The Project Gutenberg eBook of Women wanted, by Mabel Potter Daggett

Title: Women wanted

The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War

Author: Mabel Potter Daggett

Release Date: June 6, 2022 [eBook #68257]

Language: English

Produced by: Fay Dunn, Fiona Holmes and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive

To My Friend

KATHERINE LECKIE

THE ILLUMINATION OF

WHOSE PERSONALITY HAS

LIGHTED MY PATHWAY TO

TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS

AFFECTIONATELY

DEDICATED

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.

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[14] 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[15] 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[16] 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[17] 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[18] 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:

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[19] 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.

[20]

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[21] 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[22] 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[23] 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[24] 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[25] 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[26] 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[27] 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[28] 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[29] 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[30] 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[31] 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[32] 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.

[33]

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[34] 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[35] 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[36] 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[37] 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:

Or it comes like this:

[38]

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[39] 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[40] 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.

[41]

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[42] 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[43] 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[44] 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[45] 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[46] 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.[47] 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.

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,[49] 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[50] 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,[51] 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[52] 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.[53] 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[54] 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,[55] 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.[56] 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[57] 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[58] 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[59] 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[60] 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[61] 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[62] 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[63] 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[64] 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.

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.

[65]

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[66] 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[67] 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[68] 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[69] 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[70] 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[71] 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[72] 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.[73] 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.”

[74]

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[75] 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.

[76]

“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[77] 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[78] 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.[79] 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.”

[80]

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[81] 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!”

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[83] 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[84] 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,[85] 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[86] 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[87] 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.[88] 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[89] 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[90] 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.

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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[92] 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[93] 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[94] 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[95] 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[96] 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[97] 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.

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[98] 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.

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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[100] 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[101] 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[102] 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[103] 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[104] 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[105] 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[106] 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.[107] 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[108] 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[109] 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[110] 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[111] 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[112] 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[113] 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.”

[114]

“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?

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[116] 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[117] 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[118] 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[119] 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[120] 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.

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 [121]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[122] 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[123] 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.[124] 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[125] 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.[126] 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[127] 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 [128], 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.

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?”[129] 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[130] 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[131] 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[132] 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[133] 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[134] 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[135] 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[136] 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.”

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 [137]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[138] 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[139] 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.”[140] 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[141] 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,[142] 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[143] 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[144] 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[145] 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[146] 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.

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[148] 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.[149] 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[150] 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[151] 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[152] 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[153] 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[154] 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[155] 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[156] 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[157] 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[158] 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[159] 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[160] 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[161] 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.[162] 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[163] 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[164] 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:

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[165] 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[166] 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[167] 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[168] 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[169] 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[170] 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[171] 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.”

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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[173] 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.

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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[175] 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[176] 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[177] 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[178] 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.”

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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[180] 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?[181] 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[182] 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[183] 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:[184] “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[185] 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[186] 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[187] 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[188] 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![189] 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[190] 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.

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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[192] 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[193] 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[194] 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[195] 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[196] 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[197] 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[198] 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[199] 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.”

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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.

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,[202] 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.

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 [203]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[204] 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[205] 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[206] 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[207] 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[208] 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[209] 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;[210] 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[211] 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[212] 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[213] 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[214] 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[215] 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[216] 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[217] 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[218] 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:[219] 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[220] 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[221] 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[222] 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[223] 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[224] “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.”

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. [225]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[226] 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[227] 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.[228] 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[229] 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[230] 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,[231] 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.

[232]

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[233] 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.

[234]

’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[235] 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[236] 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[237] 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[238] 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.

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[240] 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[241] 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[242] 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[243] 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[244] 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[245] 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[246] 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[247] 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[248] 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[249] 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[250] 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[251] 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.

Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of [252]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[253] 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.[254] 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[255] 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.”[256] 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.”

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[257] 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[258] 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[259] 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.

[260]

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[261] 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[262] 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 [263]the enemy, only eventually to reach London and start out once more for new fields to conquer.

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[264] 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.”

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 [265]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[266] 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[267] 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,[268] 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[269] 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[270] 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.[271] 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[272] 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.

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,[274] 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[275] 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,[276] 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.

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[277] 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[278] 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.[279] 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.

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[281] 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?[282] 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[283] 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[284] 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.

[285]

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[286] 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[287] 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[288] 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[289] 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[290] 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?

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[291] 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[292] 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[293] 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]

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 [294]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[295] 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[296] 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[297] 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[298] 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[299] 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.

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[300] 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[301] 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[302] 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[303] 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[304] 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.

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 [305]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[306] 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[307] 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.”

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[309] 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[310] 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[311] 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[312] 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[313] 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,[314] 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[315] 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[316] 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[317] 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,[318] 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[319] 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[320] 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, [321]urgently recommending the new institution “in spite of the war need for economy at the present time in all other directions.”

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[322] 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[323] 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[324] 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[325] 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[326] 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[327] 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.[328] 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[329] 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[330] 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[331] 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[332] 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[333] 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[334] 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.[335] 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[336] 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[337] 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!

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[339] 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[340] 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[341] 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[342] 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[343] 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,[344] 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[345] 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.

[346]

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[347] 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[348] 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[349] 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[350] 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[351] 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[352] “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[353] 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[354] 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[355] 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[356] 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[357] 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,”[358] 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.[359] 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[360] 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[361] 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.

[362]

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[363] 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[364] 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[365] 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[366] 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[367] 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?

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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[369] 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[370] 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[371] 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,[372] 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[373] 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.

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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[375] 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.[376] 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[377] 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[378] 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.

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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[380] 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[381] 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[382] 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[383] 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[384] 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