three generations of employment had not
yet sufficed to efface the impression from the minds even of most young
girls themselves who went out to earn their living that it was only a
temporary expedient until they could marry and be supported ever after.
Even when they discovered after marriage that they were still earning
their own living just as much in their husband’s kitchen as anywhere
they had been before, public opinion and the neighbours disapproved
of their working for any one outside their own family. Who, Madam,
would sew on your husband’s buttons? So strong was this sentiment that
it even threatened to crystallise on the statute books. There were
districts in Germany and in the North of England where they talked
about passing a law against the employment of the married woman. Then
fortunately about this time the world came to 1914 and the revolution
of all established thought.

Everybody sees now a reason why Mrs. Black should work. Her country
wants her to. And it has swept aside to the scrap-heap of ancient
prejudice all the other reasons against the industrial employment of
women. Among the rest, the most material reason, the most real reason
of all, that woman’s place was the home and every other place was
man’s. That was true. And it was one of the most incontrovertible
facts that each woman who sought employment came up against. Industry
had never been arranged for her needs or her convenience.


MAKING INDUSTRY OVER FOR HER

Now it’s being made over, actually made over! Already woman wins this
victory in the Great War. Don’t we all of us know industries where
there hasn’t been so much as a nail to hang a woman’s hat on, where
it wouldn’t be spoiled, let alone a room in which she could wash her
hands, or change her working clothes? But go through Europe now and you
will scarcely find any place they haven’t tried the best they could to
fix up for woman’s occupancy. She shall have the nicest hook that they
can find to hang her hat on. She shall have a whole cupboard, a locker
to keep it in, if she’ll only put it there to-day. And oh, ladies, all
of you listen, there’s even a mirror to see if it’s on straight! Just
a little while ago I stood in a factory “somewhere in France,” where
they had built a beautiful retiring room with lavatories and hot and
cold water and a row of shining white enamelled sinks. And one day of
course some thoughtful woman had brought in her handbag a piece from
her cracked looking-glass and fastened it on the wall between two
tacks, you know the way you would? A little later, the superintendent
of the factory saw it there: “I sent right out,” he told me himself
with feeling, “and bought this one.” And he showed me with pride the
full length plate-glass mirror that hung on the wall where the little
old cracked looking-glass used to be. I think every government in
Europe now has mirrors listed among “necessary supplies.” I mention it
as significant of the anxious effort to please the feminine fancy.

But the first most important thing that was done in making over
industry, was opening the door from the inside for Mrs. Black’s
arrival. Every door-keeper to-day has his instructions from higher up
not to keep the lady knocking out in the cold. Her coming was in the
first instance heralded in England, actually heralded with a flourish
of trumpets. That procession of 40,000 women that Mrs. Pankhurst led
down the Strand into industry, under the new standard, “For Men Must
Fight and Women Must Work,” had flags flying and bands playing. And the
English Government paid for the bands. Parliament records show that
this Suffrage procession was financed to the extent of 3,000 pounds,
which is $15,000. Has there ever been a more revolutionary conversion
than this to the Woman’s Cause? For the first time in history, the
woman movement is underwritten by Government. It is with this support
that it’s going strong all over the world to-day.

The place that is being made for Mrs. Black and her contemporaries
is everywhere in the first instance at least, being arranged through
Government intervention. With every new push on the front, the soldiers
that go down in the awful battalions of death have to be replaced by
others, which means that more and more men must be “combed out” of the
shops back home. And to employers governments have said: Hire women in
their places.

To this employers answered as they have so many times to us when we
have asked to be hired: “But women don’t know how.”

You see, it has always been so difficult for us to learn. From the
bricklayers and the printers up to the medical men and the lawyers and
the ministers, there has always been that gentlemen’s agreement in
every trade: “Don’t let her in. And if she gets in, don’t let her up,
any higher up than you have to.”

But now over all the world, to every industry that shows a slackening
in production, there is issued one common government General Order:
“Teach the Women.” And the employer looks questioningly toward the
work bench at the figure in the leather apron there, who in some of
the most highly skilled trades, has always threatened to take off that
apron and walk out of the shop when a petticoat crossed the threshold.
There are shops in which there has never been a woman apprentice,
because he wouldn’t teach her. Would he now?

The skilled workman was summoned in England to the Home Office for a
heart-to-heart talk with the Government. He came from the cotton trade,
the woollen and the worsted trade, the bleachers and dyers’ trade, the
woodworkers and furnishers’ trade, the biscuit trade, the boot and shoe
trade, the engineering trade and a great many others. The Government
spoke sternly of its power under martial law. The skilled workman,
shifting his cap from one hand to the other, began to understand. But
he still stubbornly protested: “Women haven’t the mental capacity for
my work.”

“We shall see,” said Government.

“But it will take so long to learn my trade, five years, six years,
seven years.”

“Ah, so it will. Very well, then, teach the women a part of your trade
at a time, a process in which instruction can be given in the shortest
length of time.”

“But the tools of my trade, they are heavy for a woman’s hands.”

“There shall be special tools made.”

And there have been. So, the now famous “dilution” of labour has been
arranged. Mrs. Black is “in munitions.” I saw her standing at a machine
that is called a capstan lathe, drilling the opening in a circular
piece of brass. There used to be employed in this shop, 1,500 men and
the man power has been now so diluted, that there are 200 men and
1,300 women. There are rows and rows of the capstan lathes and down
each alleyway, as the space between them is called, there are lines of
women like Mrs. Black. They have to start the machine, to feed it, and
control it, and stop it. In three weeks’ time most of them were able
to learn these repetitive operations. But they do not yet know how to
take the machine apart or to fix it if anything breaks. So up and down
each row there goes a skilled man who is still retained for this, a
“setter-up,” he is called in the trade. And to supervise each section
there is a foreman. It was the foreman who called my attention to the
machines. “They are,” he said, “small lathes, specially adapted to the
women. We had them made in America since the war.”


EASY ENOUGH TO ARRANGE

Like that you see, it is done. Sometimes to make over the job for the
woman, there was necessary only the simplest expedient like adding
the “flap” seat in the Manchester tram-cars for the woman-conductor
to rest between rush hours. Even in skilled trades it hasn’t always
been necessary to remodel an entire machine. Sometimes only a lever
has to be shortened. Sometimes it has been done by the addition of
“jigs and fixtures,” so that a process formerly involving judgment
and experience, is now automatically performed at a touch from the
operator. Are there heavy weights to be lifted? The paper factories
met the situation by reducing the size of the parcel. The leather,
tanning and currying trade put in special lifting tackle. The chemical
industries have trucks for transporting the heavy carboys. The
pottery and brick trades have trolleys. And the engineering trade,
for manipulating the heavy shells, has put in electrical cranes and
carriages: they are operated by a woman who sits in a sort of easy
chair from which she only lifts her hand to touch the right lever.

These and other innovations have been made in accordance with a
definite plan. You should hear it just the way a government says it:
“In considering the physical capacity of a woman factory worker,”
the Home Office directs, “it should be remembered that her body is
physiologically different from and less strongly built than that of a
man. It is desirable that the lifting and carrying of heavy weights and
all sudden violent or physically unsuitable movements in the operation
of machines should so far as practicable be avoided. Often a simple
appliance or the alteration of a movement modifies an objectionable
feature when it does not altogether remove it. When standing is
absolutely unavoidable, the hours and spells of employment should be
proportionately short, and seats should be available for use during the
brief pauses that occasionally occur while waiting for material or the
adjustment of a tool.”

There is one further instruction: “The introduction of women into
factories where men only have hitherto been employed will necessitate
some rearrangement in the way of special attention to the fencing of
belts, pulleys and machine tools.”

Well, there are now some ninety-six trades and some 1,701 processes in
which the workshop has been gotten ready like this, and woman labour
has been introduced. You see how easily it has all been brought about
now, when every one, instead of putting their heads together on How can
we keep the women out, is planning eagerly, How can we get the women in.

And do you know that Mrs. Black cannot so much as have a headache
to-morrow morning, without the English Government being sorry about it?
Every industry in the land has received its envelope, black-lettered,
“On His Majesty’s Business” and inside this note: “Care on the part
of employers to secure the welfare of women brought in to take the
place of men in the present emergency will greatly increase the
probability of their employment proving successful.” A nation, you see,
is interested in Mrs. Black’s success. “Who works fights,” announced
the Government when it invited Mrs. Black into industry. The badge, a
triangle of brass, that she wears on the front of her khaki tunic, is
inscribed “On War Service.” The French women in the munitions factories
wear on their left sleeve an armlet with an embroidered insignia, a
bursting bomb, which says the same thing.

Mrs. Black, I believe as a matter of fact, did have a headache one
morning. And her output of munitions fell off. Now that must not
happen. For the lack of the shells, you know, a battle might be lost.
The headache was investigated by the Factory Inspector. And the
Government made a great discovery, I think we may say as important to
us, to every woman who works, as was Watt’s discovery of the principle
of the steam-engine that day he watched the tea kettle. This was what
the factory inspector found out: Last night after Mrs. Black left the
shop, there was the dinner to cook, and it was eight o’clock before she
could get it ready. Then, of course, there were the dishes to wash.
Then she swept all her house through. Then she put the clothes to soak
in the tub over night. Then she worked on the stockings in the piled-up
mending basket until midnight. Then she went to bed, so that she could
be awake next morning at four o’clock. And in the morning she built a
fire under the “copper” and heated the water and washed the clothes
and boiled them and hung them out on the line. And Mrs. Black, having
already done a woman’s work before dawn, went out to fill in the rest
of the day at a man’s work!


BEYOND THE PHYSICAL ENDURANCE OF MEN

This, you should remember, was the woman whom the government had
hesitated about asking to work “overtime” on war orders. Would it be
possible to extend labour’s eight-hour day, they had asked. The Trade
Unions, when asked, had said it would be a great tax on the physique of
men. It was more than they were equal to under ordinary circumstances.
But, well, as an emergency measure, and for the duration of the war
only, Union rules would be suspended to permit of overtime. But even
then the Government decided on the eight-hour limit for women, in
exceptional circumstances permitting twelve hours. But an employer
working women longer should be liable to arrest!

Then came the Factory Inspector’s report laid before the Home Office:
Mrs. Black was working a 20-hour day! Her case was not at all unique.
“Overtime” on home work is, of course, what the great majority of
women who have gotten into industry in the past or into a profession or
a career; have been accustomed to. _Only nobody ever noticed it before!_

Now every War Office saw it as early as the first year of the war: No
woman could do a woman’s work in the home and a man’s work in the shop
and maintain the maximum output. The efficiency experts were summoned
all over Europe. They were shocked at such uneconomic management.
Could you expect any competent workingman to cook his own dinner?
There’d be a strike if you did. Why in thunder, then, should Mrs. Black
be expected to cook hers? And every nation hurried to set up in its
factories the industrial canteen, where meals are prepared and served
to employés at cost price.

At one of these industrial canteens at a factory in the suburbs of
Paris, I sat down to dinner with 600 working people. The chef, who
had shown me with pride through his great store-rooms of supplies,
apologised for the day’s menu: He was humiliated that there would
be neither rabbits nor chicken, but with a war-market one did the
best they could. The _a la carte_ bill of fare proceeded from
_hors-d’œuvres_ through _entrées_ and roasts to salads and to dessert
and cheese, and there was wine on every table. You selected, of course,
what you wished to pay for. Marie, on my right, I noticed, paid for her
dinner, 1 franc fifty. Jacques, on my left, I saw hand the waiter 1
franc seventy-five. My check came to two francs. It was a better dinner
than I was accustomed to for three times the money at the Hotel Regina
in the Rue de Rivoli. In England at the great Woolwich Arsenal, Mrs.
Black gets meat and two vegetables for eightpence, which is 16 cents,
and dessert for 2½ pence which is 5 cents. For an expenditure not to
exceed 25 pence which is 50 cents, you can get at any of the industrial
canteens in England, the four meals for the day for which the following
is a sample menu:

                                        _Cost in Pence_

  BREAKFAST: Bacon, 3 rashers                  4
             Bread, 3 slices, butter and jam   2
             Tomato                             ½
             Sugar                              ⅒
             Milk                               ½
  DINNER: Roast beef                           4
             Yorkshire pudding                 1½
             Potatoes                           ¾
             Cabbage                           1
             Apple pie and custard             1½
             Baked plum pudding                1
  TEA: 2 slices bread, butter and jam          2½
             Cake                               ½
             Sugar                              ⅒
             Milk                               ½
             Jam tarts                         1
  SUPPER: 2 slices bread                       2
             Cheese                            1
             Meat                              2
             Pickles                            ½
  Tea, coffee, cocoa, or milk with above      ½—1½

What’s happened from Mrs. Black’s headache is like a tale from the
“Arabian Nights.” A magic wand has been waved over the factory. “It
should be made,” a Frenchman told me in his enthusiasm, “a little
Paradise for woman.” And that seems to be the way they’re feeling
everywhere. Government solicitude in England for the new woman in
industry resulted in 1916 in a new act for the statute books under
which the Home Office is given wide powers to arrange for her comfort.
The scientists of a kingdom have been engaged to study “Woman.” Their
observations and deductions are every little while embodied in a “white
paper.” There have been some fourteen of these “white papers” through
which the discoveries are disseminated to the factories.

There is a staff of great chemists in government laboratories who
arrange the menus just mentioned, which are really formulas for
efficiency. Fat, protein and carbohydrates have been carefully
proportioned to produce the requisite calories of energy for a maximum
output. They emphasise the importance of the canteen with this
announcement: “For a large class of workers, home meals are hurried
and, especially for women, too often consist of white bread and boiled
tea. Probably much broken time and illness result from this cause.”

There is a staff of competent architects who were first called in
that there might be provided a place in which to eat the carefully
prepared meals. “Environment,” it is announced, “has a distinct effect
on digestion.” So a White Paper submitted diagrams for the canteen
building. “The site,” it said, “should have a pleasant, open outlook
and a southern aspect. The interior should present a clean and
cheerful appearance. The colour scheme may be in pink, duck’s-egg green
or primrose grey.” Estimates are furnished. A dining-room to be built
on the basis of 8.5 square feet of space per person may be erected at a
cost not to exceed 7 pounds per place. Table and cookery equipment can
be installed at a rate for 1,000 employés of 30 shillings, 500 employés
32 shillings, and 100 employés 47 shillings per head.

And well, you know how it is when you put so much as a back porch on
the house. You sometimes get so interested in improving, that you can’t
stop. Often you remodel the whole house. Well, the factory had to keep
up with the new dining-room. The White Papers began to say that the
workroom windows had better be washed, and the ceilings whitewashed
and for artificial lighting, shaded arc-lights were recommended. “The
question of lighting,” the report reads, “is of special importance,
now that women are employed in large numbers. Bad lighting affects
the output unfavourably, not only by making good and rapid work more
difficult, but by causing eye-strain.”

The doctors were now being assembled and soon a White Paper admonished:
“The effective maintenance of ventilation is a matter of increasing
importance, because of the large number of women employed, and women
are especially susceptible to the effects of defective ventilation.”

Plumbing came next with a White Paper that went exhaustively into the
subject of lavatory equipment, with illustrations showing the best
fittings: “Fundamental requirements are a plentiful supply of hot and
cold water, soap, nail brushes, and for each worker an individual
towel at least 2 feet square, to be renewed daily. If shower-baths
are installed, it must be recognised that for women the ordinary
shower-bath is not applicable because of the difficulty of keeping her
long hair dry or of drying it after bathing. A horizontal spray, fixed
at the level of the shoulders will overcome this objection.”


EVERY ATTENTION FOR THE WOMAN WHO WORKS

All of this reconstruction was rapidly going on when one day it rained
and Mrs. Black got her feet wet going to work in the morning. And
she was at home in bed for two days away from the lathe. Fortunately
the carpenters were still around. “There must be cloak-rooms,” came
the hurried order in a White Paper. “They should afford facilities
for changing clothing and boots and for drying wet outdoor clothes
in bad weather. Each peg or locker should bear the worker’s name or
work-number. The cloak-rooms should be kept very clean.”

And really now, a woman’s health is a serious matter! Every safeguard
must be adopted for its protection. If Mrs. Black is indisposed, it is
too bad for her to have to go all the way home to go to bed. Immediate
attention might prevent a serious illness. Why was it never thought
of before? Of course, there should be a doctor always around at the
works. So the building plans were enlarged to include a hospital.
The largest building plans I know of have been worked out by one
English factory that recently put up a whole village of wooden houses
for women employés, 700 of whom are provided with board and lodging
at 14 shillings a week. There is a public hall, a club, a chapel, a
restaurant and a hospital. Many factories now have the “hostel” for
lodging women employés who come from a distance. The hospital you will
find now at any factory of good economic standing, and the doctor and
the trained nurse and the “welfare supervisor.” The Government directs:
“At every workshop where 2,000 persons are employed, there shall be
at least one whole-time medical officer and at least one additional
medical officer, if the number exceeds 2,000. A woman welfare
supervisor shall be appointed at all factories and workshops where
women are employed.”

So now Mrs. Black is given a careful medical examination when she first
presents herself for employment. After that, she is looked over at
regular intervals. At any time, if she so much as appears pale, the
doctor is right there to take her pulse. Any little thing that may be
the matter with her is reported at once on the “sickness register.” A
Health of Munition Workers Committee, appointed by Mr. Lloyd George
with the concurrence of the Home Office has directed, “Week by week
the management should scrutinise their chart of sickness returns and
study their rise and fall.” Also any factory employing over 20 women is
required at regular intervals to fill out a questionnaire concerning
the environment and conditions of its employés, and this record is kept
on file at the Home Office.

You see how scientifically the woman in industry is handled? Why,
if the munitions output fell off this afternoon, the whole English
Parliament might rise to demand Mrs. Black’s health record to-morrow
morning.

Mrs. Black must not be allowed to be ill! She ought not even to be
permitted to get tired! Gentlemen, pass her a cup of cocoa or hot milk
in the morning at half-past ten. It is a government order which is
obligatory for factories where she is employed on specially fatiguing
processes. At about four in the afternoon, she should pause for rest
and a cup of tea. If she is engaged on a rush order, the tea may be
passed to her in the workroom. But it is most advisable that she go
to the canteen for it and have a brief period of inactivity in an
easy chair in the adjoining rest room. This isn’t fiction. This is
industrial fact for women to-day. And there is more. The Health of
Munition Workers Committee are now strongly of the opinion that for
women and girls a portion of Saturday and the whole of Sunday should
be available for rest. That Sabbath day commandment, it is discovered,
isn’t only written in the Bible. It is indelibly recorded in the human
constitution. Even if you keep at toil for seven days, you are able
to produce only a six-days’ output. Except for extraordinary, sudden
emergencies, “overtime” is a most wasteful expedient. “The effect of
all overtime should be carefully watched and workers should be at once
relieved from it when fatigue becomes apparent.” Recently in a “General
Order” for the hosiery trade, a condition is included “that every
fourth week must be kept entirely free from overtime.” A White Paper
says: “The result of fatigue which advances beyond physiological limits
(‘overstrain’) not only reduces capacity at the moment, but does damage
of a more permanent kind which will affect capacity for periods far
beyond the next normal period of rest. It will plainly be uneconomical
to allow this damage to be done.”

Oh, Mrs. Lewis, you can see that something has happened, that there’s
an entirely new sort of place in industry for woman on the other
side, as there’s going to be here. In France the gallant government
almost sees her home from work, at least they make sure of her safety
in getting there. When the employés of a factory live at a distance
involving a journey to and from work by trolley or train, it is
permitted for the women to arrive fifteen minutes later in the morning
and to stop work at night fifteen minutes earlier than the men. Thus
they avoid the rush hour and the congestion on the trains.

It was in a factory on the banks of the Seine that I noticed another
thoughtful attention. There were hundreds of women engaged in making
munitions and on the work bench before each operator in a brass
fuse filled with water to serve as a vase, was a flower, fresh and
fragrant! Great beautiful La France roses, splendid roses _de gloire_,
bride roses and spicy carnations made lanes of bloom up and down the
workroom. I turned to the foreman: “Is it some fête day?” He shook
his head: “The flowers are renewed each morning. We do it every day.
Because the women like it.”

In England one of the important duties assigned the Welfare Supervisor
is to teach the employés to play: “Familiarise the working woman with
methods of recreation hitherto unknown to her,” the instructions read.
So they have organised for her dramatic entertainments and choral
classes and they are even teaching her to dance. One factory recently
announced: “We have decided to erect a large theatre as a cinema and
concert hall.” Really, Alice in Wonderland met with no more amazing
surprises than has Mrs. Black.

And to make sure that she misses nothing that is coming to her,
the Home Office arranged its “follow-up” system. A large staff of
women inspectors are travelling up and down England stopping at the
factories. In 1915 alone, they made 13,445 visits. Is there anything
more the working lady needs? the Government always inquires when the
woman factory inspector returns from a trip. And it was the woman
factory inspector who brought word early in the war, “Why, yes, the
lady should have a new dress.”


EVEN THEY DESIGN HER CLOTHES

So the Ministry of Munitions took the matter up and summoned the
designers. As the result, the most charming “creation” was adapted
from the vaudeville stage for industry. The girl “lift” conductors at
Selfridge’s Store in London are the prettiest things you will find out
of a chorus. Theirs are called, I believe, “peg-top” breeches, and
there is a semi-fitted coat, the whole uniform in mauve and beautifully
tailored. Well, the Government has issued a variety of patterns,
some of course, for a much less expensive outfit than this. There is
one uniform that costs not more than 4 shillings: sometimes the firm
even furnishes it and launders it. The costume it is most desired
to introduce is the khaki trousers with the tunic and a round cap,
because it is really a protection for the workers against the revolving
machinery. Factories not yet quite ready for the whole innovation,
begin with the tunic and a cap and a skirt. But when you have convinced
Mrs. Black how well she is going to look in the other things, she’s
ready to put them on.

The situation adjusts itself. This report has been made on it to
the Government. I quote verbatim from the published Proceedings of
Parliament and a member’s speech: “The Ministry has spent a very
considerable amount of time in going into this matter. It would seem to
us as men a simple thing. But at any rate now from all I have heard,
they appear to have solved the difficulties. The women’s uniforms up
and down the country vary, of course, according to the duties they have
to perform, but they must strike all who have observed them not only as
useful and comely, but also as reflecting credit on the fatherly care
which the Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Munitions has
exercised over the many thousands of the daughters of Eve who look to
him as their protector.”

Daughters of Eve in your country’s service, is there anything more that
you require? Yes, one thing more: Parliament, please hold the baby! It
was a response returned from Northumberland to Wales. Every government
summoning its women in industry has sooner or later faced the request.
There were lines of women applying for Poor Relief. But why not go
to work, the authorities would ask. And the child in her arms was
the woman’s answer. Not every woman like Mrs. Black had a maiden
aunt who could be hired to take care of the children. So it happened
that, figuratively speaking, the baby was passed to Parliament. Those
gentlemen, exclaiming “Goodness gracious!” hastily looked about for a
place to lay it down.

And the public _crèche_ has been promptly erected. Sometimes it’s done
by philanthropy, sometimes by the factory, and sometimes at public
expense. “We’ll pay for it,” says perspiring Parliament, “only hurry!”
And they have hurried all over Europe. The baby of a reigning monarch
is scarcely more scientifically cared for to-day than is the working
woman’s baby.

Industry has been made over to adapt it to maternity! A baby used to be
the crowning reason of all against woman’s industrial employment. Even
if you didn’t have one, you might have. And they were very likely to
tell you they couldn’t bother to have you around. If you did succeed
in getting employment, some committee was sure to go “investigating”
while you were away from home, and they’d report that your parlour was
dusty and that your children had a dirty face. You tried to tell the
sociologists, of course, that it wasn’t so bad for children to have a
dirty face as a hungry one, and you’d wash them on Sunday. But no one
would understand and you never could adequately explain. Now you don’t
have to any more.

Every facility for first aid for the housekeeping the woman in industry
has left behind her, is being arranged. They have bought a few more
cups and plates and it has been found that the meals at public schools
that used to be for poor children can just as well be for everybody’s
children. It’s a great help to the maiden aunt. And if you haven’t one,
and you feel that you must go home to dust the parlour or to see that
little Mary puts her rubbers on when she’s out to play, why that can
be arranged. The London Board of Trade, in a special pamphlet on “The
Substitution of Women in Industry,” pointed the way to all nations with
this paragraph: “The supply of women can be frequently increased by
adaptation of the conditions of employment to local circumstances. For
example, one large mill in a certain district where ordinary factory
operatives were scarce, obtained many married women by arranging the
hours of work to suit household exigencies. In one department these
hours were from 10 A. M. to 5 P. M., while another branch was kept
going by two shifts of women, one set working from 7 A. M. to midday,
and the other from 1 P. M. to 6 P. M.” Also a memorandum from the
Health of Munition Workers’ Committee says: “It is the experience of
managers that concessions to married women such as half-an-hour’s grace
on leaving and arriving, or occasional ‘time off’ is not injurious to
output, as the lost time is made good by increased activity.”


EXPERT AT HER JOB

You see now, there is practically no reason left why a woman shouldn’t
work outside her home if she wants to. Such a nice place has been made
for her in industry, and she’s getting along so well. Let’s take the
British Government’s word for it. The Adjutant General to the Forces
in the report on “Women’s War Work in Maintaining the Industries and
Export Trade of the United Kingdom” announces, “Women have shown
themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex in
practically every calling.”

It was before the war that the great feminist, Olive Shreiner, wrote
her book which has been called the Bible of the woman movement. In it
occurs a memorable statement: “We claim all labour for our field.”
Now it is our field. Women to-day are working as longshoremen, as
navvies barrowing coke, as railway porters and conductors and ticket
takers, as postal employés and elevator operators, as brick-settlers’
labourers, attenders in roller mills, workers in 78 processes of boot
and shoe-making, in breweries filling beer casks and digging and
spreading barley, in 19 processes in grain milling, in 53 processes in
paper making, in 24 processes in furniture making, in boiler making,
laboratory work, optical work, aeroplane building, in dyeing, bleaching
and printing cotton, in woollen and velvet goods, in making brick,
glazed and unglazed wear, stoneware, tiles, glass, leather goods and
linoleum. In France a year before the war, it happened in the baking
trade that a committee appointed to take under advisement the question
of admitting women reported adversely that the trade was not “adapted”
to women. To-day there are 2000 women bakers in France. In all
countries the largest number of women are employed in two occupations,
in agriculture and in munitions. England had last spring 150,000 women
at work in the fields and was in process of enrolling 100,000 more.
In munitions the last returns show England with 400,000, Germany with
500,000 and France with 400,000 women.

In this the engineering trade, women have mastered already 500
processes, three-fourths of which had never known the touch of a
woman’s hand before the war. “I consider myself a first class workman
at my trade. It took me seven years to learn it,” said a foreman to me
through the crashing noise of the machines among which we stood, “but,”
and he waved his hand over his domain in which 1700 women were at work,
“these women, at occupations requiring speed and dexterity, already
excel me.”

He led me to the side of a girl who was drilling holes in brass. “See,”
he said, “she does 1000 holes at 50 centimes an hour. No man we were
ever able to employ, ever did more than 500 holes an hour, and we had
to pay him 75 centimes.”’

We came to the gauging department: “Here,” he said, “women are more
expert than men. See how well adapted to the task are their slender,
supple fingers? And they work for 50 centimes an hour, where we should
have to pay men 80.”

Like this the evidence of woman’s efficiency at the work they are
doing, is everywhere in Europe. It has now been written into the
records that cannot be gainsaid. That famous publication, _Women’s War
Work_, in announcing the 1701 jobs at which a woman can be employed,
asserts under the authority of the British War Office that at all of
these jobs a woman is “just as good as a man, and for some of them
she is better.” Then they sent a special commission over to see what
women were accomplishing in French factories. After a conference with
M. Albert Thomas, the French Minister of Munitions, and a wide tour
of inspection, the special commission returned to England with this
report: “The opinion in the French factories is that the output of
females on small work equals and in some cases excels that of men. And
in the case of heavier work, women are of practically the same value as
men, within certain limits (when machinery is introduced to supplement
their muscular limitations).” Italy also presents its evidence. The
_Bolettino dell’ officio del Lavoro_, Journal of the Italian Labour
Department, under date of October 16, 1916, had this to say: “It is
necessary to remove the obstacles to the larger employment of women. As
soon as manufacturers show plenty of initiative and adaptiveness for
this new class of labour, and cease to cherish preconceived opinions as
to the inferiority of woman’s work and as to the low wages it merits,
the labour of women will respond splendidly to the utmost variety of
demands.”

Apparently one controversy is now at rest: Woman knows enough for all
of these things that she has been permitted to do. Thus far, it is
true, it is the unskilled and the semi-skilled processes at which she
is employed in the largest numbers. It was, one might say, the basement
of industry to which she was first admitted. In every land that skilled
workman summoned to receive the government order, “You must let the
women in,” about to take his departure, turned at the door with cap
in hand to make a stipulation. It was the last clause of the ancient
“gentleman’s agreement.”

“All right,” the Government replied, “not any farther up than we have
to.”


ON THE WAY TO THE TOP

To-day at every convention or little district meeting of any skilled
trade, there is one question for heated discussion, “How far are the
women going?” The only answer is the woman movement that keeps on
steadily moving. And it’s moving up. With every year of the war there
are more and more vacant places. More and more of these are places high
up and higher up. And the women who are called, are coming! There is
Henrietta Boardman.

Henrietta Boardman, “somewhere in England” has arrived at one of the
highest skilled operations in munitions, tool-tempering. She sits
before a Bunsen burner and holds the tool in the flame while it turns
all beautiful tints, straw colour, purple, blue or red. She must be
able to distinguish just the right shade for its perfection. She does
it so well that all the tool-fitters in the shop now have the habit
of bringing to her, in preference to any other workman, the tools
they want tempered. Because hers last longer! There sits next to her
a skilled tool-temperer who is a member of the Engineers’ Trade Union
and the tools that he tempers will last for three-quarters of an hour:
they are considered good by the trade if they last three-quarters of
an hour. But the tools that Henrietta Boardman tempers are lasting
sometimes all night!

“It’s curious,” the foreman directing my attention to Henrietta
Boardman’s work commented. “Great colour sense a woman seems to have.
Nothing like it in men. Lots of ’em are even colour blind.”

“So?” I replied. “Then you must be putting in a great many women for
tool-tempering.”

“Hush!” he answered, raising a warning finger. And then he smiled.
“She’s the first woman tool-temperer in England. So far there’s only
one other. You see, it’s a highly technical operation,” he went on to
explain. “By the ‘diluting’ of labour scheme we aim to keep women in
unskilled processes. We admit them to skilled processes only when it’s
unavoidable.”

Now the workshop in which we stood, C-F-5, is the tool-room, confined
to highly skilled processes. The employés, he told me, number 1000 and
of these about 34 are women.

There you have an excellent comparative view of the outlook for women
in the most desirable occupations. The way, it is true, is still a
little steep and difficult. But with my eyes on Henrietta Boardman’s
bright flame, I saw that in making over industry they at least have
set the ladder up: it goes all the way up! And they’ve made room at
the top! Every week of this ghastly war, there is more and more room
made at the top for women! It was in November, 1916, that an English
manufacturer made the statement: “Given two more years of war and we
can build a battleship from keel to aërial in all its complex detail
and ready for trial, entirely by woman labour.”

_Then what will become of the labour of men?_ That skilled workman,
cap in hand, going down the steps of the Government House, met
Gabrielle Duchene coming up. At least her message to the Government has
been carried right to the War Office by the feminists in all lands.
In England, after Mrs. Pankhurst’s great triumphal procession, little
Sylvia Pankhurst, feminist, led another which served as it were as a
postscript to the first: it is in a postscript, you know, that a woman
always put the really important thing she has to say. On the banner
that Sylvia carried in London’s East End was inscribed the feminist
message: “We are willing to work _for a fair wage!_”

Gabrielle Duchene stopped the skilled workman and showed him the
message, which enunciates the demand: For equal work, equal pay. “It’s
your only protection,” she urged. But he only grinned. And he pulled
from his pocket a scrap of paper: “See,” he said, “my government
agreement that woman’s admission into industry is for the duration of
the war only.” And it is true, he has that agreement. It is the basis
on which all over the world the bargain was made: “Teach the woman how.
It is a necessary but temporary expedient. When you return from the
front, you shall have the job back. And the woman will go home again.”
But will she?

The message that went up to the Government House asking equal pay for
equal work is one of the most significant measures in the new woman
movement. Ever since women began to be in industry at all, the wage
envelope for them has been very small, as lady-like an affair as an
early Victorian pocket handkerchief—and just about as practical.
Remarks of protest on the part of the recipient were customarily met
with irritation or derision: Wages? Why, woman, what would you want
with more wages anyhow—to buy a new ribbon to put on your hat? Now a
man, of course, must have all the wages that he can get: he has to
have them to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and
the coal bill and to support a wife who keeps his house and darns his
socks. And, even if he has to have them to buy a cigar or a drink? Oh,
don’t ask foolish questions! A man has to have wages to meet all of his
expenses, a large part of which is Woman. Now run along and be a good
little girl!

But the new woman in industry can’t be dismissed so easily as that.
Especially a feminist in khaki can’t. And she was respectfully saluting
Government and begging to inquire if women were doing men’s work so
well as Government had said they were, when would women be getting
men’s pay?


EQUAL PAY IS COMING

And it was more than a “foolish question.” It was a disturbing
interrogation. Government looked up surprised from its war orders and
statistical investigations to answer: “Why, really, don’t you know,
woman’s work isn’t the same as man’s. You see, we have made over the
machines for her. And sometimes she stops for an hour and goes home to
wash the children’s faces.”

But the feminist said: “Isn’t it the output that counts?” And she
spoke of the better work and the faster work than man that women were
doing for two-thirds men’s pay. See the girl drilling 1000 holes at 50
centimes an hour where a man once drilled 500 holes for 75 centimes an
hour!

And about this time the skilled workman, discovering that the lady
was getting a hearing, came breathlessly running back to interpolate
that men had to be paid more because they knew more. Those women, for
instance, who were “gauging” with such remarkable success knew only
that one process, whereas the men knew the whole trade.

But the lady had only a woman’s logic: “If I wish to buy a dozen
clothespins,” she insisted, “I don’t care how much the person who makes
the clothespins knows, whether his knowledge reaches to mathematics or
Greek. A dozen clothespins just a dozen clothespins are to me. What I
am concerned about is only the delivery of the dozen.”

Well, anyhow, Government everywhere said it would think this matter
over. Meanwhile the walls of Paris began to flame out with a great red
and black poster that Gabrielle Duchene was putting up. It is some four
feet long by three feet wide and at the top in large letters to be
read a long way down the street, it insists: “_A travail egal, salaire
egal._” And in every land the trained workman stopped to stare up at
a lady like this at work in front of a bill-board: “You fool,” she
turned on him in scorn, “can’t you see now that it’s equal pay for
equal work for men’s sakes?”

At last he began to. Mme. Duchene is the wife of a celebrated architect
in Paris. As the chairman of the Labour section of the Conseil National
des Femmes, she had pled ineffectually for equal pay for women’s sakes.
When she cleverly changed the phrase “_for men’s sakes_” it had a new
punch in it. The aroused Bourse de Travail formed the now world-known
Comité Intersyndical d’Action contre l’Exploitation de la Femme to
back the feminist demand. And organised labour in land after land has
begun to sign up its endorsement. For the flaming poster points out in
effect: _If a woman can be had to drill 1000 holes at 50 centimes an
hour, who will hire a man to drill 500 holes at 75 centimes an hour?_
That was the little sum the feminist set labour to work out the answer
to.

And for the Government, there was Mrs. Black’s breakfast. If it takes a
breakfast that includes three rashers of bacon to produce the maximum
output of munitions for a day, how many munitions will be missing if
you don’t get the bacon? Mrs. Black wasn’t getting the bacon. Welfare
supervisors reported that while Mrs. Black ate her dinner with all
its formulated calories at the canteen, she didn’t eat her breakfast
there. In fact Mrs. Black didn’t seem to eat much breakfast anywhere.
It wasn’t the habit of the British working class woman: She usually
started work for the day on merely a piece of bread and a cup of tea.
Mrs. Black couldn’t afford three rashers of bacon for breakfast!

The matter was investigated. The average wage for women in industry in
England, it was found, had been 11 shillings a week: in the textile
trade, before the war the best paid trade in the land, the weekly
wage was 15 shillings 15 pence a week. And women wheeled shells in a
munitions factory for 12 shillings a week, for which a man was paid 25
shillings.

But it began to be arithmetically clear all around that it wasn’t wise
for a woman in England or France or anywhere else to be working for
too little pay to buy a good breakfast! That reliable organ of public
opinion, _The Times_, announced September 25, 1916: “Proper meals for
the workers is, indeed, an indispensable condition for the maintenance
of output on which our fighting forces depend, not only for victory,
but for their very lives.”

What should a woman do with wages to-day? Why, she has to have them
to buy not only a proper breakfast, but to buy the children’s shoes
and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and the _crèche_ or the
maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has to have them to buy a
new ribbon for her hat—why, she will go without her bacon to get it!
What does a woman have to have wages for to-day? Oh, don’t ask foolish
questions. At last she has those mysterious expenses, even as a man!

I think that Lloyd George was the first man to see it. Great Britain
led the way with the now famous Orders L-2, which has come to be known
as the Munition Women’s Charter. There is assured to women in the
government factories and government controlled factories equal pay on
piece work, equal pay on time work for one woman doing the work of one
fully skilled man, and a minimum of £1 a week for all women engaged on
work that was formerly customarily done by men. France followed with a
declaration for equal pay for piece work for women. Governments have
now enunciated the principle, have adopted it in practice and have
recommended its justice to the private employer. Watch the skilled
workman himself do the rest! Among the trade unions that have already
stipulated equal pay for equal work for women doing war work in their
craft are these: Engineering, cotton, woollen and worsted, china and
earthenware, bleaching and dyeing, furniture and woodwork, hosiery
manufacturing and the National Union of Railwaymen.

There has begun, like this, the greatest making over of all! Better
than all the bouquets they’ve handed us is the making over of our wage
envelope to man’s size! It isn’t finished yet. Girl lift operators in
London still get 18 shillings a week on the same elevator for which
men were paid 23 shillings. On the tramways of Orleans, France, women
conductors get 2 francs and 2.50 a day for exactly the same work for
which men were paid 4 francs a day. Nevertheless the new wage envelope
is not so lady-like as it used to be. It’s coming out in larger and
larger sizes. The London tailoring trade has increased the women’s
minimum wage from 3½d. to 6d. an hour. In Paris the women conductors
on the suburban lines have been advanced from the former 4 francs a day
to the men’s 5 francs. Glasgow has 1020 women conductors at men’s pay,
27 shillings a week. London has 2000 women omnibus conductors with the
wage formerly paid to men, 38 shillings a week. Even the German brewers
have come to equal pay for women. Thousands of women in munitions in
England are making 30 shillings a week. Some at Woolwich are making £2
to £3 per week, a few up to £4 a week. Henrietta Boardman at a skilled
man’s job gets exactly a man’s pay, 1 shilling 1d. and 1 farthing an
hour, amounting to about £4 a week. At the sixteenth annual congress
of the Labour Party, held in Manchester, England, in January, 1917,
the following resolution was introduced: “That in view of the great
national services rendered by women, during this time of war and of
the importance of maintaining a high level of wages for both men and
women workers, the Conference urges, That all women employed in trades
formerly closed to them should only continue to be so employed at trade
union rates (the wages paid to men).”

For the new woman in industry is too efficient to be countenanced as a
competitor in the labour market to offer herself at a lower wage than
men. Trade unions may even admit her as a comrade, not yet but soon.
For she’s safer to them that way! In England they are giving their
cordial support to Mary McArthur with her organisation, The National
Federation of Women Workers, in which there are already enrolled
350,000 women. In France they are backing Mme. Duchene, who in many
of the little dim-lit cafés of Paris is holding meetings to organise
the women in industry into what the French call “waiting unions.” Why
waiting? Because the men’s trades unions are ready even to make over
their constitutions to admit women to membership if necessary, that
is, _if women stay in industry_. But they are waiting to see. And
every little while they pull out from their pocket a soiled scrap of
paper to look contemplatively at it. It is a government agreement. The
Government has said the women will go home. _But will they?_


WOMEN WANTED AFTER THE WAR

Read the answer in the columns of “Casualties” appearing in the daily
papers from Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London and now New York.
How many millions of men have been drafted from industry into the awful
battalions of death, no government says. But we at least know with too,
too terrible certainty, that the jobs to which no man will ever return
from the front, now number millions and millions. And there is going
to be a world to be rebuilded! Every nation must enlist all of its
resources if it is to hold its own in the international markets of the
future. The new woman in industry, her country is going to keep right
on needing in industry!

Her husband and her children may need her there! After the men that
are dead, there are millions more, the maimed, the halt and the blind,
for whom women must work for at least a generation after the fight is
finished.

And her employer is going to need her! See all the rows and rows of
little capstan lathes made smaller for a woman’s hand? See the slender,
supple fingers so well adapted to, we will say, gauging. See Henrietta
Boardman with her finer colour sense for tool tempering than any man in
C-F-5. _See, oh, see the girl who drills 1000 holes an hour, where the
man drilled 500!_

Listen to Sir William Beardmore, owner of a projectile factory at
Glasgow, in an address before the Iron and Steel Institute: “In the
turning of the shell body, the actual output by girls with the same
machines and working under exactly the same conditions, and for an
equal number of hours, is quite double that of trained mechanics.
In the boring of shells the output is also quite double, and in the
curving, waving and finishing of shell bases, quite 120 per cent. more
than that of experienced mechanics.”

Again, in the workshops of Europe, above the rattle and the roar
of crashing machinery in shop after shop, I hear the echo of some
foreman’s voice: “Here and here and here we shall never again employ
men because we cannot afford to.” In one great factory on the banks
of the Seine where I inquired, “Are you going to keep women after
the war?” an American superintendent who had been brought over from
Bridgeport, Connecticut, answered promptly: “Sure, 9000 of ’em. We’re
going to convert this into an automobile factory and we’re not going to
throw all this specially made-to-measure-to-woman-size machinery on the
scrap-heap, you know.”

And the British Association for the Advancement of Science has
investigated and decided and announced: “Where female labour is either
underpaid or is obviously superior to male labour, a special inducement
offers itself to employers to retain the women.”

Can’t you see the efficiency expert at the elbow of Government, writing
“Void” across the face of that scrap of paper? Industry cannot afford
to let the women go.

And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate-glass mirrors and the
canteen dining-rooms done in pink, and blue, and duck’s-egg green and
the new uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in industry! Oh,
gentlemen, after all, why should she go home? For the new place in
industry is the most comfortable place in which she has ever been in
the world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk about the factory
as so unhealthful for a woman. But you see, that was because no man
knew how hard was domestic labour: he had never done it. And it was
before the experts began to gather data on how unhealthful is the home.


FACTORY WORK EASY COMPARED WITH KITCHEN WORK

There is now a most interesting investigation under way in London. It
is a scientific intensive study of the housewife, who is at last to
be tabulated and indexed, just like any other labourer. The Women’s
Industrial Council, who have undertaken it with the endorsement of
the Government, announce: “It is quite probable the results may
prove that the stretching motions involved in such domestic tasks
as the washing of heavy sheets and blankets are more harmful than
the stretching motions of the shop assistant or the vibrations which
certain engineering employés meet in their work.” I went one day in
London with the sociological investigator who is trying to find this
out. She took me to Acton, which is the district where the washing is
done for the great city. There are probably more laundries here than in
any similar area in the world. We stopped to look at one of them. It is
in a sanitary, new, up-to-date building with plenty of light and air
and every new labour-saving device known to the trade. Then we called
at some of the little cottages where live the women who work at this
laundry. But to-day is Monday, which is the “slack” day of the week in
the laundry business, and on Monday the employés remain at home to do
their own “wash,” with the same appliances that have been used in home
industry for a hundred years! The woman who came to the door when we
knocked had just taken her hands out of the suds. She was still wiping
them on her gingham apron as she talked. Do you know what she said?
At house after house it was this, that Monday at home was her hardest
day of the week. “O, yes, ma’am,” she said, “much harder than any of
the days that I am at the laundry.” Why? Because at the laundry she
has no lifting of any kind to do and no backbreaking scrubbing over a
washboard. It is done by machinery, or if there are heavy sheets that
must be lifted by hand, men are employed to do it. At home even when
she’s so fortunate as to have a faucet, all of the water she must carry
in pails from the sink to the “copper” to be heated.

Do you know, each time as we turned from a cottage door where the woman
in the gingham apron stood wiping her wet hands, I thought of that lady
in the engineering trade who operates an electrical crane from her easy
chair; and the women conductors in Manchester sitting down between
fares on the “flap” seats put in for their comfort. I think I know
what the medical journal, _The Lancet_, means when it announced in the
February, 1917, number that “Factory work, under fitting conditions may
be so beneficial to women that it may lead to permanent benefit to the
race.” And I am not surprised to learn that the Insurance Department
of the English Government has recently discovered that the greatest
percentage of illness among women occurs among domestic workers.

You see, these new tasks are not so much more laborious than the old
as the world feared. And this war has somehow brought about the most
undreamed of readjustments. In a London tube station I came upon one
of them: my startled gaze encountered a man on his knees scrubbing the
floor and a woman at the ticket window taking tickets!

Do you know, the more I see of the woman in industry, the more it looks
to me as if she could stand it. Anyhow, she’s stronger than she used to
be. One insurance society at Manchester with 26,000 members found that
it paid out for sickness benefits in 1915, £300 less than in 1914. The
insurance actuary attributed the improved health to the better food
and better clothing the members were now able to buy through the wages
they were receiving in the munitions factories. The annual report of
Great Britain’s chief inspector of factories and workshops for 1916,
commenting on the good health of the women employés, observes: “There
can be little doubt that the high wages and the better food they have
been able to enjoy in consequence, have done much to bring about this
result.” And you don’t find among employers any more the complaint
that women employés are less reliable than men because of their more
frequent absences on account of illness. Very likely they may once have
been so. Only a very strong woman could have been equal to the old
overstrain of a man’s work in the shop plus a woman’s work in the home.
And there was often a marked lowering of her vitality and efficiency.
But the new improved man’s size wage envelope is proving, you see, the
effectual remedy. Wages enough to buy good food and then to pay for
some one to cook it—that has made a new woman of this woman in industry.

And she doesn’t want to go back to general housework in her own
home, and to the “home” meals of white bread and boiled tea which the
Home Office has specifically pointed out are not good enough on which
to produce shells. She’s accustomed now to her breakfast bacon! The
workingman’s wife at household labour had no Saturday half holidays
in the kitchen. She had something like a sixteen hour day with no laws
against overtime. Nobody bothered about how many hours she worked.
Nobody counted her food calories. Nobody brought her roses. Nobody
taught her to dance. Nobody noticed that she ought to be happy, without
which she couldn’t be efficient. Most of all, gentlemen, there wasn’t
any wage envelope there!

Do you know of any reason why she should wish to go back? Some 3000 of
her were asked about it through a questionnaire recently sent out in
England. And of these 3000, 2500 answered: “I prefer to remain in the
work I am now doing.” I am sure Mrs. Black would.

And I know the world is going to be very much surprised about it. But I
think that Mr. Black, when he returns from the front, will prefer that
she should. For Mr. Black is going to get a better dinner that way! The
industrial canteen can cook better and cheaper for him and Mrs. Black
than she could at home. She can’t make plum pudding in the home, as
they can at the canteen for 2d. a portion. The chef who is buying for
1500 people gets rates that she never could for seven from the huckster
and the fish-monger and the rest. Besides, Mrs. Black never had any
special training for cooking, as she now has for engineering. In the
shop she has learned to do one thing very well indeed. In her home
there wasn’t any one thing she ever had learned to do very well. And
she worked ineffectually and inefficiently at several highly skilled
occupations: child rearing and sewing and cooking and baking and
laundry work and, occasionally, nursing. Isn’t it remarkable at any
stage of the world’s evolution, that woman should have been expected
to carry a schedule like that? You never found Mr. Black attempting to
be a carpenter and a tailor and a plumber and a gardener and a whole
lot of other useful trades all in one. No, Mr. Black’s rule always was,
stick to one trade. Jack-of-all-trades! Why, everybody knows that he
could have been master of none!

And Mrs. Black wasn’t. Now, if after the war, she prefers to stay in
engineering or some other trade, why should Mr. Black worry? The lady
will pay for her own dinner and other things besides. She can send the
wash to the laundry, and the baby will be at the _crèche_ for the day,
and the children will have dinner at school. And at night, the family
will have supper together, which Mr. and Mrs. Black on their way home
from the factory can bring from the communal kitchen. Governments
already have started the fire in the new cookstove in the communal
kitchen which England has set up in London and Germany in Berlin,
because Ministries of Food have decided food can be more scientifically
and efficiently cooked there than in the homes of the working people.


THE NEW IMPROVED HOME

Oh, can there be any one who would still wish to take away the new wage
envelope? Think what it’s already done for the working class home!
Children with shoes on their feet, you know. Women in England are
wearing fur coats. Women in France who once wore sabots are now wearing
shoes for which they have paid 40 francs, which is $8 a pair. In every
warring country working women are shopping, shopping, shopping, as they
never shopped before. O yes, it’s thrift and prudence and all that’s
proper, to put your earnings in war bonds instead. The rainy day, you
know, that’s ahead. And of course one must, for patriotism’s sake, put
some of it in war bonds, but not quite all. You see, when there have
been almost all rainy days behind and you’ve always wanted something
you couldn’t have? Well, Mrs. Black thinks you might as well live in
the sunshine and have it, now you can.

That’s the way affluence seems to have happened to the working class
home all over Europe. Prosperity is fairly gilding over every district
in which a munitions plant has arisen. And, oh, well, what if it is
gilt? Gilt’s good for little cheerless dingy houses. Do you know that,
next to the war trades, the most flourishing trade in all Europe to-day
is the cheap jewelry trade? There are places in London’s East End
where every other shop or two has come to be a jeweller’s shop, with
the windows hung splendidly with all the shining trinkets that bring a
shining light to women’s eyes.

Mr. Black was home on leave a while ago. He stopped the first thing at
the jeweller’s round the corner in Hardwick Row and bought the gold
chain and the locket Mrs. Black’s wearing now with his picture in
it. Do you know, it was so long since he’d given his wife a present,
not since their courting days, that he’d forgotten how? He was a lot
more awkward about it than he is about facing a fusillade of German
gun-fire. The perspiration just stood out on his forehead as he laid
the little package on the kitchen table and said, “Mary, here’s
something I thought you might like.”

There was a note in his voice by which she knew it wasn’t bloaters from
the fish-shop over the way. But she no more expected what it really was
than she hoped for an angel to lean out of the windows of the sky and
say, “Mary Black, here’s a gold crown for you.” The paper crackled in
the silent room while she untied the string. The chain just shimmered
once through her fingers. Her lips trembled. With a little cry, “O
Jim!” she turned to lay her head in the old forgotten place on his
shoulder. And there she sobbed out all the bitterness of seven years’
married hardship and privation with the bearing and rearing of five
children in three rooms on 22 shillings a week.

Oh, there are things that gold chains are good for more than show. The
famous uses of adversity are various. But they have been much oversung.
And after all, God in his heaven perhaps knows that even a war may be
worth while, if it’s the only way. Two wage envelopes are better than
one. The new woman with the old love revived in her heart, I’m sure,
won’t be so often cross and she won’t have to slap the children so much
as she did. Just think of the new home that the man at the front’s
coming back to! Mrs. Black’s saving now for a piano!

Mrs. Lewis, are you ready? The work-whistle calls you. My morning
paper to-day advertises for a New York department store: “To patriotic
women seeking practical means of expressing their earnestness: During
the coming season, women of intelligence will have the greatest
opportunity that was ever offered them to become producing factors
on the nation’s industrial balance sheet. Whether they need to work
or not, they should work, because it will make them happier and give
them a sense of satisfaction as nothing else in the world can under
present circumstances. We can give many women work to do to occupy part
of their time. This part-time work affords a woman, if she has home
duties, plenty of leisure for her own housework—she need not leave her
home in the morning until after the man of the house goes. She may
return in the evening before he does—she will have more money for
her home or for herself and be an independent producing factor in her
community, helping herself, her home, and in this way her country in a
time when this kind of help is most needed.”

An American woman to-day will find opportunities for work on every
hand. The Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company has 1000 women
on the pay roll. At McKee’s Rocks, Pa., the Pressed Steel Car Company
has 100 girls building artillery cars for use on the French front. The
Farrell plant of the American Sheet & Tin-plate Company at Sharon,
Pa., is employing women at $4.50 a day. A munitions factory at Dayton,
Ohio, has 5000 women working at men’s pay. The Detroit Taxicab and
Transfer Company have women operating their electric taxicabs at the
wages formerly paid to men. The United Cigar Stores Company is offering
women salesmen men’s wages. At the July, 1917, Lumbermen’s Convention
at Memphis, Tenn., the Southern Pine Association by a unanimous vote
decided that women employed in men’s places at the lumber camps should
be paid the same salaries formerly paid to men.

And Gabrielle Duchene’s flaming poster has sent a light across the
sea. The American Federation of Labour has voted: “Resolved that we
endorse the movement to obtain from all governments at the time of the
signature of the Treaty of Peace, the establishment of an international
agreement embodying the principle of equal pay for equal work
regardless of sex.”

So? Then no one really expects the new woman in industry to go home
after the war. There is a great High Court of the Ages in which man may
propose the regulation of the Universe, but God Himself disposes. And
that soiled scrap of paper will be, after all, only a scrap of paper in
the great whirlwind of economic law that bloweth where it listeth.




CHAPTER VI

THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE


Something has just happened. A hidden hand has touched a secret spring.
A closed door in a blank wall has opened. And one in the long cloak of
authority seems to be standing at the threshold pleasantly beckoning
the Lady to cross formerly forbidden portals.

For I feel like that, like a little girl living in a fairy tale that is
turning true right before my eyes. This morning there has arrived in my
mail a letter personally addressed to me from the New York University
School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance. It announces that the
entrance of the United States into the war has revolutionised American
business. That hundreds of thousands of men off for the front are
leaving behind them hundreds of thousands of vacancies. That commercial
houses are facing a shortage of trained and capable assistants. That
to fill the positions which are daily presenting themselves, women
must enter business. That to give them the necessary training, this
school offers no less than 142 courses from which they may make their
preparation for executive positions of responsibility.

It is the first time that I and the League for Business Opportunities
for Women to which I belong, have ever thus received a personal
invitation to the wide open world of commerce. The League since its
inception some five years ago has been alertly engaged in looking, as
its name implies, for business opportunities for women. We have always
been obliged to look pretty persistently for them. Never before have
they been presented to us. Now, see, the way is clear, they tell us,
right up the steeps of high finance.

The bursting bombs of war have done it. A ghastly _Place aux Dames_, it
is in truth. But the stage is set. The cue is given. There is not even
time to hesitate. Draughted, the long lines come on with steady tread.
Now our battalions fall in step with the battalions of the Allies and
the Central Powers. For English or Hun or French or Magyar or Russian
or Serb or American, the woman movement is one like that. Through the
same doorway of opportunity we all of us shall enter in. There are
blood stains on the lintel, I know. But this door, for the first time
set ajar, is the only way, it appears, between the past and the future.
With the invitation from the New York School of Commerce on my desk
before me, I too am at the threshold where the centuries meet. Down the
vista that stretches before me, I look with long, long thoughts.

[Illustration:

 MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE

 Of the Financial Centre for Women in New York, who stands at the open
 door in commerce to usher in the women of America.
]

And once more, Cecile Bornozi somewhere in Europe is passing the sugar.
In pursuit of food conservation, hotel waiters have a way of removing
the sugar bowl to the dining-room sideboard and thoughtfully forgetting
to offer it a second time. And the pretty young woman in the chic
hat, who sat opposite me at breakfast that morning, was near enough to
reach it and daring enough to commandeer the sugar bowl for our common
use. There is nothing, I believe, like a lump of sugar that so quickly
makes war-time travellers kin. That is the way I came to know Cecile
Bornozi, new woman in commerce.

She is a type distinct from her predecessors in that old world of
ours that is going up in battle smoke. Her brown hair is done in as
coquettish a curl on her forehead, her eyes are as sparkling blue,
her lips are as curving red as any girl’s who used to have nothing to
do but to dance the tango and pour afternoon tea. But her horizon has
widened beyond the drawing-room. Nor is she the business woman whom we
have had with us for a generation. Why, the stenographer who takes my
dictation is a business woman. But from her hand bag as another woman
might produce a shopping list, Cecile Bornozi has just drawn forth a
$50,000 bill of sale to her for a freight steamer.

She has just purchased it because of the increasing scarcity of
tonnage in which to transport the fire brick that she is buying for
the reconstruction of factory furnaces in the devastated districts
of France. Yesterday she shipped 90 cwt. of oil boxes and bearings
and 6 railway coal wagons. In the past few months she has sent over
some 2000 railway wagons. Like this, during the past year, she has
expended a million dollars for railway rolling stock that she rents to
the French Government. She is specially commissioned by France for
this undertaking, as her _Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement_
spread in front of my breakfast roll shows to me and all of the Allies.
A shipper has to have a license like this in these days. It is what
secures for her her export permit from the London Board of Trade.
Now she sets down her coffee cup and folds her newspaper and is off
for India House in Kingsway where fore-gather other merchants who
have confidential appointments with the War Office and the English
Government. Upon her decisions to-day will depend so much more than
the selection of a ribbon to match the blue of her eyes or the choice
of the card to win at an afternoon bridge whist party. Her care and
her forethought, her planning and her enterprise must outwit even the
German submarines and get the goods across the English Channel to keep
the transportation lines of a nation open for communication with the
front. And there will be no superior at her elbow to tell her how.

“I like big ventures. I like to do things myself. I’d sell flowers on
the curb before I’d consent to be any one’s else employé,” the new
woman in commerce flashed back at me as she buttoned her coat collar
and started out in a ten o’clock morning fog.


RISING TO THE NEW OCCASION

You see, it’s like that. The big venture is the fascinating field
that lies beyond humdrum directed routine. We have by now forgotten
the stir that was created when perhaps thirty years ago the first
woman walked into a business house to take her place at a typewriter
desk. Let us not lose sight of the innovation of our own day that is
about to command attention: the woman at the typewriter is rising. I
think we shall see her take the chair before the mahogany desk in the
president’s office.

The Woman’s Association of Commerce of America was recently organised
at Chicago in a convention of business women gathered from cities from
New York to Chicago. For the first time adequate training to fit a
woman for real commercial responsibilities is beginning to be as freely
offered as to men. Cecile Bornozi, widely known as the only railway
woman in France, came by her commercial knowledge largely through
instinct and inheritance. She gave up literature at the Sorbonne for
it, because as the daughter of Philip Bornozi, from Constantinople,
who supplied rolling stock to the railways of the Orient, France, and
Belgium, the call to commerce was in her blood. But except for the few
specially placed women like that, the way up in commerce before the
year 1914 was not plain and easy. Now all over the world there are
floating in on the morning mail invitations like the one that has just
come to me from the New York University.

How much it means, I suppose no man can quite understand. Suppose you,
sir, were going to attempt to talk glibly in terms of chiffon and voile
and chambray and all the rest of those mystifying terms that tangle the
tongue of a novice sent down the aisle of a department store with a
sample in his lower left hand vest pocket to be properly matched—you’d
feel, wouldn’t you, that a course in this positively unknown tongue
would be helpful in making yourself and your errand rightly understood.
Just so. Now all unknown language is a handicap as is this one to you,
which is quite familiar to every woman, for we learn to lisp in terms
of our clothes. But on the other hand, there are commercial terms
which you as a boy imbibed as naturally from your environment, which
are to your sister a foreign tongue. We need the schools to teach it.
And I am not sure but it is the schools now being set up by the women
who have learned through their own experience that offer the surest
interpretation of the way in these new paths in which women’s feet are
set to-day.

Just off from Central Park West in New York City, the Financial
Centre for Women has been established in direct response to the war
demand. Wall Street asked for it. Already 60 young women instructed in
practical banking, investments, accountancy, and managerial duties have
been sent out to fill responsible positions in the National Bank of
Commerce, Morgan’s, the Federal Reserve and over half a dozen other of
the leading banks of New York City. These young women have been given
an intimate working knowledge of such mysteries as stop payments and
certified checks, gold imports, cumulative and preferred shares and
all the intricacies of the market and the terms in which “the street”
talks. In the room with the green cloth covered table, about which sit
these future financiers and captains of industry in training, there
is a blackboard. See the chalk marked diagram. By the routes mapped
out in those white lines, they have brought furs from Russia, wheat
from Canada, sugar from Hawaii. And all the money transactions involved
have been properly put through. Thoroughly familiarised like this with
international operations, there is more to learn for the making of a
financier. I doubt if any but a woman would think to teach it. Miss
Elizabeth Rachel Wylie, who directs the Financial Centre, recalls her
classes from the wide world of affairs through which they circle the
globe, for personal instruction. They have now the groundwork of the
knowledge with which a business man is familiar. And Miss Wylie adds
earnestly, impressively the last lesson: “Don’t darn.”

You see, captains of industry don’t. Even so much as an office boy who
aspires to become a captain of industry doesn’t. And the woman in the
office who spends her evenings mending her stockings and washing her
handkerchiefs, misses, say, the moving pictures where the man in the
office is adding to his stock of general information. This tendency to
revert to type has been the fatal handicap of the past. By the faint
beginnings of an intention to discard it, you differentiate the new
woman in commerce from her predecessor the business woman. By way of
discipline that girl there at the green cloth covered table, whose
bag of war knitting hangs on the back of her chair the while she’s
shipping furs from Russia, will leave it at home to-morrow. Cecile
Bornozi wouldn’t have done a million dollars’ worth of business with
the French Government the past year if she had stopped to knit. And if
her thoughts had been on her stockings, she might have missed important
details in railway rolling stock. In her room at the Hotel Savoy in
London, I never saw a needle or thimble or spool of thread. But on her
table I noticed _System_, the magazine of business.


APPROACHING HIGH FINANCE IN FRANCE

Over on the banks of the Seine even as here on the banks of the Hudson,
they are teaching women now the things that Cecile Bornozi knows.
Not so long ago I stood in the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement
Commercial pour les Jeunes Filles in Paris. This practical school of
high commercial instruction for young girls is in the Rue Saint Martin
in an old monastery, the Ancien Prieure de Saint Martin des Champs,
where the Government has given them quarters. Here a high vaulted room
of prayer has been turned into an amphitheatre. On rows of benches
lifted tier after tier above the grey and white tiled floor, a hundred
and twenty-five girls sat facing a new future. For the first time in
history, _la jeune fille_ who has always been more domestic minded than
the young girl of any other nation except Germany, is being taught to
be commercially minded. Curiously enough, “Thou shalt not darn” is a
fundamental precept for success laid down by the director of the new
school in France even as at the new school in America. Mlle. Sanua in
Paris has to be perhaps even more insistent about it than Miss Wylie
in New York. These are 125 girls of the _bourgeoise_ families, any one
of whom, if the great war had not come about, would be this morning
going to market with her mother to learn the relative values of the
different varieties of soup greens. And this afternoon she would be
occupied, needle in hand, on a chemise or a robe _de nuit_ for her
trousseau. Now she has been called to a totally new environment. Here
she sits on a wooden bench, the sofa pillow she has brought with her at
her back, a fountain pen in hand, her note book on her knee, adjusting
herself to a career which up to 1914 no one so much as dreamed of for
her. She is hearing this morning a lecture on commercial law, delivered
by Mme. Suzanne Grinberg, one of Paris’ famous lawyers. _Le Professeur_
sits on a high stool before a great walnut table, her shapely hands in
graceful gesture accentuating her legal phrases. Every little while you
catch the “_n’est ce pas?_” with which she closes a period. And now and
then she turns to the blackboard behind her to illustrate her meaning
with a diagram.

Mlle. Sanua passes the school catalogue for my inspection and I notice
a course of study that includes: industrial trade marks, designs,
etc.; foreign commercial legislation; commercial documents, buying
and selling, banking, etc.; bookkeeping, commercial and financial
arithmetic; course in merchandising, including textiles, dyes, etc.;
political economy, including the distribution of wealth, the monetary
systems of the world, the consumption of wealth; pauperism, insurance,
and charities; the state and its rôle in the economic order, taxes,
socialism; economic geography and world markets; law, including public
law, civil law and laws relating to women; foreign languages. This
is the curriculum now being approached by the young girl who up to
yesterday had nothing more serious in the world to occupy her leisure
than to sit at the window with an embroidery frame in her lap watching
and waiting for a husband.

But you see three years ago, four years ago, Pierre marched by the
window in a poilu’s blue uniform and he may never come back. Marriage
has hitherto been the fixed fact of every French girl’s life. Now
numbers of women must inevitably, inexorably find another career. These
girls here are many of them the daughters of professional men, doctors
and lawyers. The girl in the third row back with the blue feather in
her hat is the niece of President Poincaré. That one with the pretty
soft brown eyes in the front row is married. The wife of a manufacturer
who is serving his country as a lieutenant in the army, she is trying
as best she may to take his place at the head of the great industrial
enterprise he had to leave at a day’s notice when his call to the
colours came. She found herself confronted with all sorts of difficult
situations. Somehow she’s managed so far by sheer force of will and
somewhat perhaps by intuition to come through some pretty narrow
situations. For the future she’s not willing to take any more such
chances. She has come to learn all that a school has to teach of the
scientific principles and the established facts of commerce. Two girls
here are the granddaughters of one of the leading merchants of the
Havre. Their brother, who was to have succeeded to the management of
the celebrated financial house, gave his life for his country instead
at the Marne. And these girls, with the consent of the family, have
dedicated their lives to taking their brother’s place in the economic
up-building of France to which the financial world looks forward after
the war.

You see like this the new woman in commerce all over the world is
planning for a career that will never again rest with stenography and
typewriting. Bringing furs from Russia and wheat from Canada is more
interesting. There is nothing like preparedness. You are almost sure
to do that for which you have specially made ready. And one glance at
the programme of study for the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement
Commercial shows clearly enough to any one who reads, that it is what
Cecile Bornozi with her flashing glance calls the “big venture” which
is the ultimate aim of this girl with the new note book on her knee.
Meantime France can scarcely wait for her to complete her training.
Mlle. Sanua has almost to stand at the door of the Ancien Prieure
to turn away the employers who come to the Rue St. Martin to offer
positions to her pupils. “Always they are asking,” she says, “have I
any more graduates ready?”

Avocat Suzanne Grinberg’s soft musical voice goes on in the
amphitheatre expounding commercial law. Outside in her adjoining
office, the little stone walled room with the religious Gothic
window, Mlle. Sanua tells me how it has come about, this new attitude
on the part of her country to women who are going to find economic
independence in the business world. In the cold little room in a war
burdened land where coal is $80 a ton, we draw our chairs closer to
the tiny grate. Mlle. Sanua leans forward and selects two fagots to be
added to the fire that must be carefully conserved with rigid war-time
economy.

As she begins to talk, I catch the look in her eyes, the glow of
idealism that I have felt somewhere before. Where? Ah, yes. It
was Frau Anna von Wunsch in whose eyes I have seen the gleam that
flashed the same feminist message. Frau von Wunsch was before the
war the presedient of Die Frauenbanck. This was for Germany a most
revolutionary institution that hung out its gold lettered sign at 39
Motzstrasse, Berlin, a woman’s bank in a land where it was contrary to
custom for a married woman to be permitted to do any banking at all.
But “Women will never become a world power until they become a money
power,” said Frau von Wunsch. And they put that motto in black letters
on all of their letter heads and checks. The armies of the world are
now entrenched between the Seine and the Rhine and since 1914 of course
hardly any personal word at all has come through the censored lines
from the feminists of Germany to the feminists of France. One does not
even know what has become of Frau von Wunsch and her Frauenbanck over
there in Mittel Europa. But the ideal that she lighted, flames now in
every land.

Mlle. Sanua’s plan too is for a new woman in commerce who shall be
a money power and a world power. And perhaps it may be France that
is temperamentally fitted to lead all lands in achieving that ideal.
The _jeune fille_, so carefully trained for domesticity only, has
been known to develop wonderful business qualities after marriage.
Invariably in the small shops of France it is Madame who presides at
her husband’s cash drawer. A woman’s hand has led industries for which
France is world famous: Mme. Pommerey whose champagne is chosen by the
epicure in every land, Mme. Paquin whose house has dictated clothes for
the women of all countries, and Mme. Duval whose restaurants are on
nearly every street corner of Paris. The commercial instinct is really
latent in every French woman. There is scarcely a French household in
which a husband making an investment of any kind does not first consult
with his wife. This birthright then, why not develop it by training and
add scientific knowledge to intuition?

That was the proposition with which the French Minister of Commerce
was approached at the beginning of the war. It was his own daughter
who came to the Bureau of State over which he presided, with a
new programme. Mlle. Valentine Thomson is the editor of _La Vie
Feminine_, in whose columns she had already advocated wider business
opportunities for women on the ground that France would have need
of women in many new capacities. Now she came to ask that the High
Schools of Commerce throughout the land should be opened to girls.
Hitherto they had been exclusively for boys. The Minister of Commerce
took the matter under consideration. The argument that girls should be
prepared for responsibilities that every year of war would more surely
bring to them sounded to him logical enough. Besides Mlle. Valentine
Thomson is a daughter with a most pretty and persuading way, a way
that is as helpful to a feminist as to any other woman. So it happened
that the Minister of Commerce, in September, 1915, issued a circular
recommending the opening of the national Schools of Commerce to women.
The Ministry could only recommend. Each Chamber of Commerce could
ultimately decide for its own city. And there were but three cities in
which the final court of authority refused, Paris, Lyons and Marseilles.

Then in Paris Mlle. Sanua decided that women too must somehow have
their chance. She had already organised her countrywomen in the
Federation of French Toy Makers, for which she has far-flung ambitions.
This new industry which she is putting on its feet in France, she has
planned shall supplant the made-in-Germany toys in the markets of
the world. But the women who are handling the industry must know how
on more than a domestic scale. And Paris, the metropolis of France,
offered them no commercial training. In the spring of 1916 Mlle.
Sanua decided to go to the Department of State about the matter. There
the Minister of Commerce, M. Thomson, furrowed his brow: “After all,
Mademoiselle,” he said, “have women the mentality for business? The
Ministry of War has opened employment in its offices to women. And
these girls now whom the Government has admitted to clerkships here,
some of them seem quite useless. Mademoiselle,” he added wearily, “is a
woman’s brain really capable for commerce?”

“Train it. Then try it. What we need is schools,” said Mlle. Sanua.

A few moments later the conversation turned on the toy industry. “What
do you know about the toy industry?” asked the Minister of State
curiously. She told him. And as the woman talked, his wonder grew.
She did know about toys, that which would enable the French to defeat
the Germans in this branch of commerce after the other defeat is
finished. Would Mlle. Sanua give a lecture on the toy industry before
the Association Nationale d’Expansions Economique? And would she make
a report before the Conference Economique des Allies? Which she did.
So here was a woman who had a brain worth while for commerce. Well,
there might be others. If the Chamber of Commerce in Paris was still
doubtful, the Ministry of Commerce would take a chance on endorsing
Mlle. Sanua’s proposal. They secured for her the Ancien Prieure. And
she established the school for which she gives her services. She
has gathered a faculty which includes celebrated names in France,
most of whom are serving without compensation. Three former Ministers
of Commerce form part of the committee of patronage for the school.
And the first diplomas last June were conferred by a state official,
the Inspector General of Education. For France is arriving at the
conclusion that she will have need of trained women as well as such
men as she can muster for the great economic conflict that is going to
follow when the other battle flags are furled.

So here at the Ancien Prieure 125 new women are coming into commerce.
“_N’est ce pas?_” I hear Avocat Suzanne Grinberg’s voice repeat. Mlle.
Sanua adds another fagot to the fire. Again as she looks up her eyes
are illumined with the ideal that animates her in the service in which
she is now engaged for her country. I think the women of France will be
a money power and a world power.

See them starting on the way. Already the Bank of France to-day has 700
women employés, the Credit Foncier has 400, and the Credit Lyonnaise
has 1200 women employés. Clerical positions in all the government
departments, including the War Office, have been opened to women. M.
Metin, the under secretary of the French Ministry of Finance, has
recently appointed Mlle. Jeanne Tardy an attaché of his department,
the first time in the history of France that a woman has held such a
position.

Now in every country this same movement has taken place. Russia has
had women clerks at the War Office, the Ministries of the Interior,
Agriculture, Education, Transportation, and at the Chancelleries of the
Imperial Court and Crown Property. The Imperial Russian Bank employed
women by preference.

In the German government bureaus and offices, the women employés
outnumber the men and they are to be found now in every bank in
Germany. There are even new women in commerce in Germany conducting
business houses that soldier husbands have left in their hands, who are
beginning openly to rebel against the restriction which excludes women
along with “idiots, bankrupts, and dishonest traders” from the Bourse
in Berlin. And recently a petition has been addressed to the Reichstag
for the removal of this bar sinister in business.


MOVING ON LONDON’S FINANCIAL DISTRICT

Probably the largest invasion of the business office, whether that of
the government or of the private employer, has taken place in England.
No less than 278,000 women have directly replaced in commerce men
released for military duty. Petticoats in the district that is known as
the “city,” I suppose are as unprecedented as they could be anywhere
in the world. The most visionary, advanced feminist, who before 1914
might have timidly suggested such an invasion, would have been curtly
dismissed with, “It isn’t done.” And in truth I believe it never would
have been done without a war. Down in Fenchurch Avenue, in the great
shipping district, I was told: “Really, don’t you know, this is the
last place we ever expected to see women. But they are here.”

The gentleman who spoke might have come out of a page of “Pickwick
Papers.” His silk hat hung on a nail in the wall above his desk. And
he wore a black Prince Albert coat. He looked over his gold bowed
eye glasses out into the adjoining room at the clerical staff of the
Orient Steamship Company of which he has charge. He indicated for my
inspection among the grey haired men on the high stools, rows of women
on stools specially made higher for their convenience. And he spoke
in the tone of voice in which a geologist might refer to some newly
discovered specimen.

It was withal a very kindly voice and there was in it a distinct note
of pride when he said: “Now I want you to see a journal one of my
girls has done.” He came back with it and as he turned the pages for
my inspection, he commented: “I find the greatest success with those
who at 17 or 18 come direct from school, ‘fresh off the arms,’ as we
say in Scotland. They, well, they know their arithmetic better. My one
criticism of women employés is that some of them are not always quite
strong on figures. And they lack somewhat in what I might call staying
power. Business is business and it must go on every day. Now and then
my girls want to stay home for a day. And the long hours, 9:30 to 5:00
in the city, well, I suppose they are arduous for a woman.”

“Mr. Clarke,” I said, “may I ask you a question: What preparation have
these new employés had for business?”

And it turns out, as a matter of fact, most of them haven’t had any. A
large number of this quarter of a million women who came at the call of
the London Board of Trade to take the places of men in the offices, are
of the class who since they were “finished” at school, have been living
quiet English lives in pleasant suburbs where the rose trees grow and
everybody strives to be truly a lady who doesn’t descend to working for
money. It is difficult for an American woman of any class to visualise
such an ideal. But it was a British fact. There were thousands of
correct English girls like this, whose pulses had never thrilled to a
career who are finding it now suddenly thrust upon them.

“Mr. Clarke,” I said, “suppose a quarter of a million men were to
be hastily turned loose in a kitchen or nursery to do the work to
which women have been born and trained for generations. Perhaps they
might not be able to handle the job with just the precision of their
predecessors. Now do you think they would?”

Mr. Clarke raised his commercial hand in a quick gesture of protest:
“Dear lady,” he said, “I remember when my wife once tried me out one
day in the nursery—one day was enough for her and for me—I, well, I
wasn’t equal to the strain. Frankly, I’m quite sure most men wouldn’t
have the staying power for the tasks you mention.”

So you see, in comparison, perhaps the new women on the high stools
that have been specially made to their size, are doing pretty well
anyhow. There are 73,000 more of them in government offices, the lower
clerkships in the civil service having been opened to them since the
war. And no less than 42,000 more women have replaced men in finance
and banking.

Really, it was like taking the last trench in the Great Push when
the women’s battalions arrived at Lombard and Threadneedle streets.
That bulwark of the conservatism of the ages, the Bank of England,
even, capitulates. And the woman movement has swept directly past the
resplendent functionary in the red coat and bright brass buttons who
walks up and down before its outer portals like something the receding
centuries forgot and left behind on the scene. He still has the habit
of challenging so much as a woman visitor. It is a hold-over perhaps
from the strenuous days of that other woman movement when every
government institution had to be barricaded against the suffragettes,
and your hand bag was always searched to see if you carried a bomb. But
the bright red gentleman is more likely to let you by now than before
1914.

Inside, as you penetrate the innermost recesses, you will go past glass
partitioned doors through which are to be seen girls’ heads bending
over the high desks. And you will meet girl clerks with ledgers under
their arms hurrying across court yards and in and out and up and down
all curious, winding, musty passage ways. I know of nowhere in the
world that you feel the solemn significance of the new woman movement
more than here as you catch the echo of these new footsteps on stone
floors where for hundreds of years no woman’s foot has ever trod before.

The Bank of England isn’t giving out the figures about the number of
its women employés. An official just looks the other way and directs
you down the corridor to put the inquiry to another black frock coat.
O, well, if that’s the way they feel about it! Others with less ivy on
the walls may speak. The London and Southwestern Bank which before the
war employed but two women, and these stenographers, now has 900 women.
One of London’s greatest banks, the London, City and Midland, has among
3000 employés 2600 women. The new woman in commerce is emerging in
England and these are some of the verdicts on her efficiency:

Bank of England: “We find the women quick at writing, slow at figures.
We have been surprised to find that they do as well as they do. But
they are not so efficient as men.”

London, City and Midland Bank: “For accuracy, willingness, and
attention to duty, we may say that women employés excel.”

Morgan and Grenfells: “We employ women on ledger work. But we find they
lack the _esprit de corps_ of men. And they don’t like to work after
hours.”

Barclay’s Bank: “We cannot speak too highly of our women clerks. They
have shown great zeal to acquire a knowledge of the necessary details.”

London and Southwestern Bank: “Women employés are even more faithful
and steady than men. But when there is a sudden rush of work, as say
at the end of the year, they go into hysterics. We find that we cannot
let them see the work piled up. It must be given out to them gradually.
This, I think, is due to inexperience. When women have had the same
length of experience and the same training as men, we see no reason why
they should not be equally as capable.”

Now that’s about the way the evidence runs. You would probably get it
about like that anywhere in Europe. There is some criticism. Isn’t it
surprising that there is not more when you remember that it is mostly
raw recruits chosen by chance whose services are being compared with
the picked men whom they have replaced? In England in 1915 the Home
Office moved to provide educational facilities for women for their
new commercial responsibilities. There was appointed its Clerical and
Business Occupations Committee which opened in London, and requested
the mayors of all other cities similarly to open, emergency training
classes for giving a ground work in commercial knowledge and office
routine. These government training courses cover a period of from three
to ten weeks. It is rather sudden, isn’t it, three weeks’ preparation
for a job in preparation for which the previous incumbent had years?

And there are thousands of the women who have gone into the offices
without even that three weeks’ training. The cousin of the wife of
the head of the firm knew of some woman of “very good family” whose
supporting man was now enlisted and who must therefore earn her own
living. Or some other woman was specially recommended as needing work.
And there was another method of selection: “She had such nice manners
and she was such a pretty little thing I liked her at once, don’t you
know.”


WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS

’Um, yes, I do know. Somewhere in America once there was an editorial
chief who said to me, his assistant, “Now I need a secretary. There’ll
be some here to-day to answer my advertisement. Won’t you see them and
let me know about their qualifications.” There were, as I remember,
some fourteen of them, grey haired and experienced ones, technically
expert and highly recommended ones, college trained ones, and one
was a dimpled little thing with pink cheeks and eyes of baby blue.
My detailed report was quite superfluous. Through the open door, as
I entered his office, the chief had one glance: “That one,” he said
eagerly, “that little peach at the end of the row. She’s the one I
want.”

Like that, little peaches are getting picked in all languages. And
after them are the others fresh from the gardens where the rose
trees grow. And among these ornamental companions of her employer’s
selection, the really useful employé who gets in, finds herself at a
disadvantage. The little peach “bears” the whole woman’s wage market.
She has hysterics: all the wise commercial world shakes its head about
the staying power of woman in business. And the whole female of the
species gets listed on the pay roll at two-thirds man’s pay.

The Orient Steamship Company, I believe, is giving equal pay for equal
work. To an official of another steamship company complaining of the
inefficiency of women employés, Sir Kenneth Anderson, President of the
Orient Line, put the query, “How much do you pay them?” “Twenty-five
shillings a week,” was the answer. “Then you don’t deserve to have
efficient women,” was the prompt retort. “We pay those who prove
competent up to three pounds a week. And they’re such a success we’ve
decided we can’t let them go after the war.” But Sir Kenneth Anderson
is the son of one of England’s pioneer feminists, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson, and the nephew of another, Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett,
president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. And
I suppose there isn’t another business house in London that has the
Orient Steamship Company’s vision. Women clerks in London business
circles generally are getting twenty shillings to thirty shillings a
week. The city of Manchester, advertising for women clerks for the
public health offices, offered salaries respectively of ten shillings,
eighteen shillings and twenty shillings a week, “candidates to sit for
examination.”

[Illustration:

 MLLE. SANUA

 Who, at the Ancien Prieure in Paris, holds open the door of commerce
 for women in France.
]

Little peaches might not be worth more, it is true. The troubled
French minister was probably right when he complained that some of
his new office force were quite useless. But there is a Federation of
University women in England with perfectly good University degrees
attesting mathematical proficiency. They say, however, that they cannot
live on less than a minimum wage of three pounds a week. Awhile ago in
Italy a group of women accountants were asked by the Administration of
Public Instruction to replace men called to the front. With exactly the
same academic licenses as men, they were nevertheless offered but
two-thirds men’s pay. And they declined the proffered positions. Nor
is it only England or Italy or Russia or France that presents this ratio
between the wages of men and those of women in the business offices.
The first resolution adopted by the new Women’s Association of Commerce
of America was one demanding equal pay for equal work. Eventually the
Women’s Association of Commerce and the Financial Centre for Women
and the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement Commercial may succeed
in cultivating in the commercial world a taste for a higher type of
employé than the little peaches of the past. But for the present it is
the handicap that the business woman in routine office positions has to
accept. And there is no Trade Union in commerce to care. Can you manage
to give equal work on two-thirds man’s pay?

If you can, this is the hour of your opportunity. The women’s
battalions are with every month of the war drawing nearer, moving
onward toward the president’s office. The London and Southwestern
Bank has advanced 200 of its women clerks to the cashier’s window.
The London City and Midland Bank a year ago promoted a woman to the
position of manager of one of its branches. It was the first time that
a woman in England had held such a position. Newspaper reporters were
hurriedly despatched to Sir Edward Holden, the president, to see about
it. But he only smilingly affirmed the truth of the rumour that had
spread like wildfire through the city. It was indeed so. And he had no
less than thirty more women making ready for similar positions.

Over in France at Bordeaux and at Nancy in both cities the first
class graduated from the High School of Commerce after the admission
of women, had a woman leading in the examinations. In the same year,
1916, a girl had carried off the first honours in the historic Gilbart
Banking Lectures in London. I suppose no other event could have more
profoundly impressed financial circles. The _Banker’s Magazine_ came
out with Rose Esther Kingston’s portrait in a half page illustration
and the announcement that a new era in banking had commenced. It
was the first time that women had been admitted to the lectures.
There were some sixty-two men candidates who presented themselves
for examination at the termination of the two months’ course. Rose
Kingston, who outstripped them all, had been for a year a stenographer
in the correspondence department of the Southwestern Bank. Now she was
invited to the cashier’s desk.

To correctly estimate the achievement, it should be remembered that
the men with whom she competed, had years of commercial background
and this girl had practically one year. There were so many technical
terms with which they were as familiar as she is with all the varieties
of voile. What was the meaning of “allonge”? she asked three of her
fellow employés bending over their ledgers before she found one who was
willing to make it clear that this was the term for the piece of paper
attached to a bill of exchange. Fragment by fragment like this, she
picked up her banking knowledge. Once the Gilbart lecturer mentioned
the “Gordon Case,” with which every man among his hearers was quite
familiar. She searched through three volumes to get an intelligent
understanding of the reference. Meantime, I think she did “darn”
nights. You see, her salary was thirty shillings a week.


THE NEW WOMAN AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

This is for the feminine mind the besetting temptation most difficult
to avoid. Can we give up our “darning” and all of the habits of
domesticity which the word connotes? It is the question which women
face the world over to-day. Success beckons now along the broad highway
of commerce. But the difficult details of living detain us on the way
to fame or fortune. And we’ve got to cut the apron-strings that tie
us to yesterday if we would go ahead. Which shall it be, new woman
or old? Most of us either in business or the professions cannot be
both. Dr. Ella Flagg Young, widely known as the first woman to so
arrive at the top of her profession as Superintendent of Schools in
the city of Chicago, received a salary of $10,000 a year. She had made
it the inviolable rule of her life to live as comfortably as a man.
She told me that she did not permit her mind to be distracted from her
work for any of the affairs of less moment that she could hire some
one else to attend to. She did not so much as buy her own gloves. Her
housekeeper-companion attended to all of her shopping. And never, she
said, even when she was a $10 a week school teacher, had she darned her
own stockings!

       *       *       *       *       *

There are a few women who have, it is true, managed to achieve success
in spite of the handicap of domestic duties. But they must be women of
exceptional physique to stand the strain. I know a business woman in
New York who, at the head of a department of a great life insurance
company, enjoys an income of $20,000 a year. Yet that woman still
does up with her own hands all of the preserves that are used in her
household. Her husband, who is a physician with a most lucrative
practice, you will note doesn’t do preserves. He wouldn’t if the family
never had them.

A woman who is a member of the New York law firm of which her husband
is the other partner was with him spending last summer at their
country place. She, during their “vacation,” put up a hundred cans of
fruit. I think it was between strawberry time and blackberry time that
she had to return to town to conduct a case in court. She had cautioned
her husband that while she was gone, he be sure to “see about” the
little green cucumbers. But, of course, he didn’t. What heed does a
man—and he happens also to be a judge of one of the higher courts—give
to little green cucumbers? Long after they should have been picked,
they had grown to be large and yellow, which, as any woman knows, takes
them way past their pickling prime. That was how the woman who cared
about little green cucumbers found them, when she returned from the
city. In despair she threw them all out on the ground. The next day,
turning the pages of her cook book, she happened to discover another
use for yellow cucumbers. Putting on a blue gingham sunbonnet, she went
out to the field back of the orchard and laboriously gathered them all
up again. And she could not rest until on the shelf in her farm house
cellar stood three stone crocks filled with sweet cucumber pickle. She
just couldn’t bear to see those cucumbers go to waste. It is the sense
of thrift inculcated by generations of forbears whose occupation was
the practice of housewifery.

The Judge doesn’t have any such feeling about pickles or any other
household affairs. When he goes home at night, he reads or smokes or
plays billiards. When the lady who is his law partner goes home, even
though their New York residence is at an apartment hotel, she finds
many duties to engage her attention. The magazines on the table would
get to be as ancient as those in a dentist’s office if she didn’t
remove the back numbers. Who else would conduct the correspondence
that makes and breaks dinner engagements and do it so gracefully as to
maintain the family’s perfect social balance? Who else would indite
with an appropriate sentiment and tie up and address all the Christmas
packages that have to be sent annually to a large circle of relatives?
Well, all these and innumerable other things you may be sure the Judge
wouldn’t do. He simply can’t be annoyed with petty and trivial matters.
He says that for the successful practice of his profession, he requires
outside of his office hours rest and relaxation. Now the other partner
practises without them. And you can see which is likely to make the
greater legal reputation.

In upper Manhattan, at a Central Park West address, a woman physician’s
sign occupies the front window of a brown stone front residence. She
happens to be a friend of mine. Katherine is one of the most successful
women practitioners in New York. Nine patients waited for her in
the ante room the last time I was there. From the basement door,
inadvertently left ajar, there floated up the sound of the doctor’s
voice: “That chicken,” she was saying, “you may cream for luncheon. I
have a case at the hospital at two o’clock. We’ll hang the new curtains
in the dining-room at three. And—well, I’ll be down again before I
start out this morning.”

I know the Doctor so well that I can tell you pretty accurately what
were the other domestic duties that had already received her attention.
She has a most wonderful kitchen. She had glanced through it to see
that the sink was clean and that each shining pot and pan was hanging
on its own hook. She had given the order for the day to the butcher.
She had planned the dinner for the evening, probably with a soup
to utilise the remnants of Sunday’s roast. Then—I have known it to
happen—some one perhaps called, “O, say, dear, here’s a button coming
loose. Could you, ’er, just spare the time?”

Well, ultimately she stands in the doorway of her office with her
calm, pleasant “This way, please” to the first patient, and turns her
attention to the diagnosis, we will say, of an appendicitis case.
Meanwhile, down the front staircase a carefree gentleman has passed
on his way to the doorway of the other office. He is the doctor whose
sign is in the other front window of this same brown stone residence.
What has he been doing in the early morning hours before taking up
his professional duties for the day? His sole employment has been the
reading of the morning newspaper! Katherine never interrupts him in
that. It is one of the ways she has been such a successful wife. She
learned the first year of their marriage how important he considered
concentration.


MAN’S EASY WAY TO FAME

Now you can see that there’s a difference in being these two doctors.
And it’s a good deal easier being the doctor who doesn’t have to sew
on his own buttons and who needs take less thought than the birds of
the air about his breakfasts and his luncheons and his dinners, how
they shall be ordered for the day. That’s the way every man I know
in business or the professions has the bothersome details of living
all arranged for him by some one else. I noted recently a business
man who was thus speeded on his way to his office from the moment of
his call to breakfast. The breakfast table was perfectly appointed.
“Is your coffee all right, dear?” his wife inquired solicitously. It
was. As it always is. The eggs placed before him had been boiled just
one and a half minutes by the clock. He has to have them that way,
and by painstaking insistence she has accomplished it with the cook.
The muffins were a perfect golden brown. He adores perfection and in
every detail she studies to attain it for him. The breakfast that he
had finished was a culinary achievement. “Don’t forget your sanatogen,
dear,” she cautioned as he folded his napkin. “Honey, you fix it so
much better than I can,” he suggested in the persuasive tone of voice
that is his particular charm. She hastily set down her coffee cup and
rose from the table to do it. Then she selected a white carnation from
the centrepiece vase and pinned it in his buttonhole. He likes flowers.
She picked up his gloves from the hall table, and discovering a tiny
rip, ran lightly upstairs to exchange them for another pair, while
he passed round the breakfast table, hat in hand, kissing the five
children in turn. Then he kissed her too and went swinging down the
front walk to catch the last commuters’ train.

I happened to see him go that morning. But it’s always like that. And
when she welcomes him home at night, smiling on the threshold there,
the five children are all washed and dressed and in good order, with
their latest quarrel hushed to cherubic stillness. The newest magazine
is on the library table beneath the softly shaded reading lamp, and
a carefully appointed dinner waits. All of the wearisome domestic
details of existence he has to be shielded from. For he is a captain of
industry.

There are even more difficult men. I know of one who writes. He has
to be so protected from the rude environment of this material world
that while the muse moves him, his meals carefully prepared by his
wife’s own hands, because she knows so well what suits his sensitive
digestion, are brought to his door. She may not speak to him as she
passes in the tray. No servant is ever permitted to do the cleaning
in his sanctum. It disturbs the “atmosphere,” he says. So his wife
herself even washes the floor. Hush! His last novel went into the sixth
edition. He’s a genius. And his wife says, “You have to take every care
of a man who possesses temperament. He’s so easily upset.” For the lack
of a salad just right, a book might have failed.

’Er, do you know of any genius of the feminine gender for whom the gods
arrange such happy auspices as that? Is there any one trying to be a
prominent business or professional woman for whom the wrinkles are all
smoothed out of the way of life as for the prominent professional man
whom I have mentioned?

We who sat around a dinner table not long ago knew of no such fortunate
women among our acquaintance. That dinner, for instance, hadn’t
appointed itself. Our hostess, a magazine editor, had hurried in
breathless haste from her office at fifteen minutes of six to take
up all of the details that demand the “touch of a woman’s hand.” The
penetrating odour of a roast about to burn had greeted her as she
turned her key in the hall door. She rushed to the oven and rescued
that. Two of the napkins on the table didn’t match the set. Marie, the
maid, apologetically thought they would “do.” They didn’t. It was the
magazine editor who reached into the basket of clean laundry for the
right ones and ironed them herself because Marie had to be busy by
this time with the soup. The flowers hadn’t come. She telephoned the
florist. He was so sorry. But she had ordered marguerites, and there
weren’t any that day. Yes, if roses would answer instead, certainly he
would send them at once. The bon bons in yellow she found set out on
the sideboard in a blue dish. Why weren’t they in the dish of delicate
Venetian glass of which she was particularly fond? Well, because the
dish of delicate Venetian glass had gone the way of so many delicate
dishes, down the dumb waiter shaft an hour ago. Marie didn’t mean
to break it, as she assured her mistress by dissolving in tears for
some five minutes while more important matters waited. A particular
sauce for the dessert depending on the delicacy of its flavouring, the
editor must make herself. Well—after everything was all right, it was a
composed and unperturbed and smiling hostess who extended the welcome
to her invited company.

The guest of honour was a woman playwright whose problem play was
one of the successes of last season. She has just finished another.
That was why she could be here to-night. While she writes, no dinner
invitation can lure her from her desk. “You see, I just have to do
my work in the evening,” she told us. “After midnight I write best.
It’s the only time I am sure that no one will interrupt with the
announcement that my cousin from the West is here, or the steam pipes
have burst, or some other event has come to pass in a busy day.”

We had struck the domestic chord. Over the coffee we discussed a book
that has stirred the world with its profound contribution to the
interpretation of the woman movement. The author easily holds a place
among the most famous. We all know her public life. One who knew her
home life, told us more. She wrote that book in the intervals of doing
her own housework. The same hand that held her inspired pen, washed the
dishes and baked the bread and wielded the broom at her house—and made
all of her own clothes. It was necessary because her entire fortune
had been swept away. Does any one know of a man who has made a profound
contribution to literature the while he prepared three meals a day or
in the intervals of his rest and recreation cut out and made, say,
his own shirts? I met last year in London this famous woman who has
compassed all of these tasks on her way to literary fame. She’s in a
sanitarium trying to recuperate from nervous prostration.


THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

The hand that knows how to stir with a spoon and to sew with a needle
has got to forget its cunning if women are to live successfully and
engage in business and the professions. The woman of the present
generation has struggled to do her own work in the office and, after
hours that of the woman of yesterday in the home. It’s two days’ work
in one. It has been decided by the scientific experts, you remember,
who found the women munition workers of England attempting this, that
it cannot be done consistently with the highest efficiency in output.
And the Trade Unions in industry endorse the decision.

This is the critical hour for the new women in commerce to accept the
same principle. I know it is difficult to adopt a man’s standard of
comfortable living on two-thirds a man’s pay. And I know of no one to
pin carnations in your buttonhole. But somehow the woman in business
has got to conserve her energy and concentrate her force in bridging
the distance that has in the past separated her from man’s pay. There
is now the greatest chance that has ever come to her to achieve it—if
she prepares herself by every means of self-improvement to perform
equal work. Don’t darn. Go to the moving pictures even, instead.

For great opportunities wait. Lady Mackworth of England, when her
father, Lord Rhondda, was absent on a government war mission in America
recently, assumed complete charge of his vast coal and shipping
interests. So successful was her business administration, that on his
resignation from the chairmanship of the Sanatogen Company, she was
elected to fill his place. Like this the new woman in commerce is going
to take her seat at the mahogany desk. Are you ready?

The New York newspapers have lately announced the New York University’s
advertisement in large type: “Present conditions emphasise the
opportunities open to women in the field of business. Business is
not sentimental. Women who shoulder equal responsibilities with men
will receive equal consideration. It is unnecessary to point out that
training is essential. The high rewards do not go to the unprepared.
Classes at the New York University are composed of both men and women.”

Why shouldn’t they be? It is with madame at his side that the thrifty
shop keeper of France has always made his way to success.

The terrible eternal purpose that flashes like zig-zag lightning
through the black war clouds of Europe, again appears. From the old
civilisation reduced to its elements on the battle fields, a new world
is slowly taking shape. And in it, the new man and the new woman shall
make the new money power—together.




CHAPTER VII

TAKING TITLE IN THE PROFESSIONS


They are the grimmest outposts of all that mark the winning of the
woman’s cause. But they star the map of Europe to-day—the Women’s War
Hospitals.

Out of the night darkness that envelops a war-ridden land, a bell
sounds a faint alarm. From bed to bed down the white wards there
passes the word in a hoarse whisper: “The convoy, the convoy again.”
Instantly the whole vast house of pain is at taut attention. Boyish
women surgeons, throwing aside the cigarettes with which they have
been relaxing overstrained nerves, hastily don white tunics and take
their place by the operating tables. Women physicians hurry from the
laboratories with the anesthetics that will be needed. Girl orderlies,
lounging at leisure in the corridors, remove their hands from their
pockets to seize the stretchers and rush to their line-up in the
courtyard. The gate keeper turns a heavy iron key. From out the
darkness beyond, the convoy of grey ambulances reaching in a continuous
line from the railway station begins to roll in.

On and on they come in great waves of agony lashed up by the latest
seething storm of horror and destruction out there on the front. In the
dimmed rays of the carefully hooded light at the entrance, the girl
chauffeur in khaki deftly swings into place the great vehicle with her
load of human freight. A nurse in a flowing headdress, ghostly white
against the night, alights from the rear step. The wreckage inside
of what has been four men, now dead, dying or maimed, is passed out.
Groans and sharp cries of pain mingle with the rasping of the motor as
the ambulance rolls on to make way for another.

The last drive in the trenches has been perhaps a particularly terrible
one. All night like this, every night for a week, for two weeks, the
rush for human repairs may go on. Men broken on the gigantic wheel of
fate to which the world is lashed to-day will be brought in like this,
battalion after battalion to be mended by women’s hands. The appalling
distress of a world in agony has requisitioned any hands that know how,
all hands with the skill to bind up a wound.

It is very plain. You cannot stand like this in a woman staffed
hospital in the war zone without catching a vision of the great moving
picture spectacle that here flashes through the smoke of battle. Hush!
From man’s extremity, it is, that the Great Director of all is himself
staging woman’s opportunity.

The heights toward which the woman movement of yesterday struggled in
vain are taken at last. The battle has been won over there in Europe.
Between the forces of the Allies and the Kaiser, it is, that another
fortress of ancient prejudice has fallen to the waiting women’s
legions. It was entirely unexpected, entirely unplanned by any of
the embattled belligerents. Woman had been summoned to industry. The
proclamation that called her went up on the walls of the cities almost
as soon as the call of the men to the colours. There were women porters
at the railway stations of Europe, women running railroads, women
driving motor vans, women unloading ships, women street cleaners, women
navvies, women butchers, women coal heavers, women building aeroplanes,
women doing danger duty in the T. N. T. factories of the arsenals, and
in every land women engaged in those 96 trades and 1701 jobs in which
the British War Office authoritatively announced: “They have shown
themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex.”

Let the lady plough. Teach her to milk. She can have the hired man’s
place on the farm. She can release the ten dollar a week clerk poring
over a ledger. She can make munitions. Her country calls her. But the
female constitution has not been reckoned strong enough to sit on the
judge’s bench. And Christian lands unanimously deem it indelicate for
a woman to talk to God from a pulpit. From the arduous duties of the
professions, the world would to the last professional man protect the
weaker sex.

Then, hark! Hear the Dead March again! As inexorably as in the
workshops and the offices, it began to echo through the seminaries and
the colleges, through the laboratories and the law courts. Listen!
The sound of marching feet. The new woman movement is here too at the
doors. High on the walls of Leipzig and the Sorbonne, of Oxford and
Cambridge and Moscow and Milan, on all of the old world institutions of
learning, the long scrolls of the casualty lists commenced to go up.
Whole cloisters and corridors began to be black with the names of men
“dead on the field of honour.” And civilisation faced the inexorable
sequel. Women at last in the professions now are taking title on equal
terms with men.

The doors of a very old established institution in Fifty-ninth Street,
New York, swung open on a day last autumn. And a line of young women
passed through. They went up the steps to take their place—for the
first time that women had ever been there—in the class rooms of the
College of Physicians and Surgeons. There is perhaps a little awkward
moment of surprise, of curiosity. A professor nods in recognition to
the new comers. The class of 1921 smiles good naturedly. An incident is
closed.

And an epoch is begun. Outside on a high scaffolding there are masons
and carpenters at work. See them up there against a golden Indian
summer sky. They are putting the finishing touches on a new $80,000
building addition. And the ringing of their hammers and chisels,
the scraping of their trowels is but significant of larger building
operations on a stupendous scale not made by human hands.


A LOOK BACKWARD IN MEDICINE

This is the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University,
which after more than a hundred years of history has decided to enlarge
its accommodations and add a paragraph to its catalog announcing the
admission of women. To understand the significance of this departure
from custom and precedent we should recall the ostracism which women
have in the past been obliged to endure in the medical profession.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman of modern times in any land to
achieve a medical education, knocked in vain at the doors of some
twelve medical colleges of these United States before one reluctantly
admitted her. She was graduated in 1849 at the Geneva Medical College
now a part of Syracuse University. The entrance of this first woman
into the medical profession created such a stir that Emily Blackwell
the second woman to become a doctor, following in the footsteps of
her sister, found even more obstacles in her path. The Geneva college
having incurred the displeasure of the entire medical fraternity now
closed its doors and refused to admit another woman. Emily Blackwell
going from city to city was at last successful in an appeal to the
medical college of Cleveland, Ohio, which graduated her in 1852. So
great was the opposition now to women in the profession, that it was
clear that they must create their own opportunities for medical
education. In turn there were founded in 1850 the Philadelphia Medical
College for Women with which the name of Ann Preston is associated as
the first woman dean; in 1853 the New York Infirmary to which in 1865
was added the Woman’s Medical College both institutions founded by
the Drs. Blackwell; in 1863 the New York Medical College and Hospital
for Women. “Females are ambitious to dabble in medicine as in other
matters with a view to reorganising society,” sarcastically commented
the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_. Society as also the medical
profession coldly averted its face from these pioneer women doctors.

“Good” women used to draw aside their skirts when they passed Elizabeth
Blackwell in church. When she started in practice in New York City
she had to buy a house because no respectable residence would rent
her office room. Dr. Anna Manning Comfort had her sign torn down in
New York. Druggists in Philadelphia refused to fill prescriptions for
Dr. Hannah Longshore. Girl medical students were hissed and jeered at
in hospital wards. Men physicians were forbidden by the profession to
lecture in women’s colleges or to consult with women doctors. Not until
1876 did the American Medical Association admit women to membership.
How medical men felt about the innovation, which State after State was
now compelled to accept, was voiced by the _Boston Medical and Surgical
Journal_ of 1879 which said: “We regret to be obliged to announce
that, at a meeting of the councillors held Oct. 1, it was voted to
admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.”

Syracuse University, recovering from the censure visited upon it for
receiving Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first of the coeducational
institutions to welcome women on equal terms with men to its medical
college. Other coeducational colleges in the West later began to take
them. In 1894 when Miss Mary Garrett endowed Johns Hopkins University
with half a million dollars on condition that its facilities for the
study of medicine be extended to women equally with men, a new attitude
toward the woman physician began to be manifest. From that time on,
she was going to be able with little opposition to get into the
medical profession. Her difficulty would be to get up. Now no longer
was a woman doctor refused office facilities in the most fashionable
residential quarters in which she could pay the rent. Her problem
however was just that—to pay the rent. A medical diploma doesn’t do it.
And to practise medicine successfully, therapeutically and financially,
without a hospital training and experience is about as easy as to learn
to swim without going near the water. The most desirable opportunities
for this hospital experience were by the tacit gentleman’s agreement in
the profession quite generally closed to women.

Until very recently, internships in general hospitals were assigned
almost exclusively to men. Dr. Emily Dunnung Barringer in 1903 swung
herself aboard the padded seat in the rear of the Gouverneur Hospital
ambulance, the first woman to receive an appointment as ambulance
surgeon in New York City. Twice before in competitive examinations she
had won such a place, but the commissioner of public charities had
declined to appoint her because she was a woman. In 1908 another girl
doctor, Dr. Mary W. Crawford in a surgeon’s blue cap and coat with a
red cross on her sleeve, answered her first emergency call as ambulance
surgeon for Williamsburg Hospital, Brooklyn. It happened this way:
the notification sent by the Williamsburg Hospital to Cornell Medical
College that year by some oversight read that the examination for
internship would be open to “any member of the graduating class.”

When “M. W. Crawford” who had made application in writing, appeared
with a perfectly good Cornell diploma in her hand, the authorities were
amazed. But they did not turn her away. They undoubtedly thought as
did one of the confident young men applicants who said: “She hasn’t a
chance of passing. Being a girl is a terrible handicap in the medical
profession.” When she had passed however at the head of the list of
thirty-five young men, the trustees endeavoured to get Dr. Mary to
withdraw. When she firmly declined to do so, though they said it
violated all established precedent, they gave her the place. And a new
era in medicine had been inaugurated.

Here and there throughout the country, other women now began to
be admitted to examinations for internships. They exhibited an
embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of them
were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was for the
hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution had
“no accommodations for women doctors” which simply meant that all of
the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on this ground that
Philadelphia’s Blockley Hospital, the first large city almshouse in the
country to open to women the competitive examination for internship,
again and again refused the appointment even to a woman who had passed
at the head of the list. It was 1914 before Bellevue in New York City
found a place for the woman intern: five women were admitted among the
eighty-three men of the staff.

This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the indication
of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in consequences.
Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass bottle
containing a kidney preserved in alcohol. In all the annals of the
medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been another kidney
just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for a layman
to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it happens that a
young woman physician discovered the patient with that kidney and
diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed it
successfully. Then a man physician came along and borrowed it and read
a paper on it at a medical convention. He is now chronicled throughout
the medical fraternity with the entire credit for the kidney.

“And it isn’t his. It’s our kidney,” I heard the girl doctor say with
flashing eyes. “You’ll take it easier than that when you’re a little
older, my dear,” answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer in the
professional atmosphere that is so chilling to ambition.

It was against handicaps like this that the women in medicine were
making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly’s name, in New York, is at the
top in the annals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a famous surgeon
in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and Dr. Emma V. P. Culbertson are leading
members of the medical profession in Boston. Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar
was in 1917 appointed visiting surgeon on the staff of the Women’s
Hospital in New York, the first woman in New York City to receive such
an appointment. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, who established in New York the
first bureau of child hygiene in the world, is probably more written
of than is any man in medicine. As chief of this department, she has
under her direction 720 employés and is charged with the expenditure
annually of over a million dollars of public money. She is a graduate
of Dr. Blackwell’s medical college in which social hygiene first
began to be taught with the idea of making medicine a preventive as
well as a curative art. It was the idea that Harvard University a few
years later incorporated in a course leading to the degree “Doctor
of Public Health.” And though a woman had thus practically invented
“public health” and another woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and
original doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was refused at
Harvard the opportunity to take their course leading to such a title.
The university did not admit women. But a little later the trustees of
Bellevue Hospital Medical College, initiating the course and looking
about for the greatest living authority to take this university
chair, came hat in hand to Dr. Baker, even though their institution
does not admit women to the class rooms. “Gentlemen,” she answered,
“I’ll accept the chair you offer me with one stipulation, that I may
take my own course of lectures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public
Health elsewhere refused me because I am a woman.” Like this the woman
who has practically established the modern science of public health,
in 1916 came into her title. It is probably the last difficulty and
discrimination that the American woman in medicine will ever encounter.

The struggle of women for a foothold in the medical profession is the
same story in all lands. It was the celebrated Sir William Jenner of
England who pronounced women physically, mentally and morally unfit
for the practice of medicine. Under his distinguished leadership
the graduates of the Royal College of Physicians in London pledged
themselves, “As a duty we owe it to the college and to the profession
and to the public to offer the fullest resistance to the admission
of women to the medical profession.” Well, they have. The medical
fraternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge.


A WORLD-WIDE RECONSTRUCTION

But to-day see the builders at work at the College of Physicians
and Surgeons in New York. Yale and Harvard have also announced the
admission of women to their medical colleges. And it is not by chance
now that these three most exclusive medical colleges in the United
States have almost simultaneously removed their restrictions. They are
doing it too at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of
Moscow. The reverberation from the firing line on the front is shaking
all institutions to their foundations. As surely as if shattered by a
bomb, their barriers go down. Like that, the boards of trustees in all
countries are capitulating to the Great Push of the new woman movement.
All over the world to-day the hammers and chisels are ringing in
reconstruction. It is the new place in the sun that is being made for
woman. The little doors of Harvard and Yale and Columbia are creaking
on their ancient hinges because the gates of the future are swinging
wide. It is not a thin line that is passing through. The cohorts of
the woman’s cause are sweeping on to occupy the field for which their
predecessors so desperately pioneered.

Forward march, the woman doctor! It is the clear call flung back from
the battle fields. Hear them coming! See the shadowy figures that lead
the living women! With 8000 American women doctors to-day marches the
soul of Elizabeth Blackwell. Leading 3000 Russian women doctors there
is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first medical woman of that
land, who in 1865 was denied her professional appellation and limited
to the title “scientific midwife.” With the 1100 British women there
keeps step the spirit of Sophia Jex Blake pelted with mud and denied a
degree at Edinburgh University, who in 1874 founded the London School
of Medicine for Women.

And there is one grand old woman who lived to see the cause she led
for a lifetime won at last. The turn of the tide to victory, as surely
as for the Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the professional
woman’s cause when the British War Office unfurled the English flag
over Endell Street Hospital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a
new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest significance on
the vision of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.[1] The beautiful eyes of
her youth were not yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all
of their old star fire glowed again when the news of this great war
hospital, entirely staffed by women, was brought to her at her home in
Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she sat in her white cap, her active hands
that had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly in her lap.

[1] Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England,
Dec. 17, 1917.

Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of modern times, the first
in England. When as Elizabeth Garrett she came to London to be a doctor
in 1860, there was no University in her land that would admit her.
Physicians with whom she wished to study, were some of them scornful
and some of them rude, and some were simply amazed. “Why not become a
nurse?” one more tolerant than the rest suggested. The girl shook her
head: “Because I mean to make an income of a thousand pounds a year
instead of forty.” The kindly old doctor who finally yielded to her
importunities and admitted her to his office, also let her in to the
lectures at the Middlesex Hospital with the specific arrangement that
she should “dress like a nurse” and promise earnestly “not to look
intelligent.” Her degree she had to go to Paris for. Like that she
got into the medical profession in 1871 a year before her marriage to
the director of the Orient steamship line. Dean of the London School
of Medicine for Women and founder of the New Hospital for Women, she
came through the difficult days when it was only in “zenana” practice
in India that English women doctors had a free field. Russia too
dedicated her pioneer medical women to the heathen, modestly designing
them for the Mussulman population and at length permitting them the
designation “physician to women and children.” That idea lingered long
with civilisation. As late as 1910 a distinguished British surgeon in
a public address allowed that there was this province for the woman
physician, the treatment of women and children. But any medical woman
“who professed to treat all comers,” her he held to be an “abomination.”

Then the world turned in its orbit and came to 1914. And Elizabeth
Anderson’s eyes looked on the glory of Endell Street. Do you happen
to be of that woman movement which but yesterday moved upward toward
the top in any of the professions so laboriously and so heavily
handicapped? Then for you also, Endell Street is the shining citadel
that to-day marks the final capitulation of the medical profession to
the woman’s cause, as surely as the New York Infirmary in Livingston
Place still stands as the early outpost established by the brave
pioneers. But the ordinary chance traveller who may search out the
unique war hospital in the parish of St. Giles in High Holborn, I
suppose may miss some of this spiritual significance to which a woman
thrills. The buildings which have been converted from an ancient
almshouse to the uses of a hospital are as dismal and as dingy as any
can be in London. They are surrounded by a fifteen foot high brick wall
covered with war placards, a red one “Air Raid Warning,” a blue one
“Join the Royal Marines,” and a black one “Why More Men are Needed.
This is going to be a long drawn out struggle. We shall not sheathe the
sword until—” and the rest is torn off where it flapped loose in the
winter wind.

In a corner of this wall is set Christ Church, beside which a porter
opens a gate to admit you to the courtyard. Here where the ambulances
come through in the dark, the bands play on visitors’ day. It is a
grey court yard with ornamental boxes of bright green privet. On the
benches about wait the soldiers, legless soldiers, armless soldiers,
some of them blind soldiers. On convalescent parade in blue cotton
uniform with the gaiety of red neckties, every man of them at two
o’clock on a Tuesday is eager, expectant, waiting—for his woman.
Mothers, wives, sweethearts are arriving, the girls with flowers, the
women with babies in their arms. And each grabs his own to his hungry
heart. You go by the terrible pain and the terrible joy of it all that
grips you so at the throat. Inside where each woman just sits by the
bedside to hold her man’s hand, it is more numb and more still. A girl
orderly in khaki takes you through. Her blue shoulder straps are brass
lettered “W. H. C.,” “Women’s Hospital Corps.” The only man about the
place who is not a patient is the porter at the gate. The women in
khaki with the epaulets in red, also brass lettered “W. H. C.,” are the
physicians and surgeons.

There is one of these you should not miss. You will know her by her
mascot, the little fluffy white dog “Baby” that follows close at her
heels. Her figure in its Norfolk belted jacket is slightly below the
medium height. Her short swinging skirt reveals trim brown clad ankles
and low brown shoes. She has abundant red brown hair that is plainly
parted and rolled away on either side from a low smooth brow to fasten
in a heavy knot at the back of her head. I set down all of these
details as being of some interest concerning a woman you surely will
want to see. Surgeon in chief and the commanding officer in charge
of this military hospital with 600 beds, she is the daughter of Dr.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She is also the niece of Mrs. Millicent
Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies. And she is to-day one of England’s greatest surgeons, Dr.
Louisa Garrett Anderson, with the rank of major in the English army.

Her place in this new woman movement is the more significant because
of her prominent affiliation with that of yesterday. For the militancy
in which she is now enlisted Dr. Anderson had her training in that
other militancy that landed women in Holloway Jail. Her transfer to
her present place of government service has come about in a way that
makes her one of our most famous victory exhibits. “You have silenced
all your critics” the War Office told her when they bestowed on her the
honour of her present official rank as she and her Woman’s Hospital
Corps “took” Endell Street.

It was a stronghold that did not capitulate by any means at the first
onslaught of the women’s forces. There was, at least, as you might say,
a preliminary skirmish. The Woman’s Hospital Corps raised and financed
by British medical women was at the beginning of the war offered to the
British Government. But in the public eye these were only “physicians
to women and children.” Kitchener swore a great oath and said he’d have
none of them for his soldiers. Practically the War Office told them to
“run along.” Well, they did. They went over the Channel. “They are
going now to advance the woman’s cause by a hundred years. O, if only
I were ten years younger,” sighed Elizabeth Anderson wistfully as she
waved them farewell at Southampton on the morning of Sept. 15, 1914.

France was in worse plight than England. Under the Femmes de France of
the Croix Rouge, the Government there permitted the Women’s Hospital
Corps to establish themselves in what had been Claridge’s Hotel in the
Champs Elysées. In the course of time rumours reached the British War
office of this soldiers’ hospital in Paris run by English women. Oh,
well, of course, women surgeons might do for French _poilus_. At length
it was learned however that even the British Tommies were falling into
their hands. And Sir Alfred Keogh, director of the General Medical
Council, was hurried across to see about it.

“Miss Anderson,” he addressed the surgeon in charge, “I should like to
look over the institution.”

“Certainly,” she acquiesced. “But it’s Dr. Anderson, if you please.”
Three times as they went through the wards, he repeated his mistake.
And three times she suggested gravely, “Dr. Anderson, if you please.”

[Illustration:

 DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON

 The first woman physician in England and after Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
 of America the next woman of modern times to practise medicine.
]

They had finished the rounds. “This,” he said, “is remarkable, ’er
quite remarkable, don’t you know. But may I talk with some of your
patients privately?”

Then the soldiers themselves, British soldiers, assured him of their
complete satisfaction with the surgical treatment they had received.
Indeed the word, they said, was out in all the trenches that the
Women’s Hospital was the place to get to when a man was wounded. Women
surgeons took more pains, they were less hasty about cutting off arms
and legs, you see. Oh, the Women’s Hospital was all right.

“Extraordinary, most extraordinary,” murmured Sir Alfred Keogh. And
this report he carried back to the General Medical Council. “Incredible
as it may seem, gentlemen,” he announced gravely, “it seems to be so.”

“It appears then,” brusquely decided Kitchener, “that these women
surgeons are too good to be wasted on France.” And promptly their
country and the War Office invited them to London. It was England’s
crack regiment after the great drive on the Somme that was tucked under
the covers for repairs at Endell Street. The issue was no longer in
doubt. “Major” Anderson and the Women’s Hospital Corps held the fort
for the professional woman’s cause in England.


WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT

Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangan, fascinating little French feminist, meanwhile
was executing a brilliant coup in demonstration to her government.
France, it was true, had seen that British women could be military
doctors and surgeons. But the French woman doctor, oh, every one was
sure that the French woman doctor’s place was the home. And if ever
there was a woman whom God made just to be “protected,” you’d say
positively it was Nicole Gerard-Mangin.

She stood before me as she came from her operating room, curling
tendrils of bright brown hair escaping from the surgeon’s white cap
set firmly on her pretty head, a surgeon’s white apron tied closely
back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness of line. She is
soft and round and dainty and charming. She has small shapely hands, as
exquisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I looked at her hands
in the most amazement, the hands that have had men’s lives in their
keeping, little hands that by the sure swift skill of them have brought
thousands of men back from death’s door. You’d easily think of her as
belonging in a pink satin boudoir or leading a cotillion with a King
of France. And she’s been at the war front instead. “Madame la petite
Major” she is lovingly known to the soldiers of France. She too has
that rank. You will notice on one of the sleeves of her uniform the
gold stripe that denotes a wound and on her right pink cheek you will
see the scar of it. On her other coat sleeve are the gold bars for
three years of military service.

This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, Dr. Gerard-Mangin was in
charge of the tuberculosis sanitarium, Hôpital Beaugou, in Paris. When
the call came for volunteers for army doctors, she signed and sent in
an application, carefully omitting however to write her first name.
The War Office, hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin
as any other man. One night at twelve o’clock her _concierge_ stood
before her door with a government command ordering the doctor to
report at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case
in one hand and a surgeon’s kit in the other, she was on her way. The
astonished military _medecin-en-chef_, before whom she arrived, threw
up his hands: “A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be.”

She held out her government order: “_N’est ce pas?_” He examined it
more closely. “But yet,” he insisted, “it must be a mistake.”

“_En ce moment_,” as they say in France, a thousand wounded soldiers
were practically laid at the commander’s feet—and he had only five
doctors at hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy of a woman
before him. After all there was an alertness, an independent defiance
of her femininity that straightened at attention to duty now every
curving line of the little figure. His glance swept the wounded men:
“Take off your hat and stay a while,” he said in desperation. “But,” he
added, “I shall have to report this to the War Office. There must be an
investigation.”

Three months later when the Inspector General of the French army
arrived to make it, he learned that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had performed six
hundred operations without losing a single patient. “You’ll do even
though you are not a man,” he hazarded.

A little later she was ordered to Verdun to organise a hastily
improvised epidemic hospital. For the first week she had no doctors and
no nurses. There was no equipment but a barracks and the beds. As fast
as these could be set up, a patient was put in. There were no utensils
of any kind but the tin cans which she picked up outside where they had
been cast away by the commissary department when emptied of meat. There
was no heat. There was no water in which to bathe her patients except
that which she melted from the ice over an oil lamp. For six weeks she
worked without once having her clothing off. One of her feet froze and
she had to limp about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid arrived and
she had a staff of twenty-five men under her direction. There were
eight hundred beds. For seventeen months the hospital was under shell
fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. Three hundred and
twenty-nine panes of glass were shattered one day. A man next the
little doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her but she had only
time to staunch the flow of blood with her handkerchief. Outside the
American ambulance men were coming on in their steady lines. They
delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 18,000 wounded in four days, whom
she in turn gave first aid and passed on to interior hospitals. Later
when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back from the army infected
with tuberculosis, the Government required its greatest expert for the
diagnosis of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-Mangin in the fall of 1916
was recalled from the front to be made _medecin-en-chef_ of the new
Hôpital Militaire Edith Cavell in the Rue Desnouettes, Paris. It is a
group of low white buildings with red roofs. The white walls inside are
ornamented above the patients’ beds with garlands of red and blue and
yellow flowers. And the commanding officer’s own gay little office has
curtains of pink flowered calico. Grey haired French scientists in the
laboratories here are taking their orders from Madame la petite Major.
Soldiers in the corridors are giving her the military salute. One day
there came a celebrated French general: “When I heard about you at
Verdun,” he said, “I could not believe it. I insisted, she cannot be a
surgeon. She is only a nurse. I have made the journey all the way to
Paris,” he smiled in candour, “to find out if you are real.”

The records of the War Office show how real. Dr. Gerard-Mangin did
her two years’ service at the front without a day off for illness and
never so much as an hour’s absence from her post of duty. She is the
only surgeon with the French army who has such a record. Her right
to a place in the profession in which no man has been able to equal,
let alone surpass, her achievement, would seem to be assured beyond
question. Let us write high on the waving banners carried by the
cohorts of the woman’s cause the name of Nicole Gerard-Mangin. It was
not a simple or an easy thing that she has done. You would know if you
heard her voice tremulous yet with the agony on which she has looked.
“I shall nevair forget! I shall nevair forget!” she told me brokenly,
in the gay little pink calico office. And the beautiful brown eyes
of the little French major, successful army surgeon, were suddenly
suffused with woman’s tears.


WHAT SCOTTISH WOMEN DOCTORS DID

Like this the woman war doctor began. Before the first year of the
great conflict was concluded, there was not a battle front on which
she had not arrived. And the Scottish Women’s Hospitals have appeared
on five battle fronts. Organised by the Scottish Federation of the
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and supported by the
entire body of constitutional suffragists under Mrs. Fawcett of London,
they afford spectacular evidence of how completely the forces of the
woman movement of yesterday have been marshalled into formation for
the winning of the new woman movement of to-day. Dr. Elsie Inglis[2]
the intrepid leader of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, like a general
disposing her troops to the best strategic advantage, has literally
followed the armies of Europe, placing her now indispensable auxiliary
aid where the world’s distress at the moment seems greatest. There
have been at one time as many as twelve of the Scottish hospitals in
simultaneous operation. Sometimes they are forced to pick up their
entire equipment and retreat with the Allies before the onslaught of
the Hun hordes. Sometimes they have been captured by the enemy, only
eventually to reach London and start out once more for new fields to
conquer.

[2] Died 1917.

These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan trimmings and the sign of
the thistle embroidered on their hats and their epaulets, have crossed
the vision of the central armies with a frequency that has seemed, to
the common soldier at least, to partake of the supernatural. Bulgarian
prisoners brought into the Scottish Women’s Hospital operating at
Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up into the doctors’ faces
in amazement to inquire: “Who are you? We thought we had done for
you. There you were in the south. Now here you are in north. Are you
double?” Of this work in the north, in the Dobrudja from where they
were obliged to retreat into Russia, the Prefect of Constanza said in
admiration: “It is extraordinary how these women endure hardship. They
refuse help and carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies.”

At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish women left their first
record of efficiency at Calais. Their hospital there in the Rue
Archimede, operated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest percentage
of mortality for the epidemic of enteric fever. In France the hospital
at Troyes under Dr. Louise McElroy was so good that it received an
official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika to be regularly
attached to the French army, this being one of the very few instances
on record where a voluntary hospital has been so honoured. The
Scottish Hospital under Dr. Francis Ivins, established in the deserted
old Cistercian abbey at Royaumont, is one of the show hospitals of
France. When the doctors first took possession of the ancient abbey
they had no heat, no light but candles stuck in bottles, no water but
that supplied by a tap in the holy fountain, and they themselves slept
on the floor. But eventually they had transformed the great vaulted
religious corridors into the comfortable wards of Hôpital Auxiliarie
301. They might, the French Government had said, have the “_petite
blessé_.” They would be entrusted with operations on fingers and toes!
And every week or so, some French general ran down from Paris to see
if they were doing these right. But within two months the War Office
itself had asked to have the capacity of the hospital increased from
100 to 400 beds. And the medical department of the army had been
notified to send to Royaumont only the “_grande blessés_.” At the end
of the first week’s drive on the Somme, all of the other hospitals were
objecting that they could receive no more patients: their overworked
staffs could not keep up with the operations already awaiting them in
the crowded wards. “But,” said the French Government, “see the Dames du
Royaumont! Already they have evacuated their wounded and report to us
for more.”

[Illustration:

 MISS NANCY NETTLEFOLD

 Leader in the campaign to admit women to the practise of law in
 England.
]

It was in Serbia that four Scottish hospitals behind the Serbian
armies on the Danube and the Sava achieved a successful campaign in
spite of the most insurmountable difficulties. Here under the most
primitive conditions of existence, every service from bookkeeping to
bacteriology, from digging ditches to drawing water was done by women’s
hands. It was not only the wounded to whom they had to minister. They
came into Serbia through fields of white poppies and fields of equally
thick white crosses over fresh graves. They faced a country that was
overcome with pestilence. All the fevers there are raged through the
hospitals where patients lay three in a bed, and under the beds and
in the corridors and on the steps and on the grass outside. After
months of heartbreaking labour when the plague had finally abated, the
enemy again overran Serbia and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, hastily
evacuating, retreated to the West Moravian Valley. Some of the doctors
were taken prisoners and obliged to spend months with the German and
Austrian armies before their release. Others joined in the desperate
undertaking of that remarkable winter trek of the entire Serbian
nation fleeing over the mountains of Montenegro. Scores perished. But
the Scottish women doctors, ministering to the others, survived. Dr.
Curcin, chief of the Serbian medical command, has said: “As regards
powers of endurance, they were equal to the Serbian soldiers. As
regards morale, nobody was equal to them. In Albania I learned that the
capacity of the ordinary Englishwoman for work and suffering is greater
than anything we ever knew before about women.”

Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. Where, oh, where
are all those earlier fabled disabilities of the female sex for the
practice of the profession of medicine? A very celebrated English
medical man, returning recently from the front, found a woman resident
physician in charge of the London hospital of whose staff he was
a particularly distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly
tendered his resignation, only to be told by the Board of Directors
practically to forget it. And he had to.

Why man, you see you can’t do that sort of thing any more! Yesterday,
it is true, a woman physician was only a woman. To-day her title to her
place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven great London
hospitals that never before permitted so much as a woman on their
staff, now have women resident physicians in charge. Five of them are
entirely staffed by women. The British Medical Research Commission
is employing over a score of women for the highly scientific work of
pathology. When one of those Scottish Women’s Hospitals on its way to
Serbia was requisitioned for six weeks to assist the British army at
Malta where the wounded were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities
there, at length reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided that
the Malta military hospitals in the future could not do without the
woman doctor. They sent to London for sixty of her. And the War
Office reading their report asked for eighty more for other military
hospitals. By January, 1915, professional posts for women doctors were
being offered at the rate of four and five a day to the London School
of Medicine for Women, and they hadn’t graduates enough to meet the
demand!

Like that the nations have capitulated. The woman physician’s place
in Europe to-day is any place she may desire. Russia, which before
the war, would not permit a woman physician on the Petrograd Board
of Health because its duties were too onerous and too high salaried
for a woman, had by 1915 mobilised for war service even all of her
women medical students of the third and fourth years. France has Dr.
Marthe Francillon-Lobre, eminent gynecologist, commanding the military
hospital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue de Monceau,
Paris. In Lyons the _medecin-en-chef_ of the military hospital is Dr.
Thyss-Monod who was nursing a new baby when she assumed her military
responsibilities. Everywhere the woman doctor rejected of the War
Office of yesterday is now counted one of her country’s most valuable
assets. And so precious is she become to her own land, that she may not
be permitted to leave for any other. “Over there” the governments of
Europe have ceased to issue passports to their women doctors.

You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. Medical associations
will no longer bar you as in America until the seventies and in England
until the nineties. Salaried positions will not be denied you. Clinical
and hospital opportunities will not be closed to you. You of to-day
will no more be elbowed and jostled aside. You will not even be crowded
out from anywhere. For there is room everywhere. Oh, the horror and
the anguish of it, room everywhere. And every day of the frightful
world conflict they are making more of it. Great Britain alone has sent
10,000 medical men to the front. America, they say, is sending 35,000.

Hurry, hurry, urges this the first profession in which the women’s
battalions have actually arrived as it hastily clears the way for
you. The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, not to be
outdone by any institution now bidding for women’s favour, has rushed
up an “emergency” plant, a new $200,000 building. The London School of
Medicine has erected a thirty thousand pound addition and the public
appeal for the funds was signed by Premier Asquith himself. The nations
to-day are waiting for the women who shall come out from the colleges
equipped for medical service.


A PLACE IN EVERY PROFESSION

And after the most arduous profession of all, how about the others? If
a woman can be a doctor at a battle front, how long before she can be a
doctor of divinity? At the City Temple in London on a Sunday in March,
1917, a slender black robed figure preceded an aged clergyman up the
pulpit steps. With one hand resting on the cushioned Bible she stood
silhouetted against the black hanging at the back of the pulpit, her
face shining, illumined. By the time that the white surpliced choir had
ceased chanting “We have done those things that we ought not to have
done,” the ushers were hanging in the entrance corridor the great red
lettered signs “Full.”

The house was packed to the last seat in the gallery to hear Miss
Maude Royden, one of England’s leading suffragists, “preach.” This
church is nearly 300 years old and only once before, when Mrs. Booth
of the Salvation Army was granted the privilege, has a woman ever
spoken from its pulpit. Some six months since, Maude Royden has now
been appointed pulpit assistant at the City Temple, the first woman
in England to hold such a position. Dr. Fort Newton, the pastor, in
announcing the innovation, declared: “We want the woman point of view,
the woman insight and the woman counsel.” The City Temple is not an
Episcopalian Church. But even the established church has recently heard
an archbishop cautiously pronounce the opinion that “we may invite
our church women to a much larger share in the Christian service than
has been usual.” You see there are 2000 English clergymen enrolled
as chaplains at the front. Laywomen were last year permitted to make
public addresses in the National Mission of Repentance. They thus
ascended the chancel steps. A committee of bishops and scholars—and
one woman—has now been appointed to see how much farther women may be
permitted to go on the way to the pulpit itself. A few of the smaller
churches in America have a woman minister in charge. But from the
arduous duties of the highest ecclesiastical positions women in all
lands are still “protected.” High established places are of course the
last to yield. Theology continues to be the most closed profession.
But Maude Royden in the pulpit of the London City Temple, the highest
ecclesiastical place to which a woman anywhere in the world has yet
attained, has, we may say, captured an important trench.

In the field of science the opposing forces are even more steadily
falling back before the advancing woman movement. One of the most
conservative bodies, the Royal Astronomical Society of England, has
added a clause to its charter permitting women to become fellows. The
Royal Institute of British Architects has also decided to accept women
as fellows and in 1917 the Architectural Association for the first time
opened its doors to women students. Germany even has several women
architects employed in military service, among them Princess Victoria
of Bentheim. Russia, in 1916, admitted women to architecture and
engineering.

Chemistry is distinctly calling women in all lands. Sheffield
University, England, in 1916 announced for the first time courses in
the metallurgical department for training girls as steel chemists to
replace young men who have been “combed out” of Sheffield’s large
industrial works. Firms in Leeds, Bradford and South Wales are filling
similar vacancies with women. Bedford College of London University
had last year started a propaganda to induce young women to study
chemistry. In 1916 there were some twelve graduates in the chemical
department and the college received applications from the industrial
world for no less than 100 women chemists. So insistent was the demand
that even Woolwich Arsenal was willing to take a graduate without
waiting for her to get her degree. Women are wanted too in physics
and bacteriology. A London University woman has been appointed to a
position at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and there
were last year, at this one university, offers of twenty positions for
women physicists that could not be filled. All over the world now,
in trade journals are beginning to appear advertisements for women
chemists and physicists.

Even in the teaching profession there is the record of new ground won.
Women have of course been longest admitted to this the poorest paid
profession, and in it they have been relegated to the poorest paid
places. But now over in Europe, note that one-third of all the masters
in the German upper high schools are enlisted in the army and with the
consent of the Department of Education women are for the first time
being appointed to these places, in some instances even at the same
salaries as were received by the men whom they replace. Russia had in
the first year of the war opened the highest teaching positions in
that country to women, by a special act of the Duma providing that
“their salaries shall equal those of men in the same position.” Russia
also in 1915 had her first woman college professor, Mme. Ostrovskaia,
occupying the chair of Russian history at the University of Petrograd.
In 1916 Mlle. Josephine Ioteyko, a celebrated Polish scientist, had
been invited to lecture at the College de France in Paris. In 1917
Germany had its first woman professor of music, Fraulein Marie Bender,
at the Royal High School of Music in Charlottenburg. And in the same
year England had appointed its first woman to an open university chair,
when Dr. Caroline Spurgeon was made professor of English literature at
Bedford College.

[Illustration:

  _Albert Wyndham, Paris_

 MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG

 Celebrated woman lawyer of Paris who pleads cases before the _Conseil
 de la Guerre_. The privilege thus accorded the French women lawyers
 marks an epoch in history. It is the first time in the world that
 women have conducted cases before a military tribunal.
]

In each country like this, where the opposing professional lines
begin to show a weakened resistance, surely, sometimes silently,
but irresistibly and inevitably, the new woman movement is taking
possession. Next to medicine the legal profession, one may say, is at
present the scene of active operations. The woman movement in law, as
in medicine, began for all the world in the United States. It was in
1872 that one Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago knocked at the tight shut
doors of the legal profession in the State of Illinois. Of course her
request was refused. Public opinion blushed that a woman should be
guilty of such effrontery, and the learned judges of the court rebuked
the ambitious lady with their finding that: “The natural and proper
timidity which belongs to the female sex unfits it for many of the
occupations of civil life. And the harmony of interests which belong
to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting
a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.” Syracuse
University, which gave to the world the first woman physician, also
graduated Belva A. Lockwood, who in 1879 was the first woman to be
permitted to practise law before the Supreme Court of the United
States. Every State but Virginia has now admitted women to the practice
of law. There are something over 1000 women lawyers in the United
States. Their way in and their way up has been attended with the same
difficulties that women encountered just about a generation ahead of
them in the medical profession. The University of Michigan was one of
the first institutions to admit women to its law school on the same
terms as men. The Women’s Law class at New York University was started
in the nineties. Many law colleges, as Boston, Buffalo and Cornell,
have since opened their doors. It was in 1915 that Harvard University
announced the Cambridge Law School, the first graduate law school in
America exclusively for women, and the only graduate law school open to
them in the East.

But opportunities for professional advancement for women in law have
been exceedingly limited. It is on the judge’s bench, in every land,
that their masculine colleagues have most stubbornly refused to move
up and make room. So it is noteworthy that Georgiana P. Bullock was
in 1916 made a Judge of the Woman’s Court in Los Angeles, the first
tribunal of its kind in the world. A few women have been allowed a
place as judges in the children’s courts. Catherine Waugh McCulloch
of Chicago, who some years ago as justice of the peace was the first
woman anywhere in the world to have arrived at any judicial office,
scored another victory in December, 1917, when she was made a master in
chancery, the first woman to receive such an appointment. Litta Belle
Hibben, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles in 1915, and Annette
Abbot Adams, assistant United States district attorney in San Francisco
in the same year, were the first women to arrive at these appointments.
Helen P. McCormick, in 1917 assistant district attorney in New York,
is the first woman in the more conservative East to become a public
prosecutor. There is a reason for this advance. Could a woman really
be accepted as an expert in the interpretation of laws, so long as she
was permitted no share in making them? With the pressure of the woman
movement at the gates of government resulting in enfranchisement, that
handicap of civic inferiority is being removed.

Like this even in the United States farthest from the war zone, the
rear guard of the women’s lines in the legal profession are moving. At
the front “over there,” every country reports distinct progress. Even
a deputation of Austrian women have been to their department of state
to demand admission to the legal profession. In October, 1917, on a
petition from the German Association of Women Lawyers, the Prussian
Ministry of Justice made the first appointment of women in the Central
Berlin law courts, three women having legally qualified there as law
clerks. In Russia directly after the revolution one of the first
reforms secured by the Minister of Justice was the admission of women
lawyers to the privilege of conducting cases in court on equal terms
with the men of the profession. The Italian Parliament in 1917 passed
a bill granting to women in that country the right to practise law.

Specially significant is the legal situation in England, the land
where Chrystabel Pankhurst, denied the opportunity to practise law,
became instead a smashing suffragette. Now, see the vacant places in
the London law courts where day by day women clerks are appearing with
all of the duties, though not yet the recognition, as solicitors.
And the English Parliament at last is considering a bill which shall
permit women to be admitted to this branch of the legal profession in
England. This bill really should be known as Nancy Nettlefold’s bill.
The year that Nancy Nettlefold arrived at her twenty-first birthday
and was presented at court, Cambridge University announced in June,
1912, that she had taken the law tripos, her place being between the
first and second man in the first class honours list. And she at
the time determined to make the winning of the legal profession her
contribution to the woman’s cause. With four other English women,
who have also passed brilliant law examinations, she has financed
and worked indefatigably in the campaign to that end. To-day they
have that conservative organ of public opinion, the London _Times_,
urging in favour of their case: “Many prejudices against women have
been shattered in this war. And there is no stronger theoretical case
against the woman lawyer as such than against the woman doctor.”
The bill permitting women to enter the Law Society has passed a
second reading in the House of Lords, Lord Buckmaster, its sponsor,
declaring: “The true sphere of a woman’s work ought to be measured by
the world’s need for her services and by her capacity to perform that
work.”

And the world’s need presses steadily, inexorably day by day. France
had called 1500 men lawyers to the colours when the War Office sent
a brief notice to the bar association of Paris: “On account of the
absence of so many men at the front,” read the summons, “women lawyers
are wanted in the Ministry of War.” Women have been in the legal
profession in France since 1900. There are 52 women lawyers in Paris.
But their practice has been limited largely to women clients. Madame
Miropolsky has made a reputation as a divorce lawyer. Madame Maria
Verone is the prominent barrister of the Children’s Court. A year ago I
heard Avocat Suzanne Grinberg plead a case before a tribunal which up
to 1914 had never listened to a woman’s voice.

[Illustration:

 DR. ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON OF NEW YORK

 Who is organizing the American women physicians for war service.
]

As she stood there in the ancient Palais de Justice of Paris, her
small, well formed head wound round with its black braid, her red lips
framing with easy facility the learned legal phrases, her expressive
hands accentuating her points with eager gesture, her woman’s figure
in the flowing legal robe of black serge with the white muslin cravat,
was outlined against a thousand years of history. Eight soldiers
with bayonets stood on guard at the rear of the room. The court whom
she addressed was seven judges of military rank in splendid military
uniform. And her client was a soldier. This is the Conseil de la
Guerre. See the epitage, the sash that falls from Suzanne Grinberg’s
left shoulder. It is edged with ermine, the sign that she is entitled
to plead before the Tribunal of War. It is the first time in the
history of the world, here in France, that women lawyers have been
empowered to appear in military cases. The Salle de Pas-Perdus, they
call the great central promenade at the Palais de Justice. Note that
these new women lawyers who wear the ermine walk in the Hall of Lost
Footsteps! On the walls of this court house in which Suzanne Grinberg
pleads, you may read wreathed in the tricolours of France, “_Avocats à
la Cour d’Appel de Paris Morts pour la Patrie_,” and there follow 127
names.

Only the day before yesterday woman’s capacity for the higher education
to fit her for the professions was in grave doubt. Vassar College once
stood as the farthest outpost of radical feminism, and Christian women
were counselled by their clergymen not to send their daughters there.
Even after the moral stigma of a college education had passed, the
critics said that anyhow the female mind was not made to master science
and Greek and mathematics. And it was only about twenty years ago that
Phi Beta Kappa decided to risk the opening of its ranks to college
women—of course provided that any of them should be able to attain the
high scholarship that it required. The female mind, you know!

Well, at the last Phi Beta Kappa council meeting, the secretary
reported to that distinguished body that in the elections of the past
three years, women have captured in Phi Beta Kappa an aggregate of 1979
places to 2202 for men. What shall the oldest college fraternity do
in the face of this feminine invasion? A letter on my desk says that
the committee on fraternity policy has been commissioned to take under
advisement this grave situation and report to the council meeting of
1919! So the present Phi Beta Kappa record seems to dispose forever of
the old tradition of the mental inferiority of the always challenged
sex.

Ladies, right this way for titles, please, one profession after another
takes up the call to-day. New York University at its opening last fall
registered 110 women in its law school, the largest number ever entered
there. Already the American medical women are called and coming.
New York City has recently appointed women doctors for nearly every
municipal institution. The first mobile hospital unit of American women
physicians with a hospital of 100 beds, to be known as the Women’s
Oversea Hospital Unit, is now in France. It is backed financially
by the National Women’s Suffrage Association. And it goes from that
first original outpost of the professional woman’s cause, Elizabeth
Blackwell’s New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Meanwhile the
entire Medical Women’s National Association is being organised for war
service under the direction of Dr. Rosalie S. Morton, who has been made
a member of the General Medical Board of the United States Government
at Washington. The American Women’s Hospitals are being formed for
civilian relief at home and for service with Pershing’s army. From the
Surgeon General’s headquarters in Washington the announcement is made:
“There will be need for the war service of every woman physician in the
United States.”

And through the vast Salle de Pas-Perdus of the world, the professional
women are passing. The Lost Footsteps! O, the Lost Footsteps! Forward
the advancing columns. Hush, there are ways that are not our ways! On
with the new woman movement, but with banners furled before the woe of
a world! For all the pæans of our victory are drowned in the dirge of
our grief.




CHAPTER VIII

AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT


The man in khaki stood at the door. And he held a woman close to his
heart in mansion or cottage—in a rose bowered cottage on the English
downs, or red roofed behind the yellow walls of France and Italy,
or blue trimmed beside a linden tree in Germany, or ikon blessed in
Russia. All that he had in the world, his estates, his fields or his
vineyards, his flocks or his factory, his shop or his job, his home and
his children, he was leaving behind. “I leave them to you, dear,” he
said.

The bugles blew. And he kissed her again. Then he went marching down
the street in those fateful days of August, 1914, when all the world
began going to war.

So in land after land she took up the trust and the burden that the
man who marched away had left her, to “carry on” civilisation. It was
the woman movement that was to be under the flags of all nations. Ours
too now flies behind the battle smoke. A little while since and our
men commenced to stand in khaki on our front porches, then went down
the front walk to join the long brown lines passing along Main Street
on their way to France. At Washington they told us why it had to be.
“They were going,” the President himself explained, “to fight for
Democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority, to have a
voice in their own government.” In the name of liberty, we too pass
under the rod. But we fall in line to catch step with the women’s
battalions of the world. We shall see them moving triumphantly even
on the very strongholds against which the woman’s cause of yesterday
dashed itself most vainly.

The tasks of the world were one by one being handed over to women
by men who were taking up arms instead. By solemn proclamation of
church and state, the patriotic duty of thus releasing every possible
citizen for military service was profoundly impressed on the women of
every nation. Only there was still one function that no country was
asking them to assume. In England a thoughtful woman filling in her
registration paper stating the national service that she could render,
wrote down her qualifications like this: “Possessed of a perfectly good
mentality and a University training, prepared to relieve a member of
Parliament who wishes to go to the front.”

But the lady wasn’t called. Whole brigades of women swung out across
the threshold of the home into industry. Regiment after regiment went
by into commerce. Companies passed into the professions. Cohorts even
crossed the danger zone for duty right up to the firing line. But
government was still reserved for men. Could a woman vote? O, my
lords, the legislative hall was not woman’s place!

Then the armies of Europe got into action. Even as their primitive
forefathers had done, the men of the modern world came together to
put liberty to the test of the sword. They fight for the freedoms
their leaders have formulated—and for another they did not know and
did not understand. A freedom that was enunciated from Holloway jail
and turbulently contested in London streets is also being fought to a
finish in front line trenches even along the Somme and the Aisne and
the Yser.

Sergeant Jones of Company C of the 14th regiment of the Cold Stream
Guards was a combatant. He was a British soldier bravely defending his
flag against the Huns. And he found himself up against a great deal
more that his enemies also equally face, the most revolutionary force
that the world has ever known in this Great War that is overturning the
destinies and opinions of individuals and the decrees of the social
order as lightly and as easily as the dynasties of kings.

Sergeant Jones was bowled completely over. A German bullet hit him,
and another and another. For weeks thereafter he was wandering on
the borderlands of death. At length he was drifting back to earth
in a roseate blur of warmth and soft comfort. Slowly his mind began
to establish again the realities of existence. The roseate blur
straightened away and away from beneath his chin: it was the cherry
red comforter that covered his bed at Endell Street Hospital, London.
Rip Van Winkle himself came back with no more wonderment. The sergeant
awoke, a soldier literally in the hands of women.

He couldn’t so much as bathe his own face. A woman in a white
headdress, with a red cross in the centre of her forehead, was doing it
for him. When he opened his eyes again, a girl orderly in a blue tunic
was saying, “You can smoke if you want to.” And she began propping
pillows softly about his shoulders. There was a queer numb feeling
along his side. He couldn’t find his right hand. “Never mind,” the girl
said hastily. She placed the cigarette between his lips and held the
lighted match. He smoked and began to remember that he had gone over
the top. He pulled gently again for his right hand. He tried to draw up
his left leg. At the least movement, somewhere outside the numb, tight
bound area of him, there were answering stabs and twinges of pain. He
wanted to flick the ashes from his cigarette. As he turned his head and
his left hand found the tray on the little bedside stand, he glimpsed
a long row of cherry red comforters that undulated in irregular lines.
From where he lay, he could see still, white faces, bandaged heads, an
arm in a sling, a man in a convalescent uniform clumsily trying out
crutches. The man in the very next bed to his own lay moaning with
face upturned to the light, hollow, empty, staring sockets where the
eyes had been. In the bed beyond was a man with his face sewed up in
an awful twisted seam that was the writhing caricature of the agony
that had slashed it. A sickening sensation of nausea swept over the
sergeant. God in heaven, he thought, then how much was the matter with
him?

A woman was coming down the room, pausing now and then by the side of
a cherry red comforter. By the waving mass of her red brown hair, she
was a woman, but not such as the sergeant had seen before. His mother
wore a black dress and his wife’s, he remembered, was a blue silk
for Sundays and at home, why he supposed it was calico beneath their
gingham aprons. But this woman was in khaki as surely as ever he had
been.

Now she reached his bed. She stood looking down on him with an air
of proprietorship, almost of possession. “How are you, this morning,
Sergeant Jones?” she asked, with firm professional fingers reaching
authoritatively for the pulse in his left wrist. Without waiting for
a reply, she was proceeding calmly to turn back the covers. “We have
a little work to do here, I think,” she said, gently grasping—could
the sergeant be sure—it seemed to be his left leg. “The dressings, you
know,” she was saying easily.

“But, but, ’er—the doctor,” he gasped in protest.

“I am the doctor,” she answered.

Of the female of the species, Sergeant Jones of course had heard. He
had never before seen one. “I’ll be—” he started to say. But he wasn’t.
Then he would have jerked away. But he couldn’t. “I want a doctor, a
real one,” he blurted out angrily.

A shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the woman’s eyes.
Often she had seen them like this. “I am the surgeon in charge, the
commanding military officer here,” she replied evenly. “After awhile,
I’m sure you won’t mind.”

She went quietly on unwinding him. He heard her scissors snip. She was
going to take some stitches. Once or twice she had to hurt horribly.
She did it with deft precision. With the same quick motions, the
sergeant had seen his wife at home roll out a pudding crust or flap
a pancake. It was the convincing sureness of the woman who knows her
business. Could a woman be a doctor, after all? The strips of linen had
piled in a blood stained heap on the floor. With an effort the sergeant
steadied his voice: “What is there left of me?” he asked.

The doctor smoothed his pillow first. “Sergeant,” she said very gently,
“you have one perfectly good arm. I think there will be one leg. Last
week the other—” But the sergeant did not have to hear the rest of the
sentence. When he struggled back from somewhere in a black abyss, the
hand that last week had held the surgeon’s knife was softly smoothing
back the damp locks of hair from his cold forehead. She drew the cherry
red comforter up and patted it about his shoulders with the infinite
sympathy that speaks in a woman’s touch. She leaned over him with a
glance that signalled courage and understanding. Then she left him to
fight the fight he had to fight in the grim grey light of that London
day for his own readjustment to the cruelty of existence. Was he glad
that a woman was a doctor? She had saved his life.

There were weeks of convalescence. The hospital librarian in khaki
stopped beside his cherry red comforter. He turned his face to the
wall. There was nothing she could do for him. But in time he came to
watch for her on her rounds as he did for the doctor. Finally he asked
for books and magazines and the papers. And the news of the day that
she brought him, flared with just two topics, War and Woman. The one
was man’s universal activity, the other was his Great Discovery. You
know how pleased a boy is with a Christmas toy he finds will go with
some new unexpected action? Women were in all kinds of unprecedented
action.


THE NEW WOMAN’S SLOGAN

The girl orderly in the blue tunic dressed Sergeant Jones one day for
the convalescent soldiers’ outing. A girl chauffeur of the Woman’s
Reserve Ambulance Corps picked him up in her arms like a child and
set him on the seat beside her and took her place at the wheel. Could
a woman drive a car? She shot hers in and out of the tangled maze of
the London traffic as easily as a girl he had seen send a croquet ball
through a wicket. Other cars whizzed by with women at the wheel. Great
motor vans, with a woman on the high driver’s seat, swung safely past.
Fleets of motor busses came careening along with girl conductors in
short skirts balancing jauntily in command on the rear platforms. The
bus marked “Woolwich Special” drew up at the Haymarket curb to take on
a load of women munition workers going out for the night shift at the
great arsenal. High on a ladder against a building here in Cockspur
Street, two girl window cleaners stand at work in tunic and trousers.
Girl footmen are opening the doors of carriages before the fashionable
shops of Oxford Street. Girl operators are running the lifts. Girl
messengers in government uniform are going in and out of Whitehall.

A kingdom is in the hands of its women. Round and round the world has
turned since yesterday.

Here in Trafalgar Square a crowd of a thousand people hang on the words
that a woman is speaking. Jones had never heard Mrs. Pankhurst; he had
forbidden his wife to when she came to their town. Rampant, women’s
rights females were against the laws of God and England. This, the arch
conspirator of them all, he pictured in his mind’s eye as permanently
occupied in burning country residences and bombing cathedrals and
engaging in hand to hand conflicts with the London police.

Now wouldn’t it take your breath away? Here she was doing nothing
at all of the kind. A very well gowned lady stood directly between
the British lions, her slender figure outlined against the statue of
Nelson. Her clear, ringing tones carried over the listening throng to
Jones and his comrades in the Women’s Reserve Ambulance car. One small
hand frequently came down into the palm of the other in the emphatic
gesture that in times past brought two continents to attention. It is
the hand that hurled the stone that cracked the windows of houses of
government around the world.

To-day, as England’s most active recruiting agent, the greatest leader
of the woman’s cause is calling men to the colours to win the war. Had
she once a slogan, Votes for Women? ’Tis a phrase forgot. In the public
squares of London since the war, her countrymen have heard from Mrs.
Pankhurst only “Work for Women.” Round and round, you see, the world
has turned.

A puzzled Sergeant Jones asked the next day for a book about the woman
movement. It was Olive Schreiner’s “Woman and Labour” the librarian in
khaki brought him. “But I wanted to know about the suffragettes, the
suffragettes. Did you ever hear of them?” he questioned. So Rip Van
Winkle might have asked, I suppose, why, say, for women who once wore
hoop skirts.

The woman beside the hospital bed smiled inscrutably for an instant.
“Sergeant,” she said with a level glance, “I was one, a militant,
Sergeant,” she added evenly. “And the doctor was in Holloway jail, and
your nurse. And the girl who drove your car yesterday was a hunger
striker and—” She stopped. The truce! By the pact that was signed in
Kingsway, the most radical suffragists in the world, along with all the
others, were war workers now in their country’s cause and not their own.

The woman in khaki was still. Jones stared. She was dropping no bombs.
Only the armies were smashing. Nothing about here was broken but
men—and women were mending them!

At length they had the sergeant patched up as well as they could. He
would never again work at his skilled trade. But they pinned a medal
for valour on his coat lapel. And they sent him back to his wife in the
north of England. The woman who met him at the door fell on her knees:
“My dear, my dear!” She gathered him from a wheel chair into her arms
with a sob. The man who had gone out in khaki was home again.

“Mustered out of the service,” his papers read. But his wife will never
be!

Mustered out of service. So was the man with the twisted face, who
never again can smile. And so was the man with the blinded eyes, whose
little daughter on sunny days leads him to the Green Park where he sits
on a bench and talks to the squirrels. Just so I have seen him sitting
in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Just so he sits in the Tiergarten by
the side of the River Spree. He is going to be “re-educated” to keep
chickens. And Sergeant Jones shall learn basket weaving for a living!
Oh, and there are thousands of others!

After each great drive on the front, they are passing through the
hospitals to the cottage rose bowered and red roofed, to the blue
trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage. And now they are waited
for in plain little white houses where a woman on the front porch
shades her eyes with her hand to look down Main Street as far as she
can see. And it isn’t the woman who can fall on her knees and gather
her burden to a hungry heart whose shoulders will bear the heaviest
load. It is the woman whose arms are empty never again to be filled!

These are the women whom not even the peace treaty will discharge from
their “national service.” Every Great Push makes more of them. And the
rest must always watch fearfully, furtively looking down Main Street
as the years of strife wear on. Who shall say whether she too may be
conscripted to “carry on” for life. For this is the way of war with
women.

Like this, the trust and the burden have rested heavier and heavier on
woman’s heart and hands. Millions of men will never be able to lift it
for her again. No one knows when the others will. Men must fight and
women must work.

So many men are with the flag at the front. So many men are under the
crosses, the acres of crosses with which battle fields are planted. So
many men are in wheel chairs and on crutches. Women are carrying on in
the home, in industry, in commerce and in the professions. Then why not
in the State?

[Illustration:

 MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON

 For fifty years leader of the Constitutional Suffragists, whose cause
 triumphed in 1918 when Parliament granted the franchise to English
 women.
]

Little by little, in every land, a voice began to be heard. It was the
voice of the man with the flag, and the man with the twisted face, and
the man with the blinded eyes, and the voice of Sergeant Jones. It
said what the sergeant said, when from his wheel chair by the window
where his wife had placed it, he took his pen in hand and wrote back to
Endell Street hospital: “Women are wonderful. I didn’t know before.
Now I wouldn’t be afraid for you even to have the vote.”

And curiously enough, what the man in the wheel chair and the man in
the Green Park and the Tuileries and the man with the flag was saying,
the newspapers began to repeat as if it had been syndicated round the
world. The _Matin_ had it in Paris, the _Times_ in London and the
_Tageblatt_ in Berlin. You read it in all languages: “The women are
wonderful. We didn’t know before.”


GREATEST DRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY

Then couldn’t a woman who could cast a shell, cast a vote? Parliaments
trembled on the verge of letting her try.

It wouldn’t be at all the difficult undertaking it used to look to
those women of yesterday, whose place was in the home pouring afternoon
tea or embroidering a flower in a piece of lace. Why, to-day they would
scarcely have to go out of their way at all to the polls! They could
just stop in as easily as not, as they went down the street to their
day’s work in shop and office and factory. Sergeant Jones’s wife is
out of the home now anyway from six o’clock in the morning until seven
at night making munitions. Some one must support her family, you know.
Well, all over the world a new call began. Simultaneously in every
civilised land, through the crack in the window of the government house
where man gathered with his fellow man, you could hear it. In some
lands yet it is only a murmur of dissent. But in many lands now it
is a rising chorus of consent: “Women wanted in the counsels of the
nation!”

At the gates of government, the new woman movement has arrived. And not
through the broken window is it entering in. Without benefit of even
a riot, suffrage walking very softly and sedately is going through an
open door. In England, a gentleman holds it ajar, a gentleman suave and
smiling and bowing the ladies to pass!

Democracy, the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice
in their own government, is breaking through apparently on all the
fronts at once. It is a most remarkable coincidence. In August, 1917,
Parliament in England removed the “grille,” the brass lattice barring
the ladies’ gallery in the House of Commons and symbolising what had
been the English woman’s position. The _Times_, commenting on the
proceeding, characterised it as a “domestic revolution.” In the same
month in India 5000 Hindus were applauding Shimrati Pandita Lejjawati
who at Jullundur had come out on a public platform to urge that her
country abolish purdah!

But the great drive for Democracy that now thrills around the world at
the International Suffrage Alliance headquarters, began unmistakably
in Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst in the old days never staged a raid on the
houses of Parliament more spectacularly. Just see the gentleman bowing
at the open door! It is Mr. Asquith, the former leader who for years
held the Parliamentary line against all woman’s progress. And smiling
right over his shoulder stands Mr. Lloyd George, the present premier.
Oh, well! The girl in the green sweater who horsewhipped one member of
Parliament, at the Brighton races, is driving a Red Cross ambulance in
Flanders. The quiet little woman in a grey coat, who fired the country
house of another in 1912, is rolling lint bandages. Sergeant Jones’s
wife has become a bread winner. Soldiers are not afraid for women to
vote. And cabinet ministers take courage!

There is a town in the north of England with a monument erected to a
shipwrecked crew: “In memory of 17 souls and 3 women,” says the marble
testimonial. That categorical classification to which the English ivy
clings is about to be changed. Six million English women are about to
be made people![3]

[3] Bill passed by House of Lords and received King’s sanction, Feb. 6,
1918.

At the outbreak of hostilities, politicians the world over hastened
to declare woman’s suffrage a “controversial” question that must be
put aside during the war. And every government engaged said to its
suffragists: “We’re in so much trouble, for heaven’s sake don’t you
make us any more.”

“Well, we won’t,” the women agreed, as the organisations in land after
land called off their political campaigns. It was for his sake—the
man in khaki. And in every land, the trained women of the suffrage
societies assembled their countrywomen to stand ready with first aid
for him. Day by day, week after week, now year after year, they have
been feeding the nation’s defenders, clothing them, nursing them,
passing up ammunition to them. To-day there isn’t an army that could
hold the field but for the women behind the men behind the guns.

In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National
Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, had been a member of the
committee that in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for
the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl of twenty then. It
was a cause, you see, to which she had given a lifetime, that she
now laid aside. With the summons, “Let us show ourselves worthy of
citizenship,” she turned 500 women’s societies from suffrage propaganda
and Parliamentary petitioning to hospital and relief work.

But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic leader of the Woman’s
Social and Political Union who had first smashed suffrage into the
front page of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms to give
her country’s claims precedence above her own, that the world realised
that there was a new formation in the lines of the woman movement.

Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Holloway jail recuperating from a
hunger strike, when there came to her from her government the overtures
for a peace parley. When the authorities offered her release for all
of the suffragettes in prison and amnesty for those under sentence,
she ran up the Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In no
uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, “I who have been against the
government, am now for it. Our country’s war shall be our war.”

For a minute after that proclamation, you could have heard a pin drop
in the great assembly hall of the smashing suffragettes. Then in a
burst of applause she had them with her: they would follow their
leader. Some few at first drew back in consternation. Had their late
leader lost her mind? The girl in the green sweater looked dazed: “I
was in the front ranks of her body guard when we stormed Buckingham
Palace,” she murmured. A very few were angry: “She’s selling out the
cause,” they exclaimed bitterly.

But she wasn’t. The greatest little field marshal the woman movement
has ever known, was leading it to final victory.

When Kitchener announced, “We shall not be able to win this war until
women are doing nearly everything that men have done,” it was the
woman who had organised raids on Parliament who now organised the
woman labour of a nation. On the day that she led 40,000 women down
the Strand to man the factories of England and turned Lincoln’s Inn
House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a munitions employment
bureau, opponents of the woman’s cause the world over began an orderly
retirement from their front line trenches. The next morning the London
_Post_ announced: “We stand on the threshold of a new age.”

We do. You see, you could not have practically the men of all nations
in arms for Democracy without their finding it. And some of them who
buckled on their armour to go far crusading for it, are coming to the
conviction that there is also Democracy to be done at home. When the
history of these days at length is written, it will come to be recorded
that the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose
authority they submit, was practically assured by the events of 1917.

In that year, the women who came to petition the English Parliament for
citizenship, got what they had for fifty years been asking in vain. For
the women who with Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Despard of
the Women’s Freedom League now stood at the gates of government were:
women shell makers and howitzer makers, pit brow lassies, chain makers,
textile workers, railway engine cleaners, women motor lorry drivers
in khaki, women letter carriers, women window cleaners, women bus
conductors, women engineers, women clerks, women in the civil service,
women tailors, women bakers, women bookbinders, women teachers, women
army nurses, women army doctors, women dentists, women chemists, and
women farm labourers. Among them was the wife of the man with the
twisted face and the wife of the man with the blinded eyes and the wife
of Sergeant Jones.

The capitulation of the English Government was assured in the
recantations of its greatest men. Ex-premier Herbert H. Asquith spoke
first: “I myself,” he declared, “as I believe many others, no longer
regard the woman suffrage question from the standpoint we occupied
before the war.... I have said that women should work out their own
salvation. They have done it. The woman’s cause in England now presents
an unanswerable case.”

Mr. Lloyd George agreed: “The place of woman,” he said, “is altered
for good and all. It would be an outrage not to give her the vote.
The further parliamentary action now involved may be regarded as a
formality.”

General French, former commander of the British armies, the brother
of Mrs. Despard and of Mrs. Harley who died at the front, crossed the
Channel to announce his conversion to the woman’s cause through “the
heroism, the endurance and the organising ability of the women on the
battlefields of France and Belgium.”

The press of the country burst into print with a new confession of
faith. The _Observer_ declared: “In the past we have opposed the claim
on one ground and one ground alone—namely, that woman by the fact of
her sex was debarred from bearing a share in national defence. We were
wrong.” The _Daily Mail_: “The old argument against giving women the
franchise was that they were useless in war. But we have found out that
we could not carry on the war without them.” The _Evening News_: “In
the home woman has long been a partner—not always in name, perhaps, but
generally in practice. Now she is a partner in our national effort.
And if she demands a partner’s voice in the concerns of the firm, who
shall say her Nay?” The _Northern Daily Telegraph_: “The duties of
citizenship are fulfilled by women to the uttermost. The continuance
of the sex disqualification would be a cruel crime and a blind folly
as well.” The _Referee_: “Women have earned a right to be heard in the
nation’s councils. The part they have played in winning the war is
their victory.”

Like this, the cause that yesterday was rejected and most bitterly
assailed of men was now championed by the nation. This was a kingdom
saying Votes for Women. Field Marshal Pankhurst would never again have
to. Her war-time strategy had won. When Mr. Asquith rose in the House
of Commons himself to move the woman’s suffrage resolution, it had
ceased to be a “controversial” question. The measure was passed by an
overwhelming majority.


RECORD YEAR FOR SUFFRAGE CAUSE

The domestic reform that was begun in England has echoed round the
world. See that which had come to pass in 1917: Four other nations,
France, Italy, Hungary and the United States had suffrage measures
before their parliaments. Members of the Reichstag were warning that
Germany cannot avoid it if she would keep up in efficiency with the
rest of the world. King Albert announced that it should be one of his
first acts for a restored Belgium to confer citizenship on its women.
Holland and Canada have just accomplished it in limited measure.
Russia and Mexico in the throes of revolution have actually achieved
it. Women have for the first time taken their seats in the governing
bodies of three nations, Hermila Galindo in the Congress of Mexico,
Mrs. McKinney and Lieutenant Roberta Catherine McAdams in Canada and
Jeanette Rankin in the United States. A woman, the Countess Sophia
Panin, has been a cabinet minister in Russia. And for the first time
since civilisation began, a woman, Dr. Poliksena Schiskina Yavein, as
a member of the Council of 61 at Petrograd, has assisted in writing a
nation’s constitution.

[Illustration:

 MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER

 One of the feminist leaders in Paris to whose appeal for votes for
 women the French government is listening to-day.
]

On with Democracy! Nations are convinced that those who serve their
country should have a voice in directing its destinies. Land after
land preparing to extend its franchise for soldiers, as England
with her Representation of the People Bill, is reflecting on a real
representation. For every country is finding itself face to face with
the question with which Asquith first startled Britain, “Then what are
you going to do with the women?” Everywhere at the gates of government
are deputations like that in England who are saying, “We also serve who
stand behind the armies. We too want to be people.”

And some one else wants them to be. From the training camps to the
trenches, the supporting column of the man in khaki stretches. Every
knitted sweater, every package of cigarettes tied with yellow ribbon
has been helping votes for women. And now over there he is getting
anxious about his job or his home or his children. What can he know
at the front about food control or the regulation of school hours in
Paris or London or New York? And when there are decisions like that to
be made, “I’d like to leave it to Her,” the soldier is beginning to
conclude. Why, war-time is the time for women to be free! The whole
world is athrill with the new ideal.

See the lines of women arriving before the government houses. Theresa
Labriola voices the demand of the National Federation in Italy:
“Women,” she says, “form the inner lines of defence for the nations.
We need the ballot to make our lines strong.” Yes, yes, agrees her
country. You shall begin right away with the municipal franchise. And
Premier Boselli and the Italian Parliament are proceeding to get it
ready.

In France, Mme. Dewitt Schlumberger and Mme. Charles LeVerrier for the
Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, present the “unanswerable
case.” The senate on the Seine, looking out, sees many women wearing
long crêpe veils in the delegation before its doors. “Let us give
them,” says a member of the Chamber of Deputies in a burst of poetic
chivalry, “the suffrage _de la morte_: every soldier dying on the
battle field shall be permitted to designate the woman relative he
wishes to have carry on his citizenship for him.” Very gently the women
of France declined the suffrage of the dead. Presenting a carefully
prepared brief that was the review of their war work, they said, “We
can vote for ourselves, please.” And who else shall? There are whole
communes with most of the men dead. There are villages with not
so much as a man to be made mayor, and a woman filling the office
instead. The French Chamber of Deputies has before it a bill to confer
the municipal franchise on women. “It is an act of justice,” says
ex-Premier Viviani. The _Droit du Peuple_ declares, “After the war,
many homes will be maintained by women who will perform men’s tasks and
fulfil men’s obligations. They ought to have men’s rights.”

Canada, too, thought to reward her women with a vicarious vote. The
“next of kin” franchise was devised, by which the Government has
conferred on the wife or widow, mother, sisters and daughters of men
in the service the right to vote. But the delegations of women outside
the government house at Ottawa do not go away. They still wait. “We
also serve,” they repeat. And the country, in which no less than five
provinces last year gave to all of their women full citizenship, has
promised now to prepare the full direct federal franchise.

In Mittel Europa, Rosika Schwimmer is marshalling the feminist forces.
Under her leadership, a great deputation has marched to the Town Hall
in Budapest. The resolution there presented for universal suffrage was
carried by the Burgomaster to the Emperor. In reply, the Hungarian
Feminist Union has received the assurance of the prime minister that
the Government will introduce a measure extending the franchise to
a limited class of women. At Prague, Austria, the Town Council has
appointed a committee to draw up a new local government franchise
which shall include women. The free town of Hamburg, Germany, preparing
to enlarge its franchise in recognition of the self-sacrifice of
soldiers, hears the voice of Helene Lange and 27,000 women. They are
reminding the Hamburg Senate that women, too, who have borne the
burdens of war, will wish to devote themselves to reconstruction
and in order to fulfil the duties of citizens, they claim citizens’
rights. The Prussian Diet has before it the petition of Frau Minna
Cauer and the Frauenstimmrechtsbund urging that suffrage for women be
included in the projected franchise reform. The Reichstag arranging a
Representation of the People Bill has at last referred the petition of
the Reichverbund, the German National Union for Woman Suffrage, “for
consideration” _zur kenntnisnahme_, which is the first indication of
their change of attitude before the women’s offensive. The Socialists
in the Reichstag are urging: “Women suffrage is marching triumphantly
through other lands. Can Germany afford to fall behind the other
nations, with her women less fully equipped than the rest for the
struggle for existence?” Meanwhile, Germany, as other countries, is
depending more and more upon her women. Two leading cities, Berlin
and Frankfort-on-Main, both have women appointed to their municipal
committees. Frau Hedwig Heyl, that woman behind the food control policy
for the Empire, who has turned her great chemical factory on the
Salzufer to canning meat for the army, says: “Woman suffrage in Germany
is a fruit not yet ripe for the picking. I water the tree,” she adds
significantly.

Holland has seen in The Hague 4,000 women assembled in the Binnehof,
the public square before the House of Parliament. On their behalf,
Dr. Aletta Jacobs, president of the Vereenigingvoor Vronwenkeisrecht,
presented to Premier Cort Van der Linden a petition with 164,696
signatures, asking for citizenship for women. “Society,” Dr. Jacobs
told him, “can only gain when the forces and energy of its women, now
concentrated on the struggle for the vote, can be used along with
men’s in finding a solution for the many social problems for which
the insight of both is necessary.” And the Dutch Parliament, making
over its Constitution to enlarge the franchise for men, decided on
the amazing plan about women, “We will try them first, as members of
Parliament. And if we find they can make the laws, afterward we shall
let them vote for law makers.” So the new Dutch constitution gives
to women the “passive” franchise, which is the right to hold all
administrative offices, including representation in Parliament. There
is also removed an old prohibitory clause, so that the way is now
clear for the introduction of a measure for the “active” franchise for
women—if it is found the dinner doesn’t burn while they are sitting in
Parliament.

A South African Party Congress, for the first time it has ever listened
to women, has received a delegation who urge: “Half the population of
the country is composed of women. Can you any longer afford to do
without our point of view in your national deliberations?” The Grand
Council of Switzerland is considering a bill which is before it,
proposing to give women the franchise in communal affairs. Mexico is
struggling toward national freedom with her women at the side of her
men. It was not even considered necessary to incorporate in the new
constitution the woman suffrage provision suggested by Hermila Galindo
at the national convention. The new Mexican Federal constitution states
explicitly that “Voters are those Mexicans who are 21 if unmarried and
over 18 if married and possessed of an honest means of livelihood.” And
under this constitution, in the March, 1917, elections, Mexican women
quietly voted as a matter of course along with the other citizens.

[Illustration:

 DR. POLIKSENA SCHISKINA YAVEIN

 Who led 45,000 women to the duma in Petrograd to make their calling to
 citizenship sure.
]

In all of Russia’s turbulent revolutionary unrest, none of the divers
parties struggling for supremacy there, denies the claim of half
the race to the freedom which it is hoped ultimately to establish.
The Provisional government’s first announcement was for universal
suffrage. But the Russian women weren’t going to take any chance.
They remembered a French revolution that also proclaimed “universal”
suffrage and has not yet done anything of the kind. The Russian League
for the Defence of Women’s Rights said, “Let’s be certain about this.
We want our calling to citizenship made sure.” So Dr. Schiskina Yavein,
the president of the League, led 45,000 women to the Imperial Duma in
Petrograd. As their spokesman she told the government: “At this time
of national crisis we should have no confusion of terms. Without the
participation of women, no franchise can be universal. We have come for
an official declaration concerning the abolition of all limitations
with regard to women. We demand a clear and definite answer to two
questions: Are women to have votes in Russia? And are women to have a
voice in the Constituent Assembly which only in that case can represent
the will of the people? We are here to remain until we receive the
answer.”

Well, the answer came. It was an unconditional affirmative, received
in turn from the men who came out from the government house to reply
to the waiting women: M. V. Rodzianko, president of the Imperial
Duma; N. S. Tchkeidze, president of the Council of Workingmen’s and
Soldiers’ Deputies, and Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of
Ministers. And when the preliminary parliament of the Russian Republic
was opened at Petrograd in October, 1917, the chair was offered to
Madame Breshkovsky, the celebrated “Little Grandmother” of the Russian
Revolutionaries, as the senior member of the council.

In New York City on election night of November, 1917, the newsboys
shrilled out a new cry, “The wimmin win!” “The wimmin win!” It was like
a victory at Verdun or the Somme. The cables throbbed with the news
that New York State, where the woman movement for all the world began
ninety years before, had made its over three million women people. It
is now only a question of time when all other American women will be.
New York State carries with it almost as many electoral votes as all
of the 17 previous States combined, which have conferred on women the
Presidential franchise. The strongest fortress of the opposition is
fallen. And President Wilson has already recommended women suffrage to
the rest of the States as a war measure for immediate consideration.

It was from the hand of Susan B. Anthony that the torch of freedom was
received by every leader of the woman movement now carrying it. On her
grave at Rochester, N. Y., we have already laid the victory wreath.
For Democracy, the right of women to have a voice in the government to
whose authority they submit, is about to be established in the earth!

“One thing that emerges from this war, I feel absolutely convinced,”
(it is Mr. Lloyd George, Premier of England, who is speaking in a
public address), “is the conviction that women must be admitted to a
complete partnership in the government of nations. And when they are
so admitted, I am more firmly rooted than ever in the confident hope
that they will help to insure the peace of nations and to prevent
the repetition of this terrible condition of things which we are now
deploring. If women by their enfranchisement save the world one war,
they will have justified their vote before God and man.”

There is a story that the anti-suffragists started. But it’s our best
suffrage propaganda now. A farmer’s wife in Maine, who had cooked the
meals and swept the house, and washed the children and sent them to
school, and hoed the garden and fed the chickens, and worked all the
afternoon in the hayfield, and was now on her way to the barn to finish
her day’s work with the milking, was accosted by an earnest agitator,
who asked her if she didn’t want the vote. But the farmer’s wife shook
her head: “No,” she answered, “if there’s any one little thing the men
can be trusted to do alone, for heaven’s sake, let ’em!”

But is there? From the rose bowered cottage, the cottage red roofed and
the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage, and the plain
little white house somewhere off Main Street, there is a rising to the
question.

Lest we forget, this war was made in the land where woman’s place was
in the kitchen!

And the mere housewifely mind asks, Could confusion be anywhere worse
confounded than in the government houses of the world to-day?

Hark! You cannot fail to hear it! The cry of the nations is now sharp
and clear. It is the cry of their distress: “Women wanted in the
counsels of state.”




CHAPTER IX

THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY


You unto whom a child is born to-day, unto you is this written. I bring
you glad tidings. Blessed are you among the nations of the earth. Wise
men all over the world are hurrying to bring you gifts. Only lift
your eyes from the baby at your breast and in your mirror I am sure
you shall see the shining aureole about your head. Exalted are you,
O, woman among all people. Know that you have become a Most Important
Person. Governments are getting ready to give your job a priority it
never had before. For you, why you are the maker of men!

The particular commodity that you furnish has been alarmingly
diminished of late. It is clear what has happened with the present
world shortage of sugar: we pay 11c and 16c a pound where once we paid
four. The world shortage in coal has increased its cost in certain
localities almost to that of a precious metal, so that in Paris within
the year it has sold for $80 a ton. It is just as the political
economists have always told us, that the law of supply and demand fixes
prices. That which becomes scarce is already made dear.

Thus is explained quite simply over the world to-day the rising value
of a baby. Civilisation is running short in the supply of men. We
don’t know exactly how short. There are the Red Cross returns that
say in the first six months alone of the war there were 2,146,000
men killed in battle and 1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures,
however, of cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There is a
living figure that may not be. See the woman in black all over Europe
and to-morrow we shall meet her in Broadway. There are so many of her
in every belligerent land over there that her crêpe veil flutters
across her country’s flag like the smoke that dims the landscape in
a factory town. It is the mourning emblem of her grief unmistakably
symbolising the dark catastrophe of civilisation that has signalled
Parliaments to assemble in important session. Population is being
killed off at such an appalling rate at the front that the means for
replacing it behind the lines must be speeded up without delay. To-day
registrar generals in every land in white-faced panic are scanning the
figures of the birth rates that continue to show steadily diminishing
returns. And in every house of government in the world, above all the
debates on aeroplanes and submarines and shipping and shells, there is
the rising alarm of another demand. Fill the cradles! In the defence of
the state men bear arms. It is women who must bear the armies.

Whole battalions of babies have been called for. If we in America have
had no requisitions as yet, it is because we have not yet begun to
count our casualty costs. L’Alliance Nationale pour L’Accroissement
de la Population Française is calling on the French mothers for at
least four children apiece during the next decade. Britain’s Birth
Rate Commission wants a million new babies from Scotland alone. The
Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungs Politik, which is the society for
increase of population organised at a great meeting in the Prussian
Diet House, has entered its order with the German women for a million
more babies annually for the next ten years. And that is the “birth
politics” of men.

Then to the proposals of savants and scientists, sociologists and
statesmen, military men and clergymen and kings, there has been
entered a demurrer. Governments may propose, Increase and multiply.
She-who-shall-dispose overlays their falling birth rate figures with
the rising death rate statistics. And there is tragedy in her eyes:
“What,” she asks, “have you done with my children? The babies that I
have given you, you have wasted them so!”

Is it not true? Even now along with the war’s destruction of life on
the most colossal scale known to history, children throughout the
world are dying at a rate that equals the military losses. In England
a hundred thousand babies under one year of age and a hundred thousand
more that do not succeed in getting born are lost annually. In America
our infant mortality is 300,000 a year. In Germany it is half a million
babies who die annually. The economics of the situation to a woman
is not obscure. Conservation of the children we already have, is the
advice of the real specialist in repopulation. One other suggestion
she contributes. She has made it practically unanimously in all lands.
In the Prussian Diet House it was one speaking with authority as the
mother of eight who interpolated: “Meine Herren, if you would induce
women to bring more children into the world you must make life easier
for mothers.” “Messieurs, Messieurs,” called the Union Française pour
le Suffrage des Femmes to the Société pour la Vie with its curious
proposal of money grants in reward to fathers of large families, “to
get children, you must cultivate mothers!” “Gentlemen,” declared the
Duchess of Marlborough at a great public meeting on race renewal held
in the Guild Hall, London, “care of the nation’s motherhood is the war
measure that will safeguard the future of the state.”

These amendments in birth politics offered on behalf of the Most
Important Person have been practically adopted the world over.
Chancellors of the Exchequer are everywhere busy writing off
expenditures from the taxes running into millions, in support of
nation-wide campaigns for the conservation of the child. Maternity from
now on in every land takes the status of a protected industry. Britain
is ready to devote two and one-half million dollars a year to schools
for mothers. France has voted a “wards of the nation” bill, to provide
for the care of 700,000 war orphans, at a cost to the state which
it is estimated will mean an outlay of two hundred million dollars.
Public provisions for motherhood and infancy are proceeding apace
with provisions for the armies. If you are going to have a baby in
Nottingham, England, a public health visitor comes round to see that
you are perfectly comfortable and quite all right. And the municipality
that is thus anxiously watching over your welfare solicitously inquires
through a printed blank on which the reply is to be recorded, “Have
you two nightgowns?” In Berlin large signs at the subway and elevated
stations direct you to institutions where rates are moderate, or even
the Kaiser himself will be glad to pay the bill. Similar facilities are
offered by the government of France in the “Guide des Services Gratuits
Protegeant la Maternite,” with which the walls of Paris are placarded.
Even the war baby, whose cry for attention not all the ecclesiastical
councils and the military tribunals commanding “Hush” has been able to
still, at last is too valuable to be lost. And every Parliament has
arranged to extend the nation’s protection on practically equal terms
to all children, not excluding those we have called “illegitimate,”
because somebody before them has broken a law.


FINANCING MATERNITY

You see, yesterday only a mother counted her jewels. To-day states
count them too. Even Jimmie Smith in, we will say, England, who before
the war might have been regarded as among the least of these little
ones, has become the object of his country’s concern. Jimmie came
screaming into this troublous world in a borough of London’s East End,
where there were already so many people that you didn’t seem to miss
Jimmie’s father and some of the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie
belongs to one of those 300,000 London families who are obliged to live
in one and two room tenements. Five or six, perhaps it was five, little
previous brothers and sisters waited on the stair landing outside the
door until the midwife in attendance ushered them in to welcome the new
arrival. Now Jimmie is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either
soldiers of war or soldiers of industry. And however you look at the
future, his country’s going to need Jimmie. He is entered in the great
new ledger which has been opened by his government. The Notification of
Births Act, completed by Parliament in 1915, definitely put the British
baby on a business basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six hours
of its advent, be listed by the local health authorities. Jimmie was.

And he was thereby automatically linked up with the great national
child saving campaign. Since then, so much as a fly in his milk is a
matter of solicitude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it’s heard
in Westminster. And it’s at least worried about there. Though all the
King’s councillors and all the King’s men don’t yet quite know what
they’re to do with the many problems of infancy and complications of
pregnancy with which they are confronted, now that these are matters
for state attention.

A first and most natural conclusion that they reached, as equally has
been the case in other lands, was that the illness of babies was due
to the ignorance of mothers. Well, some of it is. And that has proven
a very good place to begin. For every one else, from a plumber to a
professor, there has always been training. Only a mother was supposed
to find out how by herself. Now she no longer has to. The registration
of Jimmie’s birth itself brought the Health Visitor, detailed from the
public health department of the borough, for her first municipal call
on his mother. She found Mrs. Smith up and trying to make gruel for
herself. After serious expostulation, the maternity patient was induced
to return to bed, where she belonged. Gruel, the white-faced woman who
sank back on the pillow insisted, was easy. Why, probably she should
not have minded it at all. Only that day before yesterday she had
gotten up to do a bit of wash and had fainted at the tub. She hadn’t
seemed to be just right since. Neither had the baby.

The visitor leaned across the bed and removed a “pacifier” from the
baby’s mouth. “But he has to have it,” said the mother, “he cries so
much. All my children had it.” Looking round at them, the visitor saw
that it was true. Each exhibited some form of the facial malformation
that substantiated the statement. And one was deaf from the adenoid
growth. And one was not quite bright. This was, of course, no time for
a medical lecture beyond Mrs. Smith’s comprehension. But the effort was
made to impress her with the simple statement of fact that a pacifier
really was harmful for a child. There were inquiries about the baby’s
feeding. No, of course, it was not being done scientifically. Well,
the mother was told, if he were fed at regular intervals he would be
in better condition not to cry all the time. And of course she herself
must not get tired. It was Mrs. Smith’s first introduction to the
practice of mothercraft as an art. At the school for mothers recently
opened in the next square, where the Health Visitor had her enrolled
within a month, her regular instruction began.

The schools for mothers are now being established as rapidly as
possible throughout the country. It is not an absolutely new
enterprise. The first one in England, from which all the others are
being copied, had been started in London by an American woman who had
married an Englishman, Mrs. Alys Russell, a graduate of Bryn Mawr.
Women recognised at once the value of the plan. It was only a question
of popularising and paying for it. This the war has accomplished.
Government will now defray 50 per cent. of the cost of a school under
the operation of either voluntary agencies or borough authorities.
Already 800 schools have been opened. Some of the most successful
are at Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow, under municipal direction.
Parliament, you see, by financing it has established the school for
mothers as a national institution.

The “infant consultation” is the feature about which its activities
centre. Jimmie was taken regularly for the doctor’s inspection and
advice and there is on file there at the school a comprehensive record
in which is entered every fact of his family history and environment
and his own physical condition, with the phenomena of its changes
from week to week. The weekly weighing indicated very accurately
his progress. And the week that his weary mother’s milk failed, the
scales reported it. The modified milk was carefully prescribed but
the next week’s weighing indicated that Mrs. Smith wasn’t getting the
ingredients together right. The Health Visitor was assigned to go
home with her and show her just how. Like that, Jimmie was constantly
supervised. When the doctor at the consultation, tapping the little
distended abdomen with skilled fingers, announced, “This baby is
troubled with colic,” Mrs. Smith said he had been having it a good
deal lately. Well, a little questioning corrected the difficulty. The
trouble was pickles, and he never had them after that. Also he never
had the summer complaint, which the former Smith babies always had in
September.

You see, there is no proper cupboard at Jimmie’s house. There is
only the recess beside the chimney, and flies come straight from
the manure heap at the back of the house to the milk pitcher on the
shelf. Mrs. Smith didn’t know that flies mattered. She knows now, and
at the school she has learned that you protect the baby from summer
complaint by covering the pitcher with a muslin cloth. She also has
learned how to make the most ingenious cradle that ever was contrived.
It’s constructed from a banana box, but it perfectly well serves the
purpose for which it was designed. That Jimmie should sleep alone, is
one of the primary directions at the school. Of course, it is clear
that this is hygienically advisable, and there is another reason: these
crowded London areas are so crowded that even the one bed the family
usually possesses is also overcrowded. With some five other children
occupying it with their mother, there was danger that Jimmie would
some night be smothered. “Overlaying,” as it is called, is the reason
assigned in the death certificate for the loss of a good many London
babies.


BETTER BABIES ARE PRODUCED

Jimmie in his banana cradle slept better than any of the other babies
had. He had a little more air. Also he was cleaner than the others,
because his mother had learned that dirt and disease germs are
dangerous. But it is not easy, you should know, to keep children clean
where every pint of water you wash them in must be carried up stairs
from the tap on the first floor and down stairs again to the drain. A
frequent bath all around in the one stewpan that perforce must serve
for the purpose is out of the question. But there was a real wash basin
now among the new household furnishings that Mrs. Smith was gradually
acquiring. There are so many things that one goes without when one’s
husband is an ordinary labourer at the limit line of 18s. a week. But
when he becomes a soldier and you get your regular separation allowance
from the government, you begin to rise in the social scale. Mrs.
Smith, like so many others of the English working class women, now
during the war was “getting on her feet.” And some of the improvement
in family life was certainly registering in that chart card at the
school consultation that recorded Jimmie’s progress.

When his father, home from Flanders on furlough, held him on his knee,
it was a better baby than he had ever held there before. For one thing
it was a heavier baby: children in this district used to average
thirteen pounds at one year of age. And now those whose attendance
at the consultations is regular average sixteen and seventy-five
hundredths pounds. Also Jimmie was a healthier baby. He hadn’t rickets,
like the first baby, who had suffered from malnutrition. What could you
do when there was a pint of milk a day for the family and the baby had
“what was left”? He hadn’t tuberculous joints, like the second baby. He
hadn’t died of summer complaint, like the third and the fifth babies.
And he hadn’t had convulsions, like the seventh baby, who had been born
blind and who fortunately had died too. Yes, when one counts them up,
there have been a good many, and if some hadn’t died, where would Mrs.
Smith have put them all? The six that there are, seem quite to fill two
rooms and the one bed.

Still in the course of time there was going to be another baby.
Governments crying, “Fill the cradles,” seem not to see those that are
already spilling over. But the development of birth politics has at
last arrived at an important epoch—important to all the women in the
world—in the recognition of the economic valuation of maternity. It
has dashed acquiescent compliance in a world old point of view most
tersely expressed in that religious dictum of Luther: “If a woman die
from bearing, let her. She is only here to do it.” Mrs. Smith will
not die from bearing to-day if her government can help it—nor any
other mother in any other land. Instead, all science and sociology are
summoned to see her through. The rising value of a baby demonstrates
clearly that you cannot afford to lose a maker of men. The British
Government and the German Government and the French Government,
speeding up population, are now taking every precaution for the
protection of maternity. The mortality record for women dying in child
birth in England has been about 6,000 a year. In Germany it has been
10,000. There was also in addition to this death rate a damage rate.
The national health insurance plan inaugurated by several countries
before the war was beginning to reveal it: the claims for pregnancy
disabilities, the actuaries reported, were threatening to swamp the
insurance societies. New significance was added to these phenomena when
there began to be the real war necessity for conserving population.

The Registrar General, laying the case before Parliament in England,
found it suddenly strengthened by a book presented by the Women’s
Co-operative Guild. The volume constitutes one of the most amazing
documents that ever found a place in any state archives. It is entitled
“Maternity,” and is a symposium constituting the cry of woman in
travail. A compilation of 160 letters written by members of this
working women’s organisation recounting the personal experiences of
each in childbirth, it reflects conditions under which motherhood is
accomplished among the 32,000 members of the Guild. “Maternity,” with
its simple, direct annals of agony is a classic in literature, a human
document recommended for all nations to study. The gentlemen in the
House of Commons, who had turned its tragic pages, looked into each
other’s faces with a new understanding: there was more than maternal
ignorance the matter with infant mortality! And a new population
measure was determined on.

“These letters” impressively announced the Right Honourable Herbert
Samuel, “give an intimate picture of the difficulties, the miseries,
the agonies that afflict many millions of our people as a consequence
of normal functions of their lives. An unwise reticence has hitherto
prevented the public mind from realising that maternity presents a
whole series of urgent social problems. It is necessary to take action
to solve the problems here revealed. The conclusion is clear that it
is the duty of the community so far as it can to relieve motherhood of
its burdens.” So you will now find the maternity centre being erected
next door to the school for mothers. The Government in 1916, announcing
that it would assume also 50 per cent. of this expense, sent a circular
letter to all local authorities throughout the kingdom, urgently
recommending the new institution “in spite of the war need for economy
at the present time in all other directions.”

[Illustration:

 HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH

 Formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt of New York, who is leading the movement
 in England for the conservation of the nation’s childhood.
]

STARTING THE BABY RIGHT

Mrs. Smith was automatically registered from the school for mothers
to the books of the maternity centre when the Health Visitor learned
that it was time. The medical authorities report that 40 per cent. of
the total deaths of infants occur within a month after birth and are
due very largely to conditions determined by the state of the mother’s
health. A specific trouble is maternal exhaustion. Mrs. Smith, under
weekly observation at the ante-natal clinic, was discovered to be
hungry. She didn’t know it herself, because she had so long been that
way. It gets to be a sort of habit with the working class woman, who
must feed her husband first, because he is the bread winner. He has the
meat and the children have the soup, and she is very likely to have the
bread and tea. The clinic doctor, looking Mrs. Smith over, wrote out
a prescription. It wasn’t put up in a bottle. It was put on a plate.
Mrs. Smith was to attend the mothers’ dinner, served every day at the
centre. The mother, being the medium of nourishment for the child, the
good food that she would get here would do more than any dosing that
might be done afterward to ensure the right kind of constitution for
the coming little British citizen. In the “pre-natal class,” under the
instruction of a sewing teacher and with municipal patterns furnished
by the city of London, she made better baby clothes than she had ever
had before. The materials, bought at wholesale, are furnished at cost
price, the entire layette at 10s. to be paid for by a deposit of 6d. a
week.

As time went on, Mrs. Smith’s headaches became more severe. Carrying
water and coal upstairs greatly aggravated the heart trouble she had
had since Jimmie’s birth. Suddenly dizzy one day, she nearly fell from
a chair on which she was standing to wash the windows. The next morning
her feet were so swollen she could with difficulty get on her shoes.
Her neighbour on the lower landing remarked, “Of course, you’ll have to
be worse before you’re better.” And she herself knew no other way.

But the ante-natal clinic did. The doctor wrote kidney trouble on her
attendance card. That, of course, was the technical diagnosis. He might
have said it another way had he written “overwork” and “overbearing.”
It was a long time since Mrs. Smith had been strong. She had nursed two
of the children with measles right up to the day that the seventh had
arrived. Three months later, with the eighth expected, she was going
out charring. Her husband was out of work. The 30 shillings maternity
benefit that would be coming to her from the national insurance
department on the birth of her baby, would have to be supplemented
somehow in order to meet all the additional expenses of the occasion.
Well, the eighth baby was a miscarriage instead. Then there was the
ninth, and then there was Jimmie, in quick succession. And with the
five others and trying to keep up with all that she was learning at
the school for mothers should be done for children, why it was more
than one pair of hands was equal to. She had now reached the verge of
collapse.

The clinic doctor was telling her gravely that she must have medical
attendance at once. The business of a centre is to supply supervision,
but for medical treatment the patient is referred to her own physician.
Mrs. Smith didn’t have one. Half the babies of the kingdom are brought
into the world by midwives. Mrs. Smith could not afford a doctor. Well,
Parliament could. The bill, presented by the physician in whose care
she was now placed, was paid half by the national government and half
by the health department of this borough. It is an arrangement which is
considered a good investment by the national treasury. Without this aid
Mrs. Smith would have died in convulsions and a new baby might never
have been born. Careful feeding and careful doctoring obviated both
disasters and carried the case to a triumphant conclusion. The baby
is here. On his first birthday anniversary he tipped the scales at 20
pounds.

Mrs. Smith counts it a confinement _de luxe_ that brought him. For the
first occasion in her maternal history she did not have to get out of
bed to do the washing. For two weeks she just “laid up” while a Home
Help took the helm in her household. The Home Help is an adaptable
person in a clean blouse and a clean apron, who comes in each morning,
and cooks and scrubs, and washes, and gets the children off to school.
Her wages of 13s. a week were paid half by the centre and half by Mrs.
Smith through her weekly 6d. contribution to the Home Help Society. But
there was a greater event than even the Home Help. A “bed to yourself
to have a baby in,” is the dream of luxury to which the working class
woman with her new war-time allowance looks forward. Mrs. Smith,
carefully saving out a shilling here from the “coal and lights,” and
another shilling there, perhaps, from “clothes and boots,” painfully
accumulating the little fund, had achieved the bed of her ambition.
And neighbours from the length of the square and around the next
turning came in to look at her as she lay in state, as it were, the new
improved baby by her side.

There are improved babies like Mrs. Smith’s arriving every day in
England. They are not all among the working class. They are reported
with increasing frequency, as at Nottingham and Huddersfield, among
the artisan class. Even comparatively well-to-do mothers in the best
of homes have not in the past been always accustomed to the skilled
medical supervision during pregnancy which is now afforded without
cost. It is Parliament’s plan to have the new maternity service as
available for the entire population as is public education for school
children. The city of Bradford exhibits the ideal of a complete
municipal system now in successful operation: an infants’ department
occupying a new three-story building, with a consultation to which
600 mothers come weekly; a maternity department with the ante-natal
clinic; a maternity hospital, announced as “the first of its kind” in
the world; a staff of municipal midwives for service in the homes; a
cooking depot, from which meals in heat-proof vessels distributed by
motor vans are dispensed to 500 expectant mothers daily; and a staff of
20 women health visitors to connect the homes of Bradford with all of
this municipal maternity service.

Still England’s comprehensive scheme of assistance to mothers grows.
Down the street, Mrs. Smith noticed one day another new institution
that has been started. It is a municipal _crèche_, for which the
Government pays 75 per cent. of the cost of operation. The sign in the
window says that it is a nursery for the care and maintenance of the
children of munition workers. Three meals are provided, and the charge
is 6d. a day. Just around the corner, the Labour Exchange has out a
sign, “8,000 women wanted at once for shell-filling factories. Age 16
to 40. No previous experience necessary. Fill the factories and help to
win the war.”

And Mrs. Smith is thinking. The school for mothers has taught her
to. Do you know that the number of children who survive the first
year in good health is 71 per cent. in homes where the wage income is
over 20s. a week and it drops to 51 per cent. in homes where the wage
income is less than 20s. a week? The sociologists have also some very
interesting figures that were compiled at Bradford. In 1911 the infant
mortality rate there in houses that rented for six pounds and less was
163 in 1,000; house rent six to eight pounds, infant mortality, 128;
house rent eight to twelve pounds, infant mortality, 123; house rent
over twelve pounds, infant mortality, 88. And here in London infant
mortality is over 200 per 1,000 in one-room tenements, as compared with
100 in tenements of four rooms and upwards. Now, Mrs. Smith, I don’t
suppose, has ever seen those figures. But she doesn’t need to. She
understands why the small white hearse goes so continuously up and down
some streets. She knows perfectly well that there will be more light
and air for her children in three or four rooms than in two. Also that
the rent will cost her 9s. 6d. a week, where now she pays 4s. 6d. But
in a factory there are women earning 25 and 30s. a week, and even up to
two pounds a week. Mrs. Smith is thinking.


THE MADONNA IN INDUSTRY

Meanwhile over in France Azalie de Rigeaux, at half-past ten this
morning, will step aside from the lathe where she turns fuses, to
retire for say half-an-hour for another service. Azalie de Rigeaux is
a munitions worker in trousers in a Usine le Guerre in a _banlieu_ of
Paris. See her now as she takes her baby in her arms and seats herself
in a low chair by a small crib. A wedding-ringed hand opens her working
blouse from the throat downward, the black lines of the cloth fold
away from her bosom, revealing in lovely contrast the white, satiny
texture of her skin. And she, too, even as you, a mother anywhere in
the world, smiles happily into her baby’s eyes as she holds him to
her breast. It is a mother and child picture the like of which you
will not find in any gallery of Europe. Azalie de Rigeaux, crooning
softly here to her child, is a new figure in life, so new that she has
not yet reached the canvas of even the modern masters in art. See just
above the curve of her arm where rests the bay’s head, the armlet that
she wears on her left sleeve. Embroidered on it is that sign of her
national enlistment, a bursting bomb. It is important because it is the
clue to the new picture. All over the world war has called the woman to
the factory. And what shall she do with the baby? Well, the baby is so
valuable that the state is not going to let it cry.

It is France that makes the security for maternity gilt-edged. By the
gifts they are bringing here, one would say that this is the country
that to-day takes precedence of all others in its appreciation of the
rising value of a baby. As every one has heard, there has not in a long
time, in generations indeed, been a surplus of babies in France. As
a matter of fact, they have always been scarce. And they are so dear
that the passion for the child is the distinctive national trait. This
building in which Azalie de Rigeaux nurses her child to-day was erected
at a cost of 75,000 francs. It stands in the factory yard, adjacent
to the shop in which women make shells. In this sunny high-ceilinged
room, with plenty of sunlight and air, rows and rows of dimpled babies
sleep in the blue cribs with the dainty white cover-lids. Four times
a day the mothers from the shop across the way, as Azalie de Rigeaux
has now, come to nurse them. Outside the long French windows there is a
large French “jardin,” where the older children, in blue and pink check
aprons, play. The nursery dining-room has a low table with little low
chairs, where they come to their meals. Nourishing broths and other
foods are prepared in a shining, perfectly equipped kitchen. There is
a white bathroom with porcelain basins and baths of varying sizes; on
the long shelf across the room are the separate baskets that hold the
individual brushes. Each child, on arrival in the morning, is given a
bath and a complete change of clothes. Once a week they are weighed.
The doctor and the staff of trained nurses are alert to detect the
least deviation from normal. Scientific supervision like this costs the
firm 1 franc 35 centimes per day per child. To Azalie de Rigeaux and
the other mothers in their employ, it is free.

It is this _crèche_ at Ivry-sur-Seine which is the model recommended by
the ministry of munitions to the factories of France. The last feature
to make this, a national institution, absolutely complete, has been
added. It was the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes that one
day held a conference with the ministry of munitions. “Gentlemen,” they
said, “a mother who must go home from a factory to stand over a wash
tub, gets so tired that the baby’s source of nourishment is imperilled.
And when a baby languishes, a future soldier may be lost.”—A state
department was at instant attention—“Gentlemen,” it was pointed out,
“there is one thing more that you must do.” Well, they have done it. In
this model babies’ building at Ivry-sur-Seine there is a steam laundry
in which two women are kept constantly employed, so that there shall be
no night laundry work for the child whom the mother takes home. There
are washed eight hundred diapers a day. You see there is nothing that
the Government will not do for a child in France. Nothing is too much
trouble.

Even her employers will be equally as pleased as the state if Azalie
de Rigeaux shall decide to give another citizen to France. They have
told me so. “Why, it is patriotism,” the factory owner explained to me,
as we stood there among the whirring belts and the revolving wheels
of a thousand machines in this Usine de Guerre. “Don’t you see,” he
patiently elucidated, “I’m sure if she will only have the baby every
one else should do what they can.”

This is what they do for Azalie de Rigeaux. She comes directly
under the protection of L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et
Infantile, which, as you will read on all the walls of Paris, is
organised “to secure to all pregnant women adequate and suitable
nourishment, proper housing accommodations, relief from overwork and
skilled medical advice, all of the social, legal and medical protection
to which she is entitled in a civilised society.” A visitor will arrive
from the nearest Mairie to inform the prospective mother of all the
aids that are available for her. All of the municipally subsidised
institutions have had their accommodations increased since the war.
There are the Municipal Maternity Hospitals, where care is free, or
there is the Mutualité Maternelle, the self-supporting maternity club
through which one may make arrangements for accouchement. There are
free meals for mothers at the Cantines Maternelles, which are spread
over Paris. Are there other children in the family, so that their
care is a burden to the mother? She must not tire herself with the
housework. They will be taken to the country at municipal expense
and she shall go to a Refuge to rest in preparation for the coming
confinement. There are free layettes to be had at every Mairie. A
limousine will even take the lady to a hospital if necessary. The
military automobiles of the army are subject to requisition for this
purpose by L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et Infantile of
Paris.

There is also definite financial assistance. The Government will pay
to Azalie de Rigeaux ten francs and fifty centimes a week for four
weeks before and four weeks after the confinement, with an additional
three francs fifty centimes a week if she nurses the child. To this her
employer tells me he will add his bonus for the baby, 105 francs if
she has been in his employ for one year, 135 francs after three years,
and after six years it will be 165 francs. All indications point to
market quotations on the French baby rising even higher. Prof. Pinard,
the celebrated _accoucher_ of Paris, who has assisted into the world
so many babies that he should know their value as much as any man may,
is saying they are really worth more. Through the Academy of Medicine
in France he is recommending to the Senate a measure providing for a
payment to a mother, from the time that gestation begins until the
child is one year old, of five francs a day.


IT MEANS THE LIBERATION OF THE MOTHER

But most significant to the woman movement of all lands is the welcome
that the Usine de Guerre is extending to Azalie de Rigeaux. Of all the
making over they have been doing for us in industry, this is perhaps
the most revolutionary in its effects on the whole social structure.
For when industry takes the baby, it means the passing of the wage
envelope to a whole class of the population whose arms were hitherto
literally too burdened to reach for it. Here at Ivry-sur-Seine they do
not shake their heads and say, “Oh, you might have a baby. We prefer to
employ a man who won’t.” On the contrary preference in employment is
given to a woman who has a child. The only person who takes precedence
of her is the woman with two children or, of course, with three. From
the day that she signifies she is going to have another, she becomes an
object of special solicitude. She will be shielded from any injurious
strain. Because it may not be well for her to stand at the lathe, she
will be transferred to the gauging department, where she may remain
continuously seated. And, while the gauging department’s regular rate
of pay is but 50 centimes an hour, her own job’s rate of pay, 60, 70,
80 centimes an hour, whatever it may be, will be continued.

“But isn’t it an interruption to your business to have employés
who every now and then have to stop to have a baby?” I asked the
French manufacturer. “Ah, no, Madame,” he replied, “surely it is no
disturbance at all. It is nothing even if a woman should wish to be
absent for two or three months. Is she not serving her country? We
simply arrange a large enough staff of employés so that always there
are some to fill the gaps. Maternity is something that may be estimated
by percentage. We count on it that Camille here will probably have a
baby in July. Etienne, next to her, may have one in September. Well, by
the time a substitute employé is finished with taking Camille’s place,
she will be required in Etienne’s place, then, perhaps, in Azalie’s
place. It is very easy, I say, to arrange.”

And it is because the rising value of a baby makes it worth while.
It is in France, where maternity has always been important, that all
of the institutions for the welfare of the child now being rushed
to completion in other lands have been originally invented. We in
America, in some of our large cities, have started the “clinic” and
the “consultation” and the _crèche_. Italy is inaugurating them.
Russia sent to Paris for specific information about them before the
war. Germany’s “Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Haus” in Berlin, a veritable
“laboratory of the child,” from which the child culture system
adapted from France has been developed for the Empire, is a monument
to the national thoroughness, which, making military preparation for
the conquest of the world, made maternity preparation on almost as
comprehensive a scale.

Industry to-day beckoning the woman, you see, Parliament is bound to
provide for the child. Mrs. Smith in England—or in America or anywhere
else—you need not hesitate.

Azalie de Rigeaux’s baby is, what is it one shall say, as good as gold
all day long. Do you know that he is so well regulated that there is
no deviation from his perfection save on Mondays when he gets back to
the _crèche_ fretful and perhaps a little inclined to be colicky after
a week end at home? At that munitions _crèche_ down your street the
babies shall have a bath every day and no one will have to carry the
water toilsomely upstairs by the pint. Think of the dainty cribs to
sleep in and the beautiful green garden to play in! There are three
meals a day that never fail. You can easier pay for those meals than
cook them. How many skilled vocations are you trying to follow in your
home! The graduate of a school for mothers, you are doing, the best
you can, more than the winner of a Cambridge tripos would attempt to
undertake! Cooking and sewing and nursing, laundry work and scrubbing
and child culture, that is the gamut of the achievements you are trying
to accomplish. Oh, Mrs. Smith, one trade in the factory is easier. What
artisan can be good at his job if he must also putter with half a
dozen others? Well, the world is no longer going to ask it of you, the
maker of men!


THE CHILD’S CHANCE DEPENDS ON FAMILY INCOME

Tradition may still rise to protest: But the home! You wouldn’t abolish
the home! I think you would if you had seen it, Mrs. Smith’s home.
Child mortality in her street is at the rate of 200 per 1,000. I know
a home in the other end of London that is as lovely as a poet’s dream.
Child mortality in this district is 40 per 1,000. There is a great
house facing a park. There are three children in it. They have a day
nursery and a night nursery and a school room all to themselves. They
are cared for by a head nurse, and an assistant nurse, a governess, and
a mother who now and then comes to caress them and see that they are
happy. There are, you see, four women—to say nothing of the household
staff of eight servants indirectly contributing to the same service—to
care for three children in the West End.

In the East End Mrs. Smith has only one pair of hands to do for seven,
and she is no super-woman. They live in two rooms that the fiercest
all the time scrubbing could not keep clean. The discoloured walls are
damp with mildew. You can see the vermin in the cracks. There isn’t any
pantry. There isn’t any sink. There isn’t so much as a cook stove, only
an open grate. _There isn’t any poetry in a home on less than a pound a
week!_

Down the street is the way out to the new home that Mrs. Smith’s wage
envelope will help to build. There will be at least 4 rooms and the
children away during the day under expert care. The little children of
the rich in the West End nursery have no more scientific supervision
than the municipal _crèche_ will afford Mrs. Smith for hers. I know
she will not longer personally wash their faces and wipe their noses.
Even when she tries to, as you may have noticed in any land, she
cannot possibly do those tasks as often as they should be done. The
mere physical needs of children, any one else can attend to. But only
a mother can love them. Hadn’t we better conserve her more for that
special function? The rising value of a baby begins to demand it.

And don’t worry about the effect of factory employment on her
health. Two government commissions of experts, one in France and one
in England, tell us it’s all right after all. Both report that a
properly arranged factory is as good a place as any for a woman. Some
significant figures presented to England’s Birth Rate Commission show
that the proportion of miscarriages is among factory workers 9.2 per
cent. as compared with 16 per cent. among women doing housework in
the home. Hard work and heavy work, you see, are just as harmful in
Mrs. Smith’s kitchen as they might be anywhere else—and not nearly so
well paid! Really, in spite of its historic setting there is no sacred
significance attaching to the figure of a woman bending over a washtub
or on her knees scrubbing a floor. Let us venerate instead Azalie de
Rigeaux nursing her child in a Usine de Guerre! After the schools for
mothers and the maternity clinics have done what they may to reduce
infant mortality, the mothers in industry may do some more. Take your
babies in your arms, Mrs. Smith, and flee from that stalking spectre of
poverty that has already snatched four of them to the grave. The door
of the municipal _crèche_ stands ajar!

Like this, the world is making ready for reconstruction. Let there be
every first aid for the maker of men. We await one more measure: Mrs.
Smith must never again have ten babies when she lives in two rooms—nor
Frau Schmidt in Berlin. This unlimited increase that crowds children
from the cradle to the coffin, in the haste to make room for more, has
been the fatal force that has impelled nations teeming with too many
people to make war for territorial expansion. We shall not blot out
from civilisation the Prussian military ideal until we have likewise
effaced the Prussian maternity ideal of reckless reproduction. That
the cradles of the world may never again spill over, the nations must
rise from the peace table with a new population policy. In the “birth
politics” of the future there must be birth control. When children are
scarce, are they dear. See France! The rising value of a baby may yet
lift the curse of Eve!

Then shall we be ready to repopulate right. After the battles are won
and man’s work of conquest is done, woman’s war work will only have
begun. I have stood in the cathedral at Rheims and in the stricken
silence looked with sickening dismay on the destruction of the
beautiful temple of worship builded with such exquisite art and such
infinite labour. But I assure you not all the cathedrals of Europe
piled in a single colossal ruin, broken sculptured saint on saint, can
stir the beholder with the poignant pain of one war hospital! There
in the whitewashed wards with the smell of blood and ether, where the
maimed lie stiff and still and the dying moan and the mad rave in wild
delirium, stand there and your soul shall shrivel in horror at the
destruction of men! It is the agony of it all, and the suffering and
the sorrow and the grief of it all—and then something more. You creep
with the feeling that every one of these men once was builded with
such exquisite art and such infinite labour and such toilsome pain and
anguish by God and a woman! It is a stupendous task of creation to be
done over again when the armies shall have finished their work. Bone of
her bone and flesh of her flesh, God and woman must rebuild the race.
You unto whom a child can be born to-day, to you Parliaments make their
prayer!

Not a captain of industry who assembles the engines of war, not a
general who directs the armies, may do for his country what you can
do who stand beside its cradles. The cry that rings out over Empires
bleeding in the throes of death is the oldest cry in the world. Women
wanted for maternity!




CHAPTER X

THE RING AND THE WOMAN


That woman who crossed the threshold of the Doll’s House awhile ago—you
would scarcely recognise her as you meet her to-day anywhere abroad in
the world. She has put aside yesterday as it were an old cloak that has
just slipped from her shoulders. And she stands revealed as the one of
whom some of us have for a long time written and some of us have read.
For a generation at least she has been looked for. Now she is here.

You see when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though
no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women
munition workers and women conductors and women bank tellers and women
doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt
if there is a statesman anywhere who has leaned to unlock a door of
opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realised that he was
but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is reshaping the
world for mighty ends, rough hewn though they be to-day from the awful
chaos of war.

But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and
stands again before the cottage rose bowered on the English downs, red
roofed in France and Italy, blue trimmed in Germany or ikon blessed in
Russia or white porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her
to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length
and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall
see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when
he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened
to her since. It is woman’s coming of age. Look, she is turning the
ring on her finger to-day.

When the man in khaki went away, that ring was sign and symbol of
the status assigned to her by all the oldest law books and religious
books of the world. And none of the modern ones had been able wholly
to eradicate from their pages the point of view that was the most
prevailing opinion of civilisation. The most ancient classification of
all listed in one category “a man’s house and his wife, his man servant
and his maidservant, his ox and his ass and any other possessions that
are his.” An English state church has given her in marriage to him “to
obey him and serve him.” A German state church has bound her “to be
subject to him as to her lord and master.” Christian lands have agreed
that a woman when she marries enters into a state of coverture by which
they tell us “the husband hath power and dominion over his wife.”
Religious teachers from St. Paul to Martin Luther, law givers from
Moses to Napoleon have been unanimous on this point, which Napoleon
framing his code for France summed up briefly, Woman belongs to man.

This has been the basic assumption of church and state from whose
courts of authority each concession of individuality for woman has been
won only by process of slow amendment. It is still so subtly interwoven
in dogma and statute that there is not yet any land where a woman,
though thinking herself free, may not trip against a legal disability
that has not yet been dislodged. For Blackstone, the great authority of
reference, declares “the very being or legal existence of the woman is
suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated in that of
the husband.” And all over the world, all the church councils and all
the state courts have not yet been so reformed but that by reversion to
type they will hark back to the pronouncement. Man and wife are one—and
he is the one. So the man’s mind thinketh.

And the woman’s mind? Since he went away in khaki, it has thought long,
long thoughts. When he comes back, this new woman looking into his eyes
with the level glance, he will find is a woman who has earned money—in
a new world that has been made over for her so that she can. You see
all those lines of women in industry and commerce and the professions?
Some of them walk up to a paymaster’s window on Saturday night and some
of them wait for the checks that arrive in their mail. But it is an
experience in common through which all are passing. The open door to
the shop and the factory and the counting room, to law or to medicine
is the great gateway to the future where dreams shall come true. For
the women who have passed through, have arrived at last at the great
goal, economic independence.

Now what that means the sociologists could tell. Though they might
not think to put it in terms of, for instance, Elsa von Stuttgart’s
slippers. They would, I suppose, agree that economic independence is
the right to earn one’s living—and be paid for it like a man. One
earned it yesterday if one washed the dishes and cooked the meals and
reared the children and kept the house for the other person who held
the purse. Housekeepers of this class have been the busiest people we
have had about us. And yet the census offices administered by men had
so little idea of these women’s economic value, that they have been
actually listed in government statistical returns as “unoccupied.” So
also of course were the other housekeepers who, eliminating some of
these most arduous tasks from the long day, nevertheless were not at
least idle when they bore a man’s children and presided at his dinner
table and entertained his friends and practised generally the graceful
art of making a home. When they undertook these duties, there was a
church promise, With all my worldly goods, I thee endow. That figure
of speech, the law courts reduce to “maintenance,” that is to say,
board and clothes. But, so widely disseminated has been the idea that
the lady is “unoccupied” that these are generally regarded not in the
nature of a recognition of service and a return for value received,
but rather as perquisites bountifully bestowed on the recipient. So
that frequently her range of choice in the matter has been, we may say,
limited.

Frau Elsa von Stuttgart before the war had her board and clothes. But
her husband had forbidden her to get her hats at a certain little
French shop in Unter den Linden that she had always patronised before
her marriage. And with all his money, he decided that one pair of
evening slippers would do even for a woman in the social position of
a Prussian officer’s wife. They lived in a villa at Zehlendorff that
was perfectly equipped with everything that he considered desirable.
There was a grand piano of marvellous tone, though she didn’t even
play the piano at all. She was a doctor of philosophy, who before
her marriage had been a teacher at the High School in Berlin and her
hobby, it happened, was books. She liked them in beautiful bindings
and she always used to buy them that way. But of course she couldn’t
any more because her husband said it was extravagance, quite useless
extravagance. Well, really you know, maintenance may be slippers and
hats, but it isn’t books after all. And she had a lovely house and a
piano of marvellous tone. How hard it was about the slippers, I suppose
only a woman can understand. You see Elsa von Stuttgart has pretty
feet, small and dainty feet. Every other woman in her set has German
feet. “Look at them,” she whispered to me at a _kaffee klatch_ one day
in 1914. And I did. And I knew why her soul loved little satin slippers
better than Beethoven or Lizst. She has them now once more. The house
with the grand piano is closed and her husband is with his regiment.
Elsa von Stuttgart in a class room is lecturing on philosophy again.
She has rented a small apartment the walls of which are lined with
books. You think the slippers a luxury for war-time perhaps? Well, she
wrote me that she has done penance for them in extra meatless days to
atone for the price.

In France the Countess Madelaine de Ranier lived in a château of the
old aristocracy. And she had a fortune of hundreds of thousands of
francs but not a sou to spend as she pleased. You would have thought
that she had everything that heart could wish, until you caught
unawares the wistful expression in her eyes when they forgot their
smiling. Madelaine de Ranier, having no children of her own, would
have loved to write checks for the charities that took care of other
people’s children. But she couldn’t. It was a very large dot that she
had brought to her husband. But by the laws of France he administered
it. Out of the income, he of course paid her bills. The third year
of her marriage there occurred to her the idea for a confidential
arrangement which she made with her dressmaker for doubling on the
bills submitted for her evening gowns and dividing the proceeds
accruing. It was the Countess’ only source of ready money. She kept
it in the secret drawer of her jewel case, these few francs that she
could count her own, among her costly articles of adornment valued at
thousands. To-day the Count is somewhere on the Somme and Madelaine de
Ranier is daily at a desk in Paris directing the great commercial house
in which her dot and the family fortune are invested. I saw her in the
winter of 1917. Her eyes were sparkling. From the large income that she
now handles, she had just written off a contribution to the Orphans of
France Fund for the nation. And nobody had said, “You must not,” or
equally as authoritatively, “I do not wish it.”

In England there is Edith Russell, Dr. Edith Russell she really is. She
gave up her profession when she married, to devote herself wholly to
home making in the great house in Cavendish Square, London. It requires
nine servants and careful planning to meet the expenses, even though
her husband turns over to her all of his income. “Can’t we go out to
Hampstead to a smaller house instead?” she asked him one day, laying
her housekeeping accounts before him. She was trying somehow to plan
for a financial surplus. The Malthusian League was in need of funds and
she used to be one of its most earnest workers. But her husband said:
“Not at all.” Even if there were indeed hundreds of pounds available,
he did not approve of the League’s principles anyhow. Now Dr. Edith
Russell in response to her country’s call is back on the staff of the
borough health department in the medical work in which she was engaged
before her marriage. And she is again a Malthusian League contributor.
You see, it’s her own money now, not her husband’s.

Up in the north of England there is a factory town where the largest
works in November, 1914, hung out a notice that any women who before
their marriage had been employed there would be taken back. Mrs. Webber
was. The regular weekly wage is so much better than the occasional
charing which was all that she had been able to get to supplement her
husband’s frequent unemployment. Her children are among those who have
been since the war transferred at school from the free list to the
paid dinners. Before the war there were 11,000 children in this town
to be supplied with free school dinners. Now since their mothers work
outside the home, this figure has dropped to 2,370. Mrs. Webber also
is one of those women who have been shopping. All over Europe they
have been doing it. From Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London,
delighted shop keepers report that women who never had money before are
spending it. The curate in the parish to which Mrs. Webber belongs—Mrs.
Webber used to char for his wife, but is no longer available—told me
that these working classes have gone perfectly mad about money and
the reckless expenditure of it. And I asked him how and he said: “Why
cheese, they all of them have it for supper now. And the woman in that
house, the third from the end of the row,” he pointed it out from his
study window, “has a fur coat.” It was Mrs. Webber’s house the curate
mentioned.


HIS PERSONALITY—AND HERS

Well now, you see, to Elsa von Stuttgart in Berlin, it may be little
satin evening slippers, and to Madelaine de Ranier in Paris it may be
orphans of France, and to Dr. Edith Russell in London it may be the
great reform for which the Malthusian League is organised, and to Mrs.
Webber it may be school dinners and cheese and a fur coat—but to all of
them it’s economic independence. Mrs. Webber says, “A shilling of your
own is worth two that ’e gives you.” Edith Russell and the rest I have
not heard say it. But from Countess to char woman, you see, this about
the wage envelope is certain: It’s yours to burn if you care to—or to
buy with it what you choose! There are millions of women over this war
racked world who have it to-day, who never had it before. And the hand
that holds this new wage envelope holds the future of the race in its
keeping. Not since that magna charta that the barons wrested from King
John, has so powerful a guarantee of liberty been won. It carries with
it all the freedoms that the feminists have ever formulated. She who
stepped out of the Doll’s House stands at the threshold of a new earth.
Something very much more than little satin slippers and books and fur
coats and their own money is coming to women!

Let us see. You would have been astounded, I believe, if Elsa von
Stuttgart had attempted to dictate to her husband his hats or his
slippers. Anyway, Herr von Stuttgart would. You would not have
expected Edith Russell to have suggested across the breakfast table:
“My dear, the propaganda of such and such a society to which you belong
is not pleasing to me. I do not care to have you support it.” Why,
either gentleman would have been a henpecked husband to have permitted
any such interference with his personal liberty. Not even in America
would any wife so presume to dare. It is quite likely that a lady
living in New York could announce over the coffee cups, “My dear, we
will move to Long Island to-day.” And the voice behind the newspaper
would probably agree without a demurrer, “I’ll be out on the 4:30
train.” Probably also he has never heard how many pairs of slippers she
has, and all he knows about her hats is their price. But after all, it
is only by the privilege he permits her that the lady can put it over
like this. At any moment that he cares to assert it, he still holds the
balance of power in this household.

Because man and wife are one, he who carries the purse is the one. It’s
only the new purse in the family that can alter the situation anywhere
in the world. She who carries it is another one, with her personal
liberty too. In the last analysis, it is only a person who can pay the
rent who can talk with assertion about where “we” shall live and how.

No economist in any university chair understands this any more clearly
than does Mrs. Webber, who once lived in two rooms and now lives in
three _because she can pay the rent_! The new purse in her family
has raised the whole scale of living for her and for her children.
Yesterday her personality was merged and submerged in that of a
husband to whose standard of maintenance she was limited. To-day she
is emerging with a wage envelope in her hand and a personality of her
own, as is likewise Elsa von Stuttgart and Edith Russell and Madelaine
de Ranier. Society may be tremendously startled to find them at last
counted so that one and one in the marriage relation shall make two.
When in this great world war, that autocracy with its divine right of
kings that has ruled and wrecked civilisation shall have been swept
from the throne, there is another autocracy with its “divine” authority
of one sex over the other that is going into the scrap-heap of old
systems.

Through the events of these war days already it is clear that such an
eternal purpose runs. Nobody thought of it when woman was called from
the home in all lands. But there has really begun the casting off of
that ancient chrysalis of “coverture.” Have you by chance yet met among
your acquaintances the woman who is refusing to part with her own name?
Mary McArthur, the great English labour leader, is the wife of Mr.
Anderson, a member of Parliament and she is the mother of a baby. But
she has never ceased to be herself. “You call yourself Miss McArthur,”
a curious inquirer remarked to her one day, “and yet they say your cook
tells that you are very respectable.”

There are numbers of women like this in London and in New York, who
are preferring their own identity to that of their husbands. The
German and Scandinavian women going a little farther say, “Let us at
mature age take an adult title.” Master Jones, you know, does not
wait for the day of his marriage to emerge from his adolescence as
“Mr.” Jones, Fraulein is but a diminutive, “little Frau,” a prefix of
immaturity. Rosika Schwimmer, touring America for a lecture bureau,
assured inquiring reporters: “Of course I am Frau Schwimmer. Why
shouldn’t I be? I have passed my 35th birthday.” The Imperial Union
of Women Suffragists of Germany in convention assembled, not long ago
decided to adopt the adult title Frau for all women of mature age, the
“unity title,” they call it. In this first faint stirring, there is
significance of wide changes.

She whose identity had so disappeared at the altar, that the law
actually wrote her down on the statute books as _civiliter mortua_, one
“civilly dead,” is about to be restored to the status of an individual.
The long road, along which the woman movement of yesterday made its
slow way, is now at the sharpest turning.

The struggle of women in all lands to be released from the
discriminations that have limited their human activities set free
the spinster some time ago. The point of view that is now generally
accepted about her, and without contravention in the most advanced
countries, was most definitely formulated some sixty years ago in
Scandinavia. There they put on the statute books a law abolishing the
previous male guardianship over unmarried women and permitting a
person “of staid age and character” to manage her own affairs. At first
this was a privilege to be granted only on special appeal to the king.
But at last the right of self-government at 21 was established for all
unmarried women. So radical a departure from custom was of course not
accomplished without misgivings. There were those who feared that for
a woman to manage her own affairs, was not in accordance with true
womanly dignity and the dictates of religion. They said, The majority
of women do not want it. Why, then, give them a responsibility they do
not wish or ask for? But in spite of those objections, the spinster
came to be recognised as a responsible individual.

For so long now has the world been accustomed to seeing her going
about, doing as she pleases almost as any other adult, that we have
forgotten that she ever couldn’t. She can acquire education. She can
own property. She has been able for some time now to get into a great
many occupations and professions: only her difficulty was to get up.
And there has been that limitation to her income. It has remained
stationary at a figure seldom passing two-thirds that of a man’s
income. The teaching profession affords statistics that are world-wide
testimony to the situation that has prevailed from, say, Newark, N. J.,
to Archangel, Russia: there have been women school teachers working
for a less wage than the man school janitor: there have been women
professors at the head of high school departments at a salary less
than that of the men subordinates whom they directed. Still, in all of
her personal affairs, a spinster in every country has been for a long
time now as free as the rest of the people.


SIGNING AWAY HER FREEDOM

Then, on the day that the ring is slipped on her finger, she has put
her name to a contract that has more or less signed away her liberty,
according to the part of the world in which she happens to live. In
Finland, for instance, where the position of women has been in many
respects as advanced as anywhere in the world, even a woman member of
Parliament at her marriage reverts to type, as it were: though she
still sits in Parliament, she passes under the guardianship of her
husband! In Sweden, she lost her vote: for that country, in 1862 the
first to grant the municipal franchise to women, cautiously withheld
it until 1909 from married women. There is, indeed, almost no land in
which marriage does not in some way limit for the rest of her life a
woman’s participation in world affairs. She may have lost property
rights, personal rights, political rights, or perhaps she has lost her
job, her right to work and be paid for it. At any rate, she must look
around to determine how many of these things may have happened to her.
Any of them that haven’t, are special exemptions from that universal
ruling of all nations that a woman on marriage enters into a state
of coverture, with its accompanying legal disability. “Disability”
is defined by Dicey’s “Digest” as the “status of being an infant,
lunatic, or married woman.” And there you are.

It was from that predicament that the earliest woman’s rights’
associations sought to extricate the woman who had taken the wedding
veil and ring. Susan B. Anthony’s first most famous achievement back
in the sixties was a law establishing the right of a married woman
in New York State to the ownership of her own clothes! By specific
enactments since then, one and another of the rights to which other
human beings are naturally born have been bestowed on married women.
The most clearly defined of these, and the most widely recognised at
last, are the right to their separate property and the right to their
own earnings, which prevails in most of the United States. The Married
Women’s Property Act accomplished it in England. In France, after 14
years of agitation for it, Mme. Jeanne Schmall and the Société l’Avant
Courriere in 1907 at last secured the law giving to the married woman
the free disposition of her salary. But these concessions it is not
easy to disentangle from that basic notion, which is warp and woof of
the whole fabric of law, that a married woman has passed under the
guardianship of her husband.

For in Germany and Scandinavia and France, “separate property” to
ensure her title to it, must be specially secured to her by an
antenuptial contract. In Sweden, her earnings are hers, only if they
remain in cash. In France she is permitted to invest them in bonds,
provided first she either makes affidavit before a notary proving
her ownership or brings a written permit from her husband. In the
State of Washington, the supreme attempt to confer equality on woman
finds expression in the statute: “All laws which impose or recognise
civil disabilities upon a wife which are not imposed or recognised
as existing as to the husband, are abolished.” But in spite of that
most laudable effort, the end is not yet attained. For the State of
Washington is still enmeshed in the community property system, by which
the management and control of the common property in marriage is vested
in the husband. And although the law has been distinctly framed that
a married woman is entitled to her own earnings, it practically takes
them away from her by requiring her to count them in with the community
property which is under her husband’s control. The atomic theory, you
see, was not more firmly fixed in science than is this idea that has
been embedded in the social structure that a married woman is legally,
civilly, and politically a minor!

Even in these United States, where the mention of the “subjection of
woman” raises a smile, so largely has it by the grace of the American
man been permitted to become a dead letter, the _employment_ of married
women has remained against public policy. Many boards of education
have by-laws about it. Even these women teachers who commit matrimony
and conceal it are almost invariably later on detected and dropped
from the pay roll when found guilty of maternity. Business houses have
shared in the prejudice. A Chicago bank as lately as 1913 adopted a
rule requiring the resignation of woman employés on marriage. Because
the married woman, the bank president said, “should be at home, not at
a typewriter or an adding machine.” Similarly a United States civil
service regulation reads: “No married woman will be appointed to a
classified position in the postal service, nor will any woman occupying
a classified position in the postal service be reappointed to such
position when she shall marry.”

A world has been arranged, you see, on the assumption of the complete
eclipse of the personality of the married woman—with the burden resting
on her to disprove it in the legal situations where she has come to be
recognised as an individual. Custom prefers that a married woman should
be a dependent person. It was an idea that fifty years of feminist
bombardment had not dislodged from the popular mind. Now in four years
of war, it has crumbled.

“Women wanted,” called the world in need, wanted even though married!
And out of the seclusion and separation to which she was hitherto
consigned, the woman with the ring has come to find her wage envelope.
All regulations against her employment are now rescinded in Europe,
as soon they will be here. The working woman in particular has been
given her release. The state, you remember, will now cook her meals and
care for her children. And it was all a mistake that attributed infant
mortality to the industrial employment of mothers. Now it is found that
a wife’s wage envelope really reduces infant mortality by improving
environment. There will be fewer of Mrs. Webber’s children, you know,
dying in three rooms than in two!

The ban on the married woman in the civil service and in the
professions is lifted. The Association of Austrian Women’s
Organisations in their 1916 convention passed the resolution demanding
the abolition of the “celibacy clause” for women office holders. And
although no country has as yet formally erased this from the statute
books, governments have at least tacitly consented to remember it
no more against a woman that she has married. That is why Dr. Edith
Russell is again practising medicine in the public health service
and Prof. Elsa von Stuttgart is teaching philosophy. Especially in
medicine is it recognised that the married woman physician is more
than ever fitted for a part in the campaign for the conservation of
child life. And if she is also a mother, so much the better. Why was
it never thought of before? Of course a person who has had a baby is
the real expert who knows more about it than the person who never can
have one. Women formerly dropped from the civil service on account of
marriage have been recalled all over Europe. Even Germany has opened
to them post, telegraph, and railway positions. So many masters in
Germany’s upper high schools are at the front, that married women have
been called to these positions. Hundreds of married women have been
reinstated in the school rooms of England. Detroit, Mich., the other
day repealed its regulations which forbade the employment of married
women as teachers in the public schools. It is Russia that has led
all lands in her recognition of the woman teacher, not only refusing
longer to penalise her for marriage but actually, as we have seen,
establishing for her the principle of equal pay for equal work.


WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MINOR

Like this, the married woman has to-day been welcomed in industry,
in commerce, and in the professions. This person of affairs abroad
in the world a minor! It is more than a disability that she herself
must endure. It becomes an annoyance to the world to have her so.
According to Bacon’s Abridgement, a very imposing volume, it is still
written that “the law looks upon husband and wife but as one person and
therefore allows but of one will between them, which is placed in the
husband.” But you see what a far cry it is from the woman in London
or Paris or Berlin to “the one” on the western front. How is she to
“obey” that man in the Vosges or on the Somme since she cannot have
telegraphic communication about her daily movements? And without it,
the French woman was left in a helpless tangle in the Napoleonic code.

Madelaine de Ranier at the head of a great business concern in Paris
found herself forbidden to sign a check, unable to open a bank account.
The Count had enlisted on the second day after war was declared and he
had left with her a sum of gold. When it was exhausted and she faced
the need of funds, she was unable to negotiate a loan on valuable
bonds that she owned. Oh, the bonds were all right. The difficulty was
that she was a married woman. And though very rich, she nevertheless
was obliged to turn to friends who relieved her immediate financial
necessities. Now in the drawer of her office desk there is a legal
paper bearing the seal of France: across the bottom is printed “_Bon
pour autorisation maritale_” and beneath is the Count’s signature.
Until he had consented to make this arrangement, sending on from the
front this “authorisation of the husband,” she was prohibited from
transacting any business. For a married woman in France might not sell
property or mortgage it or acquire it or sign a business contract or
go to law without the consent of her husband! Women acting temporarily
as mayors of some of the French villages, from which almost the
entire male population has been mobilised, have found it necessary
in order to execute municipal papers to turn to a male citizen for
his signature, even though he might not be able to write and could
only make his mark. Finally in 1916, the situation came up, for legal
decision. The validity of a building contract entered into by a French
woman was questioned in court. The judge after mature deliberation
rendered a decision that although the woman was not empowered to sign
the contract, yet as she had acted with the tacit consent of her
husband and in his interest and that of the country, the court would
uphold the validity of the act. “It is necessary,” he said, “that for
the welfare of France, women shall take the place of men and perform
duties which have hitherto been considered outside their sphere.” The
Union Fraternelle des Femmes at once began pressing Parliament for
the removal from the statute books of the requirement for “_maritale
autorisation_.” And not long ago the Chamber of Deputies passed the
bill granting to married women for the period of the war, permission to
demand from the courts the right to do without this legal formality.
Italy in 1917 completely swept away this same ancient restriction. The
bill introduced by the Italian Minister of Justice, Signor Sacchi,
abrogated not only _maritale autorisation_, but “every other law which
in the field of civil and commercial rights curtails the capacities of
Italian women.” Speaking for the measure in Parliament, Signor Sacchi
declared it an “act of justice—of reparation almost, to which women
have now more right than ever.”

But these civil disabilities have not been limited to Latin countries.
You may find them anywhere as a hang-over from past ages. It is simply
the natural corollary to that old doctrine of coverture that the acts
of the dependent person should lack authority before the law. Even in
the State of Washington, a wife may not sue alone in a court of law to
recover personal damages: her husband must join with her in the suit.
Everywhere in the professions and in business, woman’s progress has
been blocked because the courts, looking into the law books, found the
status of this person in question. If her protected position more or
less prevents her from entering into legal contracts, doubt is cast
on all of her agreements. What prudent business man would wish to
engage in a business transaction with her? There are provisions of the
Married Women’s Property Act in England, which make her not liable to
imprisonment for refusal to pay her debts. And who would choose to be
represented in a court of law by an advocate who, though to-day in
clear possession of all of her capacities, may to-morrow cease to be
“responsible” before the law? For any woman, though not yet married,
is always subject to that liability! That was what the courts of the
United States decided when the first women began to apply for admission
to the legal profession. And it is to correct the position in which
women are placed by the common law that their admission to the practice
of law in America has been by the slow process of an “enabling act”
from State to State. In England, where this common law still bars
the way, their present appeal now before Parliament is significantly
entitled “A Bill to remove disqualifications on the ground of sex or
marriage for the admission of persons as solicitors.”

There is still another “disability” which is causing to-day perhaps
the most world-wide concern of all. A spectacular figure has been
silhouetted against the background of the great war. In the tranquil
days of peace, a woman might have been all her life married to a man
of differing nationality without making the discovery that she had
thereby lost her own: by law when she married, she became of her
husband’s nationality. When the troops began to march in 1914, a wife
like this suddenly found herself a woman without a country. Frightened
English women married to Germans resident in London, panic-stricken
German women married to Englishmen who happened to be resident in
Berlin, knew not which way to turn for a haven from the terrors of war.
Pronounced aliens in their home land, their position was even worse
than that of, the woman of actual enemy birth who was stranded in a
foreign country when the war burst. She could at least go home. But
where should a woman who was married to an enemy alien go?

Her own country turned on her coldly with the declaration, His people
are your people. And nowhere in the world would she be so little
welcome as among his people now at war with and bitterly hostile to
hers. There are instances where these women have been obliged to find
refuge in neutral countries. In some lands they have been permitted to
remain in the place of their birth, but under police espionage. A man
and his wife, you know, are one. And if he controls her absolutely,
from her slippers to her principles, is it likely that she will dare to
be a free agent in her war sympathies? As a matter of fact, this war
has developed that she is always more or less under the cold suspicion
even of relatives and neighbours, of having along with the loss of her
own nationality lost also her patriotism. Who shall say but that in
obedience to her husband she may be a spy? I stood at the desk in the
Bow Street Police Station registering my arrival in London one war day,
when a timid voice of inquiry at my side also addressed the sergeant:
“I want to ask,” she said diffidently, “if I could possibly have my
mail sent here to police headquarters? You see, it’s letters from my
husband interned here in England because he’s a German. I’m an English
woman. But every boarding house in London where I try to live, as soon
as that envelope marked ‘Enemy Internment Camp’ arrives in my mail,
turns me out.”

Like this, the “alien wife” has to be shunted about in many lands
to-day. Even a woman who has not so lost her nationality may not travel
without all of the credentials of her marital status to establish it.
If you apply for a passport at Washington, you are asked for your
husband’s birth certificate and under some conditions your marriage
certificate. A married man is not asked for his. Why this inquiry into
your personal affairs? Because it is tacitly assumed that you are so
under the authority of another person that there is no knowing what he
may make you do. By all law and religion you have been taught to obey
him. Then if he told you to blow up a ship, would you? The only way to
make sure that you are a “safe” person to be at large, is to make sure
of your husband’s loyalty. For your identity is not your own, you see,
it’s his. If he happens to be French or Russian or German or Hottentot,
so you must be.


WOMAN’S COMING OF AGE

That’s the way that men have made the world. Now see it beginning to
be made over. Women everywhere are crying out in their conventions
and associations that the married woman’s own nationality should be
restored to her. America is the first country to take action about it.
And here, because women have arrived at the halls of government, it
is more than resolution and petition. The United States Congress has
before it a bill proposing the repeal of the law compelling women to
relinquish their American citizenship on marriage to foreigners. The
bill was introduced, let us note, by the Hon. Jeanette Rankin, the
first woman to be a member of the national law-making body.

What was it man said a little while ago: “You do not need a vote, my
dear. I will represent you in government and make the laws for you.”
So all over the world he did. But isn’t it plain now that he made a
mess of some of the laws he made for her? It is a conviction that has
crystallised simultaneously in all countries that woman in her present
independent sphere of activity has won her right to self-determination
in all matters personally important to her. That is why measures
for her enfranchisement are so universally under way. Let her vote
for herself. Let her represent herself. No one else has been able
successfully to do this for her. And it may be that now she will be
able to make better arrangements for herself than others have for her
in this world where certainly a great deal has gone wrong.

So we have arrived at woman’s coming of age. She who used to be by the
most ancient family law passed as a chattel from the guardianship of a
father to that of a husband, is now to be an individual. It is only now
that she could be. In a way they were right yesterday who refused to
regard her as a responsible person. For she wasn’t. Under the coercion
of coverture, she even had to think the way that pleased the person who
paid her bills! To-day with a wage envelope in one hand and a ballot in
the other, she is as much of a human being as any one else is. As such,
she is in a position to find the full status of her own personality.
For the first time since history began, she will be under no one else’s
authority.

No greater revolution than this will have been wrought by the Great
World War. It is going to be safe to permit to wives in all lands that
they retain their own nationality. The reason is clear: because no one
can compel this new woman, even though she is a wife, to be a spy, or
anything else that she does not wish to be. _Or anything else that she
does not wish to be!_

In those words, the woman movement of to-day full-throated carols a
hope for humanity that has not echoed before in all the epics or the
sagas or the inspired revelations since the fall of man. Who giveth
this woman in marriage? She who was a bondwoman now is free. And church
and state shall hear her terms!

Oh, yes, they shall! For a reform of the institution on which society
rests is all that will prevent a rebellion against it. What do
women want? This woman who turns the ring on her finger? Read the
publications that during the past decade have said: _The Free Woman_,
edited by Dora Marsden in England; Minna Cauer’s _Die Frauenbewegung_
and Marie Stritt’s _Die Frauenfrage_ and Helene Stocker’s _Die Neue
Generation_ in Germany; _La Française_, edited by Jane Misme in France;
and Margaret Sanger’s _The Woman Rebel_ in New York; the teachings of
Dr. Alice Vickerey in London and of Dr. Aletta Jacobs in Amsterdam.
There were even women in the radical vanguard of that woman movement of
yesterday who were ready to end marriage if it were not mended.

The world—and man who made it—had no adequate conception of the hurt
that was smothered and smouldering in the heart of her over whom he
exercised his dominion and power. Windows were heard smashing in
England. Over in Germany there had begun a breaking with less noise
about it, so that the world in general did not know. In the Kaiser’s
kingdom right in the face of the mailed fist, traditions not to be
so easily repaired as glass were being shattered. But it was the
suffragette outburst in London that caught public attention. Thoughtful
men who honestly wanted to know—and never could understand—turned to
each other with the question, Why do women do this? And no man could
tell.

Gentlemen, come with me. There is sitting in Westminster in 1910 a
Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce. Not yet even have their
findings changed English law. But the commission was appointed to make
inquiry into these matters in response to a rising feeling of unrest
over the present arrangements. Witnesses, to give evidence that it may
be determined what ought to be done, are in 1910 being called. This
government commission, it should be noted, quite contrary to precedent,
includes among the churchmen and statesmen who have been appointed to
decide the question, also two women. One of them, the Lady Francis
Balfour, is interrogating a witness whom she has summoned to the stand
because she has a particular point that she wishes to elucidate. He is
the Bishop of Birmingham, whose church insists that at marriage the
woman passes indissolubly into the power of the husband. To the man, it
is permitted that he may divorce her for adultery. But so long as these
two shall live, not even for that offence on his part may she have
release. He may beat her. He may flay her soul. But she is his—unless
she gets all of these details spread on the public records and the
judges of the courts decide that there are enough of them legally to
constitute “cruelty.” Then, for adultery together with this cruelty on
the part of a husband, a few English women have been allowed divorce.
But it is very difficult and very expensive and very offensive to the
clergy when it has been actually accomplished.

The Lady Francis Balfour is speaking. To the Bishop of Birmingham she
is saying: “Let me take a concrete case. You may have a woman who is a
Christian and you may have her husband ill using her in some sort of
way. We have had evidence put before us, which is of course known to
us all, that there are even men who live on the prostitution of their
wives. Now, is that not a contract which has been broken on the one
side in the worst possible way? Are they twain one flesh? Is that for
better and for worse?”

Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.”

Lady Francis Balfour: “And is that wife to stick to that husband, she
being a Christian, and to do as he commands her?”

Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.”


WHAT WOULD MEN HAVE DONE?

That’s all, gentlemen. You and I will go. There will be other witnesses
and days of testimony. But isn’t this enough? What would you yourselves
do if your church and your state handed you over body and soul, like
this, to any other human being to have and to hold and to exercise this
power and dominion over you? I don’t believe you’d ever stop at all to
parade and respectfully to petition about it. I think you’d be mobbing
and rioting and bombing right away. And if they had arrested you and
put you in Holloway Jail, you’d have raised the roof and torn down the
whole social structure!

Well, in England women broke windows. In Germany, as I have said, they
broke more. “Your statutes have limited the liberties of the woman who
marries. Then you shall never limit us,” was the gauntlet thrown down
to society by the extremists. They were university women, some of them
with doctor of philosophy degrees, who scathingly refused the ring
and faced free love instead. They were quite frank about it—and quite
fearless. I have talked with them there in Berlin. They looked at me as
clear eyed, when they told me of what they had done, as any women who
have walked ringed and veiled down a church aisle into legal wedlock.
Well, they seemed to think it was the only way, to act directly instead
of to agitate.

And they got out the book of the church ritual that they had
repudiated. And they turned to a paragraph and said to me, Read. And I
read: “The woman’s will, as God says, shall be subject to the man and
he shall be her master: that is, the woman shall not live according
to her free will ... and must neither begin nor complete anything
without the man. Where he is, there must she be and bend before him as
her master, whom she shall fear and to whom she shall be subject and
obedient.”

So I write it here, gentlemen, for you to see. And again, I submit,
What would you do if they had said it that way to you? Be fair. Could
any ring have held you?

It was natural, I think, that revolt should be most bitter in England
and in Germany, the two countries where women were driven to the verge
of desperation. A Frenchman may hold the reins of his authority so
gaily that a woman with skill evades them. And the dear American man
will pass them right over to you if you’re a woman of any judgment
and _finesse_ at all. But in those lands where a wife must not only
promise to obey, but also they made her, the eruption was due. Action
and reaction are equal in the old law of physics, and you can pretty
accurately measure the rebound by that. It was because the ring hurt
worse in Germany than anywhere else in the world, that they just tore
it off. But the marriage strike that was started in Germany wasn’t
staying there.

In nearby Sweden, a woman who is a very prominent lawyer and a man
who is a university professor, decided to do with an announcement in
a newspaper instead of a ceremony in a church—and the lady remains
a lawyer. It was the only way that she could. The law of that land
places the woman, on the day that she marries, under her husband’s
guardianship, and pronounces her incompetent thereafter to act as an
attorney in court! The newspaper announcement as it is now used in
Scandinavia is called the “conscience marriage.”

There were also Anglo-Saxon women who had rebelled. In London, an
Oxford graduate who had done with window breaking told me quite
candidly that she was living what she called the “unorthodox life.”
And there were others in her particular London suburb. In New York
City, even, there are women who have preferred the “free union.”

You see how near it was to being wrecked, this an institution more
revered by society than all of the cathedrals and art galleries. Only
this war, probably, could have averted the disaster. Now this new
woman, with her wage envelope and her vote, has become articulate. She
can speak as one who can pay the rent, about how “we” shall live.

Oh, it’s not either Hampstead or Long Island. Never mind for a while
whether the lace curtains will be long enough or shall the floors be
done over. Yesterday her domain was the home. To-day it’s the wide,
wide world to be set to order. For the first time she’s facing her
destiny, with the right to decide more than the parlour carpet or her
satin slippers or even her sociological principles.

How “we” shall live and love together, is the question for
consultation. And there is statute and dogma and custom and convention
and tradition to be done over. These have been handed down until they
are many of them past all usefulness. Some of them are moth-eaten and
quite outworn. None of them, please note this, gentlemen, none of
them is of her selection. Just think of that. There’s not a code in
the world that was formulated by a woman. The creeds that have come
from Rome and Wittenberg and Westminster were not even submitted for
woman’s inspection. And marriage was made for her by law courts and
church councils to which she was not even asked. There was not so much
as a by-your-leave to the lady, in the matter of her most intimate
personal concern. Oh, isn’t this clearly where the reconstruction of
civilisation shall commence?


MAKING OVER MARRIAGE

Only for the man in khaki to come home again it waits. Then with the
new woman, together at last, they can build the new world aright. For
never again shall we permit any such skewed and twisted and one-sided
job as that of the past. “Dear,” she will say, “you did it as well as
you could, probably, that old world. But the trouble was, that you did
it alone.”

And with a little whimsical smile, she’ll quote for him the old proverb
that “two heads are better than one.” Then perhaps they will walk in
the garden in the evening. And with her hand in his arm, she will speak
as she never could speak before—as a free woman who has found her soul!
There were things, I think, that God forgot when he talked to Moses and
to St. Paul. But now he’s told them to her.

Listen: “Marriage,” she will say, “marriage, dear, we must make over so
that it shall be something very sweet and very sacred.”

Oh, it wasn’t always that yesterday. There are women who know it
wasn’t. When a man could say to the woman the law gave to him, “Come
unto me to-night, or I shall not give you money with which to buy
shoes for the children to-morrow.” Or he may have said, “the slippers
for your pretty feet”—when marriage was that way, everything in it
divine just died! It shall never be so again.

Hear the new woman. “We shall have more love about marriage and less
law,” she will say. “And we shall never let them lock us in. Love
always laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths who thought
they had bolted and barred the Doll’s House with ordinance and ritual.
For how love cometh, we may not say, who are mute before so much as
the mystery of the tint of the rose or the perfume of the lilies in
June. Nor how love goeth, dare we define. Presumptuous mortals who have
thought to hold back love with law and enactment, have made of marriage
an empty form, echoing with the mockery of the happiness that fled.”

Well, we will say that she is talking like this under the stars. The
next morning at breakfast she will come right to the point. And I
know where she will begin. “That old doctrine of coverture,” she will
say, “take it away!” There is a place for the relics of an antiquated
civilisation. In the museum of the Tower of London they have in a glass
case the little model of the rack and thumb screw. The executioner’s
block and the headsman’s axe is an important and impressive exhibit.
And there are the coats of mail of early warriors. It is customary,
I believe, to put there all things that are passing into desuetude:
a hansom cab went in the other day. Now let them take also this
ancient doctrine of coverture, and put it in a glass case for future
generations to wonder at its barbarity. Then may the marriage contract
be rewritten with a really free hand.

How it will be done all over the world, we even at present may
prophesy. See already Scandinavia. The northern sky was alight
with the forecast of woman’s freedom, even before this war broke.
Contemporaneously with the enfranchisement of women up there, completed
in Denmark only in 1915, almost the first act of governments in which
all of the people were for the first time represented, was to appoint a
marriage commission. On it are both men and women from the three lands,
Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. It is still at work revising the marriage
laws. The task is not completed. But there are important sections of
the new code ready: they have taken the “obey” out of the marriage
service; they have stipulated for divorce by mutual consent, that is by
request of the parties interested, who are to be let out of wedlock as
simply and as easily as they were let in. Further personal rights and
property rights are all being defined and arranged on the new basis of
equality of morality and duty and responsibility and on the assumption
that the wife is a separate personality from her husband.

The nearby country of Finland, where the woman movement has always kept
step with Scandinavia, has also taken similar action. The Law Committee
of the Finnish Parliament had in 1917 appealed to local authorities and
other qualified bodies for suggestions on the subject of the reform of
the marriage laws. Seven women’s associations united in formulating
the pronouncement which was returned. There is no paragraph about
divorce for the reason that Finland has already accomplished divorce
by mutual consent. For the rest, it is probably the most complete
presentment available of the new woman’s point of view. This is what
she asks:—

1. That the guardianship of the husband shall cease, and the married
woman have an equal right of action in all legal matters, even against
her husband; that she shall have the right to plead in courts of law
and to carry on business independently.

2. That the married couple shall have equal responsibilities and rights
as regards the children and provide for them together.

3. That the husband and wife shall have equal right to represent the
family in public matters. If either party uses this right improperly,
it can be taken from him or her by the courts on the demand of the
other party.

4. If either husband or wife should be a cause of danger to the
other, the party who is endangered shall have the right to separate
from the other. The courts shall be empowered to decide whether the
circumstances are such as to entitle the complaining party to receive
maintenance.

5. That if a married couple separates, the party who retains the care
of the child shall decide the question of the child’s education. If
this right be misused, the other party shall have the right to appeal
to the courts for rectification.

6. That if any labour contract or business be conducted by one of the
parties to the detriment of the family, the other party shall have the
right of appeal to the courts with the object of annulling the contract
or forbidding the business.

7. That in regard to the property of married couples, there shall be
three possible alternative methods of arrangement: (a) Joint possession
in the case of earned income. (b) Joint possession of every description
of property. (c) Separation of property.

8. Several points must be taken into consideration in regard to the
working of these different methods of arrangement: (a) That the
distinction between real and other descriptions of property shall
cease. (b) That each party shall have control over his or her separate
property and the income derived from it and over all earned income.
(c) That each party shall be bound to contribute to the maintenance
of the family in proportion to his or her means, either in work or in
financial resource. (d) That in case of joint possession, the whole
income, earned or unearned, of each party shall belong to the common
family fund. (e) That in the case of joint possession, both parties
shall have equal rights of disposition. These rights shall be used
by them jointly in such a manner that neither party shall be able
to dispose of the property without the consent of the other, and no
transaction can take place without the consent of both parties. (f)
That the party who gives the chief labour and attention to the home
shall have a due share of the common property and of the earned
income, with full power to defray his or her personal expenses and
those of the home.

9. Before marriage, the contracting parties shall agree on which of
the three systems the property shall be arranged. This agreement shall
be capable of alteration after marriage with due legal formalities and
safeguards.

10. Husband and wife shall inherit from each other on the same footing
with the children.

This memorial from the Finnish women coincides perfectly in spirit
with the new laws in process of construction for Scandinavia. When the
Dutch Parliament, which has just conferred a new measure of suffrage
on the women of the Netherlands, was in 1917 debating the matter, an
alarmed reactionary rose to object: “But how can married women vote?
For married women are not free. They are like soldiers in barracks, who
have lost the liberty to express their thoughts.”


THE NEW FATHERHOOD

Sir, that’s just the point. But the liberty that was lost, is found. No
one, as we have seen, is going to compel this new woman to be anything
that she does not want to be. Let us not forget this now as she goes on
talking. For she is coming presently to that which is at the heart of
the whole woman question, nay, more, the human question.

“Dear,” she is going to say, “there is that which matters more than all
the rest for us now to decide. It’s the children, the children are
on my mind.” Then she is going to emphasise how important it is that
parenthood shall be equalised. By the laws that men have made about it,
quite universally, equally in fact in England and Germany and France
and Italy and Russia and the United States, the father is the only
parent. His will decides its religion, its education, and all of the
conditions under which the child shall be reared. There are a few of
the United States, most notably those where women vote and one or two
others in which pressure has been brought to bear by the feminists,
where the law has been corrected. Also in Scandinavia and in Australia,
as soon as women have come into the vote, one of their first efforts
has been to establish what is known as “equal guardianship,” the right
of a married mother to her own child. To an unmarried mother, by a
strange perversity in the statutes of men, is conceded not only all the
right to the child but there is put upon her all of the responsibility
of its parenthood.

The new woman is not going to rest content to have it stand that
way. Already the world is being forced to a new deal for childhood.
The sins of the fathers are being lifted from the children on whom
society in the past has so heavily visited them. A baby has broken no
law. Why brand it, then, as “illegitimate”? War babies crying in all
lands have brought statesmen to startled attention. Government after
government has arranged for what is called the “separation allowance”
to go to the woman at home to whom the soldier at the front knows
that it belongs—even though she has no marriage lines to show. So the
War Office pen writes off one discrimination. Of children who used to
be called “illegitimate,” 50,000 born annually in England and 180,000
born annually in Germany will now be entitled to start life with equal
financial government aid that the others get.

It is the first step in the direction of the new arrangements about
parenthood. The polite fiction that used to pass, that there were any
children without fathers, is going to be ruled out of court. Of all
the laws that have been written that evidence the difference in the
point of view of men and women, see the illegitimacy laws. Napoleon put
it in his code “_La recherche de la paternité est interdite_,” and it
was only in 1913 that the feminists of France, led by Margaret Durand,
succeeded in getting that edict modified so that a woman in France
is no longer “forbidden” to look for the father of her child. Up in
Norway, where women vote, they put on the statute books in 1915 a very
different law: it commands that the father of the child shall be found.
This is the famous law framed by Johan Castberg, minister of justice,
and inspired by his sister-in-law, Fru Kathe Anker Moler. The draft of
the bill was submitted in advance to the women’s clubs of the country:
the National Women’s Council of Norway stamped it with the seal of
approval. So that there can be no doubt but that it has put the matter
as a woman thinketh. Even the title of the new law significantly omits
all objectionable reference: it is a “Law Concerning Children whose
Parents have not Married Each Other.” They are equally entitled to a
father’s name and support and to an inheritance in his property as
are any other kind of children. The father must be found! Not even if
the paternity is a matter of doubt among three men or six men or any
several men, can any of them, or all of them, escape behind “_exceptio
plurium_,” which in other lands affords them protection. In Norway,
they are every one of them a party to the possible obligation. And
the financial responsibility of fathering the child in question is
distributed _pro rata_ among them. What the Norwegian law accomplishes,
you see, is the abolition of anonymous paternity.

Like this, there is a great deal in the laws and the religion and the
public opinion of the world of yesterday that will need revision.
Lastly, there is that which is of more significance than all the rest.
Way back in the beginning of things, the lady who was called Eve, you
remember as the Sunday school lesson ran, got the world into a lot of
trouble, it was said, by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Too little knowledge, some one else has told us, may prove a dangerous
thing. But there is a Latin proverb on which a school of therapeutics
is founded, “_Similia similibus curantur_.” Then, if “like cures like,”
what we need to-day is more knowledge to make right the ancient wrong
that afflicts the earth! Well, we have it.


THE WHISPER OF GOD

This new woman will look back into the dear eyes that search hers. In
her level glance there will flash an understanding of life that never
was in woman’s eyes before in all the ages of sorrow since the angel
fixed up the flaming swords that shut her out of Eden. For in the white
silence where she has found her soul, she has heard even the closest
whisper of God. If man before missed it, why, maternity was naturally
the matter that he could not know and could not understand. This is
the new revelation, _that maternity shall be made more divine_! There
has been a halo about it in song and picture and story. But we want to
put a halo on in London’s east end and New York’s east side. Creation
itself is to be corrected.

Doesn’t it need to be? See how many men, it is being discovered
to-day, are not well enough made for soldiers. England is obliged to
reject 25% of her men as physically unfit. America is reported to have
rejected 29%. The other nations cannot show any better figures. If in
the great arsenals that are manufacturing munitions of war, one shell
in four turned out was spoiled, the industry would have to be at once
investigated and put on a more efficient basis than that. Quite likely
the mistake might be discovered to be “speeding up.” There had been an
effort to turn out too many shells. If fewer shells are made, they can
be better made. And you will get just as many in the end. For by the
present process, all these shells that fail, you see, do not count in
the real output.

It’s just like this about people. We’ve been trying to have too many.
When Mrs. Smith in London or in New York or Frau Schmidt in Berlin,
has six or eight or more children in, say, two rooms, some of them are
going to have rickets and some of them are going to have tuberculosis
and some of them are going into penal institutions. So that when
you come to want them for the army, you find that one in four has
failed. Why, even chickens would. A poultry fancier does not presume
to try to raise a brood of chickens in quarters too crowded for their
development. He measures his poultry house and determines how many
chickens he can accommodate with enough air and space—and how many he
can afford to feed. He limits the flock accordingly. Mrs. Smith in
London or New York and Frau Schmidt in Berlin, can too!

Fire and electricity and other useful forces we have long since
obtained the mastery over and turned from a menace to a blessing to
mankind. But another even mightier force has ravaged the world like
unchained lightning. Because it has not been controlled. Men thought
that it must not be. So the fear of its consequences has haunted
homes in every land since the pronouncement, “I will greatly multiply
thy conceptions.” All of the great religious teachers said that you
must not take the misery out of maternity. It was meant to be there.
And science, which had accomplished miracles in mitigating other
suffering, stood afar off from the woman in childbirth. So much as
an anæsthetic to deaden the pain was forbidden, until quite recent
times, as an interference with the will of the Almighty. It was Queen
Elizabeth of England who broke that taboo. By virtue of her royal
authority, she demanded chloroform. And got it. Her daring could then,
of course, be followed by other women. Newer iconoclasts are calling
for twilight sleep, that achieves maternity in a dream. Add birth
control. And we shall be out of the trouble in which the unhappy lady
called Eve so long ago involved all of her daughters.

Birth control means, instead of a maternity that is perpetual,
unregulated and haphazard and miserable, a maternity that is
intelligently directed and limited. So that it shall be volitional.
The rising value of a baby at last requires that people shall be as
carefully produced as the shells we are making with such infinite
accuracy. Most of all, it is important that there shall not be too many
babies lest some of them not well done shall be only worthless and
good for nothing. You see, you have to think about quality as well as
quantity when you are counting for a final output. Russia, which had a
birth rate of 50 per thousand, the highest birth rate in Europe, is the
nation whose military defences have crumpled like paper. It was France,
with a birth rate of 28 per thousand, the lowest in Europe, that held
the line for civilisation at the Marne. And it was Germany, which has
always imposed on its women as a national service the speeding up of
population, that plunged the world into the agony of this war. Because
55% of the families of Berlin live in one-room tenements and there is
nowhere to put the babies that have kept on coming, Germany reached
out for the territory of her neighbours. The pressure of population
too large for too narrow boundaries is as certain in its consequences
as is the pressure of steam in a tea kettle with the spout stopped up.
There’s sure to be an explosion. Germany exploded. Back of her military
system, it is her maternity system that is responsible for the woe of
the world to-day. It’s plain that the way not to have war anywhere ever
again is not to have too many babies!

John Stuart Mill, the great economist who two generations ago looked
into the future and saw a vision of the woman movement that would be,
said: “Little advance can be expected in morality until the production
of large families is regarded in the same light as drunkenness or any
other physical excess.” And he added: “Among the probable consequences
of the industrial and social independence of women, I predict a great
diminution of the evil of overpopulation.” John Stuart Mill meant Mrs.
Webber and Mrs. Smith. Two children to be enjoyed instead of ten to be
endured, is an ideal of family policy possible of attainment even in
the east ends and the east sides of the world. For to Mrs. Webber or to
Mrs. Smith, handling her own wage envelope, no one any more may say,
“I shall not give you money for shoes to-morrow unless—” Volitional
motherhood is the final truth that shall make women free. No one can
compel the new woman to be anything that she does not wish to be, not
even to be a mother until she chooses the time.

After that curse pronounced upon Eve, there was a promise: “The seed
of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head!” “We can do it, dear.”
That’s what the new woman will say triumphantly to the man who comes
back to her from the Great War. Together they will take up the task of
making, not only a new earth, but a new race!

And I think he will be glad for what she tells him. The wonder is, not
so much that women in the past were willing to endure the “subjection
of women,” but that men consented to it. A bird in a cage can of course
be made to eat out of the hand of the owner who feeds it. But see the
bird that is free and will come at your call!

The women in industry and commerce and the professions and in
government, whom we are seeing in these years of war passing all
barriers, will at last make their final stand for what? It is for
happiness. Look! Even now, who has the vision to discern, may discover
the gates of Eden swinging wide. And when the man in khaki, with the
age-old yearning in his heart, “Woman wanted, my woman,” comes back
to clasp her in his arms once more, these two everywhere shall enter
in. For the ultimate programme toward which the modern woman movement
to-day is moving is no less than paradise regained! It may even, I
think, have been worth this war to be there.


THE END


Transcriber’s Notes

Page 27—changed l’Opera to l’Opéra

Page 27, Page 49—changed de identitie to de identité

Page 50—changed Medaille to Médaille

Page 64—changed Endel Street, London to Endell Street, London

Page 95—changed Blessés Militairs to Blessés Militaires

Page 106—changed leggins to leggings

Page 112, Page 127—changed attache to attaché

Page 145—changed commune of Exoudon to commune of Exoudun

Page 208—changed grey and while to grey and white

Page 145, Page 210—changed President Poincare to President Poincaré

Page 247—changed perservered to preserved

Page 248—changed Harvard University a few years
   incorporated to Harvard University a few years later incorporated

Page 251—changed Edinborough to Edinburgh

Page 251—changed Aldeborough, Suffolk to Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Page 299, Page 304—changed Dr. Poliksena Shiskina Yavein to Dr. Poliksena
 Schiskina Yavein

Page 302—changed zur kenntisnahme to zur kenntnisnahme

Page 304—changed Hermila Galinda to Hermila Galindo

Page 323—changed invesment to investment

Page 328—changed minstry to ministry

Page 330—changed Mutualite to Mutualité

Page 377—changed paternite to paternité

Page 382—changed there is not where to there is nowhere

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 68257 ***