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diff --git a/old/68257-0.txt b/old/68257-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 19ca0e3..0000000 --- a/old/68257-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9879 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Women wanted, by Mabel Potter Daggett - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -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 - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN WANTED *** - - - -Transcriber’s Notes - -Hyphenation has been standardised. - -Changes made are noted at the end of the book. - - - - - WOMEN WANTED - - MABEL POTTER DAGGETT - - - - - WOMEN WANTED - - _The story written in blood red - letters on the horizon of the - Great World War_ - - - BY - MABEL POTTER DAGGETT - AUTHOR OF “IN LOCKERBIE STREET,” ETC. - - - _Illustrated_ - - - NEW YORK - GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1918, - BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY - - - COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918, - BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY - - - PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - - - - - TO MY FRIEND - - KATHERINE LECKIE - - THE ILLUMINATION OF - WHOSE PERSONALITY HAS - LIGHTED MY PATHWAY TO - TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS - AFFECTIONATELY - DEDICATED - - - - -CONTENTS - - - CHAPTER PAGE - - I GLIMPSING THE GREAT WORLD WAR 13 - - II CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 48 - - III HER COUNTRY’S CALL 82 - - IV WOMEN WHO WEAR WAR JEWELRY 115 - - V THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 147 - - VI THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 201 - - VII TAKING TITLE IN THE PROFESSIONS 239 - - VIII AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 280 - - IX THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 308 - - X THE RING AND THE WOMAN 338 - -[Illustration: - - _Page 106_ - - MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE - - When she led 40,000 English women through the streets of London in - July, 1915. This procession is the vanguard in the march of all the - women of the world to economic independence. -] - - - - -ILLUSTRATIONS - - - MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE THE - MARCH OF THE ENGLISH WOMEN INTO - INDUSTRY _Frontispiece_ - - PAGE - - THE STAFF OF THE WOMEN’S WAR HOSPITAL, ENDELL - ST. W. C., LONDON 64 - - MRS. H. J. TENNANT OF LONDON 96 - - VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY OF PARIS IN - THE RED CROSS SERVICE 120 - - LADY RALPH PAGET, CELEBRATED WAR HEROINE 128 - - MRS. KATHERINE M. HARLEY OF LONDON, WHO DIED - AT THE FRONT 136 - - MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE OF NEW YORK 202 - - MLLE. SANUA AT THE HEAD OF THE PARIS SCHOOL OF - COMMERCE FOR WOMEN 224 - - DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON, ENGLAND’S FIRST - WOMAN PHYSICIAN 256 - - MISS NANCY NETTLEFORD OF LONDON 264 - - MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG OF PARIS, FAMOUS LAWYER 272 - - DR. ROSALIE S. MORTON OF NEW YORK 276 - - MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON 290 - - MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER OF PARIS 298 - - DR. SCHISKINA YAVEIN OF PETROGRAD 304 - - HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH 320 - - - - -WOMEN WANTED - - - - -CHAPTER I - -GLIMPSING THE GREAT WORLD WAR - - -“Who goes there?” - -I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war offices of Europe. -Automatically my hand slides over my left hip. But to-day my tailored -skirt drapes smoothly there. - -The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As -regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to -buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my side -and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to be -thoughtful like that when you’re carrying credentials on which at any -moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As faithfully -as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them over: my -letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my -passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all the -rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way. Ah, they -were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to -my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done. - -The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. “Who goes there?” -These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their belts -and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows and rows -of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of them! I -still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the other. -This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I jump at the -sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling something’s -going to catch you if you don’t watch out. Well, you have it like -that for a long time after you’ve been in the war zone. Will it be a -submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel? - -It was on a summer’s day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of the -_Pictorial Review_. “Look!” I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his -desk. “See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the -battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!” - -He brushed aside the magazine “lay out” before him, and lifted his eyes -to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the feminists of New -York he has been known as the man with the vision. “Yes,” he agreed, -“you are right. It is the wonder that is coming. Will you go over there -and find out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation means to -the woman’s cause?” - -And he handed me my European commission. The next morning when I -applied for my passport I began to be written down in the great books -of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep to-day. Hear -the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in full. I must -clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must be -able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene between the -Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was born. They -want to know the colour of my husband’s eyes. They will ask for all -that is on my grandfather’s tombstone. They must have my genealogy -through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it -glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the block in Europe, -you see, without meeting some military person who must know. - -Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to -proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is -the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with -a look, and he charges: “You’re not a suffragist, are you? Well,” he -goes on severely, “they don’t want any trouble over there. I don’t know -what they’ll do about you over there.” And his voice rises with his -disapproval: “I don’t at all know that I ought to let you go.” - -But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me the pen -with which to “sign on the dotted line.” It is the required documentary -evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser and I wouldn’t -speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all governments demand -to know very particularly who goes there when it happens to be a -woman. You’re wishing trouble on yourself to be a suffragist almost -as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an alien enemy. -There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over from say 1908 —that -you may break something, if it is only a military rule. Why are you -wandering about the world anyhow? You’ll take up a man’s place in the -boat in a submarine incident. You’ll be so in the way in a bombardment. -And you’ll eat as much sugar in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted -lines as you’re told. - -They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away -and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing -event in any day’s work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time -that I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having -finished the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I -lay my troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy -magazine assignment. “There’s going to be some risk,” the editor of the -_Pictorial Review_ said to me that day in his office, with just a note -of hesitation in his voice. “I’ll take it,” I agreed. - -The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting adrift from the American -shore. Standing at the steamship’s rail, I am gazing down into faces -that are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through the ocean’s -mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes that look back love into mine? - -I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to fade from the great -adventure on which I am embarked. We are steaming steadily out to sea. -Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought for every to-morrow, -that is with a war zone traveller even in his dreams. A cold October -wind whips full in my face. I shiver and turn up my coat collar. But is -it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can no longer see the New York -sky line for the tears in my eyes. And I turn in to my stateroom. - - * * * * * - -There on the white counterpane of my berth stretches a life-preserver -thoughtfully laid out by my steward. On the wall directly above the -wash-stand, a neatly printed card announces: “The occupant of this -room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the starboard side.” It makes quite -definitely clear the circumstances of ocean travel. This is to be no -holiday jaunt. One ought at least to know how to wear a life-preserver. -Before I read my steamer letters, I try mine on. It isn’t a “perfect -36.” “But they don’t come any smaller,” the steward says. “You just -have to fold them over so,” and he ties the strings tight. Will they -hold in the highest sea, I wonder. - -The signs above the washstands, I think, have been seen by pretty -nearly every one before lunch time. When we who are taking the Great -Chance together, assemble in the dining-room, each of us has glimpsed -the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot house. We all -earnestly hope it will be the captain who will take us across the -Atlantic. But we know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the -boatman Charon who will take us silently across the Styx. - -Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be always -going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present sensation. -I don’t know just how many of my fellow travellers go to bed at night -with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their lips. But I -know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old: - - Now I lay me down to sleep - I pray the Lord my soul to keep. - And should I die before I wake, - I pray the Lord my soul to take. - -Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in -this same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of -inspection to one’s personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish -to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean -over the steamship’s rail to look for the great letters four feet high -and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea -German craft to notice that this is the neutral _New Amsterdam_ of the -Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its most -savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: “Now that makes -us quite safe, don’t you think?” And somebody answers as promptly as -expected. “Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t sink us when they see that sign.” -And no one speaks the thought that’s plain in every face: “But Huns -make ‘mistakes.’ And remember the _Lusitania_.” - -We always are remembering the _Lusitania_. I never dress for dinner at -night without recalling: And they went down in evening clothes. We play -cards. We dance on deck. But never does one completely while away the -recurring thought: Death snatched them as suddenly as from this my next -play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe that the band is just -beginning. - -We read our Mr. Britlings but intermittently. The plot in which we -find ourselves competes with the best seller. Subconsciously I am -always listening for the explosion. If the Germans don’t do it with a -submarine, it may be a floating mine that the last storm has lashed -loose from its moorings. - -What is this? Rumour spreads among the steamer chairs. Everybody -rises. Little groups gather with lifted glasses. And—it is a piece of -driftwood sighted on the wide Atlantic. That thrill walks off in about -three times around the deck. - -But what is that, out there, beyond the steamer’s path? Right over -there where the fog is lifting? Surely, yes, that shadowy outline. -Don’t you see it? Why, it’s growing larger every minute. I believe it -is! Oh, yes, I’m sure they look like that. Wait. Well, if it were, it -does seem as if the torpedo would have been here by now. Ah, we shall -not be sunk this time after all! Our periscope passes. It is clearly -now only a steamship’s funnel against the horizon. - -Then one day there is an unusual stir of activity on deck. The sailors -are stripping the canvas from off the lifeboats. The great crane is -hauling the life rafts from out the hold. Oh, what is going to happen? -The most nervous passenger wants right away to know. And the truthful -answer to her query is, that no one can tell. But we are making ready -now for shipwreck. In these days, methodically, like this it is done. -It has to be, as you approach the more intense danger zone of a mined -coast. You see you never can tell. - -I go inside once more to try the straps of my life-preserver. But we -are sailing through a sunlit sea. And at dinner the philosopher at our -table—he is a Hindu from Calcutta—says smilingly, “Now this will do -very nicely for shipwreck weather, gentlemen, very nicely for shipwreck -weather.” It is the round-faced Hollander at my right, of orthodox -Presbyterian faith, who protests earnestly, “Ah, but please no. Do not -jest.” The next day when the dishes slide back and forth between the -table racks, none of us laugh when the Hollander says solemnly, “See, -but if God should call us now.” Ah, if he should, our life boats would -never last us to Heaven. They would crumple like floats of paper in -Neptune’s hand. Eating our dessert, we look out on the terrible green -and white sea that licks and slaps at the portholes and all of us are -very still. The lace importer from New York at my left, is the most -quiet of all. - -For eight days and nights we have escaped all the perils of the deep. -And now it is the morning of the ninth day. You count them over like -that momentously as God did when he made the world. What will to-morrow -bring forth? Well, one prepares of course for landing. - -I sit up late, nervously censoring my note book through. The nearer -we get to the British coast, the more incriminating it appears to be -familiar with so much as the German woman movement. I dig my blue -pencil deep through the name of Frau Cauer. I rip open the package of -my letters of introduction. What will they do to a person who is going -to meet a pacifist by her first name? That’s a narrow escape. Another -letter is signed by a perfectly good loyal American who, however, -has the misfortune to have inherited a Fatherland name from some -generations before. Oh, I cannot afford to be acquainted with either -of my friends. I’ve got to be pro-ally all wool and yard wide clear to -the most inside seams of my soul. I’ve got to avoid even the appearance -of guilt. So, stealthily I tiptoe from my stateroom to drop both -compromising letters into the sea. - -Like this a journalist goes through Europe these days editing oneself, -to be acceptable to the rows of men in khaki. So I edit and I edit -and I edit myself until after midnight for the British government’s -inspection. I try to think earnestly. What would a spy do? So that I -may avoid doing it. And I go to bed so anxious lest I act like a spy -that I dream I am one. When I awake on the morning of the tenth day, -all our engines are still. And from bow to stern, our boat is all -a-quiver with glad excitement. We have not been drowned! There beside -us dances the little tender to take us ashore at Falmouth. - - -FACING THE STEEL LINE OF INQUIRY - -The good safe earth is firm beneath our feet before the lace importer -speaks. Then, looking out on the harbor, he says: “On my last business -trip over a few months since, my steamship came in here safely. But the -boat ahead and the next behind each struck a mine.” So the chances of -life are like that, sometimes as close as one in three. But while you -take them as they come, there are lesser difficulties that it’s a great -relief to have some one to do something about. At this very moment I -am devoutly glad for the lace importer near at hand. He is carrying my -bag and holding his umbrella over me in the rain. For, you see, he is -an American man. The more I have travelled, the more certain I have -become that it’s a mistake to be a woman anywhere in the world there -aren’t American men around. In far foreign lands I have found myself -instinctively looking round the landscape for their first aid. The -others, I am sure, mean well. But they aren’t like ours. An Englishman -gave me his card last night at dinner: “Now if I can do anything for -you in London,” he said, and so forth. It was the American man now -holding his umbrella over me in the rain, who came yesterday to my -steamer chair: “It’s going to be dark to-morrow night in London,” he -said, “and the taxicabs are scarce. You must let me see that you reach -your hotel in safety.” And I felt as sure a reliance in him as if we’d -made mud pies together or he’d carried my books to school. You see, you -count on an American man like that. - -But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as -you go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my -passport hard. It has been removed from its usual place of secure -safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of being a woman abroad -in war-time. Men have pockets, easy ones to get at informally. I have -among my “most important credentials”—they are in separate packages -carefully labelled like that—a special “diplomatic letter” commending -me officially by the Secretary of State to the protection of all -United States embassies and consulates. When they handed it to me -in Washington, I remember they told me significantly: “We have just -picked out of prison over there, two American correspondents whose -lives we were able to save by the narrowest chance. We don’t want any -international complications. Now, do be careful.” - -I’m going to be. The Tower of London and some modern Bastille on the -banks of the Seine and divers other dark damp places of detention over -here are at this minute clearly outlining themselves as moving pictures -before my mind. I earnestly don’t want to be in any of them. - -We have reached the temporary wooden shack through which governments -these days pass all who knock for admission at their frontiers. Inside -the next room there at a long pine table sit the men with pistols in -their belts and swords at their sides, whose business it is to get -spies when they see them. We are to be admitted one by one for the -relentless fire of their cross-questioning. They have taken “British -subjects first.” Now they summon “aliens.” - -To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at once like some sort -of a charge. You never were convicted of this before. And it seems -like the most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. Besides, I am -every moment becoming more acutely conscious of my mission. The rest -of these my fellow travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. For -a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring -person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But -in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war-times one has -to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier -upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a -most harmless, pleasant person? - -From the decision the other side of that door, there will be no appeal. -The men in khaki there have authority to confiscate my notes—or me! And -they are so particular about journalists. One friend of mine back from -the front a month ago had his clothes turned inside out and they ripped -the lining from his coat. Then there is the lemon acid bath, lest you -carry notes in invisible writing on your skin. They do it, rumor says, -in Germany. But who can tell when other War Offices will have adopted -this efficiency method? Oh, dear, what is the use not to have been -drowned if one must face an inquisition? And they may turn me back -on the next boat. My thoughts are with the lemon acid bath. How many -lemons will it take to fill the tub, I am speculatively computing, when -“Next,” says the soldier. And it is I. - -A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I am face to face with my -first steel line. The words of the British consul again ring warningly -in my ears, “I don’t at all know what they’ll do about you over there.” - -No one ever does know these days. It’s the tormenting uncertainty that -keeps you literally guessing from day to day whether you’re going or -coming. And on what least incidents does human judgment depend. Perhaps -they’d like me better if my hat were blue instead of brown. Thank -heaven I didn’t economise on the price of my travelling coat. I step -bravely forward when the officer at the head of the table reaches out -his hand for my passport. - -In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department -of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they -affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal -information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my -face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller -looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the -very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I! - -“Now what have you come over here for?” he inquires in a tone of voice -that seems to say, “Nobody asked you to England. We’re quite too busy -about other things to entertain strangers.” - -I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed “To Whom it may -Concern.” Signed by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_, it states -that I am delegated to study the new position of women due to the war. -Will he want me to? He may be as sensitive as the British consul in New -York about the woman movement. He may prefer that it should not move at -all. - -I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I -tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of -my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that. -Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must -carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with -gentlemen in khaki all over Europe. - -Well, what is he going to do about me? I get out my letters of social -introduction. There are 84! I strew them on the table for him to read. -There is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, the search -and the confiscation and the lemon acid bath? I wonder, and I wonder. -But I try to stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar the -decision that is forming in the officer’s mind. I am watching alertly -for his expression. But there isn’t any. I can’t tell at all whether -he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up -behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind -that I am a spy. He has read only four letters—— - -And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in -New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the -line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: “She’s all right. Let -her go.” - -I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment -like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to “Our Duchess” has done -it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo -Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes -all opposition! - -The soldier at the other end of the room opens a little wooden door in -a wooden wall that lets me into England. My baggage is already being -chalk marked “passed.” I am here! I clutch my passport happily and -convulsively in my hand. You have to do that until you can restore it -to the safer place. It’s the most important item in what the French -call your “_pieces de identité_.” At any moment a policeman in the -Strand, a gendarme in the Avenue de l’Opéra may tap an alien on the -shoulder with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you? - - -THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY - -London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the -black pall of darkness in which the cities over here have enveloped -themselves against war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night, -every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. Over there on the -horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their -great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of -destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every -building is tightly shuttered. The street lamps with their globes -painted three-quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid -beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must develop a protective sense -that enables them to find their way at night as a cat does in the dark. -“I’m sorry,” says an apologetic English voice, and before you know it, -you have bumped against another passerby. There is another sudden jolt. -And you are scrambling for your balance the other side of the curb you -couldn’t see was there. If you are familiar with the door knob where -you’re going to stop, you will be so much the surer where you’re at. - -Looking out on this darkest London from Paddington railway station at -midnight I sit on my trunk and wait. Do you remember the popular song, -There’s a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? Oh, I hope there is. - -I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is the card of the Englishman -politely ready to look after me in London. It is the American man who -is out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer a taxicab. Somehow -he has done it. At last the cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur -to take us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk. - -A small green light within the hooded entrance, picks the Ritz Hotel -out of the Piccadilly blackness. Inside, after the gloom through which -we have come, I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly -in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people still live here! -Right then at the hotel register, the voice of Scotland Yard speaks for -the War Office. And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me refuge -from the night, I must answer. The “registration blank” presented for -me to fill in, demands certain definite information: “(1) Surname. (2) -Christian names. (3) Nationality. (4) Birthplace. (5) Year of birth. -(6) Sex. (7) Full residential address: Full business address. (8) -Trade or occupation. (9) Served in what army, navy or police force. -(10) Full address where arrived from. (11) Date of signing. (12) -Signature.” And a little below, “(13) Full address of destination. (14) -Date of departure. (15) Signature.” A last line in conspicuous italics -admonishes: “Penalty for failing to give this information correctly 100 -pounds or six months imprisonment.” Well, of course a threat like that -will make even a woman tell her age as many times as she is asked. But -I do it rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. For the -“registration blank” was made in Germany. I remember it before the war, -at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. - -I must sign now on the dotted line before I can even go to bed. I -arrange my clothing carefully on a chair within reach of my hand. You -rest that way in a warring city, always ready to run. The Zeppelins -may come so swiftly. In London you know your nearest cellar. In France -you have selected your high vaulted entrance arch under which to take -refuge when the sirens go screaming down the street, “_Gardez vous, -Gardez vous._” - -The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in the first darkness of -London was not gone when I closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw -it off. You may not be of those who are wearing crêpe. But you cannot -escape the woe of the world which will enfold you like a garment. - -In the morning the ordinary business of living has become one of -strenuous detail. The law requires that an alien shall register with -the police within 24 hours of arrival. When I have thus established -a calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go out into -Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on parole. And I face -an environment strung all over with barbed wire restrictions on my -movements. Every letter that comes for me from America will be read -before I receive it, marked “Opened by the Censor.” If I wish to go -away from this country, I must ask the permission of the Foreign -Office, the consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed and -my own consulate before I can so much as purchase a ticket. I may not -leave London for any “restricted area” where there has been an Irish -revolution or a German bombardment without the consent of Scotland -Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz Hotel, which is registered as my -official place of residence, for more steam-heat at the Savoy, without -notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure and the Bow Street -Station of my arrival. The Defence of the Realm and the Trading with -the Enemy Acts and others in a land at war are lying around like bombs -all over the place. Have a care that you don’t run into them! - -I am alone one evening at the International Suffrage Headquarters in -Adam Street, deep lost in a sociological study of carefully filed -data. Do you believe in subconscious warnings? Anyhow, I am bending -over a box of manila envelopes when suddenly, out of the silence of -this top floor room, I am impressed with a sense of danger. It is as -plain and clear as if a voice over my shoulder said “Look out.” I do -look up quickly. And there on the wall before my eyes, I read Order -4 from the Defence of the Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over -London, I discover later. But this is the first time I have seen it. It -reads: “The curtains of this room must be drawn at sundown.” And from -two windows with wide open curtains, my brilliant electric light is -streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as far as Trafalgar Square -for all the German Zeppelins and Scotland Yard to see! Just for an -instant I am paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand finds -the electric button and I hastily switch myself into the protecting -darkness. Somehow I grope my way through the hall and down the -staircase. And I slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the police -arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward -I read one day of an earl’s daughter even, who had been arrested and -fined 25 pounds for “permitting a beam of light to escape from her -window.” - -The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not -put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even -the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free -speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise, -“Silence.” In France they put it most picturesquely, “Say nothing. Be -suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open.” Absolutely the only -safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody’s doing -it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest -of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military -orders, the rule is absolute. And you’ve no idea how many people are -under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I -begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to -have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of -a visé. Wouldn’t a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to -be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw -her? Even the girl conductor on the ’bus this morning, when I essayed -to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for, -how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a -frightened rabbit. - -So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though -I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the -Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my -life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain -information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do? - -Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one’s self personally -conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine -contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival -here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to -bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary -and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked -them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to -France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should -a journalist do? - -Well, evidently a journalist should get in good standing with a war -office which alone can press the button to everywhere she wants to -go. The short cut to a war office is through a press bureau. But a -press bureau modestly shrinks from the publicity that it purveys. -You do not find it on Main Street with a lettered signboard and a -hand pointing: “Journalists, right this way.” And you can’t run right -up the front steps of a war office and ring the bell. It would be -a what-do-you-call-it, a _faux pas_ if you did. Even for a private -residence it would be that. There isn’t anywhere that I know of over -here even in peace time that as soon as you reach town you can call a -hostess up on the telephone and have her say, “Oh, you’re the friend -of Sallie Smith that she’s written me about. Come right along up to -dinner.” Why, the butler would tell you her ladyship or her grace or -something like that was not at home. It just can’t be done like that -outside of America. You don’t rush into the best English circles that -way, much less the English government. Absolutely your only way around -is through a formal correspondence. - -One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down bed-quilt at the Ritz and -spread out my letters of introduction to choose a journalistic lead. -There are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and a lovely rose -velvet carpet on the floor and heavy rose silk hanging at the windows. -But there isn’t any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds six or -it may be seven coals—you see why Dickens always writes of “coals” in -the plural—and you put them on delicately with things like the sugar -tongs. It isn’t good form to be warm in England. The best families -aren’t. It’s plebeian and American even to want to be. - -My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am trying to determine -which letter. This to Sir Gilbert Parker was the 84th letter handed me -by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_ as I stepped on the boat. It is -the one I now select first, quite by chance, without the least idea of -where it is to lead me. The next evening at 6 o’clock I am on my way to -Wellington House. “Sir Gilbert,” speaks the attendant in resplendent -livery. And I find myself in a stately English room. There, down the -length of the red velvet carpet beneath the glow of a red shaded -electric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from his chair. “Do -you know where you are?” he asks with a smile, glancing at the letter -of introduction on his desk that tells of my mission. “This,” he says, -“is the headquarters of the English government’s press bureau for the -war and I am in charge of the American publicity.” Who cares for Lord -Northcliffe now! Or even the King of England! Of all the inhabitants -of this land, here was the man a journalist would wish to meet. The -man who has written “The Seats of the Mighty” sits in them. From his -desk here in the red room he can touch the button that will open all -the right doors to me. He can’t do it immediately, in war-time. One -has to make sure first. I must come often to Wellington House. There -are days when we talk of many things, of life and of New York. He is -less and less of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. He -is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might have belonged to the -Authors’ League up on Forty-second Street. I half suspect he does. “I -do know my America rather well,” he says at length. “I married a girl -from Fifty-seventh Street. And I have a brother who lives in St. Paul.” - -It is the way his voice thrills on “my America.” I am sure any American -correspondent hearing it would have been ready even in the fall of -1916 to clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American compact to -win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune with the American temperament. -He doesn’t wear a monocle. And he says to a woman “Now, what can I do -for you?” in just the tone of voice that an American man would use -when everything is going to be all right. I remember the red room -just before he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me at this -moment: “I have confidence in Mr. Vance, your editor. I know him,” -reflects the man who is deciding. “But—are you in ‘Who’s Who’?” Just -for the lack of a line in a book, a government’s good favour might -have been lost! But he reached for the copy above his desk. “Any more -credentials?” he asks. I cast desperately about in my mind—and drop a -Phi Beta key in his hand. “I won’t take that up on you,” he says with a -smile. And my cause is won. - - -THE WAY IT IS DONE - -Long important envelopes lettered across the top “On His Majesty’s -Service” begin to arrive in my mail. All the government offices will be -“at home” and helpful—when a personal interview has further convinced -each that I am clearly not at all a German person nor the dangerous -species of the suffragist. Where are the slippers that will match this -gown? And which are the beads that will be best? Mine is a hazardous -undertaking, you see, that requires all of the art at the command of -a woman: I must so state the mission on which I have come that _my_ -woman movement may seem pleasing in the eyes of a man—why, possibly a -man whose country house even may have been burned in behalf of votes -for women! Clearly I must mind my phrases, to get my permits. And if -you’re a journalist in war-time, you need the permit as you do your -daily bread. - -To get it, you write about it and call about it and write about it some -more. And then it comes like this: - - FOREIGN OFFICE, Nov. 6, 1917. - - _Dear Mrs. Daggett_:— - - If you will call to-morrow Wednesday at 3 o’clock at the main entrance - to Woolwich Arsenal and ask for Miss Barker, presenting the attached - paper, you will find that arrangements have been made for your visit. - - Yours very truly, - - G. S. B. - -Or it comes like this: - - HEADQUARTERS, LONDON DISTRICT, - Horse Guards, S.W., Nov. 7, 1917. - - MRS. M. P. DAGGETT, - Room 464 Ritz Hotel, - - _Dear Madam_:— - - I have pleasure in informing you that under War Office instructions - I have arranged with the officer commanding 3rd London General - Hospital, Wandsworth Common, S.W., for you to visit his hospital at 11 - A. M. on Friday next, the 9th instant. - - I am, dear Madam - - Yours faithfully, - - O. —— - COLONEL D.A.D.M.S. - London District. - - -England in war-time is open for my inspection. I am getting my data -nicely when one day there develops the dilemma of getting away with -it. I open the _Times_ one morning to read a new law: “On and after -Dec. 1,” the newspaper announces, “no one may be permitted to take out -of England any photograph or printed or written material other than -letters.” I have a trunkful. Clearly I can’t get by any khaki line with -that concealed about my person. Sir Gilbert walks twice, three times up -and down the red room. “I’ll see what I can do about it,” he says. “I -don’t know. But I’ll try.” A few days later my data begins to go right -through all the laws. - -“First consignment,” I cabled across the Atlantic, “coming on the _St. -Louis_, if it doesn’t strike a mine.” I follow it with a registered -letter to the editor: “I hope God and you will always be good to -Gilbert Parker. And now if I don’t get back—” And I give him exact -directions about the material on the way. For it is no idle imagining -that I may not reach home. - -I am facing France and the Channel crossing. Here in London it is so -long since the Zeppelins have been heard from that we are almost lulled -into a sense of security that they will not come again. If they do high -government circles usually hear in advance. A friend whose cousin’s -brother-in-law is in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds -out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and death plans must go -into the discard. For you see I am changing my danger back again from -Zeppelins to submarines. - -Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports now that about four -out of six boats are getting across. I may get one of the four. On -the night train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer-rug in the -unheated compartment. Travelling is not what you might say encouraged. -This journey to Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will -now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will anywhere connect. There -are as many difficulties as can possibly be arranged. Governments -don’t want you doing this every day in the week. And there is always a -question whether you will be permitted to do it at all. At Southampton -I must meet the steel line with the challenge, “Who goes there?” - -Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at his belt and a -sword at his side. He looks a second time at my passport: “You want to -go all sorts of places you’ve no business to,” he says sharply. - -“Not all of them now,” I answer humbly, “only France.” “Well, why -even France?” he persists testily. I try to tell him. I present for -a second consideration one of my “most important credentials.” It is -a personal letter from the French consul in New York specially and -cordially recommending me to the “care and protection of all the civil -and military authorities in France.” At last he tosses the letter -inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to say, “Oh, well, if they -want her over there?” It comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the -last man, and a visé in purple ink lets me through to the boat. - -Shall I remember the _Sussex_? You don’t so much after you’ve lived -daily with death for a while. Some time during the night I am drowsily -conscious that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has taken -the wheel to guide us in and out among mines placed perilously as a -protection against German submarines. Our lives are coming through -dangerous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. The next steel -line, here, is French. And with the letter from the consul at New York -in my hand I am literally and cordially and politely bowed into France. - -At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the -dinner table the next day is just about to sail, “going back to God’s -country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the -Pacific Coast,” he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment -that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a -year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate -as he says it. “Cheer up,” he urges. “You just have to remember to take -a Frenchman’s promises as lightly as they’re made. They always aim to -please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner -to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only -more promises. But you’re an American woman. You’ll dig through. Good -luck,” he says. And a taxicab takes him. - - -WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT - -Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and -Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time -a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the -niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in -world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited -in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we -pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue -Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden -wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her -child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in -her eyes and the dead man’s picture in the locket at her throat. - -They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the -locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most. -There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their ’teens just now -coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as -the pictured locket! There will be no man’s face to fill it! Love that -would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood -that’s falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay! - -How far off now seems that summer’s day I walked through 39th Street, -my pulses throbbing pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this -commission! I wonder if ever life can look like that again. The heavens -arched all blue above New York and the sunshine lay all golden on the -city pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I had heard about war, -even as have you and your next door neighbour. War was battle dates -that had to be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of tiresome -pages in history it should mobilise before our eyes, why, of course it -would be flags flying, bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down -Fifth Avenue! - -And now I have seen war. Every way I turn I am looking on men with -broken bodies and women with broken hearts. War is not merely the hell -that may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a day or a night -that ends in death. War is worse. War is that big strong fellow with -eyes burned out when he “went over the top,” whom I saw learning to -walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the Home for the Blind -in London. They’re teaching him now to make baskets for a living! War -is that boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in Regents -Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life! War is that peasant -from whom to-day I inquired my way in one of the little _banlieues_ of -Paris. There was the _Croix de Guerre_ in his coat lapel. But he had to -set down on the ground his basket of vegetables to point down the Quai -de Bercy with his remaining arm. You know how a Frenchman just has to -gesture when he talks? The stump of the other arm twitched a horrible -accompaniment as he indicated my direction! - -Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their -native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their -countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their -legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair. -And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces! -So long as they shall live, in every one’s eyes into which they look, -they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass -their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces! -The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day making faces to be -fastened on. - -Like this you’ve got to go through Europe these days with a sob in the -throat. I turn to the difficult details of living for relief from the -awful drama of existence. In Paris there is the nicest United States -ambassador that ever was sent in a black frock coat to represent his -country abroad. In the course of my travels there are embassies I have -met who are about as useful to the wayfaring American in a foreign -land as a Rogers plaster group on a parlour table. But you arrive at -Mr. Sharpe’s embassy in the Rue de Chaillot and it doesn’t matter at -all if it happens to be perhaps 4:33 and his reception hour closed -at, say, 4:31. He says, “Come right in.” Yes, he talks like that, not -at all in the tone of royalty. “When’d you get in town?” he asks as -genially as if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. By this -time you’re sitting in a chair drawn up to his desk and discussing the -last Democratic victory. “How’s Charlie Murphy standing now with the -administration?” perhaps he asks, and then pretty soon, “But what can I -do for you in Paris?” - -And he does it. You don’t have to call his secretary a week later -to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And -the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that -there’s an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the -street. That’s not Mr. Sharpe’s way. Within ten minutes he had handed -me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France. -He laughed as he passed it to me. “Honestly, I’d hate to hand any -one a gold brick,” he said. “That document looks imposing enough and -important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to -take you to the front at 9 A. M. to-morrow. But nothing like -that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries. -And an American can’t.” - -You can hear that in every foreign language. It was a spectacled Herr -Professor in Berlin who once said to me severely, “You Americans, this -hurry it is your national vice.” I feel that foreign governments have -duly disciplined me in this direction during the past few months. So -much of my job in serving the _Pictorial Review_ in Europe seems to be -to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. At the Maison -de la Presse, 3 Rue François 1st, in the Service de l’Information -Diplomatique, whither my Briand letter leads me, I seem to spend hours. - -They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can be, to take me to the -front. And the days pass and the days pass. “Ah, but you see, for a -lady journalist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must be -specially arranged.” And the weeks go by. And M. Polignac is so polite -and polite and polite—just that and nothing more. - -One day he says to me: “And, Mme. Daggett, how long is it you will -be in Paris?” “Why,” I falter, “I hadn’t expected to winter here. -I’m waiting, you know, just waiting until I can go to the front.” -“And how much longer now could you wait?” he inquires. “Oh,” I answer -desperately, “I’ll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn’t stay -longer than that.” - -So in the course of the next few days there comes a letter telling me -how it pains the French government that they should not be able to -“take that trip in hand” before the 29th. And of course if I must leave -them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, they so much regret, etc., -etc. - -If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I must dig through! And -in my room at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in -hand. - -To “Maison de la Presse, Service de l’Information Diplomatique,” I -write: “Gentlemen, your favour of the 26th inst. with your regrets -just received. And I hasten to write you that I cannot, for the sake -of France, accept your decision as final, without presenting to your -attention a situation with which you may not be familiar. You see, -gentlemen, in the country from which I come, we have a feminism that -is neither an ideal nor a theory, but a working reality. In America, -there were when I left, four million women citizens, and the State -legislatures every little while making more. These are, gentlemen, -four million citizens with a vote, whose wishes must be consulted by -Congress at Washington in determining the war policy of the United -States. Their sympathies help to determine the amount of the war relief -contributions that may come across the Atlantic. These are four million -women who count, gentlemen, please understand, exactly the same as four -million men. - -“Other American publications may offer Maison de la Presse other -facilities for reaching the American public. But none of them can -duplicate the facilities presented by the _Pictorial Review_, the -leading magazine to champion the feminist cause. It is the magazine -that is read by the woman who votes. Is not France interested in what -she shall read there? - -“Believe me, gentlemen, the opportunity for propaganda that I offer you -is unparalleled. I beg you therefore to reconsider. I earnestly desire -to go to the front this week. Can you, I ask, permit me to leave this -land without granting the privilege? For the sake of France, gentlemen! -Awaiting your reply, I remain,” etc. - -That letter was posted at 11 o’clock at night. Before noon the next -day Maison de la Presse was on the telephone and speaking English. In -France they do not hurry. It is not customary to use the telephone. And -it is at this time against the law to speak English on it. But listen: -“Will Mme. Daggett find herself able to accept the invitation of the -French government to go to the front on Thursday?” inquires the voice -on the wire. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES - - -“It is going to be perhaps a dangerous undertaking,” says the French -army officer the next day in the reception room at Maison de la Presse. -He is speaking solemnly and impressively. “Do you still wish to go?” he -asks, addressing me in particular. I look back steadily into his eyes. -“_Oui, Monsieur._” Then his glance sweeps inquiringly the semicircle -of faces. There are six journalists and a munitions manufacturer -from Bridgeport, Connecticut. And they all nod assent. The room is -singularly silent for an instant, the officer just standing quietly, -his left hand resting on his sword-hilt. Then he turns and passes -to each of us the official Permis de Correspondent de la Presse aux -Armees, for our journey to Rheims the next day. And we all sign on the -dotted line. - -Before I retire that night I rip the pink rose from off my hat and -lay out the long dark coat which is to envelop me from my neck to my -heels. It is the camouflage which, in accordance with the army orders, -blends one with the landscape as a means of concealment from the German -gunners’ range. Rheims is under bombardment. It was fired on yesterday. -It may be to-morrow. There must not be, the army officer has assured -us, even the flower on the lady’s hat for a target. - -My electric light winks once. Two minutes later it winks twice, and -is gone, according to the martial law which puts out all lights in -Paris from 11:30 at night until 8 o’clock in the morning. I grope my -way to bed in the darkness and at 6 o’clock the next morning, I dress -by candle light. I count carefully the “_pieces de identité_” in the -chamois safety bag that hangs over my left hip and place in my hand bag -my passport and my French _permis_, both of which must be presented at -the railway station before I can purchase a ticket. I look to make sure -that the inside pocket of my purse still contains my business card with -its pencilled request: “In case of death or disaster kindly notify the -_Pictorial Review_, New York City.” And as I pass the porter’s desk at -the hotel entrance I leave with the sleepy concierge one other last -message: “If Mme. Daggett has not returned by midnight, will the hotel -management kindly communicate with her friend Mlle. Marie Perrin, 12 -Rue Ordener?” All these are precautions that you take lest you be lost -in the great European war. - -The Gare l’Est is crowded always with throngs of soldiers arriving -and departing for the front. It is necessary that our party assemble -as early as seven o’clock to get in line at the ticket window for -the eight o’clock train, for every traveller’s credentials must be -separately and carefully read and inspected. At Epernay, where we -alight at 10:30, the station platform is densely packed with French -soldiers in the sky blue uniforms that have been so carefully matched -with the horizon color of France. A debonnair French captain has -been appointed by the French government to receive us. He is in full -uniform, splendid scarlet trousers and gold braided coat, with his -left breast ornamented with the _Croix de Guerre_ and the _Médaille de -Honneur_. After the formal salutations are over, however, his orderly -envelops all of the captain’s splendour too in the long sky blue coat -for camouflage against the Germans. And we start for Rheims in the -convoy of three luxuriously appointed “_camoens_,” the limousines -placed at our disposal by the government. They, too, are painted blue -grey to blend with the landscape, and each flies a little French flag. - -“_Ou allez vous, Monsieur?_” the sentry at the bridge of Epernay -challenges our chauffeur. And the French captain himself leans from -the window to answer, “_À Rheims. Une mission de la gouvernement._” -So we pass sentry after sentry. It is 15 miles to Rheims. This is the -Department of the Marne, with the vineyards that have produced the -most famous wines of the world. The “smiling countryside of France,” -the poets have termed it. In September, 1914, history changed it to -the grim field of carnage running red with the blood of civilisation -that here made its stand against the onrushing Huns. Right across -that valley see the battlefield of the Marne. Along this road the -German army passed. From this little village that we are entering, -all the inhabitants fled before their approach. The enemy now is not -far away. Over there, just against that horizon, lie the trenches they -now occupy. See this roadside along which we are driving, how it is -curiously hung with linen curtains? They are strung on wires fifteen -feet high. For miles we ride behind them. It is the camouflage, the -French captain says, that hides us from German view. We have just -emerged from the forest at the edge of the Mountain of Rheims when, -hark! Hear it—the sharp, distinct sound of an explosion! What is it? -Where is it? The captain lays his hand reassuringly on my arm: “It is, -I think, a tire that has burst on the rear car.” - -“Captain,” I say, “no automobile tire I ever heard sounded exactly like -that.” - -“You are not nervous?” he asks. I shake my head. “Well,” he admits, “it -is sometimes that the Germans do take a chance shot at this road.” - -But at Rheims when we arrive, I notice that all our automobile tires -are quite intact. We enter the city through the great bronze gate, the -finishing ornaments of which have been nicked off by German shells. -We stand in the midst of a scene of desolation that looks like the -ruins of some long ago civilisation. Once, before this world that men -had builded began to go to pieces, even as the blocks that children -pile tumble to a nursery floor, here was a populous busy city of some -120,000 souls. Now our footsteps echo through deserted streets. Not -a man or woman or child is in sight. The grass is growing in the -pavement there between the street-car tracks. The Hotel de Ville is -only a shell of a building with the outer walls standing. This shop -is shuttered tight. The next has the entire front gone, blown away in -a bombardment. There are empty houses from which the occupants have -months ago fled. Here stands the skeleton of a pretentious residence, -the roof gone and the front riddled: we look directly in on the -second-story room with a dresser and a bed in disarray. There a curtain -from a deserted little front parlour flaps dismally through a shattered -window-pane almost in our faces. Here above the cellar-grating of a -house in ruins, there arises a sickening odour. We look at each other -in questioning horror; perhaps the military with the pick and spade -assigned to disinterment duty after some bombardment did not dig deep -enough here. But the captain does not wish to understand and hurries us -along to the next street. - - -A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION - -In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once Rheims, at last -there is a sound of life. Down the Rue de la Paix, the street of -peace, an army supply-wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how -pleasant can be the sound even of noise. - -Then across the way appears a milk-woman, pushing her cart with four -tin cans and jingling a little bell. There are a few people, it seems, -still left, employés in the champagne industry, who cling to their -homes even though they must live in the cellar. Now the devastation -increases and the houses begin to be mere rubbish heaps of brick and -mortar as we approach the Place de la Cathédrale. - -At length we stand before the famous Cathedral of Rheims itself. I know -of no more impressive place to be in the closing days of the year 1916 -than here at the front of the terrible world war. - -In this edifice is symbolised all that civilisation of ours that -culminated in the Twentieth Century, now to be razed to the ground. -For lo, these seven hundred years, even as the two great towers above -us have lifted the infinite beauty of their architectural lace-work -against the blue-domed sky, some thirty generations of the human soul -have sent their aspirations heavenward on the incense of prayer. Over -these very stones beneath our feet, king after king of France has -walked, to receive the crown of Charlemagne and to be anointed before -this altar from “_le sainte ampouli_.” And now here to-day is history -in no dead and musty pages but in the making, white-hot from the anvil -of the hour! Only a little over a mile away are the German guns that -from day to day shower the shell-fire of their destruction on the city. -This spot upon which we stand is their particular objective point of -attack. Hear! There is a rumbling detonation. We wait hushed for an -instant. But the sound is not repeated. You see, already there have -been some 30,000 shells poured on Rheims. Twelve hundred fell in one -day only. At any moment there may be more. - -“If the bombardment should begin,” we had been instructed at Maison de -la Presse, “you would rush for the nearest cellar.” I think we all have -listening ears. Every little while there is certainly repeated that -desultory firing on the front. - -But nothing is dropping on us. And reassured, we turn to examine -the great shell hole in the pavement not five yards distant. The -Archbishop’s Palace, immediately adjoining the church, is flat on the -ground in ruins. The cathedral itself is slowly being wrecked. But in -the public square directly before it, look here! See Joan of Arc on -her horse triumphantly facing the future! In her hand she is waving -the bright flag of France. Amid the débris of the great war piling up -about her, the famous statue stands absolutely untouched. Here at the -very storm centre of the attack on civilisation, with the hell-fire of -the enemy falling in a rain of thousands of shells about her, she seems -as secure, as safe under God’s heaven as when the people passed daily -before her to prayer. Shall we not call it a miracle? - -“See,” says the captain, his head reverently uncovered, his eyes -shining, “our Maid of Orleans. No German shall ever harm her!” And -since the war began, it is true, no German ever has. Not a statue -of the famous girl-warrior anywhere in France has been so much as -scratched by the enemy. Her name was the password on the day of the -Battle of the Marne and there are those who think it was the shadowy -figure of a girl on a horse that led the troops to that victory. Oh, -though cathedrals may crumble and cities be laid waste and fields be -devastated, some time again it shall be well with the world. For the -faith of the people of France in Joan of Arc shall never pass away. - -That we realize, as we look on the rapt face of the captain who leads -us now within the great church itself, where for three years all -prayers have ceased. The marvellous stained glass from the thirteenth -century, which made the religious light of the beautiful windows, now -hangs literally in tatters like torn bed-quilts blowing in the wind. -That great jagged hole in the roof was torn by a shell at the last -bombardment. There are fissures in the side walls. The rain comes -in, and the birds. Doves light there on the transept rail. Amid the -rubbish of broken saints with which the floor is littered, there yet -stands here and there a sorrowful statue hung with the garland of faded -flowers reminiscent of some far-off fête day. And _Requiescat in pace_, -you may read the legend cut in the stone of the eastern wall above the -tomb of some Christian Father. - -In the nearby Rue du Cardinal de Lorraine, in a garden saying his -rosary, walks an old man in a red cap, one of the few remaining -residents who will not leave the city. He is the venerable Mgr. Lucon, -Cardinal of Rheims. Always he is praying, praying to God to spare the -cathedral. And God does not. “I do not understand. I suppose that He -in His wisdom must have some purpose in permitting the church to be -destroyed,” says the Cardinal of Rheims. “I do not understand,” he -always adds humbly. - -“One may not understand,” repeats the captain. And he takes us -to luncheon at the Lion d’Or, the little inn where the wife of -the proprietor still stays to serve any “mission of the French -_gouvernement_.” Then he shows us the famous champagne cellars of the -_Etablissement Pommery_. Here one hundred feet below the ground, in the -chalk caves built a thousand years ago by the Romans, are twelve miles -of subterranean passageways with thirteen million bottles of the most -celebrated champagne in the making. - -The superintendent pours out his choicest brand: “_Vive la France_ and -the Allies,” he says, lifting his glass. He talks more English than the -captain can. He is telling us of when the Germans entered Rheims. “Four -officers,” he says, “came riding ahead of the army. And I met them by -chance just as they arrived in the market place of Rheims.” - -“What did you do?” asks the New York correspondent of the _London -Daily Mail_. “I wept,” says the Frenchman, simply and impressively. -“Gentlemen,” he adds solemnly and sadly, “I hope you may never meet -some day four conquering Chinamen riding up Broadway.” - -I find myself catching my breath suddenly at that. And I am glad when -the captain hums a gay little French tune and holds out his glass a -second time: “Give us again ‘_Vive la France_.’” - -The sun is dipping red in the west when we turn to leave Rheims and -Joan of Arc bravely flying the French flag before its crumbling -cathedral. There is the rumble of guns once more at the front. Then -the winter dusk rapidly envelops the road along which we are speeding. -It is the same road to Epernay. But now it is alive with traffic. Under -the protecting cover of the soft darkness, all sorts of vehicles are -passing. The headlights of our car flash on a continuous procession -of motor lorries, munition-wagons, army supply-wagons, tractors, and -peasants’ carts carrying produce to market. So we arrive at Epernay for -a lunch of red wine and war bread at the little station. By ten o’clock -we are safely within the walls of Paris. We have escaped bombardment! - -It is two days later before the French official _communiqué_ in the -daily papers begins again recording: “At Rheims toward six o’clock last -night, after a violent attack with trench mortars, the Germans twice -stormed our advance posts. But these two attempts completely failed -under our machine-gun fire and grenade bombing.” - - -DIFFICULT DAYS IN THE WAR ZONE - -It isn’t what happens necessarily. It’s what’s always-going-to-happen -that keeps one guessing between life and death in a war zone. And -there are special torments of the inquisition devised for journalists. -Ordinary civilians are occupied only with saving their lives. -Journalists must save their notes. - -At half-past eleven o’clock that night of my return from Rheims, there -is dropped in the mail box on my hotel room door, a cablegram from -America: “Steamship _St. Louis_ here. Your material from London not on -it.” The room in which I stand, the Hotel Regina, and the city of Paris -all reel unsteadily for an instant. Has the British Government eaten -up all my journalistic findings so preciously entrusted to Wellington -House? I grasp the brass foot rail of the bed and bring myself -upstanding. If they have, it is no time for me to lose my head. - -Jacques with the empty coat sleeve and the _Croix de Guerre_ on his -breast, who operates the elevator, I am sure thinks it a woman demented -who is going out in the streets of Paris alone at midnight. But “an -_Americaine_,” one can never tell what “an _Americaine_” will do. -“Pardon,” he says hesitatingly as I step out, “madame knows the hour?” -Yes, madame knows the hour. But an alien may not send a telegram -without presenting a passport, the document that never for an instant -goes out of one’s personal possession. No messenger can do this errand -for me. - -Five minutes later I am in a taxicab tearing down the Rue Quatre -Septembre to the cable office in the Bourse. My appeal for help to Sir -Gilbert Parker in London is being counted on the blue telegraph blank -by the operator at the little window, when suddenly I remember I have -forgotten. My hand feels helplessly over my left hip where there is -concealed a letter of credit for three thousand dollars. But I falter, -“I haven’t any money, that is, where I can get at it.” - -“I have,” speaks a voice over my shoulder. I look around into a man’s -cheerful countenance. “What’s the damage?” he says again in pleasant -Manhattan English. I hesitate only for an instant. “It’s sixteen francs -I need.” - -He promptly pulls out his bank-roll. I ask for his card, of course, to -return the loan the next day with many thanks for his courtesy. He, -however, has no security that I will. As he puts me in my taxicab and -lifts his hat beneath the faint war-dimmed light of the street lamps in -the dark Rue Vivienne, he only knows that I am his country-woman. And -he is an American man. The Lord seems to send them when you need them -most. - -Three days later the awful silence in which I am suffering all the -fears there are for a journalist in war-time, is broken by a reply from -London: “Material only delayed. Sailed steamship _New York_ instead -of _St. Louis_.” After another two weeks of fitful nights in which I -dream of men in khaki who confiscate journalistic data, there comes -the message from New York that is like hearing from Heaven: “Your -consignment of material safely arrived.” Meanwhile, before I may be -permitted to take a line out of this country, Maison de la Presse must -pass on my French data. I am feverishly editing it for their approval -when there is a knock at my door. The maid is there with more letters -than the little brass mail box will hold. I eagerly open my American -mail to find it filled with holiday greetings. So, it can still be -Christmas somewhere in the world! I am standing at the window with a -Christmas card in my hand, thinking pleasant thoughts of the far-away -city called New York where there is still peace on earth, good-will -to men, when down the Rue de Rivoli passes a motor lorry piled high -with black crosses. There are fields in France that are planted with -black crosses, acres and acres of them. After each new push on the -front, more are required, black crosses by the cartload! I glanced at -my calendar. Why, to-day is Christmas! I had quite forgotten. You see, -over here all joy-making occasions seem to have been such a long while -ago, like the stories of once upon a time. - -I turn once more to the task of making ready my data for Maison de la -Presse. Here a too colourful sentence must be rejected. There is a too -flagrantly feministic document that will be safest in the waste basket. -It is the martial mind that I must meet. A press bureau, you see, is -prepared to pass promptly propaganda on the battles of the Somme. -But dare one risk, say, a pamphlet on the breast feeding of infants? -Propaganda about the rising value of a baby! Dear, dear, it might, for -all a man could tell, be treason, seditious material calculated to give -aid and comfort to the enemy! Already to my inquiries about maternity -measures in Paris, have I not been answered suspiciously: “But why do -you ask? This matter it is not of the war.” - -My emasculated data at last are ready for review by _le chef du service -de la presse_. He stamps it all over with his signature in red ink. It -is done up in packages and officially sealed in red wax with the seal -of the state of France. At the Post Office in the Rue Etienne Marcel, -I register it and mail it, committing it with a sigh to the mercies of -the great Atlantic. - - -DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT - -Having crossed the Channel once alive, it seems like tempting fate -to try it again. I draw in my breath as one about to plunge into a -cold bath in the morning, and go out to secure from three governments -the necessary permission that will allow me to return to England. -From the police alone it sometimes takes eight days to secure this -concession. But at the Prefecture of Police, they read my letter of -introduction from the French consul in New York. And I have only to -leave my photograph and sign on the dotted line. In five minutes they -have given my passport the necessary visé. The American consul easily -enough adds his. All my journey apparently is going as pleasantly as -a summer holiday planned by a Cook’s Agency, when at length I come up -with a bump against the British Control office in the Rue Cheveaux -Lagarde. And the going away from here requires some negotiations. The -British lieutenant in charge reads my nice French letter and without -comment tosses it aside. “You wish to go to London?” he asks in great -surprise. “Now, why should you wish to go to London?” He gives me -distinctly to understand this is not the open season for tourists in -England. “We don’t care to have people travelling,” he says in a tone -of voice as if that settles it. “Why have you come over here in these -difficult and dangerous times, anyhow?” he asks querulously and a -trifle suspiciously. “The best thing you can do is to go home directly. -And America is right across the water from here.” - -“But, Lieutenant,” I gasp, “my trunk is in England and I’ve got to have -a few clothes.” - -“No,” he says, “personal reasons like that don’t interest the British -Government. Neither am I able to understand a journalistic mission -which should take a woman travelling in these days of war.” He looks at -me. “The New Position of Women! It is not of sufficient interest to the -British Government that I should let you go,” he says with finality. - -“I know, Lieutenant,” I agree. “But surely you are interested in the -Allies’ war propaganda for the United States?” The light from the -window shines full on his face and I can see a faint relaxation about -the lines of his mouth. “Now I wish to go to England so that I may tell -the story of the British women’s war work. The readers of _Pictorial -Review_ are four million women who vote.” The lieutenant stirs visibly. -His sword rattles against the rounds of his chair. - -Well, my request hangs in the balance like this for a week. At length -one day he says, “I’m thinking about letting you go. I shall have to -consult with my superior officer. I don’t at all know that he will -consent.” - -There is the day that I have almost given up hope. I am waiting again -before the lieutenant’s desk. He has gone for a last consultation -with the superior officer. Will he never come back? I stare at his -empty chair. The clock on the mantel ticks and ticks. The fire in the -grate snaps and snaps. Other people at the next desk who get easier -visés than mine, come and go—a Red Cross nurse, two French sisters of -charity, a little French boy returning to school. I have counted the -pens in the lieutenant’s glass tray. I know every blot on his desk-pad. -The clock has ticked thirty-five minutes of suspense for me before the -little French soldier in red trousers opens the door and the lieutenant -is here. - -“Well,” he says, “we have decided. You are to be permitted to go, but -on one condition.” And he visés my passport, “No return to France -during the period of the war.” - -It has taken nearly two weeks to win my case. Two days later at 6 -A. M., when the gardens of the Tuileries are outlined dimly -against the faint rays of dawn, my taxicab is reeling through the -streets of Paris to the Gare St. Lazare. It is noon before the train -reaches Havre. The Red Cross nurse, the London newspaper correspondent -and the Belgian air-man all file out of our compartment and the Irish -major from Salonica is last. He turns to me with a frank Irish smile: -“Your bag can just as well go along with my military luggage. And -they’ll never even open it.” - -At eight o’clock that night in Havre, my passport and the letter from -the French consul in New York are handed down the steel line of ten -men at a table. Each looks up with the same curious smile when his -glance arrives at the last visé: “Who put that on your passport?” asks -the officer at the head of the line. “The British Control Office?” he -says with heat. “It’s none of their business.” In an inner room, four -more men examine my documents. “Did the British officer see this letter -from the French consul?” I am asked. I nod assent. A laugh goes round -the room. “Pardon, madame,” says the man with the most gold braid, “the -British Control Office does not control France. You are welcome to -France, madame, welcome to France any time you choose to come.” - -That is the War Office that speaks. So, with the French Government’s -cordial invitation ringing pleasantly in my ears, I go on board the -Channel boat. But I have no intention of returning to France right -away, gentlemen. I lay out my life-preserver with a feeling of great -relief that if I survive this crossing, it will not have to be done -over again. And once more the boat in the darkness steals safely and -silently across the Channel. - -In the morning, in Southampton, the major from Salonica hands me his -card: “Letters,” he says, a trifle wistfully, “will always reach me at -that address.” I look at the card here before me on my desk as I write -and I wonder. The major with his Irish smile may now be lying dead on -the field of battle somewhere on the front. In the midst of life we are -in death almost anywhere in the world to-day. - -[Illustration: - - THE STAFF OF THE GREAT WOMEN’S WAR HOSPITAL IN ENDELL STREET, LONDON - - This is the shining citadel that marks the capitulation the world over - of the medical profession to the new woman movement. -] - - -IN COLDEST ENGLAND - -I have again “established my residence” with the police in London. I -feel on terms of the most intimate acquaintance with the London police. -So many of them have my photograph and are conversant with all the -biographical and genealogical details of my life. You have to do it, -register at a police station, every time you change your hotel. I have -moved so often, I am nervous lest I seem like a German spy. But at the -Bow Street Station, the officer in charge just nods genially: “Oh, -that’s quite all right. Looking for more heat, aren’t you? I know. You -Americans are all alike.” - -Have you ever shivered in London in January? Then you don’t know what -it is to be cold, not even when the thermometer drops to zero and New -York’s all snowed in but the subway, and the street cleaning department -has to spend a million dollars to dig you out of the drifts. Yes, I -know about the Gulf Stream. It does pleasantly moderate the outdoor -climate so that it is never really winter in England. But the Gulf -Stream does not get into their houses. I was a luncheon guest the -other day at a residence with a crest on its note-paper. The hostess -put on a wrap to pass down the staircase from the drawing-room to the -dining-room, and with my bronchitis—all Americans get it in London—I -was simply unable to remove my coat at all. This mansion, English -ivy-covered, and mildewed with ages of aristocracy, has never had -a real fire within its walls. There are only the tiny grate fires -which are, as it were, mere ornaments beneath the mantelpiece. The -drawing-room fire is lighted only just before the guests arrive: the -men with lifted coat-tails back up to it, their hands crossed behind -them spread to the blaze; the dog and the cat draw near to the fender; -conversation about the fire becomes general in the tone of voice, -well, in which one might admire a rare sunset. The dining-room fire, -likewise, is lighted only just before the butler announces luncheon. -And in all this grand mansion you discover there isn’t any place to be -warm, unless perchance the cook in the kitchen may have it. - -Well, English hotels strive to be as coldly correct as this English -high life. And I have suffered cold storage in Piccadilly at the -rate of ten dollars a day as long as my bronchitis will bear it. I -ought to be ill in bed at this moment. But I can’t be. There isn’t -a hospital bed in Europe without a wounded soldier in it. Schools, -orphanages, monasteries, country residences, castles and many hotels -have been turned into hospitals, all of them full of soldiers. A -civilian who may be ill literally has not where to lay his head. So I -set out desperately to find heat in London. I think I have searched -every hotel from Mayfair to Bloomsbury Square. As a special concession -to American patronage a few of them have put steam-heat on their -letter heads, “central heat,” they call it. But all European radiators, -when there are any, are as reluctant as their elevators. “Lifts” move -under groaning protest and if they go up, they let you know they do -not expect to come down. The radiators are equally as sullen about -radiating. They don’t want to at all. English radiators are such toy -affairs as to be incapable of any real action. They are so small they -get lost behind the furniture. At the Hyde Park Hotel, the clerk and I -hunted all over the place: “I’m sure we used to have them,” he said. -At last our search was rewarded. We found the one that was to keep me -warm. It was behind the dresser and such a miniature affair, you’d -surely have guessed Santa Claus must have left it for the children at -Christmas time. - -Some one advised me that English hotels really didn’t do steam heat -well and the best way to be warm was to go to Brown’s, which is famous -for its grate fires. The Queen of Holland and the English nobility -always stop at Brown’s. So I tried Brown’s. I bought all the “coals” -the management would sell at one time and tipped the maid liberally to -start the fire in my room. To maintain the temperature anything above -fifty, I had to sit by the grate and keep putting on the coals myself. -In the bathroom there was no heat at all. “Oh, yes, there was,” the -management argued; “didn’t the hot-water pipe for the bath come right -up through the floor?” No, they insisted, there couldn’t be any fire in -the grate in the bathroom—because there never had been since Brown’s -began. Why, probably the hotel would burn up with so much heat as that. - -So I moved on and on. At last I came in the Strand to the Savoy, -where all Americans eventually arrive. It is the only hotel in -England with real steam-heat. Just pull out your dresser and your -wash-stand. Concealed behind each you will discover a radiator, warm, -real, life-size! Eureka! It is the only modern-comfort temperature in -London. I am able to remove sundry clothing accessories of Shetland -wool accumulated at Selfridge’s Department Store in Oxford Street. -And for the first time since my arrival on these shores I am sitting -in my hotel room unwrapped in either a rose satin down bed-quilt or a -steamer-rug. My soul once more uncurls itself for work. It is wonderful -to be warm to-day, even if one must be drowned by the Germans to-morrow. - - -GREATEST DRAMA IN HISTORY - -It begins to look gravely as if one may be. Out there in the yellow -fog beyond my window, more and more ominous are the posters that -come hourly drifting down the Strand from Fleet Street. Germany has -announced to the world that she is going to do her worst. And she -begins to tune her submarines for the sink-on-sight frightfulness -more terrible than any that has preceded. The Dutch boats stop. The -Scandinavian boats stop. The American boats stop. The entire ocean is -now blanketed in one danger zone. - -All the world’s a stage of swift-moving events, the greatest and -most terrible spectacle that has ever been put on since civilisation -began. And we in London are spectators before a drop-curtain tight -buttoned down at the corners! It is lifted now and then by the hand of -the censor to reveal only what the Government decides is good for the -people to see. The plain citizen in London has no means of knowing how -much it is that he does not know. It was six months after the Battle of -Ypres had occurred before the English newspapers got around to mention -the event. So you see with what a baffling sense of futility it is that -one scans the newspapers here now while history is making so fast that -a new page is turned every day. I am hungry for a real live paper, -bright yellow from along Park Row. And over my breakfast coffee at the -Savoy I have only the London _Times_, gravely discussing by the column, -“What Is Religion?” and “The Value of Tudor Music,” while the rest of -the world is breathless before a Russian revolution, later to be given -out in London exactly a week old. - -But there is news that even the censor is playing up with a lavish -hand. The Strand streams with the posters: “The United States on the -Verge of War.” My official permit from Downing Street to go to Holland -has arrived in the morning’s mail. I cannot get there. I cannot get to -Scandinavia. Can I get home? It is the question that is agitating a -number of Americans abroad. We watchfully wait for a warship to convoy -us. But scan the Atlantic as we may from day to day, there is none -arriving. The folks back home have a way of forgetting that we are -here. Those that do remember are saying it serves us right. We had -no business to come in war-time. Sixteen Americans at the Savoy every -day rush to read the news bulletins that hourly are tacked up in the -lounge. But the wheels of government at Washington move so slowly. The -Senate only debates and debates. And there is nothing said about us! -Will it be possible to flag the attention of Congress? The same idea -occurs simultaneously to Senator Hale in Paris and to several of us in -London. This is the answer to my cabled inquiry to Washington: “Your -request the fifth. Impracticable send warship convoy American liner -bringing Americans back from Europe. Signed, Robert Lansing, Secretary -of State.” - -So, that’s settled. The only way for any of us to get away from here -will be just—to go. And I begin to. There is myself to get home, and -my data. Three consignments have already gone over under special -government auspices. But there have been anxious periods of waiting -before a cable, “Stuff safe,” has reached me. I am going to sink or -swim with the remainder of it. Wellington House arranges with the -censor at Strand House. There the material is read and done up in -packages, in each of which is enclosed a letter with the War Office -Stamp: “Senior Aliens Officer. Port of Embarkation. Please allow the -package in which this is enclosed to accompany bearer Mrs. M. P. -Daggett as personal luggage. This package has been examined by the -censorship.” All these data are now packed in a suitcase that stands -in my hotel room awaiting my departure. - -When I was caught in the homeward rush of Americans from London in -1914, the steamship offices in Cockspur Street were jammed to the -doors. To-day they are silent, empty, echoing places. In 1917 it is -such a life and death matter to travel, that most people don’t. So -grave is the danger that the Government refuses to permit passports at -all for English women. But for me, this that I am facing is the risk of -my trade in war-time. - -To-day I had a letter from my New York office: - -“The best thing for you to do is to get home as quick as you can. -Wouldn’t it be safest by way of Spain? Any way of course is taking a -chance and a big one. I wish to the Lord you were here, safe and sound. -But there isn’t a darn thing any of us can do about getting you back. -You have either got to take your life in your hands and take a chance -coming back, or stay in London. And God knows when this war is going to -end now!” - -It is “safest by way of Spain.” Ambassador Gerard getting home -from Germany selected that route. But my passport, I remember, is -black-marked, “No return to France.” And I shall have the British -Foreign Office to explain to before I can reach my French friends who -so cordially invited my return. There will be altogether some four -steel lines to pass that way. I’d rather face the submarines. The -Spanish boats are small, only about 4,000 tons, which would be like -crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub. I’d rather be drowned than seasick. -I think I shall make sure of comfort by a British boat. - -And then—the posters in the Strand begin to announce, “Seven ships sunk -to-day.” Four Dutch boats trying for their home port, are submarined in -English waters. The _Laconia_ goes down. The Anchor liner _California_ -meets her fate. It’s real, I tell you, on this side where they’re daily -bringing in the survivors. About nine hours in the open boats is the -usual experience for the rescued. Do you see the deterring, dampening -effect that this might have on one’s enthusiasm for departure? - - -FACING LIFE OR DEATH? - -This is the month of March. Oh, wouldn’t it be well to wait until -the water is warmer? It’s a disquieting sensation to wake up in the -night and meditate on whether, say, a week or ten days from now, you -may find yourself at the bottom of the Atlantic. In this state of -low depression, you decide to live a little longer. And so to-morrow -you select a little later date for your sailing. Then the arrival of -American mail proves that at least one more boat has run the blockade -and escaped the submarines. Yours might. - -So I take my courage in both hands, and my passport, too, and buy my -ticket. When I have done this, a nice, quiet calm possesses me. It -is as if I had been a long time dying. Now it is over and finished. -I have nothing more to do about it. I pack my trunk just curiously -wondering, shall I ever wear this gown again? Or shall I not? Oh, well, -it is such a relief to be going away from all this Old World grief. Are -the war clouds gathering over New York, too? But I still can see the -city all golden in the sunlight beneath the clear blue sky. - -Last night I was awakened at twelve o’clock by the sounds of a gay -supper party’s revelry in some room down my corridor. Which of the -staid American gentlemen at this hotel is celebrating? Listen. They are -singing, evidently with lifted glasses: “Hail, hail, the gang’s all -here.” Not to the national anthem could my heart thrill more than to -Tammany’s own classic refrain. New York! New York! Not all the Kaiser’s -submarines can stop me from starting. - -I may not send word of the steamship or the date of my departure. But I -cable my home office: “If I do not succeed in reporting to you myself, -apply for the latest information of my movements, to the International -Franchise Club, 9 Grafton Street, London.” You see, if I should get the -last Long Assignment.... - -There are only sixteen first class passengers for this trip on the -_Carmania_ in her grim grey warpaint. Two of us are women, at whom -the rest stare with curious interest. Each of us as we step aboard is -handed a lifeboat ticket. Mine reads: “R. M. S. _Carmania_. Name, Mrs. -M. P. Daggett, Boat No. 5.” - -I think I know now how a person feels who is going to his execution. -We who walk up this steamship gangway are under sentence of death by -the German Government. The old Latin proverb flashes into my mind: -“_Morituri te salutamus._” It is we who may be about to die who salute -each other here on the _Carmania_ and then we are facing the steel -line. Four British officers with swords at their sides and pistols in -their belts wait for us in the drawing-room. All the other passengers -go easily by but the New York Jewish gentleman with the German name. At -last he, too, clears. But the British Government is not yet finished -with a journalist. The Tower of London and its damp dark dungeons is -again materialising clearly for me. - -The lieutenant has been questioning me for half-an-hour. “I’m sorry,” -he says, “but I think I shall have to have you searched. This suitcase -of journalistic data, you say that there is inside each package a note -stating that the material has been passed by the Government? Why isn’t -that note on the outside of the package?” - -“I don’t know,” I answer earnestly. “It’s the question I asked in vain -at Strand House. The censor said that it had to be this way. I assure -you the note is there. But if you break the outside seal to find out, -my government guarantee is gone. And if this boat by any chance goes to -Halifax, how are they to know there that I’m not a German spy?” - -The lieutenant’s eyes are on my face. I think he believes I am telling -the truth. “Well,” he orders his corporal, “go to her stateroom with -her and have a look at her luggage.” The corporal is very nice. He -finds a blank note book in my trunk. “You aren’t supposed to have -this,” he says. And there is a package of business correspondence. -“Did you tell him out there about these letters? Well, you needn’t. -And I won’t.” At the suitcase with the magic seals he gives only one -glance. To his superior officer, when we return, the corporal reports: -“Everything’s quite all right. Stuff’s stamped all over with the seal -of the War Office.” - -The lieutenant looks at his watch. “I had breakfast at seven. It’s now -one o’clock. That’s lunch time.” - -“Don’t let me detain you,” I suggest pleasantly. He shakes his head. -“I’ve got to put this job through.” - -I am this job. But the lieutenant has smiled. The conversation eases -up. “Pretty good suffrage data down at the Houses of Parliament,” he -himself suggests. “Do you know, I’m almost willing now that women -should vote. I didn’t used to be. But the war has changed my mind.” - -“By the way,” he asked suddenly, “you’re not mixed up with any of those -militants, are you?” I explain that I am not a suffragette, just a -plain suffragist. “Because I think those militants ought to be shot,” -he adds. I can only bite my tongue. Has the lieutenant no sense of -humour? No militant in Holloway Jail was ever more militant than he is -with his sword and pistol at this moment. - -“There’s a question I’d like to ask,” he goes on. “In your country -where women have the franchise, do you find that they all vote alike?” -“No more than all the men,” I answer. “Then that’s all right,” he says -in a relieved tone. “I’ve been afraid that if we let women vote, they -might all vote against war.” - - -SHALL WE GO DOWN OR ACROSS? - -“You really aren’t a militant, are you?” he says again, thoughtfully. -“Well, I’ll let you go.” So that’s my last steel line. - -The boat begins to move in the Mersey. And the ship’s siren sounds -shrilly. It is the summons to shipwreck drill. We assemble quickly in -the lounge on the top deck, every one wearing a life-preserver. At a -second call of the siren, we file out following the captain’s lead, to -stand by our boats in which the crew are already clambering to their -oars. - -So now we know how for the moment of disaster. The whole steamship -waits for it. This is a weird voyage that we begin. Mine-sweepers -out there ahead of us are cleaning up the seas. A Scandinavian boat -has just been sowing mines all over the water. The _Baltic_, here -beside us, poked her nose out yesterday, scented danger and returned -to the river. We wait now in the Mersey twenty-four hours before the -mysterious signal is given that it is the propitious moment for our -boat to get away. We steal softly to sea under cover of a dense fog -and a white snow-storm. The sea-gulls are screaming shrilly above us -like birds of prey. And we who look into each other’s eyes are facing -we know not whither, it may be America or the Farthest Country of all. - -Three men pace the wind-swept captain’s bridge, scanning the horizon, -and there are always two clinging in the crow’s nest in the icy gale. -This boat is manned by a pedigreed crew. From the captain to the last -cabin-boy, everybody has been torpedoed at least once. The Marconi -operator never smiles. He sits at his instrument with a grey, drawn -look about his young boyish mouth. He was on the _Lusitania_ when she -went down. He was the last man off the _Laconia_ the other day. The -wrinkled suit he’s wearing is the one they picked him up in out of the -sea. - -For two days out, we have the little destroyers with us, and then we -are left to our luck and the gun in front and the watching men aloft. -The lifeboats are always swung out on their davits for the siren’s -sudden call. The doors of the upper deck stand open, waiting beside -each a preparedness exhibit, boxes of biscuit, flasks of brandy, and a -pile of blankets we are to seize as we run. We two women have filled -the pockets of our steamer-coats with safety-pins, hairpins and a comb, -first aid that no one remembers to bring when they pick you up from the -open boat. My fellow traveller is huddling very close to her six-foot -husband, to be tucked safely under his arm at the emergency moment. It -is good that we are having rough weather. When the waves are tossing -high, the periscopes may not find us. - -We are sixteen people who wander like disembodied spirits from the gay -days of old through these great empty rooms that once rang with the -joy of hundreds of tourists on their pleasure-jaunts over the world. -There are no games. There is no dancing. There is no band. There are no -steamerchairs on deck. At sundown we are closed in tight behind iron -shutters. No one may so much as light a cigaret outside. - -In the ghastly silence of the days that pass, there is only the strain -and quiver of the ship, and the solemn boom, boom of the sea. Death -is so near that it seems fitting the glad activities of life should -cease, as when a corpse is laid out in the front room of a house. For -a while there is a tendency to whisper, as if we were at a funeral, or -as if, perchance, the Germans in the sea could hear. But soon we find -ourselves functioning quite normally. Not until the sixth day out, -it is true, does any one venture to take a bath. You don’t want to -be rushed like that, you know, to your drowning. But we are sleeping -regularly at night. We eat bacon and eggs for breakfast as usual. We -are pleased when there is turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner. One -does not maintain an agony of suspense forever. For most of us, I think -it began to end when we had committed ourselves to the decision of -this voyage. After that, the issue rests with God or with destiny, -according to one’s religion. - -There is no attempt at dressing for dinner on the _Carmania_. Evening -dress and all the time dress is life-preservers. We do not take them -off even at night for a while. We sleep in them. With the new styles, -of which there are many, you can. Mine is a garment that buttons up -exactly like a man’s vest. Next to the lining is a padded filling, an -Indian vegetable matter that will keep one afloat like cork. To-day one -desires the latest modern devices against death. A life-preserver costs -anywhere from five to fifteen dollars. You carry yours with you as you -do your toothbrush and your steamer-rug. - -Time ticks off the minutes to life or to death to-morrow. We walk -the decks and scan a nearly deserted ocean. Only twice do we sight a -steamship on the horizon. At table we discuss as one does usually, oh, -immortality and Christian Science and woman suffrage. The Englishman -says, “Votes for women are really impossible, don’t you know. Why, if -the British women had voted twelve years ago, there might not have been -any battleships in 1914. And then where would England have been to-day?” - -“But if the German women too had voted twelve years ago, have you -thought how much happier the world might be to-day?” I ask. The -Englishman does not see the point but the American at my left says, -“Guess you handed him one that time.” - -On April sixth the _Cunard Bulletin_, the wireless newspaper, is -laid beside our plates at breakfast with the announcement that’s -thrilled around a world, “The United States has declared for war.” The -Englishman next me says, “That must be a great relief for you.” And I -cannot answer for the choking in my throat. My country, oh, my country, -too, at the gates of hell to go in regiment by regiment! - -On Sunday the English clergyman reads the service including the phrases -in brackets: “God save the King (and the President of the United -States). Vanquish their enemies and preserve them in felicity.” Down -beneath the sea the Germans in their submarines too are praying like -that to the same God. But one hopes, oh, one earnestly hopes, that God -will not hear them. - -After the sixth day out, we have probably escaped the submarines. The -American men are no longer kindly asking me in anxious tone, “You’re -not nervous, are you?” On the eighth day they get out the shuffleboard. -Two mornings later when we awake, the sea is a beautiful blue, all -dimpling with sparkling points of golden light. It is real New York -sunlight again! The captain comes down from the pilot house smiling: -“Well, we got away this time,” he says. - -The Statue of Liberty is rising on the horizon. The Manhattan sky-line -etches itself against the heavens. Do you know, I’d rather be a -door-keeper here at Ellis Island, than a lady-in-waiting anywhere in -Europe. The _Carmania_ warps into dock in sight of the Metropolitan -Tower. Was Fourteenth Street ever cheap, common, sordid? As my -taxicab rolls across town, see how beautiful, oh, see how beautiful -is Fourteenth street, a little landscape cross-section right out of -Paradise! Nobody here is blinded, nobody maimed, nobody in crêpe, -nobody broken-hearted—yet. I have escaped from a nightmare of the -Middle Ages. I lift my face to the sunlight again. - -I know I am tired, terribly tired of doing difficult things and saving -my life from day to day. But I have not realised how near collapse I -am until I drop in a chair before the Editor’s deck in the office of -the _Pictorial Review_. I, who have been so crazy to get to the country -where there is still free speech, that I had insanely hoped to stand in -Broadway and shout, have suddenly lost my voice. I can only report in a -whisper! - -My chief looks at me in concern. “For God’s sake, girl,” he says, “go -somewhere and go to bed!” - - - - -CHAPTER III - -HER COUNTRY’S CALL - - -One Thousand Women Wanted! You may read it on a great canvas sign -that stretches across an industrial establishment in lower Manhattan. -The owner of this factory who put it there, only knows that it is an -advertisement for labour of which he finds himself suddenly in need. -But he has all unwittingly really written a proclamation that is a sign -of the times. - -Across the Atlantic I studied that proclamation in Old World cities. -Women Wanted! Women Wanted! The capitals of Europe have been for four -years placarded with the sign. And now we in America are writing it on -our sky line. All over the world see it on the street-car barns as on -the colleges. It is hung above the factories and the coal mines, the -halls of government and the farm-yards and the arsenals and even the -War Office. Everywhere from the fireside to the firing line, country -after country has taken up the call. Now it has become the insistent -chorus of civilisation: Women Wanted! Women Wanted! - -But yesterday the great war was a phenomenon to which we in America -thrilled only as its percussions reverberated around the world. Now -our own soldiers are marching down Main Street. But their uniforms -still are new. Wait. Soon here too one shall choke with that sob in the -throat. Oh, I am walking again in the garden of the Tuileries on a day -when I had seen war without the flags flying and the bands playing. It -was dead men and disabled men and hospitals full and insane asylums -full and cemeteries full. “You have to remember,” said a voice at my -side, “that all freedoms since the world began have had to be fought -for. They still have to be.” - -So I repeat it now for you, the women of America, resolutely to -remember. And get our your Robert Brownings! Read it over and over -again, “God’s in his heaven.” For there are going to be days when it -will seem that God has quite gone away. Still He hasn’t. Suddenly in -a lifting of the war clouds above the blackest battle smoke, we shall -see again His face as a flashing glimpse of some new freedom lights for -an instant the darkened heavens above the globe of the world. Already -there has been a Russian revolution which may portend the end of a -German monarchy. In England a new democracy has buckled on the sword of -a dead aristocracy. And a great Commoner is at the helm of state. But -with all the freedoms they are winning, there is one for which not the -most decorated general has any idea he’s fighting. I am not sure but -it is the greatest freedom of all: when woman wins the race wins. The -new democracy for which a world has taken up arms, for the first time -since the history of civilisation began, is going to be real democracy. -There is a light that is breaking high behind all the battle lines! -Look! There on the horizon in those letters of blood that promise of -the newest freedom of all. When it is finished—the awful throes of this -red agony in which a world is being reborn—there is going to be a place -in the Sun for women. - -Listen, hear the call, Women Wanted! Women Wanted! Last Spring the -Government pitched a khaki colored tent in your town on the vacant lot -just beyond the post office, say. How many men have enlisted there? -Perhaps there are seventy-five who have gone from the factory across -the creek, and the receiving teller at the First National Bank, and the -new principal of the High School where the children were getting along -so well, and the doctor that everybody had because they liked him so -much. - -And, oh, last week at dinner your own husband had but just finished -carving when he looked across the table and said: “Dear, I can’t stand -it any longer. I’m going to get into this fight to make the world -right.” You know how your face went white and your heart for an instant -stopped beating. But what I don’t believe you do know is that you are -at this moment getting ready to play your part in one of the most -tremendous epochs of the world. It is not only Liège and the Marne -and Somme, and Haig and Joffre and Pétain and Pershing who are making -history to-day. Keokuk, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Mich., and Little Falls, -N. Y., are too—and you and the woman who lives next door! - - -THE NEW WOMAN MOVEMENT - -Every man who enlists at that tent near the post office is going to -leave a job somewhere whether it’s at the factory or the doctor’s -office or the school teacher’s desk, or whether it’s your husband. That -job will have to be taken by a woman. It’s what happened in Europe. -It’s what now we may see happen here. A great many women will have -a wage envelope who never had it before. That may mean affluence to -a housefull of daughters. One, two, three, four wage envelopes in a -family where father’s used to be the only one. You even may have to -go out to earn enough to support yourself and the babies. Yes, I know -your husband’s army pay and the income from investments carefully -accumulated through the savings of your married life, will help quite -a little. But with the ever rising war cost of living, it may not be -enough. It hasn’t been for thousands of homes in Europe. And eventually -you too may go to work as other women have. It’s very strange, is it -not, for you of all women who have always believed that woman’s place -was the home. And you may even have been an “anti,” a most earnest -advocate of an ancient régime against which whole societies and -associations of what yesterday were called “advanced” women organised -their “suffrage” protests. - -To-day no one any longer has to believe what is woman’s place. No -woman even has anything to say about it. Read everywhere the signs: -Women Wanted! Here in New York we are seeing shipload after shipload of -men going out to sea in khaki. We don’t know how many boat loads like -that will go down the bay. But for an army of every million American -men in Europe, there must be mobilised another million women to take -their places behind the lines here 3,000 miles away from the guns, to -carry on the auxiliary operations without which the armies in the field -could not exist. - -In the department store where you shopped to-day you noticed an -elevator girl had arrived, where the operator always before has been -a boy! Outside the window of my country house here as I write, off -on that field on the hillside a woman is working, who never worked -there before. At Lexington, Mass., I read in my morning paper, the -Rev. Christopher Walter Collier has gone to the front in France and -his wife has been unanimously elected by the congregation to fill the -pulpit during his absence. Sometimes women by the hundred step into -new vacancies. The Æolian Company is advertising for women as piano -salesmen and has established a special school for their instruction. A -Chicago manufacturing plant has hung out over its employment gate the -announcement, “Man’s work, man’s pay for all women who can qualify,” -and within a week two hundred women were at work. The Pennsylvania -railroad, which has rigidly opposed the employment of women on its -office staffs, in June, 1917, announced a change of policy and took on -in its various departments five hundred women and girls. The Municipal -Service Commission in New York last fall was holding its first -examination to admit women to the position of junior draughtsmen in the -city’s employ. The Civil Service Commission at Washington, preparing to -release every possible man from government positions for war service, -had compiled a list of 10,000 women eligible for clerical work in -government departments. - -Like that it is happening all about us. This is the new woman movement. -And you’re in it. We all are. I know: you may never have carried a -suffrage banner or marched in a suffrage procession or so much as -addressed a suffrage campaign envelope. But you’re “moving” to-day just -the same if you’ve only so much as rolled a Red Cross bandage or signed -a Food Administration pledge offered you by the women’s committee of -the Council of National Defence. All the women of the world are moving. - -“Suffrage _de la morte_,” a Senator on the Seine has termed the vote -offered the French feminists in the form of a proposition that every -man dying on the field of battle may transfer his ballot to a woman -whom he shall designate. And the French women have drawn back in -horror, exclaiming: “We don’t want a dead man’s vote. We want only our -own vote.” Nevertheless it is something like this which is occurring. - -And we may shudder, but we may not draw back. It is by way of the -_place de la morte_, that women are moving inexorably to-day into -industry and commerce and the professions, on to strange new destinies -that shall not be denied. - -There on the firing line a bullet whizzes straight to the mark. A man -drops dead in the trenches. Some wife’s husband, some girl’s sweetheart -who before he was a soldier was a wage earner, never will be more. Back -home another woman who had been temporarily enrolled in the ranks of -industry, steps forward, enlisted for life in the army of labour. - -Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the feminists have asked. -But this is not our woman movement. This is His woman movement, who -moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. We may not know. And we -do not understand. But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were -in the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way that is opening -for women throughout the world. It is westward to us that this star of -opportunity has taken its course directly from above the battlefields -of Europe. - - -A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY LOOKS ON - -Women Wanted! Women Wanted! I am hearing it again over there. Outside -the windows of my London hotel in Piccadilly, a shaft of sharp white -light played against the blackness of the London sky. Down these beams -that searched the night for enemy Zeppelins, a woman’s figure softly -moved. And as I looked, the close drawn curtains of my room, it -seemed, parted and she stepped lightly across the window sill. She was -gowned in a quaint, old-time costume. “They’re not wearing them to-day,” -I smiled. - -She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with the broad arrows of -Holloway jail. There were women, you know, who suffered and died in -that prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to be the way of the -cross for the woman’s cause. - -“You ought to see the new styles,” I said. “Governments are getting out -so many new decorations for women.” - -“Tell me,” she answered. “Up in heaven we have heard that it is so. And -I have come to see.” - -So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette and I, to look on -the Great Push of the new woman movement that is swinging down the -twentieth century in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of the road -and all the gates ahead are open wide. No ukase of parliament or king -halts it. No church dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises -it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans do not mob it. No, -indeed! The applauding populace that’s crying “_Place aux dames_” would -not tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I don’t think -there’s any one left in the world who would want to so much as pull out -a hairpin of this triumphant processional. - -You see, it’s so very different from the woman movement of yesterday. -That was the crusade of the pioneers who gave their lives in the -struggling service of an unpopular ideal. Who wanted feminists free to -find themselves? Even women themselves came haltingly as recruits. But -this is a pageant, with Everywoman crowding for place at her country’s -call. And who would not adore to be a patriot? It is with flying -colors, albeit to the solemn measures of a Dead March that the new -columns are coming on. - -It is the Woman Movement against which all the parliaments of men shall -never again prevail. Majestically, with sure and rhythmic tread, it is -moving, not under its own power of propaganda, but propelled by fearful -cosmic forces. At the compulsion of a sublime destiny accelerated under -the ægis of a war office press bureau, suffragists pro and anti alike -are gathered in. Theirs no longer to reason why. For see, they are -keeping step, always keeping step with the armies at the front! - -There is a new offensive on the Somme. There is a defeat at the Yser, a -victory at Verdun or Marne. The dead men lie deep in the trenches! The -war office combs out new regiments to face the hell-fire of shrapnel -and the woman movement in all nations joins up new recruits to fill the -vacant places from which the men, about to die, are steadily enlisted. -See the sign of the times. I point it out to My Suffragette: “Women -Wanted.” With each year of war the demand becomes more insistent. Women -Wanted! Women Wanted! - -“But they didn’t used to be,” she gasps in amazement. - -And of course, I too remember when the world was barricaded against -everywhere a woman wanted to go beyond the dishpan and the wash tub and -the nursery. It all seems now such a long while ago. - -“Dear old-fashioned girl,” I reply, “women no longer have to smash a -way anywhere. They’ll even be sending after you if you don’t come.” - -When the militants of England signed with their government the truce -which abrogated for the period of the war the Cat and Mouse Act with -which they had been pursued, it was the formal announcement to the -world of the cessation of suffrage activities while the nations settled -other issues. From Berlin to Paris and London, feminists acquiesced in -the decision arrived at in Kingsway. It seemed indeed that the woman’s -cause was going to wait. But is it not written: “Whoso loseth his -life,” etc., “shall find it.” - -Women Wanted! Women Wanted! “Listen,” I say to the Soul of a -Suffragette, as we stand in the Strand. “You hear it? And it’s like -that in the Avenue de l’Opéra and in Unter den Linden and in Petrograd -and now in Broadway. To every woman, it is her country’s call to -service.” - -I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the -door of the Doll’s House opened. She who stood at the threshold where -the tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to lines of -gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then the clock on her mantel -ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries that only God himself -had planned. The force primeval that had held her in bondage, this it -was that should set her free. As straight as ever she went before to -the altar and the cook stove and the cradle, she stepped out now into -the wide wide world, the woman behind the man behind the gun. - -“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “not all the political economists from -John Stuart Mill to Ellen Key could have accomplished it. Not even -your spectacular martyrdom was able to achieve it. But now it is done. -For lo, the password the feminists have sought, is found. And it is -Love—not logic!” - -There are, the statisticians tell us, more than twenty million men -numbered among the embattled hosts out there at the front where the -future of the human race is being fought for. Modern warfare has most -terrible engines of destruction. But with all of these at command, -there is not a brigade of soldiers that could stand against their foes -without the aid of the women who in the last analysis are holding the -line. - -Who is it that is feeding and clothing and nursing the greatest armies -of history? See that soldier in the trenches? A woman raised the grain -for the bread, a woman is tending the flocks that provided the meat for -his rations to-day. A woman made the boots and the uniform in which he -stands. A woman made the shells with which his gun is loaded. A woman -will nurse him when he’s wounded. A woman’s ambulance may even pick him -up on the battlefield. A woman surgeon may perform the operation to -save his life. And somewhere back home a woman holds the job he had to -leave behind. There is no task to which women have not turned to-day to -carry on civilisation. For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned -men to their most ancient occupation—and women to every other. - -“All the suffrage flags are furled?” questions My Suffragette -incredulously, as we pass through the streets where once her banners -waved most militantly. “Gone with your broad arrows of yesterday,” I -affirm. “And you should see our modern styles.” - - -NEW COSTUMES FOR NEW WOMEN - -When women stood at the threshold listening breathlessly that August -day, there was one costume ready and laid out by the nations for their -wear in every land. Coronets and shimmering ball gowns, cap and gown in -university corridors and plain little home made dresses in rose bowered -cottages were alike exchanged for the new uniform and insignia. And the -woman who set the sign of the red cross in the centre of her forehead -appeared in her white gown and her flowing white head dress all over -Europe as instantaneously as a new skirt ever flashed out in the pages -of a fashion magazine. To her, every country called as naturally, as -spontaneously as a hurt child might turn to its mother. She it is -who has worn the red cross to her transfiguration in this new Woman -Movement with one of the largest detachments in hospital service. See -her on the sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Dardanelles, -insisting on “wounded soldiers first” as she passes her charges to -safety, and waiting behind herself goes quietly under the water. And -with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before -the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium -who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been -breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her -country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried -to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter -began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman’s place was -going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. Even as the troops -buckled on sword and pistol and the departing regiments began to move, -it was made sure that she should be waiting for them on their return. - -In Germany in the first month of the war, no less than 70,000 women of -the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein, trained in first aid to the injured, -had arrived at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for Red -Cross service. - -I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood at Cecilienhaus in -Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus with its crèche and its maternity care and -its folks kitchens and its workingmen’s gardens, was devoted to the -welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein of the nation -was engaged. Frau Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all these -social activities. Then she looked away down the Berliner Strasse and -said: “But when war comes—” Had I heard aright? That you know was in -May, 1914. But she repeated: “When war comes we are going to be able -to take care of seventy-five soldiers in this dining-room and in that -maternity ward we shall be able to have beds for a dozen officers.” -All over Germany the half million women of the Vaterlandischer -Frauenverein planning like that, “when war comes,” had taken a first -aid nurse’s training course. They were as ready for mobilisation as -were their men. France, viewing with alarm these preparations across -the border, had her women also in training. The Association des Dames -Français, the Union des Femmes de France and the Société Secours aux -Blessés Militaires, at once put on the Red Cross uniform and brought -to their country’s service 59,500 nurses. In England the Voluntary -Aid Detachments of the Red Cross had 60,000 members ready to serve -under the 3,000 trained nurses who were registered for duty within a -fortnight of the outbreak of war. Similarly every country engaged in -the conflict, taking inventory of its resources, eagerly accepted the -services of the war nurse. The same policy of state actuated every -nation as was expressed by the Italian Minister of War who announced: -“By utilising the services of women to replace men in the military -hospitals, we shall release 20,000 soldiers for active duty at the -front.” - -The Red Cross of service to the soldier is the most conspicuous -decoration worn by women in all warring countries. Everywhere you -meet the nurses’ uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was -the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Charing Cross station -where nightly under cover of the soft darkness the procession of grim -grey motor ambulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are coming -like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, at the Potsdam station in -Berlin, and up in Petrograd. In each ambulance between the tiers of -stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the figure of a woman -silhouetted faintly against the dim light of the railroad station as -she bends to smooth a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a -cigarette for a maimed man who never can do that least service for -himself again. She may be a peeress of the realm, or she may be a -militant on parole granted the amnesty of her government that needs her -more these days for saving life than for serving jail sentence. But -look, and you shall see the Red Cross on her forehead! - -The grey ambulances like this coming from the railroad stations long -ago in every land filled up the regular military hospitals through -which the patients are passed by the thousands every month. And other -women taking the Red Cross set it above the doorways of historic -mansions opened to receive the wounded. In Italy, Queen Margherita and -Queen Elena gave their royal residences. In Paris Baroness Rothschild -has made her beautiful house with its great garden behind a high yellow -wall a Hôpital Militaire Auxiliaire. And many private residences -like this are among the eight hundred hospitals in France which are -being operated under the direction of one woman’s organisation alone, -the Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires. - -[Illustration: - - MRS. H. J. TENNANT - - Director of the Woman’s Department of National Service in England. - Like this in all lands, women have been called to government councils. -] - -Here in London, in Piccadilly, at Devonshire House, desks and filing -cabinets fill the rooms once gay with social functions. And hospital -messengers go and come up and down the marvellous gold and crystal -staircase. The Duchess of Devonshire has turned over the great -mansion as the official headquarters for the Red Cross. Nearby, in -Mayfair, Madame Moravieff, whose husband is connected with the Russian -diplomatic service, is serving as commandant for the hospital she has -opened for English soldiers. Lady Londonderry’s house in Park Lane is a -hospital. By the end of the first year of war, like this, no less than -850 private residences in England had been transformed into Voluntary -Aid Detachment Red Cross Hospitals. - -In hospital financiering the American woman in Europe has led all the -rest. Margaret Cox Benet, the wife of Lawrence V. Benet in Paris, -braved the perils of the Atlantic crossing to appeal to America for -contributions to the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly. It is -equalled by only one other war hospital in Europe, the splendidly -equipped hospital of the American women at Paignton, England, initiated -by Lady Arthur Paget, formerly Mary Paran Stevens of New York. Lady -Paget, who is president of the American Women’s War Relief Fund, has -just rounded out the first million dollars of the fund which she has -personally raised for war work. - -You see how these also serve who are doing the executive and -organisation work that makes it possible for the woman in the front -lines to wear her red cross even to her transfiguration. Accelerated -by the activities of women like these behind the lines, the Red Cross -battalions are leading the Great Push of the new woman movement. The -woman in the nurse’s uniform is not exciting the most comment, however. -It is by reason of her numbers, the thousands and thousands of her that -she commands the most attention. But she was really expected. - - -WHERE YOU FIND THE MILITANTS TO-DAY - -For the amazing figure that has emerged by magic directly out of the -battle smoke of this war, see the woman in khaki! Khaki, I explain to -My Suffragette, is one of the most popular of government offerings for -women’s wear. The material has been found most serviceable in a war -zone either to die in or to live in, while you save others from dying. -It is sometimes varied with woollen cloth preferred for warmth. But the -essential features of the costume are preserved: the short skirt, the -leather leggings, the military hat and the shoulder straps with the -insignia of special service. When governments have called for unusual -duty that is difficult or disagreeable or dangerous, it is the woman -in khaki who responds: “Take me. I am here.” She will, in fact, do -anything that there’s no one else to do. - -Stick-at-nothings, the London newspapers have nicknamed the women’s -Reserve Ambulance Corps of 400 women who wear a khaki uniform with -a green cross armlet. With white tunics over these khaki suits, a -detachment of green cross girls at Peel House, the soldiers’ club in -Westminster, does house-maid duty from seven in the morning until -eight at night. They are making beds and waiting on table, these young -women, who, many of them, in stately English homes have all their lives -been served by butlers and footmen. I saw a Green Cross girl at the -military headquarters of the corps in Piccadilly making to Commandant -Mabel Beatty her report of another phase of war work. She was such a -young thing, I should say perhaps eighteen, and delicately bred. I know -I noticed the slender aristocratic hand that she lifted to her hat -in salute to her superior officer: “I have,” she said, “this morning -burned three amputated arms, two legs and a section of a jaw bone. And -I have carried my end of five heavy coffins to the dead wagon.” That’s -all in her day’s work. She’s a hospital orderly. And it’s one of the -things an orderly is for, to dispose of the by-products of a great war -hospital. - -See also, these ambulances that bring the wounded from Charing Cross. -They are “manned” by a woman outside as well as the nurse within. -There is a girl at the wheel in the driver’s seat. The Motor Transport -Section of the Green Cross Society accomplishes an average weekly -mileage of 2,000 miles transporting wounded and munitions. Like this -they respond for any service to which the exigencies of war may call. -There was the time of the first serious Zeppelin raid on London when -amid the crash of falling bombs and the horror of fire flaming suddenly -in the darkness, the shrieks of the maimed and dying filled the night -with terror and the populace seemed to stand frozen to inaction at the -scene about them. Right up to the centre of the worst carnage rolled -a Green Cross ambulance from which leaped out eight khaki clad women. -They were, mind you, women of the carefully sheltered class, who sit in -dinner gowns under soft candle light in beautifully appointed English -houses. And they never before in all their lives had witnessed an evil -sight. But they set to work promptly by the side of the police to pick -up the dead and the dying, putting the highway to order as calmly as -they might have gone about adjusting the curtains and the pillows to -set a drawing-room to rights. “Thanks,” said the police, when sometime -later an ambulance arrived from the nearest headquarters, “the ladies -have done this job.” Since then the Woman’s Reserve Ambulance Corps is -officially attached to the “D” Division of the Metropolitan Police for -air raid relief. - -That girl in khaki who is serving as a hospital orderly, you notice, -wears shoulder straps of blue. She comes from the great military -hospital in High Holborn that is staffed entirely by women. We may walk -through the wards there where we shall see many of her. Above her in -authority are women with shoulder straps of red. These are they who -wear the surgeon’s white tunic in the operating theatre, who issue the -physician’s orders at the patient’s bedside. Now the door at the end -of the ward opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands there, whom -every wounded patient able to lift his right arm, salutes as if his -own military commander had appeared. “But it’s my doctor, my doctor,” -exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday. - -And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in fact the unofficial -post of first aid physician to the Women’s Social and Political Union. -Frequently she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to attend -some militant picked up cut and bleeding from the missiles of the -mobs or released faint and dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor -herself did her bit in the old days. The Government had her in Holloway -jail for six weeks. Well, to-day they have her as surgeon in command of -this war hospital with the rank of major. She’s so well fitted for the -place, you see, by her earlier experience. - -But, visibly agitated, My Suffragette again plucks at my sleeve: “Are -you quite sure,” she asks, “that Scotland Yard won’t take her?” - -Poor dear lady of yesterday. They’re not doing that to-day. Your woman -movement was militant against the Government. This woman movement is -militant with the Government. There’s all the difference in the world. -And the woman in khaki has found it. Militancy of the popular kind -has come to be most exalted in woman. Besides a woman doctor is too -valuable in these days to be interfered with. She is no longer sent -as a missionary physician to the heathen or limited to a practice -exclusively among women and children. She is good enough for anywhere. -One issue of the _Lancet_ advertises: “Women doctors wanted for forty -municipal appointments.” Women doctors wanted, is the call of every -country. This military hospital in London of which Dr. Louisa Garrett -Anderson, major, is in command, is entirely staffed with women. Paris -has its war hospital with Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangin, major in command. -Dr. Clelia Lollini, sub-lieutenant, is operating surgeon at a war -hospital in Venice. In Russia one of the most celebrated war doctors is -the Princess Gurdrovitz, surgeon in charge of the Imperial Hospital at -Tsarkoe Selo. - -Oh, the khaki costume I think we may say is admired of every war -office. It has found a vogue among all the allies. It has appeared the -past year in America, where it has been most recently adopted. But the -model for whom it was particularly made to measure was the militant -suffragette of England. Nearly everybody who used to be in Holloway -jail is wearing it. It’s the best fit that any of them find to-day in -the shop windows of government styles. And it’s so well adapted to -women to whom all early Victorian qualities are as foreign as hoop -skirts. You would not expect one inured to hardship by alternate -periods of starvation and forcible feeding to be either a fearsome or -a delicate creature. And the courage that could horsewhip a prime -minister or set off a bomb beneath a bishop’s chair, is just the kind -that every nation’s calling for in these strenuous times. It’s the kind -that up close to the firing line gets mentioned in army orders and -decorated with all crosses of iron and gold and silver. - -You will find the woman who has put on khaki at the front in all the -warring countries. The Duchess of Aosta is doing ambulance work in -Italy. The Countess Elizabeth Shouvaleff of Petrograd commanded her own -hospital train that brought in the wounded. But it is the British woman -in khaki who has gone farthest afield. The National Union’s “Scottish -Women’s Hospitals,” as they are known, are right behind the armies. -Staffed from the surgeons to the ambulance corps entirely by women, -they go out to any part of the war zone where the need is greatest. - -See the latest “unit” that is leaving Paddington Station. The equipment -they are taking with them includes every appliance that will be -required, from a bed to a bandage, and numbers just 1,051 bales and -cases of freight. The entire unit, forty-five women, have had their -hair cut short. For sanitary reasons, is the euphemistic way of -explaining it. For protection against the vermin with which patients -from the trenches will be infested, if you ask for war facts as they -are. Units like this have gone out to settle wherever by army orders a -place has been made for them, in a deserted monastery in France that -they must first scrub and clean, in a refugee barracks in Russia, in a -tent in Serbia where they themselves must dig the drainage trenches. - -Their surgeons have stood at the operating table a week at a stretch -with only an hour or two of sleep each night. Their doctors have -battled with epidemics of typhoid and plague. Their ambulance girls -have brought in the wounded from the battlefield under shell-fire. -Hospitals have been conducted under bombardment with all the patients -carried to the cellar. Hospitals have been captured by the enemy. -Hospitals have been evacuated at command with the patients loaded on -trains or motor cars or bullock wagons for retreat with the army. There -were forty-six British women who shared in the historic retreat of the -Serbian army three hundred miles over the Plain of Kossovo and the -mountains of Albania. Men and cattle perished by the score. But the -women doctors, freezing, starving, sleeping in the fields, struggling -against a blinding blizzard with an amazing physical endurance and a -dauntless courage, all came through to Scutari. Out on the far-flung -frontiers of civilisation, the woman in khaki who has done these things -is memorialised. At Mladanovatz, the Serbians have erected a fountain -with the inscription: “In memory of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and -their founder, Dr. Elsie Inglis.” - - -SUFFRAGISTS LED ALL THE REST - -When the great call, “Women wanted,” first commenced in all lands, -there were those who stood with reluctant feet at the threshold simply -because they did not know how to step out into the new wide world -of opportunity stretching before them. In this crisis it was to the -suffragists that every government turned. Who else should organise? -These women, like My Suffragette, had devoted their lives to assembling -cohorts for a cause! The Assoziazione per la Donna in Italy, as the -Conseil National des Femmes Françaises in France, promptly responded by -offering their office machinery as registration bureaus through which -women could be drafted into service. It was the suffrage association at -Budapest, Hungary, that filled the order from the city government for -five hundred women street sweepers. The Vaterlandischer Frauenverein -assembled 25,000 women in Berlin alone to take the course of training -arranged for _helferinnen_, assistants in all phases of relief work. -But it was in England where the woman movement of yesterday had -reached its highest point in organisation that the woman movement for -to-day was best equipped to start. Britain counted among the nation’s -resources no less than fifty separate suffrage organisations, one of -which alone, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was able -to send out its instructions to over 500 branches! And the mobilisation -of the woman power of a nation was under way on a scale that could have -been witnessed in no other era of the world. - -The woman who has been enlisted in largest numbers in England as -in other lands is the woman who at her country’s call hung up the -housewife’s kitchen apron in plain little cottages to put on a new -uniform with a distinctive feature that has been hitherto conspicuously -missing from women’s clothes. It has a pocket for a pay envelope. -“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “you would not know her at all, now, -would you?” - -She came marching through the streets of London on July 17, 1915, in -one of the most significant detachments mustered for the new woman -movement, 40,000 women carrying banners with the new device: “For -men must fight and women must work.” And industry, in which she was -enlisting, presented her with a new costume. The Ministry of Munitions -in London got out the pattern. Employers of labour throughout the world -are now copying it. There isn’t anything in the chorus more attractive -than the woman who’s walked into the centre of the stage in shop and -factory wearing overall trousers, tunic and cap. Some English factories -have the entire woman force thus uniformed and others have adopted only -the tunic. Here are girl window cleaners with pail and ladder coming -down the Strand wearing the khaki trousers. The girl conductor of the -omnibus that’s just passed has a very short skirt that just meets at -the knees her high leather leggings. The girl lift operators at the -stores in Oxford Street are in smart peg-top trousers. In Germany the -innovation is of course being done by imperial decree, a government -order having put all the railway women in dark grey, wide trousers. In -France the new design is accepted slowly. The girl conductor who swings -at the open door of the Paris Metro with a whistle at her lips, wears -the men employé’s cap but she still clings to her own “_tablier_.” - -That July London procession organised by the suffragists, led in -fact by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, in response to labour’s call, “Women -wanted,” is the last suffrage procession of which the world has heard. -And it is the most important feminist parade that has ever appeared in -any city of the world. For it was a procession marching straight for -the goal of economic independence. It was the vanguard of the moving -procession of women that in every country is still continuously passing -into industry. Germany in the first year of war had a half million -women in one occupation alone, that of making munitions. France has -400,000 “munitionettes.” Great Britain in 1916 had a million women who -had enlisted for the places of men since the war began. In every one of -Europe’s warring countries and now in America, women are being rushed -as rapidly as possible into commerce and industry to release men. In -Germany nearly all the bank clerks are women. The Bank of France alone -in Paris has 700 women clerks. In England women clerks number over -100,000. And the British Government is steadily advertising: Wanted, -30,000 women a week to replace men for the armies. - -“Who works, fights,” Lloyd George has said, in the English Parliament. -English women enlisting for agriculture have been given a government -certificate attesting: “Every woman who helps in agriculture during the -war is as truly serving her country as is the man who is fighting in -trenches or on the sea.” - -“But,” protests the bewildered woman from only the other day, “they -told us that women didn’t know enough to do man’s work, that she wasn’t -strong enough for much of anything beyond light domestic duty like -washing and scrubbing and cooking and raising a family of six or eight -or ten children.” - -“Nothing that anybody ever said about women before August, 1914,” I -answer, “goes to-day. All the discoveries the scientists thought they -had made about her, all the reports the sociologists solemnly filed -over her, all the limitations the educators laid on her and all the -jokes the punsters wrote about her—everything has gone to the scrap-heap -as repudiated as the one-time theory that the earth was square -instead of round. Everything they said she wasn’t and she couldn’t and -she didn’t, she now is and she can and she does.” - - -IT IS UNIVERSAL SERVICE - -Even women who do not need to work for pay are working without it and -adding to the demonstration of what women can do. See the colonel’s -lady taking the place of Julie O’Grady at the lathe for week-end work -in the munition factories to release the regular worker for one day’s -rest in seven. Lady Lawrence in a white tunic and wearing a diamond -wrist watch is in charge of the canteen at the Woolwich Arsenal, -supervising the serving of kippers and toast at the tea hour for the -2,000 women employés. Lady Sybil Grant, Lord Rosebery’s daughter, is -the official photographer to the Royal Naval Air Service at Roehampton. -The Countess of Limerick, assisted by fifty women of title, among them -Lady Randolph Churchill, is running the Soldiers’ Free Refreshment -Buffet at the London Bridge Station. The Marchioness of Londonderry, -directing the Military Cookery Section of the Women’s Legion, has given -to her nation the woman army cook who has recently replaced 5,000 -men. Women of world-wide fame have cheerfully turned to the task that -called. Beatrice Harraden, celebrated author of “Ships That Pass in -the Night,” is in the uniform of an orderly at the Endell Street War -Hospital, where she has done a unique service in organising the first -hospital library for the patients. May Sinclair, whose recent book, -“The Three Sisters,” is one of the great contributions to feminist -literature, is enrolled as a worker at the Kensington War Hospital -Supply Department. She has invented the machine used there to turn out -“swabs” seven times faster than formerly they were made by hand. - -There is the greatest diversity in war service. One of the first calls -answered by the suffragists was for an emergency gang of 300 women -from the metropolis to supervise the baling of hay for the army. Lloyd -George has been supplied with a woman secretary and a woman chauffeur, -the latter a girl who was a celebrated hunger striker before the -war. In the royal dockyards and naval establishments there are 7,000 -women employed. Through the Woman’s National Land Service Corps 5,000 -university and other women of education have been recruited to serve as -forewomen of detachments of women farm labourers. The army last spring -was asking for 6,000 women at the War Office to assist in connection -with the work of the Royal Flying Corps. Oh, the list of what women are -doing to-day is as indefinitely long as everything that there is to be -done. - -And the woman movement sweeps on directly toward the gates of -government. See the woman war councillor who recently arrived in 1916. -She came into view first in Germany, where Frau Kommerzienrat Hedwig -Heyl of Berlin is a figure almost as important as is the Imperial -Chancellor. The daughter of the founder of the North German Lloyd Line, -herself the president of the Berlin Lyceum Club and the manager of -the Heyl Chemical Works, in which she succeeded her late husband as -president, Frau Heyl knows something of organisation. And she it is -who has been responsible more than any other of the Kaiser’s advisers -for the conservation of the food supply which keeps the German armies -strong against a world of its opponents. The second day after war was -declared, in conference with the Minister of the Interior, she had -formulated the plan that by night the Government had telegraphed to -every part of Germany: there was formed the Nationaler Frauendien -to control all of the activities of women during the war. She was -placed at the head of the Central Commission. It was the Nationaler -Frauendien that made the suggestions which the Government adopted for -the conservation of the food supply. And it was they who were entrusted -with organising the food supplies of the nation and educating the -women in their use to the point of highest efficiency. As a personal -contribution to this end, Frau Heyl has published a War Cook Book, -arranged an exhibit of substitute foods for war use, and has turned -one section of her chemical works into a food factory from which she -supplies the government with 6,000 pounds of tinned meat a day for the -army. - -After all, who are the real food controllers of a nation? Could a -minister of finance, for instance, bring up a family on, say, 20 -shillings a week? Yet there were women in every nation doing that -before they achieved fame on the firing line and in the making -of munitions. Last spring, as the food question became a gravely -determining factor in the war, it began to be more and more apparent -that the feminine mind trained to think in terms of domestic economy, -might have something of value to contribute to questions of state. Why -let Germany monopolise this particular form of efficiency? And England -in 1917 called to its Ministry of Food two women, Mrs. Pember Reeves, -one of its radical suffragists, and Mrs. C. S. Peel, the editor of a -woman’s magazine and a cook book. - -About the same time each of the warring nations decided that the -mobilised women forces everywhere could be most efficiently directed -by women. Germany appointed as an attaché for each of the six army -commands throughout the empire a woman who is to serve as “Directress -of the Division for Women’s Service.” From Dr. Alice Salomon in the -Berlin-Potsdam district to Fraulein Dr. Gertrude Wolf in the Bavarian -War Bureau, each of these new appointees is a feminist leader from that -woman movement of yesterday. In France the enrolment of French women -is under the direction of Mme. Emile Boutroux and Mme. Emile Borel. -In England the highest appointment for a woman since the war is the -calling of Mrs. H. J. Tennant, the prominent suffragist, to be Director -of the Woman’s Department of National Service. America, preparing to -enter the great conflict in the spring of 1917, at the very outset -organised a Woman’s Division of the National Defence Council and called -to its command Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the great suffrage leader. - -It’s a long way back to the Doll’s House, isn’t it, with woman’s place -to-day in the workshop and the factory, the war hospital, the war zone -and the war office? And now they are calling women to the electorate. -Russia has spoken, England has spoken. America is making ready. Doesn’t -Mr. Kipling want to revise his verses: “When man gathers with his -fellow braves for council, he does not have a place for her”? - -It really has ceased to be necessary for woman any longer to plead her -cause. Every government’s doing it for her. The woman movement now is -both called and chosen. And the British Government is the most active -feminist advocate of all. The greatest brief for the woman’s cause that -ever was arranged is a handsome volume on “Women’s War Work,” issued by -the British War Office, as a guide to employers of labour throughout -the United Kingdom. This famous publication lists exactly ninety-six -trades and 1,701 jobs which the Government says women can do just as -well as men, some of them even better. A second publication issued in -London with the approval of the War Office, sets forth in more literary -form “Women’s Work in Wartime,” and is dedicated to “The Women of the -Empire, God save them every one.” - -It was in 1916 that I talked with a German gentleman who is near -enough to the Kaiser to voice the point of view from that part of the -world. “Women from now on are going to have a more important place -in civilisation than they ever have held before,” affirmed Count von -Bernstorff as we sat in his official suite at the Ritz Hotel in New -York. “In the ultimate analysis,” he spoke slowly and impressively, “in -the ultimate analysis,” he repeated, “it is the nation with the best -women that’s going to win this war.” - -“Do you know what I think?” says the Soul of a Suffragette as we stand -before the Great Push. “I think that whoever else wins this war, woman -wins.” - -Her country’s call? Listen: there is a higher overtone—her man’s call. -Is it not the woman behind the man behind the gun who has achieved her -apotheosis? - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -WOMEN WHO WEAR WAR JEWELRY - - -There is a new kind of jewelry that will be coming out soon. We shall -see it probably this season or at least within the next few months. -It will take precedence of all college fraternity pins and suffrage -buttons and society insignia and even of the costliest jewels. For it -will be unique. Since no American woman has ever before worn it. - -As a _Mayflower_ descendant or a Colonial Dame or a Daughter of the -Revolution, you may have proudly pinned on the front of your dress the -badge that establishes your title perhaps to heroic ancestry. In the -gilt cabinet in the front parlour you may even cherish among curios -of the wide, wide world a medal of honour as your choicest family -heirloom. Who was it who won it, grandfather or great-grandfather or -great-great-grandfather? Anyway, it was that soldier lad of brave -uniformed figure whose photograph you will find in the old album that -disappeared from the centre-table something like a generation ago. We -are getting them out from the attics now, the dusty, musty albums, -and turning their pages reverently to look into the pictured eyes of -the long ago. Some one who still recalls it must tell us again this -soldier-boy’s story. Somewhere he did a deed of daring. Somehow he -risked his life for his country. And a grateful government gave him -this, his badge of courage. It’s fine to have in the family, there in -the parlour cabinet. You are proud, are you not, to be of a brave man’s -race? But blood, they say, will always tell. Heroism and daring may be -pulsing in your veins to-day as once in his. - -Have you ever thought how it might be to have your own badge of -courage? Ah, yes, even though you are a woman. No, it is true, there -are no such decorations that have been handed down from grandmother or -great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother. It is not that they did -not deserve them. But their deeds were done too far behind the front -for that recognition. To-day, as it happens, the new woman movement has -advanced right up to the firing line, and it’s different. Every nation -fighting over in Europe is bestowing honours of war on women. There -is no reason to doubt that special acts of gallantry and service on -the part of American women now in action with the hospitals and relief -agencies that have accompanied our troops abroad, shall be similarly -recognised by the War Department. To earn a decoration, you see—not -merely to inherit one—that can be done to-day. - -She was the first war heroine I had ever seen, Eleanor Warrender. Over -in London I gazed at her with bated breath—and to my surprise and -astonishment found her just like other women. - -Among those called to the colours in England in 1914, she is one of -the specially distinguished who have followed the battle flags to -within sight of the trenches, within sound of the guns. And, somehow, -one will inadvertently think of these as some sort of super-woman. -Before this there have been those who did what they could for their -men under arms. There was one woman who risked her life heroically for -British soldiers. And Florence Nightingale’s statue has been set along -with those of great men in a London public square. In this war many -women are risking their lives. They are receiving all the crosses of -iron and silver and gold. And to the lady of the decoration who wears -this war jewelry, it is a souvenir of sights such as women’s eyes have -seldom or never looked on before since the world began. - -I have said that Eleanor Warrender seemed to me just like other women. -And she is at first; other war heroines are. Until you catch the -expression in their eyes, which affords you suddenly, swiftly, the -fleeting glimpse of the soul of a woman who knows. There is that about -all real experience that does not fail to leave its mark. You may get -it in the quality of the voice, in a chance gesture that is merely -the sweep of the hand, or in the subtle emanation of the personality -that we call atmosphere. But wherever else it may register, there are -unveiled moments when you may read it in the eyes of these women who -know—that they have seen such agony and suffering and horror as have -only been approximated before in imaginative writing. The ancient -pagans mentioned in their books that have come down to us, a place -they called Hades, where everything conceivable that was frightful and -awful should happen. The Christians called it Hell. - -But nobody had been there. And there were those in very modern days who -said in their superior wisdom that it could not be, that it did not -exist. Now how are we all confounded! For it is here and now. The Lady -with the Decoration has seen it. Look, I say, in her eyes. - -For that is where you will find out. She does not talk of what she has -been through. - -“My friend Eleanor Warrender,” Lady Randolph Churchill told me, “has -been under shell-fire for three years, nursing at hospitals all along -the front from Furnes to the Vosges Mountains. Sometimes she has spent -days with her wounded in dark cellars where they had to take refuge -from the bombs that came like hail—and the cellars were infested with -rats.” - -Eleanor Warrender, when I saw her, came into the Ladies’ Empire Club at -67 Grosvenor Street, London. - -High-bred, tall, and slender, she wore the severe tailor-made suit -in which you expect an Englishwoman to be attired. In the buttonhole -of her left coat lapel there was a dark silk ribbon striped in a -contrasting colour from which hung a small bronze Maltese cross. It -is the _Croix de Guerre_ bestowed on her by the French Government -for “conspicuous bravery and gallant service at the front.” She -dropped easily on a chintz-covered lounge before the grate fire in -the smoking-room. A club-member caught sight of the ribbon in the -coat lapel. “I say, Eleanor,” she said eagerly, coming over to examine -it. - -Miss Warrender was home on leave. In a few days she would be returning -again to her unit in France. She has been living where one does not -get a bath every day and there are not always clean sheets. One sleeps -on the floor if necessary, and what water there is available sometimes -must be carefully saved for dying men to drink. The Red Cross flag -that floats over the hospital is of no protection whatever. Sometimes -it seems only a menace, as if it were a sign to indicate to the enemy -where they may drop bombs on the most helpless. - -There is a slight soft patter at the window-pane and it isn’t rain. -It’s shrapnel. The warning whistle has just sounded. There is the cry -in the streets—“_Gardez vous!_” The taubes are here. A Zeppelin bomb -explodes on contact, so you seek safety in the cellar, which it may -not reach. But a taube bomb, small and pointed, pierces a floor and -explodes at the lowest level reached. So you may not flee from a taube -bomb to anywhere. You just stay with your wounded and wait. Ah, there -is the explosion which makes the cots here in the ward rock and the -men shake as with palsy and turn pale. But, thank God, this time the -explosion is outside and in the garden. Beyond the window there, what -was a flower-bed three minutes ago is an upturned heap of earth and -stone. They are bringing in now four more patients for whom room must -be made besides these from the battlefield that have been operated on, -twenty of them, since nine o’clock this morning. These four who are now -being laid tenderly on the white cots have two of them had their legs -blown off, and two others are already dying from wounds more mortal. - -Eleanor Warrender a little later closes their eyes in the last sleep. -She has watched beside hundreds of men like that as they have gone out -into the Great Beyond. And just now she walks into the Ladies’ Empire -Club as calmly as if she had but come from a shopping tour in Oxford -Street. Ah, well, but one can suffer just so much, as on a musical -instrument you may strike the highest key and you may strike it again -and again until it flats a little on the ear because you have become -so accustomed to it. But it is the limit. It is the highest key. There -is nothing more beyond, at least. And that is what you feel ultimately -about these women who have come through the experience that leads to -the decoration. It is one in the most constant danger who arrives at -length at the most constant calm. - -[Illustration: - - THE VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY - - Of the old French aristocracy, one of the most conspicuous examples - that the war affords of noblesse oblige in the Red Cross Service. -] - -“I don’t know really why it should be called bravery,” says Eleanor -Warrender’s quiet voice. “You see, a bomb has never dropped on me, so -I have no actual personal experience of what it would be like. Now in -that old convent in Flanders turned into a hospital, Sister Gertrude at -the third cot from where I stood had a leg blown off, and Sister Felice -had lost an arm, and I think it was very brave of them to go right -on nursing in the danger zone afterward. But I—as I have said—no bomb -has ever hit me. And having no experience of what the sensation would -be like, it isn’t particularly brave of me to go about my business -without special attention to a danger of which I have no experience of -pain to remember. As for death,” and Eleanor Warrender looked out in -Grosvenor Street into the yellow grey London fog, “as for death, it is, -after all, only an episode. And what does it matter whether one is here -or there?” - -Eleanor Warrender and others have gone out into the great experience -on the borderland with death from quiet and uneventful lives of peace -such as ours in America up to the present have also been. The call -is coming now to us in pleasant cities and nice little villages all -over the United States, and the time is here when we too are summoned -from the even tenor of our ways because the high white flashing moment -of service is come. Eleanor Warrender was called quite suddenly from -a stately career as an English gentlewoman. She kept house for her -brother, Sir George Warrender, afterward in the war Admiral Warrender. -It was a lovely old country house, High Grove, at Pinnar, in Middlesex -County, of which she was the chatelaine. There had been a delightful -week-end party there for which she was the hostess. She stood on a -porch embowered in roses to bid her guests good-bye on an afternoon in -August. And she had no more idea than perhaps you have who have touched -lightly the hand of friends who have gone out from your dinner table -to-night, that the farewell was final. But two days later in a Red -Cross uniform she was on her way to her place by the bedside of the war -wounded. There has been no more entertaining since, and one cannot say -when Eleanor Warrender shall ever again see English roses in bloom. - - -THE DEMAND DEVELOPS THE CAPACITY - -The Viscountess Elizabeth D’Azy had been with her young son passing a -summer holiday at a watering-place in France. - -She had just sent the boy back to boarding-school and herself had -returned to her apartment in Paris overlooking the Esplanade des -Invalides. At the moment she had no more intention of becoming a war -heroine than of becoming a haloed plaster saint set in a niche in the -Madeleine. Yet before she had ordered her trunks to be unpacked, the -nation’s call for Red Cross women had reached her. - -“It was so sudden,” she has told me, “and I was so dazed, I couldn’t -even remember where I had put my Red Cross insignia. At last my maid -found it in my jewel case beneath my diamond necklace. I hadn’t even -seen it since I had received it at the end of my Red Cross first-aid -course of lectures.” The maid packed a suitcase of most necessary -clothing. Carrying this suitcase, the Viscountess Elizabeth Benoit -D’Azy, daughter of the Marquis de Vogue of the old French aristocracy, -in August, 1914, walked with high head and firm tread out of a -life of luxury and ease into the place of toil and privation and -self-sacrifice at the Vosges front where her country had need of her. - -That was, I think, the last time a maid has done anything for her for -whom up to that day in August there had been servants to answer her -least request. Ever since then the Viscountess D’Azy has been doing -things with her own hands for the soldiers of France. It was in the -second year of the war that a gentleman of France, General Joffre, -bent to kiss her small hand, now toil-hardened and not so white as it -used to be. There is a military group in front of a hospital that she -commands and they stand directly before a great jagged hole in the wall -torn there by a German bomb, which, as it fell, missed her by a few -metres. The General is giving her the “accolade,” and on the front of -her white uniform he has pinned the _Croix de Guerre_ of France for -distinguished service. Last year, on behalf of her grateful country, -the Minister of War conferred on her another decoration, the _Médaille -de Vermeil des Epidémies_. I do not know what others may have been -added since to these with which the front of her white blouse sagged -last spring in Paris. - -But the woman thus cited for military honours had before this -Armageddon as little expectation of playing any such rôle as have you -to-day who are, say, the social leader of the four hundred in Los -Angeles or the president of a foreign missionary society in Bangor, -Maine. Her one preparation was that two months’ course of Red Cross -lectures. Many women of the leisure class were taking it in 1910. - -“I think I will, too,” she had said to her husband. “Some elemental -knowledge of the scientific facts of nursing I really ought to have -when the children are ill.” There were five children, four little -daughters and a son. And the Viscount thought of them and reluctantly -gave his consent. - -“Very well, Elizabeth,” he had said. “I think I am willing that you -should hear the lectures. But on this I shall insist, my dear: I cannot -permit you to take the practical bedside demonstration work. I don’t -wish to think of my wife doing that kind of menial service even for -instruction purposes, and I simply could not have you so exposed to all -sorts of infection.” - -Like that it happened when Elizabeth, the Viscountess D’Azy, arrived at -the battle front to which she was first called at Gérardmer; she had -had no practical nursing experience. Oh, she got it right away. She -had quite some within twenty-four hours. But up to now, this flashing -white moment of life which she faced so suddenly, she had not so much -as filled a hot-water bag for any one. And she had never seen a man die. - -At this military barracks where she took off her hat to don the flowing -white headdress with the red cross in the centre of the forehead, one -hundred and fifty men, some of them delirious with agony, some of them -just moaning with pain, all of them wounded and waiting most necessary -attention, lay on the straw on the floor ranged against the wall. - -There weren’t even cots. And there was only herself with one other -woman to assist her in doing all that must be done for these one -hundred and fifty helpless men. - -The first that she remembers, a surgeon was calling out orders to -her like a pistol exploding at her head. She got him a basin of -water and some absorbent cotton and she managed to find the ether. -Oh, his shining instruments were flashing horribly in the light from -the window. He was going to cut off a man’s leg. “But, Doctor,” she -exclaimed, “I never had that in my Red Cross training. I don’t know -how.” She went so white that he looked at her and he hesitated. “Go out -in the garden outside,” he commanded, “and walk in the air.” He looked -at his watch. “I’ll give you just three minutes. Come back then and -we’ll do this job.” - -They did this job, the Viscountess D’Azy holding the patient’s leg -while they did it. “After that,” she has told me, “I was never nervous. -I was never afraid. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.” - -And there wasn’t anything she didn’t do. There were always the one -hundred and fifty men to be cared for: as fast as a cot was vacated -for the grave, it was filled again from the battle-line. For six weeks -the Viscountess was on her feet for seventeen hours out of every -twenty-four, carrying water, preparing food, dressing wounds, closing -the eyes of dying men. It took from eight in the morning until five in -the afternoon just to do the dressings alone. Twelve men on an average -died every night and they wrapped them in white sheets for the burial, -the Viscountess D’Azy did, daughter of one of the proudest houses of -France. - -One day the message came that the Germans, sweeping through the nearby -village of St. Dié, had denuded the hospital there of all supplies. -Would the Viscountess with her influence, the commandant begged, carry -a report of their need to Paris. She went to Paris and brought back -a truck-load of supplies. She and the driver were three days on the -return journey. German shells were again falling on the road to St. Dié -as they approached. The chauffeur stopped in terror. “Go on!” commanded -the Viscountess. “Go on!” As the car shot forward by her order, a bomb -dropped behind them, tearing up in a cloud of dust the exact spot in -the road where the car had halted. - -Word reached military headquarters of Elizabeth D’Azy’s skill in -nursing, of her unflinching coolness in the face of all danger. It -was decided that the war department had need of her at Dunkirk. The -town was under heavy bombardment, receiving between three hundred and -four hundred bombs daily. At the barracks hospital, arranged at the -railway station, there were cots for two hundred wounded. Sometimes a -thousand men were laid out on the floors. One night there were three -thousand. And there was only the Viscountess, who was the commandant, -one trained nurse, and some voluntary untrained assistants. For a -protection against the Zeppelins it was necessary that there should be -only the dimmest candle light even for the performing of operations. -As rapidly as possible patients were evacuated to base hospitals. The -commandant one night was tenderly supervising the lifting into an -American ambulance of an officer whose wounds she had just bandaged. -She leaned over the wheel to admonish “Drive slowly or he cannot live.” -And as she touched the driver’s arm there was an exclamation of mutual -surprise. The driver was A. Piatt Andrews, under secretary of the -treasury in President Taft’s administration. And the last time he had -seen the Viscountess D’Azy he had taken her in to dinner at the White -House in Washington when her husband was an attaché there of the French -Embassy. How long ago was all the gaiety of diplomatic social life at -Washington! A siren sounded shrilly now the cry of danger and death in -an approaching taube raid. And the greeting ended hastily, the hospital -commandant and the ambulance driver hurrying in the darkness to their -respective posts of duty. - -The Viscountess has been in charge of a number of hospitals, having -been transferred from place to place at the front. When I saw her, she -was temporarily in command for a few weeks at the hospital which had -been opened at Claridge’s Hotel in Les Champs Elysées in Paris. She -didn’t care about her medals or her own magnificent record. It wasn’t -even the achievements of her husband, the Viscount D’Azy, in command of -the naval battleship _Jauré-guiberry_, of which she spoke most often. -The Viscountess D’Azy’s one theme is her boy. Before the war he was her -little son. Now he is a tall and handsome officer in uniform, at the -age of nineteen, Sub-lieutenant Charles Benoit D’Azy. - -He wanted to enlist when she did. But she insisted that he remain at -school until he had finished his examinations in the spring of 1915. -He got into action in time for the great push on the Somme. Here -at the hospital in Les Champs Elysées the Viscountess shows me his -photograph, snapshots that she has taken with her kodak. Last night she -walked unattended and alone three miles through the streets of Paris -at midnight after seeing him off at the Gare de l’Est. He had started -again for the front after his furlough at home. Her one request to the -war department is to be detailed to hospital duty where she may be near -her boy’s regiment. Her pride in the boy is beautiful. When she speaks -his name that look of experience is gone for the moment, and in the -eyes of Elizabeth D’Azy there is only the soft luminous mother-love, -even as it may be reflected in your eyes that have never yet seen -bloodshed. - -[Illustration: - - LADY RALPH PAGET OF ENGLAND - - Descendant of American forefathers. She is a war heroine worshipped by - the entire Serbian nation for her consecrated devotion to their people. -] - -“Up to the time of the war,” the Viscountess said in her pretty broken -English as she looked reminiscently out on the broad avenue of Paris, -“I was doing nothing but going to fêtes all day and dancing most of the -nights. But I think there is no reason why a woman who has danced well -should not be able to do her duty as well as she did her pleasure. -_N’est ce pas_?” And from the records of the European war offices, I -think so, too. - - -THE WOMAN WHOM A NATION ADORES - -Among the English war heroines is Lady Ralph Paget, whose name has gone -round the world for her splendid service in Serbia. In that defenceless -little land, exposed so cruelly to the ravages of this terrible war, -she commanded with as efficient executive skill as any of the generals -who have been leading armies, one of the best-managed hospitals that -have faced the enemy’s fire. - -Leila Paget had lived all her life in the environment where ladies have -their breakfast in bed and some one does their hair and hands them even -so much as a pocket handkerchief. “Leila going to command a hospital?” -questioned some of her friends, “Leila who has always been so dependent -on her mother?” - -She is the daughter, you see, of the Lady Arthur Paget, the beautiful -Mary Paran Stevens of New York, who, ever since her marriage into the -British aristocracy, has been one of the leaders in the Buckingham -Palace set. Leila Paget was, of course, brought up as is the most -carefully shielded and protected English girl in high life. She grew up -in a stately mansion in Belgrave Square. She was introduced to society -in the crowded drawing-room there which has been the scene of her -brilliant mother’s so many social triumphs. But she had no ambition -to be a social butterfly. She was a débutante who did not care for a -cotillion. You see, it was not yet her hour. She was a tall, rather -delicate girl who continued to be known as the beautiful Lady Paget’s -“quiet” daughter. A few seasons passed and she married her cousin, the -British diplomat, Sir Ralph Paget, many years her senior. - -She had never known responsibility at all when one day she sat down -in the great red drawing-room in Belgrave Square to make out a list -of the staff personnel and the supplies that would be required for -running a war hospital in Serbia. Her heart at once turned to this -land in its time of trouble because she had for three years lived in -Serbia when Sir Ralph was the British Minister there. They had but -recently returned to England on his appointment as under secretary of -foreign affairs. And now she had determined to go to the relief of -Serbia with a hospital unit. I suppose British society has never been -more surprised and excited about any of the women who have done things -in this war than they were about Leila Paget. This day in the great -red drawing-room Leila Paget found her _metier_. She is the daughter -of a soldier, General Sir Arthur Paget, and what has developed as her -amazing organising and administrative ability is an inheritance from -a line of American ancestors through her beautiful mother. But from -her reserved, retiring manner none of her friends had suspected that -she was of the stuff of which heroines are made. Now, as she laid -her plans for war relief, she did it with an expeditious directness -and a mastery of detail with which some Yankee forefather in Boston -might have managed his business affairs. With a comprehensive glance -she seemed to see the equipment that would be needed. Here in the red -drawing-room she sat, with long foolscap sheets before her on the -antique carved writing desk. She listed the requirements, item by item, -a staff of so many surgeons, so many physicians, so many nurses. Then -she estimated the supplies, so many surgeon’s knives, so many bottles -of quinine, everything from bandages and sheets down to the last box -of pins. And she planned to a pound the quantity of rice and tapioca. -Her hospital ultimately did have jam and tea when all the others were -scouring Serbia in a frantic search to supplement diminishing supplies. -Without any excitement, with an utter absence of hysteria as a woman -ordering gowns for a gay season in Mayfair, Leila Paget gave her -instructions and assembled her equipment. It was, you see, her hour. - -She arrived at Uskub in October, 1914, with the first English hospital -on the scene to stem the tide of the frightful conditions that -prevailed toward the end of 1914. After the retreat of the Austrians, -Serbia had been left a charnel house of the dead and dying. Every -large building of any kind—schools, inns, stables—was filled with the -wounded, among whom now raged also typhus, typhoid, and smallpox. -There were few doctors and no nurses, only orderlies who were Austrian -prisoners. At one huge barracks fifteen hundred cases lay on the cots -and under them; at another three thousand fever patients overflowed -the building and lay on the ground outside in their uniforms, -absolutely unattended. Facing conditions like these, Lady Paget opened -her hospital in a former school building. And here in the war zone -she instituted for herself such a régime as probably was never before -arranged for an Englishwoman of title. - -She arose at four o’clock in the morning, and when she slipped from -her cot, no one handed her a silk kimono. The regulation “germ -proof” uniform worn by women relief workers in Serbia consisted of a -white cotton combination affair, the legs of which tucked tight into -high Serbian boots. Over this went an overall tunic with a collar -tight about the neck and bands tight about the wrists. There was a -tight-fitting cap to go over the hair. And beneath this uniform, about -neck and arms, you wore bandages soaked in vaseline and petroleum. It -was the protection against the attacking vermin that swarmed everywhere -as thick as common flies. Wounded men from the trenches arrived -infested with lice, and typhus is spread by lice. Lady Paget stood -heroically at her post by their bedsides, with her own hands attending -to their needs. What there was to be done in the way of every personal -service, she did not shrink from. And she unpacked bales of goods. And -she scrubbed floors. And she assisted with the rites for the dying. -There had to be a lighted candle in a dying Serbian soldier’s hand, -and often her own hand closed firmly about the hand too weak to hold -the candle alone. Her wonderful nerve never failed, but there came a -time when her frail physical strength gave out. She still held on, -working for two days with a high fever temperature before she finally -succumbed, herself the victim of typhus. Her husband was telegraphed -for. She was unconscious when he arrived and it was three or four days -before he could be permitted to see her. Her life hung in the balance -for weeks. But finally recovery began and it was planned for her to -return to England for convalescence. She and Sir Ralph were attended -to the railroad station by the military governor of Macedonia, the -archbishop of the Serbian Church, and a guard of honour of Serbian -officers. The Serbian people in their devotion lined the street and -threw flowers beneath her feet and kissed the hem of her dress. At the -station the Crown Prince presented her with the highest decoration -within his gift and the Order No. 1 of St. Sava, a cross of diamonds. -Never before had it been bestowed on any other woman save royalty. -Seldom has any woman in history been so conspicuously the object of an -entire country’s gratitude. The street on which the hospital stood was -renamed with her name. On the Plain of Kossova there stands a very old -and historic church, on the walls of which from time to time through -the centuries, have been inscribed the names of queens and saints. -Leila Paget’s name also has been written there. A nation feels even as -does that common Serbian soldier whom she had nursed back from death, -who afterwards wrote her: “For me only two people exist, you on earth -and God in Heaven.” - -Well, Leila Paget stayed with Serbia to the end. After two months’ -rest in England, she was back in July at her hospital in Uskub. Sir -Ralph had returned with her, having been made general director of -the British medical and relief work in Serbia, with his headquarters -at Nish. In October the Bulgarians took Uskub. When the city was -under bombardment during the battle that preceded its fall, Sir Ralph -arrived in a motor car to rescue his wife. But four hours later he -had to leave without her on his way in his official capacity to warn -the other hospitals which were in his charge. “Leila, Leila,” he -expostulated in vain. She only shook her head. “My place is here,” she -said, glancing backward where 600 wounded soldiers lay. Lady Paget and -her hospital were of course detained by the enemy when they occupied -the town. She remained to nurse Bulgarians, Austrians and Serbians -alike. And she organised relief work for the refugees, of whom she fed -sometimes as many as 4,000 a day. For weeks and months, it was only by -dint of the utmost exertion that it was possible to extract from the -exhausted town sufficient wood and petrol just to keep fires going in -the hospital kitchen and sterilisers in the operating rooms. “These,” -says Lady Paget, “were strange times and in the common struggle for -mere existence it did not occur very much to any one to consider who -were friends and who were enemies.” In the spring of 1916, in March, -arrangements were made by the German Government permitting the return -to England of Lady Paget and her unit. Her war record reaching America, -the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs selected her as the -recipient of their jewelled medal. It is awarded each year to the woman -of all the world who has performed the most courageous act beyond the -call of duty. - - -HEROIC SERVICE OF SCOTTISH WOMEN - -Woman’s war record in Europe is now starred with courageous acts. That -day in Serbia Sir Ralph, riding on while the people sprinkled their -mountain roads with white powder in token of surrender, came to the -Scottish Women’s Hospitals. These had not even men doctors, as at -Uskub. They were “manned” wholly by women sent out by the National -Union of Women Suffragists in Great Britain. And there was not a man -about the place except the wounded men in the beds. But Dr. Alice -Hutchinson, at Valjevo, and Dr. Elsie Inglis, at Krushevats, with -their staffs, also refused to leave their patients. All three of these -women made the decision to face the enemy rather than desert their -posts of duty. They were all three taken prisoners and required to -nurse the German wounded along with their own. Months afterward they -were released to be returned to England. Dr. Hutchinson, who has been -decorated by the Serbian Government with the order of St. Sava, when -she evacuated her hospital at the order of the Austrians, wrapped the -British flag about her waist beneath her uniform that it might not be -insulted by the invaders. Dr. Inglis had all her hospital equipment -confiscated by the Germans. When she protested that this was in -violation of Red Cross rules, the German commander only smiled: “You -have made your hospital so perfect,” he said, “we must have it.” Dr. -Inglis has been decorated with the Serbian order of the White Eagle. -Since then, at the Russian front with another Scottish hospital, Dr. -Inglis and her entire staff have again been decorated by the Russian -Government. - -In London I heard the women of the Scottish hospitals spoken of at -historic St. Margaret’s Chapel as “that glorious regiment of Great -Britain called the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.” And the clergyman who -said it, spoke reverently in eulogy of one of the most distinguished -members of that regiment, “the very gallant lady who in behalf of her -country has just laid down her life.” In the historic chapel, the wall -at the back of the altar behind the great gold cross was hung with -battle flags. Men in khaki and women in khaki listened with bowed -heads. It was the memorial service for Katherine Mary Harley, of whom -the London papers of the day before had announced in large headlines, -“Killed at her post of duty in Monastir.” - -[Illustration: - - MRS. KATHERINE M. HARLEY OF LONDON - - One of England’s famous suffragists, a number of whom have died at the - front in their country’s cause. Mrs. Harley was buried like a soldier - with her war decoration on the coat lapel of her uniform. -] - -In that other world we used to have before the war, Mrs. Harley -was known as one of England’s most distinguished constitutional -suffragists, not quite so radical as Mrs. Despard, her sister, who is -the leader of the Woman’s Freedom League. One of her most notable -pieces of work in behalf of votes for women was the great demonstration -she organised a few years ago in that pilgrimage of women who marched -from all parts of England, addressing vast concourses of people along -the highways and arriving by diverse routes for a great mass meeting -in Hyde Park. You see, Katherine Harley was an organiser of tried -capacity. And she, too, comes of a family of soldiers. She was the -daughter of Captain French, of Kent. Her husband, who died from the -effects of the Boer War, was Colonel Harley, chief of staff to General -Sir Leslie Rindle in South Africa. Her brother is Viscount Sir John -French, former field marshal of the English forces in France. And her -son is now fighting at the front. With all of this brilliant array of -military men belonging to her, it is a curious fact, as her friends in -London told me, that Mrs. Harley did not believe in war. “Katherine was -a pacifist,” one of them said at the International Franchise Club the -night that the announcement of her death was received there in a hushed -and sorrowful silence. But she believed if there must be war, some one -must bind up the wounds of war. And it was with high patriotic zeal -and with the fearless spirit of youth, albeit she was 62 years of age, -that Mrs. Harley in 1914 enlisted with the Scottish Women, taking her -two daughters with her into the service. She went out as administrator -of the hospital at Royaumont. And when that was in successful -operation, she was transferred to Troyes to set up the tent hospital -there. Then she was called to Salonica. It was at Salonica that she -commanded the famous transport flying column of motor ambulances that -went over precipitous mountain roads right up to the fighting line -to get the wounded. She was in charge of a motor ambulance unit with -the Serbian army at Monastir when in March, 1917, at the time of the -regular evening bombardment by the enemy, she was struck by a shell. -They buried her like a soldier and she lies at rest with the _Croix -de Guerre_ for bravery on her breast out there at the front of the -conflict. - -Violetta Thurston, you might think, if you met her, a little English -schoolgirl who has just seen London for the first time. Then by her -eyes you would know that she is more, by the wide, almost startled -look in what were meant to be calm, peaceful, English eyes. Violetta -Thurston is the little English nurse decorated by both Russia and -Belgium who in these last years has lived a life that thrills with -the adventures of war. She went out at the head of twenty-six nurses -from the National Union of Trained Nurses who were at work in Brussels -when the Germans arrived. They improvised their hospital in the -fire-station. At last the English nurses were all expelled by German -order and sent to Dunkirk. There Miss Thurston connected with the -Russian Red Cross. - -She has written a book, “Field Hospital and Flying Column,” on her -experiences in Russia. There were four days at Lodz that she neither -washed nor had her clothes off. And once she was wounded by shrapnel -and once nearly killed by a German bomb. The last record I have of her -she was matron in charge of a hospital at La Panne in Belgium. - - -HEROINES OF FRANCE - -No girl has, I suppose, lived a more uneventful life than did Emilienne -Moreau up to the time that she became one of the most celebrated -heroines of France. You haven’t if your home is, say, down in some -little mining village of West Virginia or in the coal-fields of -Pennsylvania, where you are going back and forth to school on week days -and to Sunday school every Sunday. Emilienne was like that in Loos. She -was sixteen and so near the end of school that she was about to get out -the necessary papers for taking the examination for _institutrice_, -which is a school teacher in France. Loos was a mining village. The -inhabitants lived in houses painted in the bright colours that you -always used to see in this gay and happy land. It was in one of the -most pretentious houses situated in the Place de la Republique, and -opposite the church, that the Moreau family lived. The large front -room of the house was M. Moreau’s store. He had worked all his life -in the mines and now at middle age, only the past summer, had removed -here with his family from a neighbouring village and he had purchased -the general store. It was with great pride that the family looked -forward to an easier life and a comfortable career for the father as a -“bonneted merchant.” Emilienne was his favourite child, his darling -and his pride, and she in turn adored her father. Often they took long -walks in the woods together. They had just come back from one of these -walks, Emilienne with her arms filled with bluets and marguerites, -when on August 1 a long shriek of the siren at the mines called the -miners from the shafts and the farmers round about from their fields. -Assembling at the Mairie for mobilisation all the men of military age -marched away from Loos. - -That night the sun went down in a blood-red glory. All the houses -of Loos were bathed in blood-red. “Bad sign,” muttered an old woman -purchasing chocolate at the store. And it was. Soon the refugees from -surrounding burning villages came flocking by in streams, telling -of the terrible Germans from whom they had escaped. Most of the -inhabitants of Loos joined the fleeing throngs. Of five thousand -people, ultimately only two hundred remained in the village. Among -these were the Moreau family, who, possessing in marked degree that -national trait of love for their home and their belongings, refused to -leave. “But,” said her father to Emilienne, “little daughter, it will, -I fear, be a long time before you will gather flowers again.” - -And it was. The Germans were in possession of Loos by October. They -poured petrol on the houses and burned many of them. At the store in -the Place de la Republique, Emilienne, with quick wit, set a bottle of -wine out on the counter and they drank and went away without burning, -although they looted the store of everything of value. During the -year that followed, Loos remained in the hands of the enemy. In the -effort of the French to retake it, it was often fired upon from the -surrounding hills. From the windows in the sloping garret roof, -Emilienne and her father watched many a battle until the bombs began -falling on the garret itself. They were exposed to constant danger. -They had to live on the vegetables they could gather from the deserted -neighbouring gardens. By December her father was ill from privation and -hunger and anxiety, and one night he died. Emilienne, girl as she was, -seems to have been the main reliance of the family, her mother, her -little sister Marguerite, and her little brother Leonard, aged nine. -The morning after her father’s death, Emilienne went to the German -commandant to ask for assistance. How should she get a coffin? How -should it be possible to bury her father? And the German laughed: “One -can get along very well without a coffin!” He finally permitted her -four French prisoners to dig the grave and the curé of Loos, he said, -could say a prayer. But Emilienne was heart-broken at the thought of -putting her father into the ground without a coffin. She and her little -brother made one with their own hands from boards she found at the -deserted carpenter-shop down the street. - -By the spring of 1915 the bombardment of Loos increased in violence. -There were days at a time when the whole family, with their black -dog Sultan, did not dare venture out of the cellar. In September, -Emilienne, ascending to the demolished garret, where she lay flat on -her stomach on the rafters, watched a battle in which the strangest -beings she ever saw took part, fantastic creatures of a grey colour who -were throwing themselves on the German trenches. As they advanced, she -noticed that they wore “little petticoats,” and she hurried to tell -her mother that these must be the English suffragettes of whom she had -heard, coming to the rescue of Loos. What they actually were was the -Scottish troops in kilts, the famous “Black Watch,” who a few days -later had driven the Germans from Loos. As they came into the village, -Emilienne, braving a cyclone of shells, and rallying her French -neighbours, ran to meet them, waving the French flag and singing the -“Marseillaise.” Thus, it is said, by her fearless courage, was averted -a retreat that might have meant disaster along the whole front. - -But the fighting was not yet over. During the next few days, Emilienne, -with the Red Cross doctor’s assistance, turned her house into a -first-aid station. Some seven of the stalwart Scotsmen in the “little -petticoats,” she herself dragged in to safe shelter when they had been -wounded. Two Germans taking aim at French soldiers she killed with a -revolver she had just snatched from the belt of a dead man. When the -enemy had been finally repulsed, Emilienne Moreau was summoned by the -Government to be given the _Croix de Guerre_. - -A little later, her pictured face was placarded all over Paris by the -French newspapers. They wanted her to write her personal story. At -first she shrank from it: “It would be presumption on the part of a -girl. What would my commune think?” But finally she was prevailed upon, -and for two months daily “_Mes Mémoires_” appeared on the front page of -_Le Petit Parisien_ with a double-column headline. Even more honours -have come to Emilienne. Great Britain bestowed on her its order of St. -John of Jerusalem and the King has sent her a personal invitation to -visit Buckingham Palace as soon as the Channel crossing shall be safe. - -With it all, you would think Emilienne, if you met her, quite a -normal girl. You see, she is young enough to forget. And it is only -occasionally that in the clear blue eyes you catch a glimpse of -tragedy. Her smooth brown hair she is as interested in having in the -latest mode as are you who to-day consulted the fashion-pages of a -magazine for coiffures. I have seen her on the sands at Trouville with -a group of girls at play at blind man’s buff in the moonlight. And by -her silvery laughter you would not know her from the rest as a heroine. -The next day, when they were in bathing and the body of a drowned man -was washed ashore, one of the other girls fainted. Afterward Emilienne -said, and there was in her eyes a far-away look of old horrors as she -spoke, “Marie, Marie, if your eyes had looked on what mine have, you -would not faint so easily.” - -There is another French girl, the youngest war heroine I know who has -been decorated by any government. And the case of Madeleine Danau is -perhaps of special interest, because any girl in the United States -can even now begin to be a heroine as she was. They say in France that -“_la petite Danau_” has served her country even though it was not -while exposed to shot and shell. She lives in the village of Corbeil -and she was only fourteen years old at the time her father, the baker, -was mobilised. A baker in France, it must be remembered, is a most -necessary functionary in the community, for as everybody has for years -bought bread, nobody even knows how to make it at home any more. The -whole neighbouring countryside, therefore, you see, was most dependent -on the baker, and the baker was gone away to war. It was then that -Madeleine proved equal to doing the duty that was nearest to her. She -promptly stepped into her father’s place before the bread-trough and -the oven. She gets up each morning at four o’clock and with the aid of -her little brother, a year younger than herself, she makes each day -eight hundred pounds of bread, which is delivered in a cart by another -brother and sister. The radius of the district is some ten miles, and -no household since war began has missed its daily supply of bread. - -One day Madeleine was summoned to a public meeting for which the -citizens of Corbeil assembled at the Mairie. She went in her -champagne-coloured dress of _toile de laine_ and her Sunday hat of -leghorn trimmed with black velvet and white roses. And there before -this public assemblage the _Préfet des Deux-Sèvres_ pinned on Madeleine -the Cross of Lorraine and read a letter from President Poincaré of -France. In it the President presented to Madeleine Danau his sincere -compliments and begged her to accept “this little jewel,” this Cross -of Lorraine, which shall proclaim that the valiant child of the -Deux-Sèvres through her own labour assuring for the inhabitants of the -Commune of Exoudun their daily bread, has performed as patriotic a -service and is as good a Frenchwoman as are any of her sisters of the -Meuse. - -The ever-lengthening list of heroic women who have distinguished -themselves in this war in Europe is now so many that it is quite -impossible even to mention any considerable number of them in less than -a very large book. You find their names now in every country quite -casually listed along with those of soldiers in the Roll of Honour -published in the daily newspapers. And it is no surprise to come on -women’s names in any of the lists, “Dead,” “Wounded,” or “Decorated.” -The French Academy out of seventy prizes in 1916 awarded no less than -forty-seven to women “as most distinguished examples of military -courage.” Among these the _Croix de Guerre_ has been given to Madame -Macherez, capable citizeness of Soissons, who has been daily at the -Mairie in an executive capacity, and to Mlle. Sellier who has been in -charge of the Red Cross hospital there during the long months of the -bombardment. The Cross of the Legion of Honor along with the cross of -Christ decorates the front of the black habit of Sister Julie, the nun -of Gerbéviller who held the invading Germans at bay while she stood -guard over the wounded French soldiers at her improvised hospital. - -It’s like this in all of the warring countries. And all of these women -with their war jewelery for splendid service, are women like you and -me. But yesterday, and they might have been pleased with a string of -beads to wind about a white throat. Out of every-day feminine stuff -like this shall our war heroines too be made. - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE - - -The baby had been fretful all that hot summer day. Every time he was -passed over to the eldest little girl, he cried. So Mrs. Lewis had to -keep him herself. All the twenty pounds of him rested heavily on her -slender left arm while she went about the kitchen getting supper. With -one hand she managed now and then to stir the potatoes “warming over” -in the pan on the stove. She put the pinch of tea in the pot and set it -steeping. And she fried the ham. She set on the table a loaf of bread, -still warm from the day’s baking and called to the eldest little girl -to bring the butter. “Aren’t we going to have the apple sauce too?” the -child asked. “Oh, yes, bring it,” the mother had answered pettishly. -“I’m that tired I don’t care how quickly you eat everything up.” - -You see she had been going around like this with the heavy baby all day -while she baked, and there were the three meals to cook. And she had -done some of the ironing and there was the kitchen floor that had to be -“washed down.” And the second little girl’s dress had to be finished -for Sunday. And Jimmie, aged nine, whose food was always disagreeing -with him, was in bed with one of his sick spells and called frequently -for her to wait on him in the bedroom at the head of the stairs. And -she had been up with the baby a good deal anyhow the night before. So -you see why Mrs. Lewis was what is called “cross.” - -Besides, she was just now facing a new anxiety. When her husband came -in from the shop and hung up his hat and she had dished up the potatoes -and the family sat down to the evening meal, there was just one subject -of conversation. The State of New York was making its preparedness -preparation with the military census that was to begin to-morrow, a -detailed inventory of man power and possessions. Hitherto for America -the war had been over in Europe. Now for the first time it was here for -the Lewis family. And other similar supper tables all over the United -States were facing it too. “But you couldn’t possibly go,” the tired -woman said across the table. - -“I may have to,” the man answered. - -“Then what’ll happen to me and the children?” she returned desperately. - -And he didn’t know. And she didn’t know. Hardly anybody knew. We on -this side of the Atlantic are now beginning to find out. - -Mr. Lewis was drafted last week. The rent is paid one month ahead. -You can see the bottom of the coal bin. There’s only half a barrel of -flour. And there are seven children to feed. No, there are none of her -family nor his that want to adopt any of them as war work. Well, there -you are. And there Mrs. Lewis is. In her nervous dread of the charity -that she sees coming, she slaps the children twice as often as she used -to and the baby cries all day. - -But, Mrs. Lewis, listen. Don’t even ask the Exemption Board to release -your husband. It’s your chance to be a patriot and let him go. And this -war may not be as bad for you as you think. There are women on the -other side could tell you. Suppose, suppose you never had to do another -week’s baking and you were rested enough to love the last baby as you -did the first, and all the children could have shoes when they needed -them, and there was money enough beside for a new spring hat and the -right fixings to make you pretty once more. So that your man coming -back from the front when the war is won, may fall in love with you -all over again. No, it’s not heaven I’m talking about. It’s here in a -war-ridden world. This is no fairy tale. It’s the truth in Britain and -France, as it’s going to be in the United States. - -“Somewhere in England” Mrs. Black, when her country took up arms in -1914, was as anxious and concerned as you are to-day. Her man was -a car-cleaner who earned 22 shillings a week on the Great Western -Railway. That seems appallingly little from our point of view. But -thousands of British working class families were accustomed to living -on such a wage. The Blacks had to. It is true there wasn’t much margin -for joy in it. And when the call to the colours came, it was to Mr. -Black an invitation to a Great Adventure. He enlisted. Well, the -first winter had not passed before it was demonstrated that Mrs. Black -and the children—there were five of them—were not going to experience -any new hardship because of the absence of the head of the family in -Flanders. By January she was saying hopefully one morning across the -fence to her neighbour in the next little smoke-coloured brick house in -the long dingy row: “If them that’s makin’ this war’ll only keep it up -long enough, I’ll be on my feet again.” - -To-day you may say that Mrs. Black is “on her feet.” There are -Nottingham lace curtains at her front windows as good as any in the -whole row of Lamson’s Walk. The new chest of drawers she’s needed ever -since she was married is a place to put the children’s clothes. And -it’s such a help to keeping the three rooms tidy. Santa Claus came at -Christmas with a graphophone. And you ought to see Mrs. Black’s fur -coat! Three other women who haven’t got theirs yet were in the night -she wore it home “just to feel the softness of it.” Their hands, do you -know, hands that are hard and grimy with England’s black town soot, -had never so much as touched fur before! And they’re going to wear it -soon, if this war keeps up. For they’re all of them these new women in -industry, like Mrs. Black. - -Mrs. Black, to begin with, has her “separation allowance” because her -husband’s at the front. That’s 12 shillings and sixpence per week for -herself, 5 shillings for the first child, three shillings sixpence for -the second and 2 shillings for each subsequent child. Well, with the -five children, that makes 27 shillings a week coming in and there’s -none of it going to the Great Boar’s Head on the corner, which always -used to get a look-in on Mr. Black’s weekly wage envelope before Mrs. -Black did. Now, in addition to this 27 shillings a week, which in -itself is 5 shillings more than the family ever had before, Mrs. Black -is at the factory where she is making 30 shillings a week. That’s 57 -shillings a week, which is her household income more than doubled. It’s -why 60,000 fewer persons in London were in receipt of poor relief in -September, 1915, than in 1903, the previous most prosperous year known -to the Board of Trade. In the West End of this town titled families -are counting their “meatless” days. In the East End, families are -celebrating meat days that were never known before the war. The Care -Committee used to have to provide boots for over 300 school children in -this district. This year there was only one family, the mother of which -was ill, that needed boots! - - -RIGHT THIS WAY, LADIES, INTO INDUSTRY - -Mrs. Lewis, this is the answer to your anxious inquiry: it’s prosperity -that’s coming to you. In every warring country there are women of the -working classes who have found it. You are going to be mobilised for -the army of industry as your husband for the other army. Only there is -no draft or conscription necessary. The recruiting station is just -down the street at the factory that recently hung out that sign bright -with new paint, “Women Wanted.” See them arriving at the entrance gate. -Fall in line, Mrs. Lewis, and get measured for your new uniform. Yes, -you are to have one. It’s some form of the things they call trousers. -But I’m sure you won’t mind that. Put it on. Put it on quickly. In it -you will find yourself the real new woman whose coming has hitherto -been only proclaimed or prophesied on the waving banners of suffrage -processions you’ve watched parading on the avenues. You are She for -whom the ages have waited. This new garment they are handing you has -the pocket in it for a pay envelope. You who have been toiling for your -board and the clothes you could get after the rest of the family had -theirs, are now a labourer worthy of hire. Economic independence, the -political economists call it, as they take their pen in hand to make -note of the long lines of you going into industry, later to write their -deductions into scientific treatises about you. - -Now, it may not particularly interest you that you are like this, a -phenomenon of the 20th century, but there are plainer terms that I am -sure you will understand. Listen, Mrs. Lewis: Every Saturday night -there is going to be money in your own pocket. The convenience of -this is that never again will you under any circumstances have to go -through any one’s else pockets for it. Do you see? Right across those -portals there where they want you so much that every obstacle that -used to be piled in your pathway has been so surreptitiously carted -away overnight, that you would hardly believe it ever was there, lie -all promised opportunities. Susan B. Anthony pioneered for them. Mrs. -Pankhurst smashed windows for them. Mrs. Catt is even now politically -campaigning for them. And you, Mrs. Lewis, are to enter in. What will -happen to you when you’ve joined up with the new woman movement? - -Let us look at the advance columns over on the other side. No one met -them with: “Woman, back to your kitchen!” Or, “This is unscriptural and -your habits of marriage and maternity will interfere with shop routine.” - -It was one of the most significant decisions of all time since the -day of the Cave Woman, that morning when Mrs. Black got her aunt to -come in to look after the children and, hanging up her gingham apron, -walked out of the kitchen. Women were doing it all over Europe. They -are to be counted now by the hundreds of thousands. Altogether we -know that they number in the millions although we have not the exact -returns from every country. By 1916 England had enrolled in industry -4,086,000 women and Germany 4,793,472 of whom 866,000 in England and -1,387,318 in Germany had never before been gainfully employed outside -their own homes. France, Italy, Russia all have similar battalions. And -the important fact is that these new recruits are going into industry -differently. Women before had to push their way in. Women now are -invited in. - -Heretofore there were all the reasons in the world why a woman should -not work outside her own home. Three generations of employment had not -yet sufficed to efface the impression from the minds even of most young -girls themselves who went out to earn their living that it was only a -temporary expedient until they could marry and be supported ever after. -Even when they discovered after marriage that they were still earning -their own living just as much in their husband’s kitchen as anywhere -they had been before, public opinion and the neighbours disapproved -of their working for any one outside their own family. Who, Madam, -would sew on your husband’s buttons? So strong was this sentiment that -it even threatened to crystallise on the statute books. There were -districts in Germany and in the North of England where they talked -about passing a law against the employment of the married woman. Then -fortunately about this time the world came to 1914 and the revolution -of all established thought. - -Everybody sees now a reason why Mrs. Black should work. Her country -wants her to. And it has swept aside to the scrap-heap of ancient -prejudice all the other reasons against the industrial employment of -women. Among the rest, the most material reason, the most real reason -of all, that woman’s place was the home and every other place was -man’s. That was true. And it was one of the most incontrovertible -facts that each woman who sought employment came up against. Industry -had never been arranged for her needs or her convenience. - - -MAKING INDUSTRY OVER FOR HER - -Now it’s being made over, actually made over! Already woman wins this -victory in the Great War. Don’t we all of us know industries where -there hasn’t been so much as a nail to hang a woman’s hat on, where -it wouldn’t be spoiled, let alone a room in which she could wash her -hands, or change her working clothes? But go through Europe now and you -will scarcely find any place they haven’t tried the best they could to -fix up for woman’s occupancy. She shall have the nicest hook that they -can find to hang her hat on. She shall have a whole cupboard, a locker -to keep it in, if she’ll only put it there to-day. And oh, ladies, all -of you listen, there’s even a mirror to see if it’s on straight! Just -a little while ago I stood in a factory “somewhere in France,” where -they had built a beautiful retiring room with lavatories and hot and -cold water and a row of shining white enamelled sinks. And one day of -course some thoughtful woman had brought in her handbag a piece from -her cracked looking-glass and fastened it on the wall between two -tacks, you know the way you would? A little later, the superintendent -of the factory saw it there: “I sent right out,” he told me himself -with feeling, “and bought this one.” And he showed me with pride the -full length plate-glass mirror that hung on the wall where the little -old cracked looking-glass used to be. I think every government in -Europe now has mirrors listed among “necessary supplies.” I mention it -as significant of the anxious effort to please the feminine fancy. - -But the first most important thing that was done in making over -industry, was opening the door from the inside for Mrs. Black’s -arrival. Every door-keeper to-day has his instructions from higher up -not to keep the lady knocking out in the cold. Her coming was in the -first instance heralded in England, actually heralded with a flourish -of trumpets. That procession of 40,000 women that Mrs. Pankhurst led -down the Strand into industry, under the new standard, “For Men Must -Fight and Women Must Work,” had flags flying and bands playing. And the -English Government paid for the bands. Parliament records show that -this Suffrage procession was financed to the extent of 3,000 pounds, -which is $15,000. Has there ever been a more revolutionary conversion -than this to the Woman’s Cause? For the first time in history, the -woman movement is underwritten by Government. It is with this support -that it’s going strong all over the world to-day. - -The place that is being made for Mrs. Black and her contemporaries -is everywhere in the first instance at least, being arranged through -Government intervention. With every new push on the front, the soldiers -that go down in the awful battalions of death have to be replaced by -others, which means that more and more men must be “combed out” of the -shops back home. And to employers governments have said: Hire women in -their places. - -To this employers answered as they have so many times to us when we -have asked to be hired: “But women don’t know how.” - -You see, it has always been so difficult for us to learn. From the -bricklayers and the printers up to the medical men and the lawyers and -the ministers, there has always been that gentlemen’s agreement in -every trade: “Don’t let her in. And if she gets in, don’t let her up, -any higher up than you have to.” - -But now over all the world, to every industry that shows a slackening -in production, there is issued one common government General Order: -“Teach the Women.” And the employer looks questioningly toward the -work bench at the figure in the leather apron there, who in some of -the most highly skilled trades, has always threatened to take off that -apron and walk out of the shop when a petticoat crossed the threshold. -There are shops in which there has never been a woman apprentice, -because he wouldn’t teach her. Would he now? - -The skilled workman was summoned in England to the Home Office for a -heart-to-heart talk with the Government. He came from the cotton trade, -the woollen and the worsted trade, the bleachers and dyers’ trade, the -woodworkers and furnishers’ trade, the biscuit trade, the boot and shoe -trade, the engineering trade and a great many others. The Government -spoke sternly of its power under martial law. The skilled workman, -shifting his cap from one hand to the other, began to understand. But -he still stubbornly protested: “Women haven’t the mental capacity for -my work.” - -“We shall see,” said Government. - -“But it will take so long to learn my trade, five years, six years, -seven years.” - -“Ah, so it will. Very well, then, teach the women a part of your trade -at a time, a process in which instruction can be given in the shortest -length of time.” - -“But the tools of my trade, they are heavy for a woman’s hands.” - -“There shall be special tools made.” - -And there have been. So, the now famous “dilution” of labour has been -arranged. Mrs. Black is “in munitions.” I saw her standing at a machine -that is called a capstan lathe, drilling the opening in a circular -piece of brass. There used to be employed in this shop, 1,500 men and -the man power has been now so diluted, that there are 200 men and -1,300 women. There are rows and rows of the capstan lathes and down -each alleyway, as the space between them is called, there are lines of -women like Mrs. Black. They have to start the machine, to feed it, and -control it, and stop it. In three weeks’ time most of them were able -to learn these repetitive operations. But they do not yet know how to -take the machine apart or to fix it if anything breaks. So up and down -each row there goes a skilled man who is still retained for this, a -“setter-up,” he is called in the trade. And to supervise each section -there is a foreman. It was the foreman who called my attention to the -machines. “They are,” he said, “small lathes, specially adapted to the -women. We had them made in America since the war.” - - -EASY ENOUGH TO ARRANGE - -Like that you see, it is done. Sometimes to make over the job for the -woman, there was necessary only the simplest expedient like adding -the “flap” seat in the Manchester tram-cars for the woman-conductor -to rest between rush hours. Even in skilled trades it hasn’t always -been necessary to remodel an entire machine. Sometimes only a lever -has to be shortened. Sometimes it has been done by the addition of -“jigs and fixtures,” so that a process formerly involving judgment -and experience, is now automatically performed at a touch from the -operator. Are there heavy weights to be lifted? The paper factories -met the situation by reducing the size of the parcel. The leather, -tanning and currying trade put in special lifting tackle. The chemical -industries have trucks for transporting the heavy carboys. The -pottery and brick trades have trolleys. And the engineering trade, -for manipulating the heavy shells, has put in electrical cranes and -carriages: they are operated by a woman who sits in a sort of easy -chair from which she only lifts her hand to touch the right lever. - -These and other innovations have been made in accordance with a -definite plan. You should hear it just the way a government says it: -“In considering the physical capacity of a woman factory worker,” -the Home Office directs, “it should be remembered that her body is -physiologically different from and less strongly built than that of a -man. It is desirable that the lifting and carrying of heavy weights and -all sudden violent or physically unsuitable movements in the operation -of machines should so far as practicable be avoided. Often a simple -appliance or the alteration of a movement modifies an objectionable -feature when it does not altogether remove it. When standing is -absolutely unavoidable, the hours and spells of employment should be -proportionately short, and seats should be available for use during the -brief pauses that occasionally occur while waiting for material or the -adjustment of a tool.” - -There is one further instruction: “The introduction of women into -factories where men only have hitherto been employed will necessitate -some rearrangement in the way of special attention to the fencing of -belts, pulleys and machine tools.” - -Well, there are now some ninety-six trades and some 1,701 processes in -which the workshop has been gotten ready like this, and woman labour -has been introduced. You see how easily it has all been brought about -now, when every one, instead of putting their heads together on How can -we keep the women out, is planning eagerly, How can we get the women in. - -And do you know that Mrs. Black cannot so much as have a headache -to-morrow morning, without the English Government being sorry about it? -Every industry in the land has received its envelope, black-lettered, -“On His Majesty’s Business” and inside this note: “Care on the part -of employers to secure the welfare of women brought in to take the -place of men in the present emergency will greatly increase the -probability of their employment proving successful.” A nation, you see, -is interested in Mrs. Black’s success. “Who works fights,” announced -the Government when it invited Mrs. Black into industry. The badge, a -triangle of brass, that she wears on the front of her khaki tunic, is -inscribed “On War Service.” The French women in the munitions factories -wear on their left sleeve an armlet with an embroidered insignia, a -bursting bomb, which says the same thing. - -Mrs. Black, I believe as a matter of fact, did have a headache one -morning. And her output of munitions fell off. Now that must not -happen. For the lack of the shells, you know, a battle might be lost. -The headache was investigated by the Factory Inspector. And the -Government made a great discovery, I think we may say as important to -us, to every woman who works, as was Watt’s discovery of the principle -of the steam-engine that day he watched the tea kettle. This was what -the factory inspector found out: Last night after Mrs. Black left the -shop, there was the dinner to cook, and it was eight o’clock before she -could get it ready. Then, of course, there were the dishes to wash. -Then she swept all her house through. Then she put the clothes to soak -in the tub over night. Then she worked on the stockings in the piled-up -mending basket until midnight. Then she went to bed, so that she could -be awake next morning at four o’clock. And in the morning she built a -fire under the “copper” and heated the water and washed the clothes -and boiled them and hung them out on the line. And Mrs. Black, having -already done a woman’s work before dawn, went out to fill in the rest -of the day at a man’s work! - - -BEYOND THE PHYSICAL ENDURANCE OF MEN - -This, you should remember, was the woman whom the government had -hesitated about asking to work “overtime” on war orders. Would it be -possible to extend labour’s eight-hour day, they had asked. The Trade -Unions, when asked, had said it would be a great tax on the physique of -men. It was more than they were equal to under ordinary circumstances. -But, well, as an emergency measure, and for the duration of the war -only, Union rules would be suspended to permit of overtime. But even -then the Government decided on the eight-hour limit for women, in -exceptional circumstances permitting twelve hours. But an employer -working women longer should be liable to arrest! - -Then came the Factory Inspector’s report laid before the Home Office: -Mrs. Black was working a 20-hour day! Her case was not at all unique. -“Overtime” on home work is, of course, what the great majority of -women who have gotten into industry in the past or into a profession or -a career; have been accustomed to. _Only nobody ever noticed it before!_ - -Now every War Office saw it as early as the first year of the war: No -woman could do a woman’s work in the home and a man’s work in the shop -and maintain the maximum output. The efficiency experts were summoned -all over Europe. They were shocked at such uneconomic management. -Could you expect any competent workingman to cook his own dinner? -There’d be a strike if you did. Why in thunder, then, should Mrs. Black -be expected to cook hers? And every nation hurried to set up in its -factories the industrial canteen, where meals are prepared and served -to employés at cost price. - -At one of these industrial canteens at a factory in the suburbs of -Paris, I sat down to dinner with 600 working people. The chef, who -had shown me with pride through his great store-rooms of supplies, -apologised for the day’s menu: He was humiliated that there would -be neither rabbits nor chicken, but with a war-market one did the -best they could. The _a la carte_ bill of fare proceeded from -_hors-d’œuvres_ through _entrées_ and roasts to salads and to dessert -and cheese, and there was wine on every table. You selected, of course, -what you wished to pay for. Marie, on my right, I noticed, paid for her -dinner, 1 franc fifty. Jacques, on my left, I saw hand the waiter 1 -franc seventy-five. My check came to two francs. It was a better dinner -than I was accustomed to for three times the money at the Hotel Regina -in the Rue de Rivoli. In England at the great Woolwich Arsenal, Mrs. -Black gets meat and two vegetables for eightpence, which is 16 cents, -and dessert for 2½ pence which is 5 cents. For an expenditure not to -exceed 25 pence which is 50 cents, you can get at any of the industrial -canteens in England, the four meals for the day for which the following -is a sample menu: - - _Cost in Pence_ - - BREAKFAST: Bacon, 3 rashers 4 - Bread, 3 slices, butter and jam 2 - Tomato ½ - Sugar ⅒ - Milk ½ - DINNER: Roast beef 4 - Yorkshire pudding 1½ - Potatoes ¾ - Cabbage 1 - Apple pie and custard 1½ - Baked plum pudding 1 - TEA: 2 slices bread, butter and jam 2½ - Cake ½ - Sugar ⅒ - Milk ½ - Jam tarts 1 - SUPPER: 2 slices bread 2 - Cheese 1 - Meat 2 - Pickles ½ - Tea, coffee, cocoa, or milk with above ½—1½ - -What’s happened from Mrs. Black’s headache is like a tale from the -“Arabian Nights.” A magic wand has been waved over the factory. “It -should be made,” a Frenchman told me in his enthusiasm, “a little -Paradise for woman.” And that seems to be the way they’re feeling -everywhere. Government solicitude in England for the new woman in -industry resulted in 1916 in a new act for the statute books under -which the Home Office is given wide powers to arrange for her comfort. -The scientists of a kingdom have been engaged to study “Woman.” Their -observations and deductions are every little while embodied in a “white -paper.” There have been some fourteen of these “white papers” through -which the discoveries are disseminated to the factories. - -There is a staff of great chemists in government laboratories who -arrange the menus just mentioned, which are really formulas for -efficiency. Fat, protein and carbohydrates have been carefully -proportioned to produce the requisite calories of energy for a maximum -output. They emphasise the importance of the canteen with this -announcement: “For a large class of workers, home meals are hurried -and, especially for women, too often consist of white bread and boiled -tea. Probably much broken time and illness result from this cause.” - -There is a staff of competent architects who were first called in -that there might be provided a place in which to eat the carefully -prepared meals. “Environment,” it is announced, “has a distinct effect -on digestion.” So a White Paper submitted diagrams for the canteen -building. “The site,” it said, “should have a pleasant, open outlook -and a southern aspect. The interior should present a clean and -cheerful appearance. The colour scheme may be in pink, duck’s-egg green -or primrose grey.” Estimates are furnished. A dining-room to be built -on the basis of 8.5 square feet of space per person may be erected at a -cost not to exceed 7 pounds per place. Table and cookery equipment can -be installed at a rate for 1,000 employés of 30 shillings, 500 employés -32 shillings, and 100 employés 47 shillings per head. - -And well, you know how it is when you put so much as a back porch on -the house. You sometimes get so interested in improving, that you can’t -stop. Often you remodel the whole house. Well, the factory had to keep -up with the new dining-room. The White Papers began to say that the -workroom windows had better be washed, and the ceilings whitewashed -and for artificial lighting, shaded arc-lights were recommended. “The -question of lighting,” the report reads, “is of special importance, -now that women are employed in large numbers. Bad lighting affects -the output unfavourably, not only by making good and rapid work more -difficult, but by causing eye-strain.” - -The doctors were now being assembled and soon a White Paper admonished: -“The effective maintenance of ventilation is a matter of increasing -importance, because of the large number of women employed, and women -are especially susceptible to the effects of defective ventilation.” - -Plumbing came next with a White Paper that went exhaustively into the -subject of lavatory equipment, with illustrations showing the best -fittings: “Fundamental requirements are a plentiful supply of hot and -cold water, soap, nail brushes, and for each worker an individual -towel at least 2 feet square, to be renewed daily. If shower-baths -are installed, it must be recognised that for women the ordinary -shower-bath is not applicable because of the difficulty of keeping her -long hair dry or of drying it after bathing. A horizontal spray, fixed -at the level of the shoulders will overcome this objection.” - - -EVERY ATTENTION FOR THE WOMAN WHO WORKS - -All of this reconstruction was rapidly going on when one day it rained -and Mrs. Black got her feet wet going to work in the morning. And -she was at home in bed for two days away from the lathe. Fortunately -the carpenters were still around. “There must be cloak-rooms,” came -the hurried order in a White Paper. “They should afford facilities -for changing clothing and boots and for drying wet outdoor clothes -in bad weather. Each peg or locker should bear the worker’s name or -work-number. The cloak-rooms should be kept very clean.” - -And really now, a woman’s health is a serious matter! Every safeguard -must be adopted for its protection. If Mrs. Black is indisposed, it is -too bad for her to have to go all the way home to go to bed. Immediate -attention might prevent a serious illness. Why was it never thought -of before? Of course, there should be a doctor always around at the -works. So the building plans were enlarged to include a hospital. -The largest building plans I know of have been worked out by one -English factory that recently put up a whole village of wooden houses -for women employés, 700 of whom are provided with board and lodging -at 14 shillings a week. There is a public hall, a club, a chapel, a -restaurant and a hospital. Many factories now have the “hostel” for -lodging women employés who come from a distance. The hospital you will -find now at any factory of good economic standing, and the doctor and -the trained nurse and the “welfare supervisor.” The Government directs: -“At every workshop where 2,000 persons are employed, there shall be -at least one whole-time medical officer and at least one additional -medical officer, if the number exceeds 2,000. A woman welfare -supervisor shall be appointed at all factories and workshops where -women are employed.” - -So now Mrs. Black is given a careful medical examination when she first -presents herself for employment. After that, she is looked over at -regular intervals. At any time, if she so much as appears pale, the -doctor is right there to take her pulse. Any little thing that may be -the matter with her is reported at once on the “sickness register.” A -Health of Munition Workers Committee, appointed by Mr. Lloyd George -with the concurrence of the Home Office has directed, “Week by week -the management should scrutinise their chart of sickness returns and -study their rise and fall.” Also any factory employing over 20 women is -required at regular intervals to fill out a questionnaire concerning -the environment and conditions of its employés, and this record is kept -on file at the Home Office. - -You see how scientifically the woman in industry is handled? Why, -if the munitions output fell off this afternoon, the whole English -Parliament might rise to demand Mrs. Black’s health record to-morrow -morning. - -Mrs. Black must not be allowed to be ill! She ought not even to be -permitted to get tired! Gentlemen, pass her a cup of cocoa or hot milk -in the morning at half-past ten. It is a government order which is -obligatory for factories where she is employed on specially fatiguing -processes. At about four in the afternoon, she should pause for rest -and a cup of tea. If she is engaged on a rush order, the tea may be -passed to her in the workroom. But it is most advisable that she go -to the canteen for it and have a brief period of inactivity in an -easy chair in the adjoining rest room. This isn’t fiction. This is -industrial fact for women to-day. And there is more. The Health of -Munition Workers Committee are now strongly of the opinion that for -women and girls a portion of Saturday and the whole of Sunday should -be available for rest. That Sabbath day commandment, it is discovered, -isn’t only written in the Bible. It is indelibly recorded in the human -constitution. Even if you keep at toil for seven days, you are able -to produce only a six-days’ output. Except for extraordinary, sudden -emergencies, “overtime” is a most wasteful expedient. “The effect of -all overtime should be carefully watched and workers should be at once -relieved from it when fatigue becomes apparent.” Recently in a “General -Order” for the hosiery trade, a condition is included “that every -fourth week must be kept entirely free from overtime.” A White Paper -says: “The result of fatigue which advances beyond physiological limits -(‘overstrain’) not only reduces capacity at the moment, but does damage -of a more permanent kind which will affect capacity for periods far -beyond the next normal period of rest. It will plainly be uneconomical -to allow this damage to be done.” - -Oh, Mrs. Lewis, you can see that something has happened, that there’s -an entirely new sort of place in industry for woman on the other -side, as there’s going to be here. In France the gallant government -almost sees her home from work, at least they make sure of her safety -in getting there. When the employés of a factory live at a distance -involving a journey to and from work by trolley or train, it is -permitted for the women to arrive fifteen minutes later in the morning -and to stop work at night fifteen minutes earlier than the men. Thus -they avoid the rush hour and the congestion on the trains. - -It was in a factory on the banks of the Seine that I noticed another -thoughtful attention. There were hundreds of women engaged in making -munitions and on the work bench before each operator in a brass -fuse filled with water to serve as a vase, was a flower, fresh and -fragrant! Great beautiful La France roses, splendid roses _de gloire_, -bride roses and spicy carnations made lanes of bloom up and down the -workroom. I turned to the foreman: “Is it some fête day?” He shook -his head: “The flowers are renewed each morning. We do it every day. -Because the women like it.” - -In England one of the important duties assigned the Welfare Supervisor -is to teach the employés to play: “Familiarise the working woman with -methods of recreation hitherto unknown to her,” the instructions read. -So they have organised for her dramatic entertainments and choral -classes and they are even teaching her to dance. One factory recently -announced: “We have decided to erect a large theatre as a cinema and -concert hall.” Really, Alice in Wonderland met with no more amazing -surprises than has Mrs. Black. - -And to make sure that she misses nothing that is coming to her, -the Home Office arranged its “follow-up” system. A large staff of -women inspectors are travelling up and down England stopping at the -factories. In 1915 alone, they made 13,445 visits. Is there anything -more the working lady needs? the Government always inquires when the -woman factory inspector returns from a trip. And it was the woman -factory inspector who brought word early in the war, “Why, yes, the -lady should have a new dress.” - - -EVEN THEY DESIGN HER CLOTHES - -So the Ministry of Munitions took the matter up and summoned the -designers. As the result, the most charming “creation” was adapted -from the vaudeville stage for industry. The girl “lift” conductors at -Selfridge’s Store in London are the prettiest things you will find out -of a chorus. Theirs are called, I believe, “peg-top” breeches, and -there is a semi-fitted coat, the whole uniform in mauve and beautifully -tailored. Well, the Government has issued a variety of patterns, -some of course, for a much less expensive outfit than this. There is -one uniform that costs not more than 4 shillings: sometimes the firm -even furnishes it and launders it. The costume it is most desired -to introduce is the khaki trousers with the tunic and a round cap, -because it is really a protection for the workers against the revolving -machinery. Factories not yet quite ready for the whole innovation, -begin with the tunic and a cap and a skirt. But when you have convinced -Mrs. Black how well she is going to look in the other things, she’s -ready to put them on. - -The situation adjusts itself. This report has been made on it to -the Government. I quote verbatim from the published Proceedings of -Parliament and a member’s speech: “The Ministry has spent a very -considerable amount of time in going into this matter. It would seem to -us as men a simple thing. But at any rate now from all I have heard, -they appear to have solved the difficulties. The women’s uniforms up -and down the country vary, of course, according to the duties they have -to perform, but they must strike all who have observed them not only as -useful and comely, but also as reflecting credit on the fatherly care -which the Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Munitions has -exercised over the many thousands of the daughters of Eve who look to -him as their protector.” - -Daughters of Eve in your country’s service, is there anything more that -you require? Yes, one thing more: Parliament, please hold the baby! It -was a response returned from Northumberland to Wales. Every government -summoning its women in industry has sooner or later faced the request. -There were lines of women applying for Poor Relief. But why not go -to work, the authorities would ask. And the child in her arms was -the woman’s answer. Not every woman like Mrs. Black had a maiden -aunt who could be hired to take care of the children. So it happened -that, figuratively speaking, the baby was passed to Parliament. Those -gentlemen, exclaiming “Goodness gracious!” hastily looked about for a -place to lay it down. - -And the public _crèche_ has been promptly erected. Sometimes it’s done -by philanthropy, sometimes by the factory, and sometimes at public -expense. “We’ll pay for it,” says perspiring Parliament, “only hurry!” -And they have hurried all over Europe. The baby of a reigning monarch -is scarcely more scientifically cared for to-day than is the working -woman’s baby. - -Industry has been made over to adapt it to maternity! A baby used to be -the crowning reason of all against woman’s industrial employment. Even -if you didn’t have one, you might have. And they were very likely to -tell you they couldn’t bother to have you around. If you did succeed -in getting employment, some committee was sure to go “investigating” -while you were away from home, and they’d report that your parlour was -dusty and that your children had a dirty face. You tried to tell the -sociologists, of course, that it wasn’t so bad for children to have a -dirty face as a hungry one, and you’d wash them on Sunday. But no one -would understand and you never could adequately explain. Now you don’t -have to any more. - -Every facility for first aid for the housekeeping the woman in industry -has left behind her, is being arranged. They have bought a few more -cups and plates and it has been found that the meals at public schools -that used to be for poor children can just as well be for everybody’s -children. It’s a great help to the maiden aunt. And if you haven’t one, -and you feel that you must go home to dust the parlour or to see that -little Mary puts her rubbers on when she’s out to play, why that can -be arranged. The London Board of Trade, in a special pamphlet on “The -Substitution of Women in Industry,” pointed the way to all nations with -this paragraph: “The supply of women can be frequently increased by -adaptation of the conditions of employment to local circumstances. For -example, one large mill in a certain district where ordinary factory -operatives were scarce, obtained many married women by arranging the -hours of work to suit household exigencies. In one department these -hours were from 10 A. M. to 5 P. M., while another branch was kept -going by two shifts of women, one set working from 7 A. M. to midday, -and the other from 1 P. M. to 6 P. M.” Also a memorandum from the -Health of Munition Workers’ Committee says: “It is the experience of -managers that concessions to married women such as half-an-hour’s grace -on leaving and arriving, or occasional ‘time off’ is not injurious to -output, as the lost time is made good by increased activity.” - - -EXPERT AT HER JOB - -You see now, there is practically no reason left why a woman shouldn’t -work outside her home if she wants to. Such a nice place has been made -for her in industry, and she’s getting along so well. Let’s take the -British Government’s word for it. The Adjutant General to the Forces -in the report on “Women’s War Work in Maintaining the Industries and -Export Trade of the United Kingdom” announces, “Women have shown -themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex in -practically every calling.” - -It was before the war that the great feminist, Olive Shreiner, wrote -her book which has been called the Bible of the woman movement. In it -occurs a memorable statement: “We claim all labour for our field.” -Now it is our field. Women to-day are working as longshoremen, as -navvies barrowing coke, as railway porters and conductors and ticket -takers, as postal employés and elevator operators, as brick-settlers’ -labourers, attenders in roller mills, workers in 78 processes of boot -and shoe-making, in breweries filling beer casks and digging and -spreading barley, in 19 processes in grain milling, in 53 processes in -paper making, in 24 processes in furniture making, in boiler making, -laboratory work, optical work, aeroplane building, in dyeing, bleaching -and printing cotton, in woollen and velvet goods, in making brick, -glazed and unglazed wear, stoneware, tiles, glass, leather goods and -linoleum. In France a year before the war, it happened in the baking -trade that a committee appointed to take under advisement the question -of admitting women reported adversely that the trade was not “adapted” -to women. To-day there are 2000 women bakers in France. In all -countries the largest number of women are employed in two occupations, -in agriculture and in munitions. England had last spring 150,000 women -at work in the fields and was in process of enrolling 100,000 more. -In munitions the last returns show England with 400,000, Germany with -500,000 and France with 400,000 women. - -In this the engineering trade, women have mastered already 500 -processes, three-fourths of which had never known the touch of a -woman’s hand before the war. “I consider myself a first class workman -at my trade. It took me seven years to learn it,” said a foreman to me -through the crashing noise of the machines among which we stood, “but,” -and he waved his hand over his domain in which 1700 women were at work, -“these women, at occupations requiring speed and dexterity, already -excel me.” - -He led me to the side of a girl who was drilling holes in brass. “See,” -he said, “she does 1000 holes at 50 centimes an hour. No man we were -ever able to employ, ever did more than 500 holes an hour, and we had -to pay him 75 centimes.”’ - -We came to the gauging department: “Here,” he said, “women are more -expert than men. See how well adapted to the task are their slender, -supple fingers? And they work for 50 centimes an hour, where we should -have to pay men 80.” - -Like this the evidence of woman’s efficiency at the work they are -doing, is everywhere in Europe. It has now been written into the -records that cannot be gainsaid. That famous publication, _Women’s War -Work_, in announcing the 1701 jobs at which a woman can be employed, -asserts under the authority of the British War Office that at all of -these jobs a woman is “just as good as a man, and for some of them -she is better.” Then they sent a special commission over to see what -women were accomplishing in French factories. After a conference with -M. Albert Thomas, the French Minister of Munitions, and a wide tour -of inspection, the special commission returned to England with this -report: “The opinion in the French factories is that the output of -females on small work equals and in some cases excels that of men. And -in the case of heavier work, women are of practically the same value as -men, within certain limits (when machinery is introduced to supplement -their muscular limitations).” Italy also presents its evidence. The -_Bolettino dell’ officio del Lavoro_, Journal of the Italian Labour -Department, under date of October 16, 1916, had this to say: “It is -necessary to remove the obstacles to the larger employment of women. As -soon as manufacturers show plenty of initiative and adaptiveness for -this new class of labour, and cease to cherish preconceived opinions as -to the inferiority of woman’s work and as to the low wages it merits, -the labour of women will respond splendidly to the utmost variety of -demands.” - -Apparently one controversy is now at rest: Woman knows enough for all -of these things that she has been permitted to do. Thus far, it is -true, it is the unskilled and the semi-skilled processes at which she -is employed in the largest numbers. It was, one might say, the basement -of industry to which she was first admitted. In every land that skilled -workman summoned to receive the government order, “You must let the -women in,” about to take his departure, turned at the door with cap -in hand to make a stipulation. It was the last clause of the ancient -“gentleman’s agreement.” - -“All right,” the Government replied, “not any farther up than we have -to.” - - -ON THE WAY TO THE TOP - -To-day at every convention or little district meeting of any skilled -trade, there is one question for heated discussion, “How far are the -women going?” The only answer is the woman movement that keeps on -steadily moving. And it’s moving up. With every year of the war there -are more and more vacant places. More and more of these are places high -up and higher up. And the women who are called, are coming! There is -Henrietta Boardman. - -Henrietta Boardman, “somewhere in England” has arrived at one of the -highest skilled operations in munitions, tool-tempering. She sits -before a Bunsen burner and holds the tool in the flame while it turns -all beautiful tints, straw colour, purple, blue or red. She must be -able to distinguish just the right shade for its perfection. She does -it so well that all the tool-fitters in the shop now have the habit -of bringing to her, in preference to any other workman, the tools -they want tempered. Because hers last longer! There sits next to her -a skilled tool-temperer who is a member of the Engineers’ Trade Union -and the tools that he tempers will last for three-quarters of an hour: -they are considered good by the trade if they last three-quarters of -an hour. But the tools that Henrietta Boardman tempers are lasting -sometimes all night! - -“It’s curious,” the foreman directing my attention to Henrietta -Boardman’s work commented. “Great colour sense a woman seems to have. -Nothing like it in men. Lots of ’em are even colour blind.” - -“So?” I replied. “Then you must be putting in a great many women for -tool-tempering.” - -“Hush!” he answered, raising a warning finger. And then he smiled. -“She’s the first woman tool-temperer in England. So far there’s only -one other. You see, it’s a highly technical operation,” he went on to -explain. “By the ‘diluting’ of labour scheme we aim to keep women in -unskilled processes. We admit them to skilled processes only when it’s -unavoidable.” - -Now the workshop in which we stood, C-F-5, is the tool-room, confined -to highly skilled processes. The employés, he told me, number 1000 and -of these about 34 are women. - -There you have an excellent comparative view of the outlook for women -in the most desirable occupations. The way, it is true, is still a -little steep and difficult. But with my eyes on Henrietta Boardman’s -bright flame, I saw that in making over industry they at least have -set the ladder up: it goes all the way up! And they’ve made room at -the top! Every week of this ghastly war, there is more and more room -made at the top for women! It was in November, 1916, that an English -manufacturer made the statement: “Given two more years of war and we -can build a battleship from keel to aërial in all its complex detail -and ready for trial, entirely by woman labour.” - -_Then what will become of the labour of men?_ That skilled workman, -cap in hand, going down the steps of the Government House, met -Gabrielle Duchene coming up. At least her message to the Government has -been carried right to the War Office by the feminists in all lands. -In England, after Mrs. Pankhurst’s great triumphal procession, little -Sylvia Pankhurst, feminist, led another which served as it were as a -postscript to the first: it is in a postscript, you know, that a woman -always put the really important thing she has to say. On the banner -that Sylvia carried in London’s East End was inscribed the feminist -message: “We are willing to work _for a fair wage!_” - -Gabrielle Duchene stopped the skilled workman and showed him the -message, which enunciates the demand: For equal work, equal pay. “It’s -your only protection,” she urged. But he only grinned. And he pulled -from his pocket a scrap of paper: “See,” he said, “my government -agreement that woman’s admission into industry is for the duration of -the war only.” And it is true, he has that agreement. It is the basis -on which all over the world the bargain was made: “Teach the woman how. -It is a necessary but temporary expedient. When you return from the -front, you shall have the job back. And the woman will go home again.” -But will she? - -The message that went up to the Government House asking equal pay for -equal work is one of the most significant measures in the new woman -movement. Ever since women began to be in industry at all, the wage -envelope for them has been very small, as lady-like an affair as an -early Victorian pocket handkerchief—and just about as practical. -Remarks of protest on the part of the recipient were customarily met -with irritation or derision: Wages? Why, woman, what would you want -with more wages anyhow—to buy a new ribbon to put on your hat? Now a -man, of course, must have all the wages that he can get: he has to -have them to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and -the coal bill and to support a wife who keeps his house and darns his -socks. And, even if he has to have them to buy a cigar or a drink? Oh, -don’t ask foolish questions! A man has to have wages to meet all of his -expenses, a large part of which is Woman. Now run along and be a good -little girl! - -But the new woman in industry can’t be dismissed so easily as that. -Especially a feminist in khaki can’t. And she was respectfully saluting -Government and begging to inquire if women were doing men’s work so -well as Government had said they were, when would women be getting -men’s pay? - - -EQUAL PAY IS COMING - -And it was more than a “foolish question.” It was a disturbing -interrogation. Government looked up surprised from its war orders and -statistical investigations to answer: “Why, really, don’t you know, -woman’s work isn’t the same as man’s. You see, we have made over the -machines for her. And sometimes she stops for an hour and goes home to -wash the children’s faces.” - -But the feminist said: “Isn’t it the output that counts?” And she -spoke of the better work and the faster work than man that women were -doing for two-thirds men’s pay. See the girl drilling 1000 holes at 50 -centimes an hour where a man once drilled 500 holes for 75 centimes an -hour! - -And about this time the skilled workman, discovering that the lady -was getting a hearing, came breathlessly running back to interpolate -that men had to be paid more because they knew more. Those women, for -instance, who were “gauging” with such remarkable success knew only -that one process, whereas the men knew the whole trade. - -But the lady had only a woman’s logic: “If I wish to buy a dozen -clothespins,” she insisted, “I don’t care how much the person who makes -the clothespins knows, whether his knowledge reaches to mathematics or -Greek. A dozen clothespins just a dozen clothespins are to me. What I -am concerned about is only the delivery of the dozen.” - -Well, anyhow, Government everywhere said it would think this matter -over. Meanwhile the walls of Paris began to flame out with a great red -and black poster that Gabrielle Duchene was putting up. It is some four -feet long by three feet wide and at the top in large letters to be -read a long way down the street, it insists: “_A travail egal, salaire -egal._” And in every land the trained workman stopped to stare up at -a lady like this at work in front of a bill-board: “You fool,” she -turned on him in scorn, “can’t you see now that it’s equal pay for -equal work for men’s sakes?” - -At last he began to. Mme. Duchene is the wife of a celebrated architect -in Paris. As the chairman of the Labour section of the Conseil National -des Femmes, she had pled ineffectually for equal pay for women’s sakes. -When she cleverly changed the phrase “_for men’s sakes_” it had a new -punch in it. The aroused Bourse de Travail formed the now world-known -Comité Intersyndical d’Action contre l’Exploitation de la Femme to -back the feminist demand. And organised labour in land after land has -begun to sign up its endorsement. For the flaming poster points out in -effect: _If a woman can be had to drill 1000 holes at 50 centimes an -hour, who will hire a man to drill 500 holes at 75 centimes an hour?_ -That was the little sum the feminist set labour to work out the answer -to. - -And for the Government, there was Mrs. Black’s breakfast. If it takes a -breakfast that includes three rashers of bacon to produce the maximum -output of munitions for a day, how many munitions will be missing if -you don’t get the bacon? Mrs. Black wasn’t getting the bacon. Welfare -supervisors reported that while Mrs. Black ate her dinner with all -its formulated calories at the canteen, she didn’t eat her breakfast -there. In fact Mrs. Black didn’t seem to eat much breakfast anywhere. -It wasn’t the habit of the British working class woman: She usually -started work for the day on merely a piece of bread and a cup of tea. -Mrs. Black couldn’t afford three rashers of bacon for breakfast! - -The matter was investigated. The average wage for women in industry in -England, it was found, had been 11 shillings a week: in the textile -trade, before the war the best paid trade in the land, the weekly -wage was 15 shillings 15 pence a week. And women wheeled shells in a -munitions factory for 12 shillings a week, for which a man was paid 25 -shillings. - -But it began to be arithmetically clear all around that it wasn’t wise -for a woman in England or France or anywhere else to be working for -too little pay to buy a good breakfast! That reliable organ of public -opinion, _The Times_, announced September 25, 1916: “Proper meals for -the workers is, indeed, an indispensable condition for the maintenance -of output on which our fighting forces depend, not only for victory, -but for their very lives.” - -What should a woman do with wages to-day? Why, she has to have them -to buy not only a proper breakfast, but to buy the children’s shoes -and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and the _crèche_ or the -maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has to have them to buy a -new ribbon for her hat—why, she will go without her bacon to get it! -What does a woman have to have wages for to-day? Oh, don’t ask foolish -questions. At last she has those mysterious expenses, even as a man! - -I think that Lloyd George was the first man to see it. Great Britain -led the way with the now famous Orders L-2, which has come to be known -as the Munition Women’s Charter. There is assured to women in the -government factories and government controlled factories equal pay on -piece work, equal pay on time work for one woman doing the work of one -fully skilled man, and a minimum of £1 a week for all women engaged on -work that was formerly customarily done by men. France followed with a -declaration for equal pay for piece work for women. Governments have -now enunciated the principle, have adopted it in practice and have -recommended its justice to the private employer. Watch the skilled -workman himself do the rest! Among the trade unions that have already -stipulated equal pay for equal work for women doing war work in their -craft are these: Engineering, cotton, woollen and worsted, china and -earthenware, bleaching and dyeing, furniture and woodwork, hosiery -manufacturing and the National Union of Railwaymen. - -There has begun, like this, the greatest making over of all! Better -than all the bouquets they’ve handed us is the making over of our wage -envelope to man’s size! It isn’t finished yet. Girl lift operators in -London still get 18 shillings a week on the same elevator for which -men were paid 23 shillings. On the tramways of Orleans, France, women -conductors get 2 francs and 2.50 a day for exactly the same work for -which men were paid 4 francs a day. Nevertheless the new wage envelope -is not so lady-like as it used to be. It’s coming out in larger and -larger sizes. The London tailoring trade has increased the women’s -minimum wage from 3½d. to 6d. an hour. In Paris the women conductors -on the suburban lines have been advanced from the former 4 francs a day -to the men’s 5 francs. Glasgow has 1020 women conductors at men’s pay, -27 shillings a week. London has 2000 women omnibus conductors with the -wage formerly paid to men, 38 shillings a week. Even the German brewers -have come to equal pay for women. Thousands of women in munitions in -England are making 30 shillings a week. Some at Woolwich are making £2 -to £3 per week, a few up to £4 a week. Henrietta Boardman at a skilled -man’s job gets exactly a man’s pay, 1 shilling 1d. and 1 farthing an -hour, amounting to about £4 a week. At the sixteenth annual congress -of the Labour Party, held in Manchester, England, in January, 1917, -the following resolution was introduced: “That in view of the great -national services rendered by women, during this time of war and of -the importance of maintaining a high level of wages for both men and -women workers, the Conference urges, That all women employed in trades -formerly closed to them should only continue to be so employed at trade -union rates (the wages paid to men).” - -For the new woman in industry is too efficient to be countenanced as a -competitor in the labour market to offer herself at a lower wage than -men. Trade unions may even admit her as a comrade, not yet but soon. -For she’s safer to them that way! In England they are giving their -cordial support to Mary McArthur with her organisation, The National -Federation of Women Workers, in which there are already enrolled -350,000 women. In France they are backing Mme. Duchene, who in many -of the little dim-lit cafés of Paris is holding meetings to organise -the women in industry into what the French call “waiting unions.” Why -waiting? Because the men’s trades unions are ready even to make over -their constitutions to admit women to membership if necessary, that -is, _if women stay in industry_. But they are waiting to see. And -every little while they pull out from their pocket a soiled scrap of -paper to look contemplatively at it. It is a government agreement. The -Government has said the women will go home. _But will they?_ - - -WOMEN WANTED AFTER THE WAR - -Read the answer in the columns of “Casualties” appearing in the daily -papers from Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London and now New York. -How many millions of men have been drafted from industry into the awful -battalions of death, no government says. But we at least know with too, -too terrible certainty, that the jobs to which no man will ever return -from the front, now number millions and millions. And there is going -to be a world to be rebuilded! Every nation must enlist all of its -resources if it is to hold its own in the international markets of the -future. The new woman in industry, her country is going to keep right -on needing in industry! - -Her husband and her children may need her there! After the men that -are dead, there are millions more, the maimed, the halt and the blind, -for whom women must work for at least a generation after the fight is -finished. - -And her employer is going to need her! See all the rows and rows of -little capstan lathes made smaller for a woman’s hand? See the slender, -supple fingers so well adapted to, we will say, gauging. See Henrietta -Boardman with her finer colour sense for tool tempering than any man in -C-F-5. _See, oh, see the girl who drills 1000 holes an hour, where the -man drilled 500!_ - -Listen to Sir William Beardmore, owner of a projectile factory at -Glasgow, in an address before the Iron and Steel Institute: “In the -turning of the shell body, the actual output by girls with the same -machines and working under exactly the same conditions, and for an -equal number of hours, is quite double that of trained mechanics. -In the boring of shells the output is also quite double, and in the -curving, waving and finishing of shell bases, quite 120 per cent. more -than that of experienced mechanics.” - -Again, in the workshops of Europe, above the rattle and the roar -of crashing machinery in shop after shop, I hear the echo of some -foreman’s voice: “Here and here and here we shall never again employ -men because we cannot afford to.” In one great factory on the banks -of the Seine where I inquired, “Are you going to keep women after -the war?” an American superintendent who had been brought over from -Bridgeport, Connecticut, answered promptly: “Sure, 9000 of ’em. We’re -going to convert this into an automobile factory and we’re not going to -throw all this specially made-to-measure-to-woman-size machinery on the -scrap-heap, you know.” - -And the British Association for the Advancement of Science has -investigated and decided and announced: “Where female labour is either -underpaid or is obviously superior to male labour, a special inducement -offers itself to employers to retain the women.” - -Can’t you see the efficiency expert at the elbow of Government, writing -“Void” across the face of that scrap of paper? Industry cannot afford -to let the women go. - -And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate-glass mirrors and the -canteen dining-rooms done in pink, and blue, and duck’s-egg green and -the new uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in industry! Oh, -gentlemen, after all, why should she go home? For the new place in -industry is the most comfortable place in which she has ever been in -the world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk about the factory -as so unhealthful for a woman. But you see, that was because no man -knew how hard was domestic labour: he had never done it. And it was -before the experts began to gather data on how unhealthful is the home. - - -FACTORY WORK EASY COMPARED WITH KITCHEN WORK - -There is now a most interesting investigation under way in London. It -is a scientific intensive study of the housewife, who is at last to -be tabulated and indexed, just like any other labourer. The Women’s -Industrial Council, who have undertaken it with the endorsement of -the Government, announce: “It is quite probable the results may -prove that the stretching motions involved in such domestic tasks -as the washing of heavy sheets and blankets are more harmful than -the stretching motions of the shop assistant or the vibrations which -certain engineering employés meet in their work.” I went one day in -London with the sociological investigator who is trying to find this -out. She took me to Acton, which is the district where the washing is -done for the great city. There are probably more laundries here than in -any similar area in the world. We stopped to look at one of them. It is -in a sanitary, new, up-to-date building with plenty of light and air -and every new labour-saving device known to the trade. Then we called -at some of the little cottages where live the women who work at this -laundry. But to-day is Monday, which is the “slack” day of the week in -the laundry business, and on Monday the employés remain at home to do -their own “wash,” with the same appliances that have been used in home -industry for a hundred years! The woman who came to the door when we -knocked had just taken her hands out of the suds. She was still wiping -them on her gingham apron as she talked. Do you know what she said? -At house after house it was this, that Monday at home was her hardest -day of the week. “O, yes, ma’am,” she said, “much harder than any of -the days that I am at the laundry.” Why? Because at the laundry she -has no lifting of any kind to do and no backbreaking scrubbing over a -washboard. It is done by machinery, or if there are heavy sheets that -must be lifted by hand, men are employed to do it. At home even when -she’s so fortunate as to have a faucet, all of the water she must carry -in pails from the sink to the “copper” to be heated. - -Do you know, each time as we turned from a cottage door where the woman -in the gingham apron stood wiping her wet hands, I thought of that lady -in the engineering trade who operates an electrical crane from her easy -chair; and the women conductors in Manchester sitting down between -fares on the “flap” seats put in for their comfort. I think I know -what the medical journal, _The Lancet_, means when it announced in the -February, 1917, number that “Factory work, under fitting conditions may -be so beneficial to women that it may lead to permanent benefit to the -race.” And I am not surprised to learn that the Insurance Department -of the English Government has recently discovered that the greatest -percentage of illness among women occurs among domestic workers. - -You see, these new tasks are not so much more laborious than the old -as the world feared. And this war has somehow brought about the most -undreamed of readjustments. In a London tube station I came upon one -of them: my startled gaze encountered a man on his knees scrubbing the -floor and a woman at the ticket window taking tickets! - -Do you know, the more I see of the woman in industry, the more it looks -to me as if she could stand it. Anyhow, she’s stronger than she used to -be. One insurance society at Manchester with 26,000 members found that -it paid out for sickness benefits in 1915, £300 less than in 1914. The -insurance actuary attributed the improved health to the better food -and better clothing the members were now able to buy through the wages -they were receiving in the munitions factories. The annual report of -Great Britain’s chief inspector of factories and workshops for 1916, -commenting on the good health of the women employés, observes: “There -can be little doubt that the high wages and the better food they have -been able to enjoy in consequence, have done much to bring about this -result.” And you don’t find among employers any more the complaint -that women employés are less reliable than men because of their more -frequent absences on account of illness. Very likely they may once have -been so. Only a very strong woman could have been equal to the old -overstrain of a man’s work in the shop plus a woman’s work in the home. -And there was often a marked lowering of her vitality and efficiency. -But the new improved man’s size wage envelope is proving, you see, the -effectual remedy. Wages enough to buy good food and then to pay for -some one to cook it—that has made a new woman of this woman in industry. - -And she doesn’t want to go back to general housework in her own -home, and to the “home” meals of white bread and boiled tea which the -Home Office has specifically pointed out are not good enough on which -to produce shells. She’s accustomed now to her breakfast bacon! The -workingman’s wife at household labour had no Saturday half holidays -in the kitchen. She had something like a sixteen hour day with no laws -against overtime. Nobody bothered about how many hours she worked. -Nobody counted her food calories. Nobody brought her roses. Nobody -taught her to dance. Nobody noticed that she ought to be happy, without -which she couldn’t be efficient. Most of all, gentlemen, there wasn’t -any wage envelope there! - -Do you know of any reason why she should wish to go back? Some 3000 of -her were asked about it through a questionnaire recently sent out in -England. And of these 3000, 2500 answered: “I prefer to remain in the -work I am now doing.” I am sure Mrs. Black would. - -And I know the world is going to be very much surprised about it. But I -think that Mr. Black, when he returns from the front, will prefer that -she should. For Mr. Black is going to get a better dinner that way! The -industrial canteen can cook better and cheaper for him and Mrs. Black -than she could at home. She can’t make plum pudding in the home, as -they can at the canteen for 2d. a portion. The chef who is buying for -1500 people gets rates that she never could for seven from the huckster -and the fish-monger and the rest. Besides, Mrs. Black never had any -special training for cooking, as she now has for engineering. In the -shop she has learned to do one thing very well indeed. In her home -there wasn’t any one thing she ever had learned to do very well. And -she worked ineffectually and inefficiently at several highly skilled -occupations: child rearing and sewing and cooking and baking and -laundry work and, occasionally, nursing. Isn’t it remarkable at any -stage of the world’s evolution, that woman should have been expected -to carry a schedule like that? You never found Mr. Black attempting to -be a carpenter and a tailor and a plumber and a gardener and a whole -lot of other useful trades all in one. No, Mr. Black’s rule always was, -stick to one trade. Jack-of-all-trades! Why, everybody knows that he -could have been master of none! - -And Mrs. Black wasn’t. Now, if after the war, she prefers to stay in -engineering or some other trade, why should Mr. Black worry? The lady -will pay for her own dinner and other things besides. She can send the -wash to the laundry, and the baby will be at the _crèche_ for the day, -and the children will have dinner at school. And at night, the family -will have supper together, which Mr. and Mrs. Black on their way home -from the factory can bring from the communal kitchen. Governments -already have started the fire in the new cookstove in the communal -kitchen which England has set up in London and Germany in Berlin, -because Ministries of Food have decided food can be more scientifically -and efficiently cooked there than in the homes of the working people. - - -THE NEW IMPROVED HOME - -Oh, can there be any one who would still wish to take away the new wage -envelope? Think what it’s already done for the working class home! -Children with shoes on their feet, you know. Women in England are -wearing fur coats. Women in France who once wore sabots are now wearing -shoes for which they have paid 40 francs, which is $8 a pair. In every -warring country working women are shopping, shopping, shopping, as they -never shopped before. O yes, it’s thrift and prudence and all that’s -proper, to put your earnings in war bonds instead. The rainy day, you -know, that’s ahead. And of course one must, for patriotism’s sake, put -some of it in war bonds, but not quite all. You see, when there have -been almost all rainy days behind and you’ve always wanted something -you couldn’t have? Well, Mrs. Black thinks you might as well live in -the sunshine and have it, now you can. - -That’s the way affluence seems to have happened to the working class -home all over Europe. Prosperity is fairly gilding over every district -in which a munitions plant has arisen. And, oh, well, what if it is -gilt? Gilt’s good for little cheerless dingy houses. Do you know that, -next to the war trades, the most flourishing trade in all Europe to-day -is the cheap jewelry trade? There are places in London’s East End -where every other shop or two has come to be a jeweller’s shop, with -the windows hung splendidly with all the shining trinkets that bring a -shining light to women’s eyes. - -Mr. Black was home on leave a while ago. He stopped the first thing at -the jeweller’s round the corner in Hardwick Row and bought the gold -chain and the locket Mrs. Black’s wearing now with his picture in -it. Do you know, it was so long since he’d given his wife a present, -not since their courting days, that he’d forgotten how? He was a lot -more awkward about it than he is about facing a fusillade of German -gun-fire. The perspiration just stood out on his forehead as he laid -the little package on the kitchen table and said, “Mary, here’s -something I thought you might like.” - -There was a note in his voice by which she knew it wasn’t bloaters from -the fish-shop over the way. But she no more expected what it really was -than she hoped for an angel to lean out of the windows of the sky and -say, “Mary Black, here’s a gold crown for you.” The paper crackled in -the silent room while she untied the string. The chain just shimmered -once through her fingers. Her lips trembled. With a little cry, “O -Jim!” she turned to lay her head in the old forgotten place on his -shoulder. And there she sobbed out all the bitterness of seven years’ -married hardship and privation with the bearing and rearing of five -children in three rooms on 22 shillings a week. - -Oh, there are things that gold chains are good for more than show. The -famous uses of adversity are various. But they have been much oversung. -And after all, God in his heaven perhaps knows that even a war may be -worth while, if it’s the only way. Two wage envelopes are better than -one. The new woman with the old love revived in her heart, I’m sure, -won’t be so often cross and she won’t have to slap the children so much -as she did. Just think of the new home that the man at the front’s -coming back to! Mrs. Black’s saving now for a piano! - -Mrs. Lewis, are you ready? The work-whistle calls you. My morning -paper to-day advertises for a New York department store: “To patriotic -women seeking practical means of expressing their earnestness: During -the coming season, women of intelligence will have the greatest -opportunity that was ever offered them to become producing factors -on the nation’s industrial balance sheet. Whether they need to work -or not, they should work, because it will make them happier and give -them a sense of satisfaction as nothing else in the world can under -present circumstances. We can give many women work to do to occupy part -of their time. This part-time work affords a woman, if she has home -duties, plenty of leisure for her own housework—she need not leave her -home in the morning until after the man of the house goes. She may -return in the evening before he does—she will have more money for -her home or for herself and be an independent producing factor in her -community, helping herself, her home, and in this way her country in a -time when this kind of help is most needed.” - -An American woman to-day will find opportunities for work on every -hand. The Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company has 1000 women -on the pay roll. At McKee’s Rocks, Pa., the Pressed Steel Car Company -has 100 girls building artillery cars for use on the French front. The -Farrell plant of the American Sheet & Tin-plate Company at Sharon, -Pa., is employing women at $4.50 a day. A munitions factory at Dayton, -Ohio, has 5000 women working at men’s pay. The Detroit Taxicab and -Transfer Company have women operating their electric taxicabs at the -wages formerly paid to men. The United Cigar Stores Company is offering -women salesmen men’s wages. At the July, 1917, Lumbermen’s Convention -at Memphis, Tenn., the Southern Pine Association by a unanimous vote -decided that women employed in men’s places at the lumber camps should -be paid the same salaries formerly paid to men. - -And Gabrielle Duchene’s flaming poster has sent a light across the -sea. The American Federation of Labour has voted: “Resolved that we -endorse the movement to obtain from all governments at the time of the -signature of the Treaty of Peace, the establishment of an international -agreement embodying the principle of equal pay for equal work -regardless of sex.” - -So? Then no one really expects the new woman in industry to go home -after the war. There is a great High Court of the Ages in which man may -propose the regulation of the Universe, but God Himself disposes. And -that soiled scrap of paper will be, after all, only a scrap of paper in -the great whirlwind of economic law that bloweth where it listeth. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE - - -Something has just happened. A hidden hand has touched a secret spring. -A closed door in a blank wall has opened. And one in the long cloak of -authority seems to be standing at the threshold pleasantly beckoning -the Lady to cross formerly forbidden portals. - -For I feel like that, like a little girl living in a fairy tale that is -turning true right before my eyes. This morning there has arrived in my -mail a letter personally addressed to me from the New York University -School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance. It announces that the -entrance of the United States into the war has revolutionised American -business. That hundreds of thousands of men off for the front are -leaving behind them hundreds of thousands of vacancies. That commercial -houses are facing a shortage of trained and capable assistants. That -to fill the positions which are daily presenting themselves, women -must enter business. That to give them the necessary training, this -school offers no less than 142 courses from which they may make their -preparation for executive positions of responsibility. - -It is the first time that I and the League for Business Opportunities -for Women to which I belong, have ever thus received a personal -invitation to the wide open world of commerce. The League since its -inception some five years ago has been alertly engaged in looking, as -its name implies, for business opportunities for women. We have always -been obliged to look pretty persistently for them. Never before have -they been presented to us. Now, see, the way is clear, they tell us, -right up the steeps of high finance. - -The bursting bombs of war have done it. A ghastly _Place aux Dames_, it -is in truth. But the stage is set. The cue is given. There is not even -time to hesitate. Draughted, the long lines come on with steady tread. -Now our battalions fall in step with the battalions of the Allies and -the Central Powers. For English or Hun or French or Magyar or Russian -or Serb or American, the woman movement is one like that. Through the -same doorway of opportunity we all of us shall enter in. There are -blood stains on the lintel, I know. But this door, for the first time -set ajar, is the only way, it appears, between the past and the future. -With the invitation from the New York School of Commerce on my desk -before me, I too am at the threshold where the centuries meet. Down the -vista that stretches before me, I look with long, long thoughts. - -[Illustration: - - MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE - - Of the Financial Centre for Women in New York, who stands at the open - door in commerce to usher in the women of America. -] - -And once more, Cecile Bornozi somewhere in Europe is passing the sugar. -In pursuit of food conservation, hotel waiters have a way of removing -the sugar bowl to the dining-room sideboard and thoughtfully forgetting -to offer it a second time. And the pretty young woman in the chic -hat, who sat opposite me at breakfast that morning, was near enough to -reach it and daring enough to commandeer the sugar bowl for our common -use. There is nothing, I believe, like a lump of sugar that so quickly -makes war-time travellers kin. That is the way I came to know Cecile -Bornozi, new woman in commerce. - -She is a type distinct from her predecessors in that old world of -ours that is going up in battle smoke. Her brown hair is done in as -coquettish a curl on her forehead, her eyes are as sparkling blue, -her lips are as curving red as any girl’s who used to have nothing to -do but to dance the tango and pour afternoon tea. But her horizon has -widened beyond the drawing-room. Nor is she the business woman whom we -have had with us for a generation. Why, the stenographer who takes my -dictation is a business woman. But from her hand bag as another woman -might produce a shopping list, Cecile Bornozi has just drawn forth a -$50,000 bill of sale to her for a freight steamer. - -She has just purchased it because of the increasing scarcity of -tonnage in which to transport the fire brick that she is buying for -the reconstruction of factory furnaces in the devastated districts -of France. Yesterday she shipped 90 cwt. of oil boxes and bearings -and 6 railway coal wagons. In the past few months she has sent over -some 2000 railway wagons. Like this, during the past year, she has -expended a million dollars for railway rolling stock that she rents to -the French Government. She is specially commissioned by France for -this undertaking, as her _Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement_ -spread in front of my breakfast roll shows to me and all of the Allies. -A shipper has to have a license like this in these days. It is what -secures for her her export permit from the London Board of Trade. -Now she sets down her coffee cup and folds her newspaper and is off -for India House in Kingsway where fore-gather other merchants who -have confidential appointments with the War Office and the English -Government. Upon her decisions to-day will depend so much more than -the selection of a ribbon to match the blue of her eyes or the choice -of the card to win at an afternoon bridge whist party. Her care and -her forethought, her planning and her enterprise must outwit even the -German submarines and get the goods across the English Channel to keep -the transportation lines of a nation open for communication with the -front. And there will be no superior at her elbow to tell her how. - -“I like big ventures. I like to do things myself. I’d sell flowers on -the curb before I’d consent to be any one’s else employé,” the new -woman in commerce flashed back at me as she buttoned her coat collar -and started out in a ten o’clock morning fog. - - -RISING TO THE NEW OCCASION - -You see, it’s like that. The big venture is the fascinating field -that lies beyond humdrum directed routine. We have by now forgotten -the stir that was created when perhaps thirty years ago the first -woman walked into a business house to take her place at a typewriter -desk. Let us not lose sight of the innovation of our own day that is -about to command attention: the woman at the typewriter is rising. I -think we shall see her take the chair before the mahogany desk in the -president’s office. - -The Woman’s Association of Commerce of America was recently organised -at Chicago in a convention of business women gathered from cities from -New York to Chicago. For the first time adequate training to fit a -woman for real commercial responsibilities is beginning to be as freely -offered as to men. Cecile Bornozi, widely known as the only railway -woman in France, came by her commercial knowledge largely through -instinct and inheritance. She gave up literature at the Sorbonne for -it, because as the daughter of Philip Bornozi, from Constantinople, -who supplied rolling stock to the railways of the Orient, France, and -Belgium, the call to commerce was in her blood. But except for the few -specially placed women like that, the way up in commerce before the -year 1914 was not plain and easy. Now all over the world there are -floating in on the morning mail invitations like the one that has just -come to me from the New York University. - -How much it means, I suppose no man can quite understand. Suppose you, -sir, were going to attempt to talk glibly in terms of chiffon and voile -and chambray and all the rest of those mystifying terms that tangle the -tongue of a novice sent down the aisle of a department store with a -sample in his lower left hand vest pocket to be properly matched—you’d -feel, wouldn’t you, that a course in this positively unknown tongue -would be helpful in making yourself and your errand rightly understood. -Just so. Now all unknown language is a handicap as is this one to you, -which is quite familiar to every woman, for we learn to lisp in terms -of our clothes. But on the other hand, there are commercial terms -which you as a boy imbibed as naturally from your environment, which -are to your sister a foreign tongue. We need the schools to teach it. -And I am not sure but it is the schools now being set up by the women -who have learned through their own experience that offer the surest -interpretation of the way in these new paths in which women’s feet are -set to-day. - -Just off from Central Park West in New York City, the Financial -Centre for Women has been established in direct response to the war -demand. Wall Street asked for it. Already 60 young women instructed in -practical banking, investments, accountancy, and managerial duties have -been sent out to fill responsible positions in the National Bank of -Commerce, Morgan’s, the Federal Reserve and over half a dozen other of -the leading banks of New York City. These young women have been given -an intimate working knowledge of such mysteries as stop payments and -certified checks, gold imports, cumulative and preferred shares and -all the intricacies of the market and the terms in which “the street” -talks. In the room with the green cloth covered table, about which sit -these future financiers and captains of industry in training, there -is a blackboard. See the chalk marked diagram. By the routes mapped -out in those white lines, they have brought furs from Russia, wheat -from Canada, sugar from Hawaii. And all the money transactions involved -have been properly put through. Thoroughly familiarised like this with -international operations, there is more to learn for the making of a -financier. I doubt if any but a woman would think to teach it. Miss -Elizabeth Rachel Wylie, who directs the Financial Centre, recalls her -classes from the wide world of affairs through which they circle the -globe, for personal instruction. They have now the groundwork of the -knowledge with which a business man is familiar. And Miss Wylie adds -earnestly, impressively the last lesson: “Don’t darn.” - -You see, captains of industry don’t. Even so much as an office boy who -aspires to become a captain of industry doesn’t. And the woman in the -office who spends her evenings mending her stockings and washing her -handkerchiefs, misses, say, the moving pictures where the man in the -office is adding to his stock of general information. This tendency to -revert to type has been the fatal handicap of the past. By the faint -beginnings of an intention to discard it, you differentiate the new -woman in commerce from her predecessor the business woman. By way of -discipline that girl there at the green cloth covered table, whose -bag of war knitting hangs on the back of her chair the while she’s -shipping furs from Russia, will leave it at home to-morrow. Cecile -Bornozi wouldn’t have done a million dollars’ worth of business with -the French Government the past year if she had stopped to knit. And if -her thoughts had been on her stockings, she might have missed important -details in railway rolling stock. In her room at the Hotel Savoy in -London, I never saw a needle or thimble or spool of thread. But on her -table I noticed _System_, the magazine of business. - - -APPROACHING HIGH FINANCE IN FRANCE - -Over on the banks of the Seine even as here on the banks of the Hudson, -they are teaching women now the things that Cecile Bornozi knows. -Not so long ago I stood in the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement -Commercial pour les Jeunes Filles in Paris. This practical school of -high commercial instruction for young girls is in the Rue Saint Martin -in an old monastery, the Ancien Prieure de Saint Martin des Champs, -where the Government has given them quarters. Here a high vaulted room -of prayer has been turned into an amphitheatre. On rows of benches -lifted tier after tier above the grey and white tiled floor, a hundred -and twenty-five girls sat facing a new future. For the first time in -history, _la jeune fille_ who has always been more domestic minded than -the young girl of any other nation except Germany, is being taught to -be commercially minded. Curiously enough, “Thou shalt not darn” is a -fundamental precept for success laid down by the director of the new -school in France even as at the new school in America. Mlle. Sanua in -Paris has to be perhaps even more insistent about it than Miss Wylie -in New York. These are 125 girls of the _bourgeoise_ families, any one -of whom, if the great war had not come about, would be this morning -going to market with her mother to learn the relative values of the -different varieties of soup greens. And this afternoon she would be -occupied, needle in hand, on a chemise or a robe _de nuit_ for her -trousseau. Now she has been called to a totally new environment. Here -she sits on a wooden bench, the sofa pillow she has brought with her at -her back, a fountain pen in hand, her note book on her knee, adjusting -herself to a career which up to 1914 no one so much as dreamed of for -her. She is hearing this morning a lecture on commercial law, delivered -by Mme. Suzanne Grinberg, one of Paris’ famous lawyers. _Le Professeur_ -sits on a high stool before a great walnut table, her shapely hands in -graceful gesture accentuating her legal phrases. Every little while you -catch the “_n’est ce pas?_” with which she closes a period. And now and -then she turns to the blackboard behind her to illustrate her meaning -with a diagram. - -Mlle. Sanua passes the school catalogue for my inspection and I notice -a course of study that includes: industrial trade marks, designs, -etc.; foreign commercial legislation; commercial documents, buying -and selling, banking, etc.; bookkeeping, commercial and financial -arithmetic; course in merchandising, including textiles, dyes, etc.; -political economy, including the distribution of wealth, the monetary -systems of the world, the consumption of wealth; pauperism, insurance, -and charities; the state and its rôle in the economic order, taxes, -socialism; economic geography and world markets; law, including public -law, civil law and laws relating to women; foreign languages. This -is the curriculum now being approached by the young girl who up to -yesterday had nothing more serious in the world to occupy her leisure -than to sit at the window with an embroidery frame in her lap watching -and waiting for a husband. - -But you see three years ago, four years ago, Pierre marched by the -window in a poilu’s blue uniform and he may never come back. Marriage -has hitherto been the fixed fact of every French girl’s life. Now -numbers of women must inevitably, inexorably find another career. These -girls here are many of them the daughters of professional men, doctors -and lawyers. The girl in the third row back with the blue feather in -her hat is the niece of President Poincaré. That one with the pretty -soft brown eyes in the front row is married. The wife of a manufacturer -who is serving his country as a lieutenant in the army, she is trying -as best she may to take his place at the head of the great industrial -enterprise he had to leave at a day’s notice when his call to the -colours came. She found herself confronted with all sorts of difficult -situations. Somehow she’s managed so far by sheer force of will and -somewhat perhaps by intuition to come through some pretty narrow -situations. For the future she’s not willing to take any more such -chances. She has come to learn all that a school has to teach of the -scientific principles and the established facts of commerce. Two girls -here are the granddaughters of one of the leading merchants of the -Havre. Their brother, who was to have succeeded to the management of -the celebrated financial house, gave his life for his country instead -at the Marne. And these girls, with the consent of the family, have -dedicated their lives to taking their brother’s place in the economic -up-building of France to which the financial world looks forward after -the war. - -You see like this the new woman in commerce all over the world is -planning for a career that will never again rest with stenography and -typewriting. Bringing furs from Russia and wheat from Canada is more -interesting. There is nothing like preparedness. You are almost sure -to do that for which you have specially made ready. And one glance at -the programme of study for the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement -Commercial shows clearly enough to any one who reads, that it is what -Cecile Bornozi with her flashing glance calls the “big venture” which -is the ultimate aim of this girl with the new note book on her knee. -Meantime France can scarcely wait for her to complete her training. -Mlle. Sanua has almost to stand at the door of the Ancien Prieure -to turn away the employers who come to the Rue St. Martin to offer -positions to her pupils. “Always they are asking,” she says, “have I -any more graduates ready?” - -Avocat Suzanne Grinberg’s soft musical voice goes on in the -amphitheatre expounding commercial law. Outside in her adjoining -office, the little stone walled room with the religious Gothic -window, Mlle. Sanua tells me how it has come about, this new attitude -on the part of her country to women who are going to find economic -independence in the business world. In the cold little room in a war -burdened land where coal is $80 a ton, we draw our chairs closer to -the tiny grate. Mlle. Sanua leans forward and selects two fagots to be -added to the fire that must be carefully conserved with rigid war-time -economy. - -As she begins to talk, I catch the look in her eyes, the glow of -idealism that I have felt somewhere before. Where? Ah, yes. It -was Frau Anna von Wunsch in whose eyes I have seen the gleam that -flashed the same feminist message. Frau von Wunsch was before the -war the presedient of Die Frauenbanck. This was for Germany a most -revolutionary institution that hung out its gold lettered sign at 39 -Motzstrasse, Berlin, a woman’s bank in a land where it was contrary to -custom for a married woman to be permitted to do any banking at all. -But “Women will never become a world power until they become a money -power,” said Frau von Wunsch. And they put that motto in black letters -on all of their letter heads and checks. The armies of the world are -now entrenched between the Seine and the Rhine and since 1914 of course -hardly any personal word at all has come through the censored lines -from the feminists of Germany to the feminists of France. One does not -even know what has become of Frau von Wunsch and her Frauenbanck over -there in Mittel Europa. But the ideal that she lighted, flames now in -every land. - -Mlle. Sanua’s plan too is for a new woman in commerce who shall be -a money power and a world power. And perhaps it may be France that -is temperamentally fitted to lead all lands in achieving that ideal. -The _jeune fille_, so carefully trained for domesticity only, has -been known to develop wonderful business qualities after marriage. -Invariably in the small shops of France it is Madame who presides at -her husband’s cash drawer. A woman’s hand has led industries for which -France is world famous: Mme. Pommerey whose champagne is chosen by the -epicure in every land, Mme. Paquin whose house has dictated clothes for -the women of all countries, and Mme. Duval whose restaurants are on -nearly every street corner of Paris. The commercial instinct is really -latent in every French woman. There is scarcely a French household in -which a husband making an investment of any kind does not first consult -with his wife. This birthright then, why not develop it by training and -add scientific knowledge to intuition? - -That was the proposition with which the French Minister of Commerce -was approached at the beginning of the war. It was his own daughter -who came to the Bureau of State over which he presided, with a -new programme. Mlle. Valentine Thomson is the editor of _La Vie -Feminine_, in whose columns she had already advocated wider business -opportunities for women on the ground that France would have need -of women in many new capacities. Now she came to ask that the High -Schools of Commerce throughout the land should be opened to girls. -Hitherto they had been exclusively for boys. The Minister of Commerce -took the matter under consideration. The argument that girls should be -prepared for responsibilities that every year of war would more surely -bring to them sounded to him logical enough. Besides Mlle. Valentine -Thomson is a daughter with a most pretty and persuading way, a way -that is as helpful to a feminist as to any other woman. So it happened -that the Minister of Commerce, in September, 1915, issued a circular -recommending the opening of the national Schools of Commerce to women. -The Ministry could only recommend. Each Chamber of Commerce could -ultimately decide for its own city. And there were but three cities in -which the final court of authority refused, Paris, Lyons and Marseilles. - -Then in Paris Mlle. Sanua decided that women too must somehow have -their chance. She had already organised her countrywomen in the -Federation of French Toy Makers, for which she has far-flung ambitions. -This new industry which she is putting on its feet in France, she has -planned shall supplant the made-in-Germany toys in the markets of -the world. But the women who are handling the industry must know how -on more than a domestic scale. And Paris, the metropolis of France, -offered them no commercial training. In the spring of 1916 Mlle. -Sanua decided to go to the Department of State about the matter. There -the Minister of Commerce, M. Thomson, furrowed his brow: “After all, -Mademoiselle,” he said, “have women the mentality for business? The -Ministry of War has opened employment in its offices to women. And -these girls now whom the Government has admitted to clerkships here, -some of them seem quite useless. Mademoiselle,” he added wearily, “is a -woman’s brain really capable for commerce?” - -“Train it. Then try it. What we need is schools,” said Mlle. Sanua. - -A few moments later the conversation turned on the toy industry. “What -do you know about the toy industry?” asked the Minister of State -curiously. She told him. And as the woman talked, his wonder grew. -She did know about toys, that which would enable the French to defeat -the Germans in this branch of commerce after the other defeat is -finished. Would Mlle. Sanua give a lecture on the toy industry before -the Association Nationale d’Expansions Economique? And would she make -a report before the Conference Economique des Allies? Which she did. -So here was a woman who had a brain worth while for commerce. Well, -there might be others. If the Chamber of Commerce in Paris was still -doubtful, the Ministry of Commerce would take a chance on endorsing -Mlle. Sanua’s proposal. They secured for her the Ancien Prieure. And -she established the school for which she gives her services. She -has gathered a faculty which includes celebrated names in France, -most of whom are serving without compensation. Three former Ministers -of Commerce form part of the committee of patronage for the school. -And the first diplomas last June were conferred by a state official, -the Inspector General of Education. For France is arriving at the -conclusion that she will have need of trained women as well as such -men as she can muster for the great economic conflict that is going to -follow when the other battle flags are furled. - -So here at the Ancien Prieure 125 new women are coming into commerce. -“_N’est ce pas?_” I hear Avocat Suzanne Grinberg’s voice repeat. Mlle. -Sanua adds another fagot to the fire. Again as she looks up her eyes -are illumined with the ideal that animates her in the service in which -she is now engaged for her country. I think the women of France will be -a money power and a world power. - -See them starting on the way. Already the Bank of France to-day has 700 -women employés, the Credit Foncier has 400, and the Credit Lyonnaise -has 1200 women employés. Clerical positions in all the government -departments, including the War Office, have been opened to women. M. -Metin, the under secretary of the French Ministry of Finance, has -recently appointed Mlle. Jeanne Tardy an attaché of his department, -the first time in the history of France that a woman has held such a -position. - -Now in every country this same movement has taken place. Russia has -had women clerks at the War Office, the Ministries of the Interior, -Agriculture, Education, Transportation, and at the Chancelleries of the -Imperial Court and Crown Property. The Imperial Russian Bank employed -women by preference. - -In the German government bureaus and offices, the women employés -outnumber the men and they are to be found now in every bank in -Germany. There are even new women in commerce in Germany conducting -business houses that soldier husbands have left in their hands, who are -beginning openly to rebel against the restriction which excludes women -along with “idiots, bankrupts, and dishonest traders” from the Bourse -in Berlin. And recently a petition has been addressed to the Reichstag -for the removal of this bar sinister in business. - - -MOVING ON LONDON’S FINANCIAL DISTRICT - -Probably the largest invasion of the business office, whether that of -the government or of the private employer, has taken place in England. -No less than 278,000 women have directly replaced in commerce men -released for military duty. Petticoats in the district that is known as -the “city,” I suppose are as unprecedented as they could be anywhere -in the world. The most visionary, advanced feminist, who before 1914 -might have timidly suggested such an invasion, would have been curtly -dismissed with, “It isn’t done.” And in truth I believe it never would -have been done without a war. Down in Fenchurch Avenue, in the great -shipping district, I was told: “Really, don’t you know, this is the -last place we ever expected to see women. But they are here.” - -The gentleman who spoke might have come out of a page of “Pickwick -Papers.” His silk hat hung on a nail in the wall above his desk. And -he wore a black Prince Albert coat. He looked over his gold bowed -eye glasses out into the adjoining room at the clerical staff of the -Orient Steamship Company of which he has charge. He indicated for my -inspection among the grey haired men on the high stools, rows of women -on stools specially made higher for their convenience. And he spoke -in the tone of voice in which a geologist might refer to some newly -discovered specimen. - -It was withal a very kindly voice and there was in it a distinct note -of pride when he said: “Now I want you to see a journal one of my -girls has done.” He came back with it and as he turned the pages for -my inspection, he commented: “I find the greatest success with those -who at 17 or 18 come direct from school, ‘fresh off the arms,’ as we -say in Scotland. They, well, they know their arithmetic better. My one -criticism of women employés is that some of them are not always quite -strong on figures. And they lack somewhat in what I might call staying -power. Business is business and it must go on every day. Now and then -my girls want to stay home for a day. And the long hours, 9:30 to 5:00 -in the city, well, I suppose they are arduous for a woman.” - -“Mr. Clarke,” I said, “may I ask you a question: What preparation have -these new employés had for business?” - -And it turns out, as a matter of fact, most of them haven’t had any. A -large number of this quarter of a million women who came at the call of -the London Board of Trade to take the places of men in the offices, are -of the class who since they were “finished” at school, have been living -quiet English lives in pleasant suburbs where the rose trees grow and -everybody strives to be truly a lady who doesn’t descend to working for -money. It is difficult for an American woman of any class to visualise -such an ideal. But it was a British fact. There were thousands of -correct English girls like this, whose pulses had never thrilled to a -career who are finding it now suddenly thrust upon them. - -“Mr. Clarke,” I said, “suppose a quarter of a million men were to -be hastily turned loose in a kitchen or nursery to do the work to -which women have been born and trained for generations. Perhaps they -might not be able to handle the job with just the precision of their -predecessors. Now do you think they would?” - -Mr. Clarke raised his commercial hand in a quick gesture of protest: -“Dear lady,” he said, “I remember when my wife once tried me out one -day in the nursery—one day was enough for her and for me—I, well, I -wasn’t equal to the strain. Frankly, I’m quite sure most men wouldn’t -have the staying power for the tasks you mention.” - -So you see, in comparison, perhaps the new women on the high stools -that have been specially made to their size, are doing pretty well -anyhow. There are 73,000 more of them in government offices, the lower -clerkships in the civil service having been opened to them since the -war. And no less than 42,000 more women have replaced men in finance -and banking. - -Really, it was like taking the last trench in the Great Push when -the women’s battalions arrived at Lombard and Threadneedle streets. -That bulwark of the conservatism of the ages, the Bank of England, -even, capitulates. And the woman movement has swept directly past the -resplendent functionary in the red coat and bright brass buttons who -walks up and down before its outer portals like something the receding -centuries forgot and left behind on the scene. He still has the habit -of challenging so much as a woman visitor. It is a hold-over perhaps -from the strenuous days of that other woman movement when every -government institution had to be barricaded against the suffragettes, -and your hand bag was always searched to see if you carried a bomb. But -the bright red gentleman is more likely to let you by now than before -1914. - -Inside, as you penetrate the innermost recesses, you will go past glass -partitioned doors through which are to be seen girls’ heads bending -over the high desks. And you will meet girl clerks with ledgers under -their arms hurrying across court yards and in and out and up and down -all curious, winding, musty passage ways. I know of nowhere in the -world that you feel the solemn significance of the new woman movement -more than here as you catch the echo of these new footsteps on stone -floors where for hundreds of years no woman’s foot has ever trod before. - -The Bank of England isn’t giving out the figures about the number of -its women employés. An official just looks the other way and directs -you down the corridor to put the inquiry to another black frock coat. -O, well, if that’s the way they feel about it! Others with less ivy on -the walls may speak. The London and Southwestern Bank which before the -war employed but two women, and these stenographers, now has 900 women. -One of London’s greatest banks, the London, City and Midland, has among -3000 employés 2600 women. The new woman in commerce is emerging in -England and these are some of the verdicts on her efficiency: - -Bank of England: “We find the women quick at writing, slow at figures. -We have been surprised to find that they do as well as they do. But -they are not so efficient as men.” - -London, City and Midland Bank: “For accuracy, willingness, and -attention to duty, we may say that women employés excel.” - -Morgan and Grenfells: “We employ women on ledger work. But we find they -lack the _esprit de corps_ of men. And they don’t like to work after -hours.” - -Barclay’s Bank: “We cannot speak too highly of our women clerks. They -have shown great zeal to acquire a knowledge of the necessary details.” - -London and Southwestern Bank: “Women employés are even more faithful -and steady than men. But when there is a sudden rush of work, as say -at the end of the year, they go into hysterics. We find that we cannot -let them see the work piled up. It must be given out to them gradually. -This, I think, is due to inexperience. When women have had the same -length of experience and the same training as men, we see no reason why -they should not be equally as capable.” - -Now that’s about the way the evidence runs. You would probably get it -about like that anywhere in Europe. There is some criticism. Isn’t it -surprising that there is not more when you remember that it is mostly -raw recruits chosen by chance whose services are being compared with -the picked men whom they have replaced? In England in 1915 the Home -Office moved to provide educational facilities for women for their -new commercial responsibilities. There was appointed its Clerical and -Business Occupations Committee which opened in London, and requested -the mayors of all other cities similarly to open, emergency training -classes for giving a ground work in commercial knowledge and office -routine. These government training courses cover a period of from three -to ten weeks. It is rather sudden, isn’t it, three weeks’ preparation -for a job in preparation for which the previous incumbent had years? - -And there are thousands of the women who have gone into the offices -without even that three weeks’ training. The cousin of the wife of -the head of the firm knew of some woman of “very good family” whose -supporting man was now enlisted and who must therefore earn her own -living. Or some other woman was specially recommended as needing work. -And there was another method of selection: “She had such nice manners -and she was such a pretty little thing I liked her at once, don’t you -know.” - - -WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS - -’Um, yes, I do know. Somewhere in America once there was an editorial -chief who said to me, his assistant, “Now I need a secretary. There’ll -be some here to-day to answer my advertisement. Won’t you see them and -let me know about their qualifications.” There were, as I remember, -some fourteen of them, grey haired and experienced ones, technically -expert and highly recommended ones, college trained ones, and one -was a dimpled little thing with pink cheeks and eyes of baby blue. -My detailed report was quite superfluous. Through the open door, as -I entered his office, the chief had one glance: “That one,” he said -eagerly, “that little peach at the end of the row. She’s the one I -want.” - -Like that, little peaches are getting picked in all languages. And -after them are the others fresh from the gardens where the rose -trees grow. And among these ornamental companions of her employer’s -selection, the really useful employé who gets in, finds herself at a -disadvantage. The little peach “bears” the whole woman’s wage market. -She has hysterics: all the wise commercial world shakes its head about -the staying power of woman in business. And the whole female of the -species gets listed on the pay roll at two-thirds man’s pay. - -The Orient Steamship Company, I believe, is giving equal pay for equal -work. To an official of another steamship company complaining of the -inefficiency of women employés, Sir Kenneth Anderson, President of the -Orient Line, put the query, “How much do you pay them?” “Twenty-five -shillings a week,” was the answer. “Then you don’t deserve to have -efficient women,” was the prompt retort. “We pay those who prove -competent up to three pounds a week. And they’re such a success we’ve -decided we can’t let them go after the war.” But Sir Kenneth Anderson -is the son of one of England’s pioneer feminists, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett -Anderson, and the nephew of another, Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, -president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. And -I suppose there isn’t another business house in London that has the -Orient Steamship Company’s vision. Women clerks in London business -circles generally are getting twenty shillings to thirty shillings a -week. The city of Manchester, advertising for women clerks for the -public health offices, offered salaries respectively of ten shillings, -eighteen shillings and twenty shillings a week, “candidates to sit for -examination.” - -[Illustration: - - MLLE. SANUA - - Who, at the Ancien Prieure in Paris, holds open the door of commerce - for women in France. -] - -Little peaches might not be worth more, it is true. The troubled -French minister was probably right when he complained that some of -his new office force were quite useless. But there is a Federation of -University women in England with perfectly good University degrees -attesting mathematical proficiency. They say, however, that they cannot -live on less than a minimum wage of three pounds a week. Awhile ago in -Italy a group of women accountants were asked by the Administration of -Public Instruction to replace men called to the front. With exactly the -same academic licenses as men, they were nevertheless offered but -two-thirds men’s pay. And they declined the proffered positions. Nor -is it only England or Italy or Russia or France that presents this ratio -between the wages of men and those of women in the business offices. -The first resolution adopted by the new Women’s Association of Commerce -of America was one demanding equal pay for equal work. Eventually the -Women’s Association of Commerce and the Financial Centre for Women -and the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement Commercial may succeed -in cultivating in the commercial world a taste for a higher type of -employé than the little peaches of the past. But for the present it is -the handicap that the business woman in routine office positions has to -accept. And there is no Trade Union in commerce to care. Can you manage -to give equal work on two-thirds man’s pay? - -If you can, this is the hour of your opportunity. The women’s -battalions are with every month of the war drawing nearer, moving -onward toward the president’s office. The London and Southwestern -Bank has advanced 200 of its women clerks to the cashier’s window. -The London City and Midland Bank a year ago promoted a woman to the -position of manager of one of its branches. It was the first time that -a woman in England had held such a position. Newspaper reporters were -hurriedly despatched to Sir Edward Holden, the president, to see about -it. But he only smilingly affirmed the truth of the rumour that had -spread like wildfire through the city. It was indeed so. And he had no -less than thirty more women making ready for similar positions. - -Over in France at Bordeaux and at Nancy in both cities the first -class graduated from the High School of Commerce after the admission -of women, had a woman leading in the examinations. In the same year, -1916, a girl had carried off the first honours in the historic Gilbart -Banking Lectures in London. I suppose no other event could have more -profoundly impressed financial circles. The _Banker’s Magazine_ came -out with Rose Esther Kingston’s portrait in a half page illustration -and the announcement that a new era in banking had commenced. It -was the first time that women had been admitted to the lectures. -There were some sixty-two men candidates who presented themselves -for examination at the termination of the two months’ course. Rose -Kingston, who outstripped them all, had been for a year a stenographer -in the correspondence department of the Southwestern Bank. Now she was -invited to the cashier’s desk. - -To correctly estimate the achievement, it should be remembered that -the men with whom she competed, had years of commercial background -and this girl had practically one year. There were so many technical -terms with which they were as familiar as she is with all the varieties -of voile. What was the meaning of “allonge”? she asked three of her -fellow employés bending over their ledgers before she found one who was -willing to make it clear that this was the term for the piece of paper -attached to a bill of exchange. Fragment by fragment like this, she -picked up her banking knowledge. Once the Gilbart lecturer mentioned -the “Gordon Case,” with which every man among his hearers was quite -familiar. She searched through three volumes to get an intelligent -understanding of the reference. Meantime, I think she did “darn” -nights. You see, her salary was thirty shillings a week. - - -THE NEW WOMAN AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS - -This is for the feminine mind the besetting temptation most difficult -to avoid. Can we give up our “darning” and all of the habits of -domesticity which the word connotes? It is the question which women -face the world over to-day. Success beckons now along the broad highway -of commerce. But the difficult details of living detain us on the way -to fame or fortune. And we’ve got to cut the apron-strings that tie -us to yesterday if we would go ahead. Which shall it be, new woman -or old? Most of us either in business or the professions cannot be -both. Dr. Ella Flagg Young, widely known as the first woman to so -arrive at the top of her profession as Superintendent of Schools in -the city of Chicago, received a salary of $10,000 a year. She had made -it the inviolable rule of her life to live as comfortably as a man. -She told me that she did not permit her mind to be distracted from her -work for any of the affairs of less moment that she could hire some -one else to attend to. She did not so much as buy her own gloves. Her -housekeeper-companion attended to all of her shopping. And never, she -said, even when she was a $10 a week school teacher, had she darned her -own stockings! - - * * * * * - -There are a few women who have, it is true, managed to achieve success -in spite of the handicap of domestic duties. But they must be women of -exceptional physique to stand the strain. I know a business woman in -New York who, at the head of a department of a great life insurance -company, enjoys an income of $20,000 a year. Yet that woman still -does up with her own hands all of the preserves that are used in her -household. Her husband, who is a physician with a most lucrative -practice, you will note doesn’t do preserves. He wouldn’t if the family -never had them. - -A woman who is a member of the New York law firm of which her husband -is the other partner was with him spending last summer at their -country place. She, during their “vacation,” put up a hundred cans of -fruit. I think it was between strawberry time and blackberry time that -she had to return to town to conduct a case in court. She had cautioned -her husband that while she was gone, he be sure to “see about” the -little green cucumbers. But, of course, he didn’t. What heed does a -man—and he happens also to be a judge of one of the higher courts—give -to little green cucumbers? Long after they should have been picked, -they had grown to be large and yellow, which, as any woman knows, takes -them way past their pickling prime. That was how the woman who cared -about little green cucumbers found them, when she returned from the -city. In despair she threw them all out on the ground. The next day, -turning the pages of her cook book, she happened to discover another -use for yellow cucumbers. Putting on a blue gingham sunbonnet, she went -out to the field back of the orchard and laboriously gathered them all -up again. And she could not rest until on the shelf in her farm house -cellar stood three stone crocks filled with sweet cucumber pickle. She -just couldn’t bear to see those cucumbers go to waste. It is the sense -of thrift inculcated by generations of forbears whose occupation was -the practice of housewifery. - -The Judge doesn’t have any such feeling about pickles or any other -household affairs. When he goes home at night, he reads or smokes or -plays billiards. When the lady who is his law partner goes home, even -though their New York residence is at an apartment hotel, she finds -many duties to engage her attention. The magazines on the table would -get to be as ancient as those in a dentist’s office if she didn’t -remove the back numbers. Who else would conduct the correspondence -that makes and breaks dinner engagements and do it so gracefully as to -maintain the family’s perfect social balance? Who else would indite -with an appropriate sentiment and tie up and address all the Christmas -packages that have to be sent annually to a large circle of relatives? -Well, all these and innumerable other things you may be sure the Judge -wouldn’t do. He simply can’t be annoyed with petty and trivial matters. -He says that for the successful practice of his profession, he requires -outside of his office hours rest and relaxation. Now the other partner -practises without them. And you can see which is likely to make the -greater legal reputation. - -In upper Manhattan, at a Central Park West address, a woman physician’s -sign occupies the front window of a brown stone front residence. She -happens to be a friend of mine. Katherine is one of the most successful -women practitioners in New York. Nine patients waited for her in -the ante room the last time I was there. From the basement door, -inadvertently left ajar, there floated up the sound of the doctor’s -voice: “That chicken,” she was saying, “you may cream for luncheon. I -have a case at the hospital at two o’clock. We’ll hang the new curtains -in the dining-room at three. And—well, I’ll be down again before I -start out this morning.” - -I know the Doctor so well that I can tell you pretty accurately what -were the other domestic duties that had already received her attention. -She has a most wonderful kitchen. She had glanced through it to see -that the sink was clean and that each shining pot and pan was hanging -on its own hook. She had given the order for the day to the butcher. -She had planned the dinner for the evening, probably with a soup -to utilise the remnants of Sunday’s roast. Then—I have known it to -happen—some one perhaps called, “O, say, dear, here’s a button coming -loose. Could you, ’er, just spare the time?” - -Well, ultimately she stands in the doorway of her office with her -calm, pleasant “This way, please” to the first patient, and turns her -attention to the diagnosis, we will say, of an appendicitis case. -Meanwhile, down the front staircase a carefree gentleman has passed -on his way to the doorway of the other office. He is the doctor whose -sign is in the other front window of this same brown stone residence. -What has he been doing in the early morning hours before taking up -his professional duties for the day? His sole employment has been the -reading of the morning newspaper! Katherine never interrupts him in -that. It is one of the ways she has been such a successful wife. She -learned the first year of their marriage how important he considered -concentration. - - -MAN’S EASY WAY TO FAME - -Now you can see that there’s a difference in being these two doctors. -And it’s a good deal easier being the doctor who doesn’t have to sew -on his own buttons and who needs take less thought than the birds of -the air about his breakfasts and his luncheons and his dinners, how -they shall be ordered for the day. That’s the way every man I know -in business or the professions has the bothersome details of living -all arranged for him by some one else. I noted recently a business -man who was thus speeded on his way to his office from the moment of -his call to breakfast. The breakfast table was perfectly appointed. -“Is your coffee all right, dear?” his wife inquired solicitously. It -was. As it always is. The eggs placed before him had been boiled just -one and a half minutes by the clock. He has to have them that way, -and by painstaking insistence she has accomplished it with the cook. -The muffins were a perfect golden brown. He adores perfection and in -every detail she studies to attain it for him. The breakfast that he -had finished was a culinary achievement. “Don’t forget your sanatogen, -dear,” she cautioned as he folded his napkin. “Honey, you fix it so -much better than I can,” he suggested in the persuasive tone of voice -that is his particular charm. She hastily set down her coffee cup and -rose from the table to do it. Then she selected a white carnation from -the centrepiece vase and pinned it in his buttonhole. He likes flowers. -She picked up his gloves from the hall table, and discovering a tiny -rip, ran lightly upstairs to exchange them for another pair, while -he passed round the breakfast table, hat in hand, kissing the five -children in turn. Then he kissed her too and went swinging down the -front walk to catch the last commuters’ train. - -I happened to see him go that morning. But it’s always like that. And -when she welcomes him home at night, smiling on the threshold there, -the five children are all washed and dressed and in good order, with -their latest quarrel hushed to cherubic stillness. The newest magazine -is on the library table beneath the softly shaded reading lamp, and -a carefully appointed dinner waits. All of the wearisome domestic -details of existence he has to be shielded from. For he is a captain of -industry. - -There are even more difficult men. I know of one who writes. He has -to be so protected from the rude environment of this material world -that while the muse moves him, his meals carefully prepared by his -wife’s own hands, because she knows so well what suits his sensitive -digestion, are brought to his door. She may not speak to him as she -passes in the tray. No servant is ever permitted to do the cleaning -in his sanctum. It disturbs the “atmosphere,” he says. So his wife -herself even washes the floor. Hush! His last novel went into the sixth -edition. He’s a genius. And his wife says, “You have to take every care -of a man who possesses temperament. He’s so easily upset.” For the lack -of a salad just right, a book might have failed. - -’Er, do you know of any genius of the feminine gender for whom the gods -arrange such happy auspices as that? Is there any one trying to be a -prominent business or professional woman for whom the wrinkles are all -smoothed out of the way of life as for the prominent professional man -whom I have mentioned? - -We who sat around a dinner table not long ago knew of no such fortunate -women among our acquaintance. That dinner, for instance, hadn’t -appointed itself. Our hostess, a magazine editor, had hurried in -breathless haste from her office at fifteen minutes of six to take -up all of the details that demand the “touch of a woman’s hand.” The -penetrating odour of a roast about to burn had greeted her as she -turned her key in the hall door. She rushed to the oven and rescued -that. Two of the napkins on the table didn’t match the set. Marie, the -maid, apologetically thought they would “do.” They didn’t. It was the -magazine editor who reached into the basket of clean laundry for the -right ones and ironed them herself because Marie had to be busy by -this time with the soup. The flowers hadn’t come. She telephoned the -florist. He was so sorry. But she had ordered marguerites, and there -weren’t any that day. Yes, if roses would answer instead, certainly he -would send them at once. The bon bons in yellow she found set out on -the sideboard in a blue dish. Why weren’t they in the dish of delicate -Venetian glass of which she was particularly fond? Well, because the -dish of delicate Venetian glass had gone the way of so many delicate -dishes, down the dumb waiter shaft an hour ago. Marie didn’t mean -to break it, as she assured her mistress by dissolving in tears for -some five minutes while more important matters waited. A particular -sauce for the dessert depending on the delicacy of its flavouring, the -editor must make herself. Well—after everything was all right, it was a -composed and unperturbed and smiling hostess who extended the welcome -to her invited company. - -The guest of honour was a woman playwright whose problem play was -one of the successes of last season. She has just finished another. -That was why she could be here to-night. While she writes, no dinner -invitation can lure her from her desk. “You see, I just have to do -my work in the evening,” she told us. “After midnight I write best. -It’s the only time I am sure that no one will interrupt with the -announcement that my cousin from the West is here, or the steam pipes -have burst, or some other event has come to pass in a busy day.” - -We had struck the domestic chord. Over the coffee we discussed a book -that has stirred the world with its profound contribution to the -interpretation of the woman movement. The author easily holds a place -among the most famous. We all know her public life. One who knew her -home life, told us more. She wrote that book in the intervals of doing -her own housework. The same hand that held her inspired pen, washed the -dishes and baked the bread and wielded the broom at her house—and made -all of her own clothes. It was necessary because her entire fortune -had been swept away. Does any one know of a man who has made a profound -contribution to literature the while he prepared three meals a day or -in the intervals of his rest and recreation cut out and made, say, -his own shirts? I met last year in London this famous woman who has -compassed all of these tasks on her way to literary fame. She’s in a -sanitarium trying to recuperate from nervous prostration. - - -THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS - -The hand that knows how to stir with a spoon and to sew with a needle -has got to forget its cunning if women are to live successfully and -engage in business and the professions. The woman of the present -generation has struggled to do her own work in the office and, after -hours that of the woman of yesterday in the home. It’s two days’ work -in one. It has been decided by the scientific experts, you remember, -who found the women munition workers of England attempting this, that -it cannot be done consistently with the highest efficiency in output. -And the Trade Unions in industry endorse the decision. - -This is the critical hour for the new women in commerce to accept the -same principle. I know it is difficult to adopt a man’s standard of -comfortable living on two-thirds a man’s pay. And I know of no one to -pin carnations in your buttonhole. But somehow the woman in business -has got to conserve her energy and concentrate her force in bridging -the distance that has in the past separated her from man’s pay. There -is now the greatest chance that has ever come to her to achieve it—if -she prepares herself by every means of self-improvement to perform -equal work. Don’t darn. Go to the moving pictures even, instead. - -For great opportunities wait. Lady Mackworth of England, when her -father, Lord Rhondda, was absent on a government war mission in America -recently, assumed complete charge of his vast coal and shipping -interests. So successful was her business administration, that on his -resignation from the chairmanship of the Sanatogen Company, she was -elected to fill his place. Like this the new woman in commerce is going -to take her seat at the mahogany desk. Are you ready? - -The New York newspapers have lately announced the New York University’s -advertisement in large type: “Present conditions emphasise the -opportunities open to women in the field of business. Business is -not sentimental. Women who shoulder equal responsibilities with men -will receive equal consideration. It is unnecessary to point out that -training is essential. The high rewards do not go to the unprepared. -Classes at the New York University are composed of both men and women.” - -Why shouldn’t they be? It is with madame at his side that the thrifty -shop keeper of France has always made his way to success. - -The terrible eternal purpose that flashes like zig-zag lightning -through the black war clouds of Europe, again appears. From the old -civilisation reduced to its elements on the battle fields, a new world -is slowly taking shape. And in it, the new man and the new woman shall -make the new money power—together. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -TAKING TITLE IN THE PROFESSIONS - - -They are the grimmest outposts of all that mark the winning of the -woman’s cause. But they star the map of Europe to-day—the Women’s War -Hospitals. - -Out of the night darkness that envelops a war-ridden land, a bell -sounds a faint alarm. From bed to bed down the white wards there -passes the word in a hoarse whisper: “The convoy, the convoy again.” -Instantly the whole vast house of pain is at taut attention. Boyish -women surgeons, throwing aside the cigarettes with which they have -been relaxing overstrained nerves, hastily don white tunics and take -their place by the operating tables. Women physicians hurry from the -laboratories with the anesthetics that will be needed. Girl orderlies, -lounging at leisure in the corridors, remove their hands from their -pockets to seize the stretchers and rush to their line-up in the -courtyard. The gate keeper turns a heavy iron key. From out the -darkness beyond, the convoy of grey ambulances reaching in a continuous -line from the railway station begins to roll in. - -On and on they come in great waves of agony lashed up by the latest -seething storm of horror and destruction out there on the front. In the -dimmed rays of the carefully hooded light at the entrance, the girl -chauffeur in khaki deftly swings into place the great vehicle with her -load of human freight. A nurse in a flowing headdress, ghostly white -against the night, alights from the rear step. The wreckage inside -of what has been four men, now dead, dying or maimed, is passed out. -Groans and sharp cries of pain mingle with the rasping of the motor as -the ambulance rolls on to make way for another. - -The last drive in the trenches has been perhaps a particularly terrible -one. All night like this, every night for a week, for two weeks, the -rush for human repairs may go on. Men broken on the gigantic wheel of -fate to which the world is lashed to-day will be brought in like this, -battalion after battalion to be mended by women’s hands. The appalling -distress of a world in agony has requisitioned any hands that know how, -all hands with the skill to bind up a wound. - -It is very plain. You cannot stand like this in a woman staffed -hospital in the war zone without catching a vision of the great moving -picture spectacle that here flashes through the smoke of battle. Hush! -From man’s extremity, it is, that the Great Director of all is himself -staging woman’s opportunity. - -The heights toward which the woman movement of yesterday struggled in -vain are taken at last. The battle has been won over there in Europe. -Between the forces of the Allies and the Kaiser, it is, that another -fortress of ancient prejudice has fallen to the waiting women’s -legions. It was entirely unexpected, entirely unplanned by any of -the embattled belligerents. Woman had been summoned to industry. The -proclamation that called her went up on the walls of the cities almost -as soon as the call of the men to the colours. There were women porters -at the railway stations of Europe, women running railroads, women -driving motor vans, women unloading ships, women street cleaners, women -navvies, women butchers, women coal heavers, women building aeroplanes, -women doing danger duty in the T. N. T. factories of the arsenals, and -in every land women engaged in those 96 trades and 1701 jobs in which -the British War Office authoritatively announced: “They have shown -themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex.” - -Let the lady plough. Teach her to milk. She can have the hired man’s -place on the farm. She can release the ten dollar a week clerk poring -over a ledger. She can make munitions. Her country calls her. But the -female constitution has not been reckoned strong enough to sit on the -judge’s bench. And Christian lands unanimously deem it indelicate for -a woman to talk to God from a pulpit. From the arduous duties of the -professions, the world would to the last professional man protect the -weaker sex. - -Then, hark! Hear the Dead March again! As inexorably as in the -workshops and the offices, it began to echo through the seminaries and -the colleges, through the laboratories and the law courts. Listen! -The sound of marching feet. The new woman movement is here too at the -doors. High on the walls of Leipzig and the Sorbonne, of Oxford and -Cambridge and Moscow and Milan, on all of the old world institutions of -learning, the long scrolls of the casualty lists commenced to go up. -Whole cloisters and corridors began to be black with the names of men -“dead on the field of honour.” And civilisation faced the inexorable -sequel. Women at last in the professions now are taking title on equal -terms with men. - -The doors of a very old established institution in Fifty-ninth Street, -New York, swung open on a day last autumn. And a line of young women -passed through. They went up the steps to take their place—for the -first time that women had ever been there—in the class rooms of the -College of Physicians and Surgeons. There is perhaps a little awkward -moment of surprise, of curiosity. A professor nods in recognition to -the new comers. The class of 1921 smiles good naturedly. An incident is -closed. - -And an epoch is begun. Outside on a high scaffolding there are masons -and carpenters at work. See them up there against a golden Indian -summer sky. They are putting the finishing touches on a new $80,000 -building addition. And the ringing of their hammers and chisels, -the scraping of their trowels is but significant of larger building -operations on a stupendous scale not made by human hands. - - -A LOOK BACKWARD IN MEDICINE - -This is the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, -which after more than a hundred years of history has decided to enlarge -its accommodations and add a paragraph to its catalog announcing the -admission of women. To understand the significance of this departure -from custom and precedent we should recall the ostracism which women -have in the past been obliged to endure in the medical profession. -Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman of modern times in any land to -achieve a medical education, knocked in vain at the doors of some -twelve medical colleges of these United States before one reluctantly -admitted her. She was graduated in 1849 at the Geneva Medical College -now a part of Syracuse University. The entrance of this first woman -into the medical profession created such a stir that Emily Blackwell -the second woman to become a doctor, following in the footsteps of -her sister, found even more obstacles in her path. The Geneva college -having incurred the displeasure of the entire medical fraternity now -closed its doors and refused to admit another woman. Emily Blackwell -going from city to city was at last successful in an appeal to the -medical college of Cleveland, Ohio, which graduated her in 1852. So -great was the opposition now to women in the profession, that it was -clear that they must create their own opportunities for medical -education. In turn there were founded in 1850 the Philadelphia Medical -College for Women with which the name of Ann Preston is associated as -the first woman dean; in 1853 the New York Infirmary to which in 1865 -was added the Woman’s Medical College both institutions founded by -the Drs. Blackwell; in 1863 the New York Medical College and Hospital -for Women. “Females are ambitious to dabble in medicine as in other -matters with a view to reorganising society,” sarcastically commented -the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_. Society as also the medical -profession coldly averted its face from these pioneer women doctors. - -“Good” women used to draw aside their skirts when they passed Elizabeth -Blackwell in church. When she started in practice in New York City -she had to buy a house because no respectable residence would rent -her office room. Dr. Anna Manning Comfort had her sign torn down in -New York. Druggists in Philadelphia refused to fill prescriptions for -Dr. Hannah Longshore. Girl medical students were hissed and jeered at -in hospital wards. Men physicians were forbidden by the profession to -lecture in women’s colleges or to consult with women doctors. Not until -1876 did the American Medical Association admit women to membership. -How medical men felt about the innovation, which State after State was -now compelled to accept, was voiced by the _Boston Medical and Surgical -Journal_ of 1879 which said: “We regret to be obliged to announce -that, at a meeting of the councillors held Oct. 1, it was voted to -admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.” - -Syracuse University, recovering from the censure visited upon it for -receiving Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first of the coeducational -institutions to welcome women on equal terms with men to its medical -college. Other coeducational colleges in the West later began to take -them. In 1894 when Miss Mary Garrett endowed Johns Hopkins University -with half a million dollars on condition that its facilities for the -study of medicine be extended to women equally with men, a new attitude -toward the woman physician began to be manifest. From that time on, -she was going to be able with little opposition to get into the -medical profession. Her difficulty would be to get up. Now no longer -was a woman doctor refused office facilities in the most fashionable -residential quarters in which she could pay the rent. Her problem -however was just that—to pay the rent. A medical diploma doesn’t do it. -And to practise medicine successfully, therapeutically and financially, -without a hospital training and experience is about as easy as to learn -to swim without going near the water. The most desirable opportunities -for this hospital experience were by the tacit gentleman’s agreement in -the profession quite generally closed to women. - -Until very recently, internships in general hospitals were assigned -almost exclusively to men. Dr. Emily Dunnung Barringer in 1903 swung -herself aboard the padded seat in the rear of the Gouverneur Hospital -ambulance, the first woman to receive an appointment as ambulance -surgeon in New York City. Twice before in competitive examinations she -had won such a place, but the commissioner of public charities had -declined to appoint her because she was a woman. In 1908 another girl -doctor, Dr. Mary W. Crawford in a surgeon’s blue cap and coat with a -red cross on her sleeve, answered her first emergency call as ambulance -surgeon for Williamsburg Hospital, Brooklyn. It happened this way: -the notification sent by the Williamsburg Hospital to Cornell Medical -College that year by some oversight read that the examination for -internship would be open to “any member of the graduating class.” - -When “M. W. Crawford” who had made application in writing, appeared -with a perfectly good Cornell diploma in her hand, the authorities were -amazed. But they did not turn her away. They undoubtedly thought as -did one of the confident young men applicants who said: “She hasn’t a -chance of passing. Being a girl is a terrible handicap in the medical -profession.” When she had passed however at the head of the list of -thirty-five young men, the trustees endeavoured to get Dr. Mary to -withdraw. When she firmly declined to do so, though they said it -violated all established precedent, they gave her the place. And a new -era in medicine had been inaugurated. - -Here and there throughout the country, other women now began to -be admitted to examinations for internships. They exhibited an -embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of them -were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was for the -hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution had -“no accommodations for women doctors” which simply meant that all of -the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on this ground that -Philadelphia’s Blockley Hospital, the first large city almshouse in the -country to open to women the competitive examination for internship, -again and again refused the appointment even to a woman who had passed -at the head of the list. It was 1914 before Bellevue in New York City -found a place for the woman intern: five women were admitted among the -eighty-three men of the staff. - -This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the indication -of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in consequences. -Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass bottle -containing a kidney preserved in alcohol. In all the annals of the -medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been another kidney -just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for a layman -to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it happens that a -young woman physician discovered the patient with that kidney and -diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed it -successfully. Then a man physician came along and borrowed it and read -a paper on it at a medical convention. He is now chronicled throughout -the medical fraternity with the entire credit for the kidney. - -“And it isn’t his. It’s our kidney,” I heard the girl doctor say with -flashing eyes. “You’ll take it easier than that when you’re a little -older, my dear,” answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer in the -professional atmosphere that is so chilling to ambition. - -It was against handicaps like this that the women in medicine were -making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly’s name, in New York, is at the -top in the annals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a famous surgeon -in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and Dr. Emma V. P. Culbertson are leading -members of the medical profession in Boston. Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar -was in 1917 appointed visiting surgeon on the staff of the Women’s -Hospital in New York, the first woman in New York City to receive such -an appointment. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, who established in New York the -first bureau of child hygiene in the world, is probably more written -of than is any man in medicine. As chief of this department, she has -under her direction 720 employés and is charged with the expenditure -annually of over a million dollars of public money. She is a graduate -of Dr. Blackwell’s medical college in which social hygiene first -began to be taught with the idea of making medicine a preventive as -well as a curative art. It was the idea that Harvard University a few -years later incorporated in a course leading to the degree “Doctor -of Public Health.” And though a woman had thus practically invented -“public health” and another woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and -original doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was refused at -Harvard the opportunity to take their course leading to such a title. -The university did not admit women. But a little later the trustees of -Bellevue Hospital Medical College, initiating the course and looking -about for the greatest living authority to take this university -chair, came hat in hand to Dr. Baker, even though their institution -does not admit women to the class rooms. “Gentlemen,” she answered, -“I’ll accept the chair you offer me with one stipulation, that I may -take my own course of lectures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public -Health elsewhere refused me because I am a woman.” Like this the woman -who has practically established the modern science of public health, -in 1916 came into her title. It is probably the last difficulty and -discrimination that the American woman in medicine will ever encounter. - -The struggle of women for a foothold in the medical profession is the -same story in all lands. It was the celebrated Sir William Jenner of -England who pronounced women physically, mentally and morally unfit -for the practice of medicine. Under his distinguished leadership -the graduates of the Royal College of Physicians in London pledged -themselves, “As a duty we owe it to the college and to the profession -and to the public to offer the fullest resistance to the admission -of women to the medical profession.” Well, they have. The medical -fraternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge. - - -A WORLD-WIDE RECONSTRUCTION - -But to-day see the builders at work at the College of Physicians -and Surgeons in New York. Yale and Harvard have also announced the -admission of women to their medical colleges. And it is not by chance -now that these three most exclusive medical colleges in the United -States have almost simultaneously removed their restrictions. They are -doing it too at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of -Moscow. The reverberation from the firing line on the front is shaking -all institutions to their foundations. As surely as if shattered by a -bomb, their barriers go down. Like that, the boards of trustees in all -countries are capitulating to the Great Push of the new woman movement. -All over the world to-day the hammers and chisels are ringing in -reconstruction. It is the new place in the sun that is being made for -woman. The little doors of Harvard and Yale and Columbia are creaking -on their ancient hinges because the gates of the future are swinging -wide. It is not a thin line that is passing through. The cohorts of -the woman’s cause are sweeping on to occupy the field for which their -predecessors so desperately pioneered. - -Forward march, the woman doctor! It is the clear call flung back from -the battle fields. Hear them coming! See the shadowy figures that lead -the living women! With 8000 American women doctors to-day marches the -soul of Elizabeth Blackwell. Leading 3000 Russian women doctors there -is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first medical woman of that -land, who in 1865 was denied her professional appellation and limited -to the title “scientific midwife.” With the 1100 British women there -keeps step the spirit of Sophia Jex Blake pelted with mud and denied a -degree at Edinburgh University, who in 1874 founded the London School -of Medicine for Women. - -And there is one grand old woman who lived to see the cause she led -for a lifetime won at last. The turn of the tide to victory, as surely -as for the Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the professional -woman’s cause when the British War Office unfurled the English flag -over Endell Street Hospital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a -new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest significance on -the vision of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.[1] The beautiful eyes of -her youth were not yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all -of their old star fire glowed again when the news of this great war -hospital, entirely staffed by women, was brought to her at her home in -Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she sat in her white cap, her active hands -that had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly in her lap. - -[1] Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England, -Dec. 17, 1917. - -Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of modern times, the first -in England. When as Elizabeth Garrett she came to London to be a doctor -in 1860, there was no University in her land that would admit her. -Physicians with whom she wished to study, were some of them scornful -and some of them rude, and some were simply amazed. “Why not become a -nurse?” one more tolerant than the rest suggested. The girl shook her -head: “Because I mean to make an income of a thousand pounds a year -instead of forty.” The kindly old doctor who finally yielded to her -importunities and admitted her to his office, also let her in to the -lectures at the Middlesex Hospital with the specific arrangement that -she should “dress like a nurse” and promise earnestly “not to look -intelligent.” Her degree she had to go to Paris for. Like that she -got into the medical profession in 1871 a year before her marriage to -the director of the Orient steamship line. Dean of the London School -of Medicine for Women and founder of the New Hospital for Women, she -came through the difficult days when it was only in “zenana” practice -in India that English women doctors had a free field. Russia too -dedicated her pioneer medical women to the heathen, modestly designing -them for the Mussulman population and at length permitting them the -designation “physician to women and children.” That idea lingered long -with civilisation. As late as 1910 a distinguished British surgeon in -a public address allowed that there was this province for the woman -physician, the treatment of women and children. But any medical woman -“who professed to treat all comers,” her he held to be an “abomination.” - -Then the world turned in its orbit and came to 1914. And Elizabeth -Anderson’s eyes looked on the glory of Endell Street. Do you happen -to be of that woman movement which but yesterday moved upward toward -the top in any of the professions so laboriously and so heavily -handicapped? Then for you also, Endell Street is the shining citadel -that to-day marks the final capitulation of the medical profession to -the woman’s cause, as surely as the New York Infirmary in Livingston -Place still stands as the early outpost established by the brave -pioneers. But the ordinary chance traveller who may search out the -unique war hospital in the parish of St. Giles in High Holborn, I -suppose may miss some of this spiritual significance to which a woman -thrills. The buildings which have been converted from an ancient -almshouse to the uses of a hospital are as dismal and as dingy as any -can be in London. They are surrounded by a fifteen foot high brick wall -covered with war placards, a red one “Air Raid Warning,” a blue one -“Join the Royal Marines,” and a black one “Why More Men are Needed. -This is going to be a long drawn out struggle. We shall not sheathe the -sword until—” and the rest is torn off where it flapped loose in the -winter wind. - -In a corner of this wall is set Christ Church, beside which a porter -opens a gate to admit you to the courtyard. Here where the ambulances -come through in the dark, the bands play on visitors’ day. It is a -grey court yard with ornamental boxes of bright green privet. On the -benches about wait the soldiers, legless soldiers, armless soldiers, -some of them blind soldiers. On convalescent parade in blue cotton -uniform with the gaiety of red neckties, every man of them at two -o’clock on a Tuesday is eager, expectant, waiting—for his woman. -Mothers, wives, sweethearts are arriving, the girls with flowers, the -women with babies in their arms. And each grabs his own to his hungry -heart. You go by the terrible pain and the terrible joy of it all that -grips you so at the throat. Inside where each woman just sits by the -bedside to hold her man’s hand, it is more numb and more still. A girl -orderly in khaki takes you through. Her blue shoulder straps are brass -lettered “W. H. C.,” “Women’s Hospital Corps.” The only man about the -place who is not a patient is the porter at the gate. The women in -khaki with the epaulets in red, also brass lettered “W. H. C.,” are the -physicians and surgeons. - -There is one of these you should not miss. You will know her by her -mascot, the little fluffy white dog “Baby” that follows close at her -heels. Her figure in its Norfolk belted jacket is slightly below the -medium height. Her short swinging skirt reveals trim brown clad ankles -and low brown shoes. She has abundant red brown hair that is plainly -parted and rolled away on either side from a low smooth brow to fasten -in a heavy knot at the back of her head. I set down all of these -details as being of some interest concerning a woman you surely will -want to see. Surgeon in chief and the commanding officer in charge -of this military hospital with 600 beds, she is the daughter of Dr. -Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She is also the niece of Mrs. Millicent -Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage -Societies. And she is to-day one of England’s greatest surgeons, Dr. -Louisa Garrett Anderson, with the rank of major in the English army. - -Her place in this new woman movement is the more significant because -of her prominent affiliation with that of yesterday. For the militancy -in which she is now enlisted Dr. Anderson had her training in that -other militancy that landed women in Holloway Jail. Her transfer to -her present place of government service has come about in a way that -makes her one of our most famous victory exhibits. “You have silenced -all your critics” the War Office told her when they bestowed on her the -honour of her present official rank as she and her Woman’s Hospital -Corps “took” Endell Street. - -It was a stronghold that did not capitulate by any means at the first -onslaught of the women’s forces. There was, at least, as you might say, -a preliminary skirmish. The Woman’s Hospital Corps raised and financed -by British medical women was at the beginning of the war offered to the -British Government. But in the public eye these were only “physicians -to women and children.” Kitchener swore a great oath and said he’d have -none of them for his soldiers. Practically the War Office told them to -“run along.” Well, they did. They went over the Channel. “They are -going now to advance the woman’s cause by a hundred years. O, if only -I were ten years younger,” sighed Elizabeth Anderson wistfully as she -waved them farewell at Southampton on the morning of Sept. 15, 1914. - -France was in worse plight than England. Under the Femmes de France of -the Croix Rouge, the Government there permitted the Women’s Hospital -Corps to establish themselves in what had been Claridge’s Hotel in the -Champs Elysées. In the course of time rumours reached the British War -office of this soldiers’ hospital in Paris run by English women. Oh, -well, of course, women surgeons might do for French _poilus_. At length -it was learned however that even the British Tommies were falling into -their hands. And Sir Alfred Keogh, director of the General Medical -Council, was hurried across to see about it. - -“Miss Anderson,” he addressed the surgeon in charge, “I should like to -look over the institution.” - -“Certainly,” she acquiesced. “But it’s Dr. Anderson, if you please.” -Three times as they went through the wards, he repeated his mistake. -And three times she suggested gravely, “Dr. Anderson, if you please.” - -[Illustration: - - DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON - - The first woman physician in England and after Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell - of America the next woman of modern times to practise medicine. -] - -They had finished the rounds. “This,” he said, “is remarkable, ’er -quite remarkable, don’t you know. But may I talk with some of your -patients privately?” - -Then the soldiers themselves, British soldiers, assured him of their -complete satisfaction with the surgical treatment they had received. -Indeed the word, they said, was out in all the trenches that the -Women’s Hospital was the place to get to when a man was wounded. Women -surgeons took more pains, they were less hasty about cutting off arms -and legs, you see. Oh, the Women’s Hospital was all right. - -“Extraordinary, most extraordinary,” murmured Sir Alfred Keogh. And -this report he carried back to the General Medical Council. “Incredible -as it may seem, gentlemen,” he announced gravely, “it seems to be so.” - -“It appears then,” brusquely decided Kitchener, “that these women -surgeons are too good to be wasted on France.” And promptly their -country and the War Office invited them to London. It was England’s -crack regiment after the great drive on the Somme that was tucked under -the covers for repairs at Endell Street. The issue was no longer in -doubt. “Major” Anderson and the Women’s Hospital Corps held the fort -for the professional woman’s cause in England. - - -WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT - -Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangan, fascinating little French feminist, meanwhile -was executing a brilliant coup in demonstration to her government. -France, it was true, had seen that British women could be military -doctors and surgeons. But the French woman doctor, oh, every one was -sure that the French woman doctor’s place was the home. And if ever -there was a woman whom God made just to be “protected,” you’d say -positively it was Nicole Gerard-Mangin. - -She stood before me as she came from her operating room, curling -tendrils of bright brown hair escaping from the surgeon’s white cap -set firmly on her pretty head, a surgeon’s white apron tied closely -back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness of line. She is -soft and round and dainty and charming. She has small shapely hands, as -exquisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I looked at her hands -in the most amazement, the hands that have had men’s lives in their -keeping, little hands that by the sure swift skill of them have brought -thousands of men back from death’s door. You’d easily think of her as -belonging in a pink satin boudoir or leading a cotillion with a King -of France. And she’s been at the war front instead. “Madame la petite -Major” she is lovingly known to the soldiers of France. She too has -that rank. You will notice on one of the sleeves of her uniform the -gold stripe that denotes a wound and on her right pink cheek you will -see the scar of it. On her other coat sleeve are the gold bars for -three years of military service. - -This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, Dr. Gerard-Mangin was in -charge of the tuberculosis sanitarium, Hôpital Beaugou, in Paris. When -the call came for volunteers for army doctors, she signed and sent in -an application, carefully omitting however to write her first name. -The War Office, hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin -as any other man. One night at twelve o’clock her _concierge_ stood -before her door with a government command ordering the doctor to -report at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case -in one hand and a surgeon’s kit in the other, she was on her way. The -astonished military _medecin-en-chef_, before whom she arrived, threw -up his hands: “A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be.” - -She held out her government order: “_N’est ce pas?_” He examined it -more closely. “But yet,” he insisted, “it must be a mistake.” - -“_En ce moment_,” as they say in France, a thousand wounded soldiers -were practically laid at the commander’s feet—and he had only five -doctors at hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy of a woman -before him. After all there was an alertness, an independent defiance -of her femininity that straightened at attention to duty now every -curving line of the little figure. His glance swept the wounded men: -“Take off your hat and stay a while,” he said in desperation. “But,” he -added, “I shall have to report this to the War Office. There must be an -investigation.” - -Three months later when the Inspector General of the French army -arrived to make it, he learned that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had performed six -hundred operations without losing a single patient. “You’ll do even -though you are not a man,” he hazarded. - -A little later she was ordered to Verdun to organise a hastily -improvised epidemic hospital. For the first week she had no doctors and -no nurses. There was no equipment but a barracks and the beds. As fast -as these could be set up, a patient was put in. There were no utensils -of any kind but the tin cans which she picked up outside where they had -been cast away by the commissary department when emptied of meat. There -was no heat. There was no water in which to bathe her patients except -that which she melted from the ice over an oil lamp. For six weeks she -worked without once having her clothing off. One of her feet froze and -she had to limp about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid arrived and -she had a staff of twenty-five men under her direction. There were -eight hundred beds. For seventeen months the hospital was under shell -fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. Three hundred and -twenty-nine panes of glass were shattered one day. A man next the -little doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her but she had only -time to staunch the flow of blood with her handkerchief. Outside the -American ambulance men were coming on in their steady lines. They -delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 18,000 wounded in four days, whom -she in turn gave first aid and passed on to interior hospitals. Later -when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back from the army infected -with tuberculosis, the Government required its greatest expert for the -diagnosis of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-Mangin in the fall of 1916 -was recalled from the front to be made _medecin-en-chef_ of the new -Hôpital Militaire Edith Cavell in the Rue Desnouettes, Paris. It is a -group of low white buildings with red roofs. The white walls inside are -ornamented above the patients’ beds with garlands of red and blue and -yellow flowers. And the commanding officer’s own gay little office has -curtains of pink flowered calico. Grey haired French scientists in the -laboratories here are taking their orders from Madame la petite Major. -Soldiers in the corridors are giving her the military salute. One day -there came a celebrated French general: “When I heard about you at -Verdun,” he said, “I could not believe it. I insisted, she cannot be a -surgeon. She is only a nurse. I have made the journey all the way to -Paris,” he smiled in candour, “to find out if you are real.” - -The records of the War Office show how real. Dr. Gerard-Mangin did -her two years’ service at the front without a day off for illness and -never so much as an hour’s absence from her post of duty. She is the -only surgeon with the French army who has such a record. Her right -to a place in the profession in which no man has been able to equal, -let alone surpass, her achievement, would seem to be assured beyond -question. Let us write high on the waving banners carried by the -cohorts of the woman’s cause the name of Nicole Gerard-Mangin. It was -not a simple or an easy thing that she has done. You would know if you -heard her voice tremulous yet with the agony on which she has looked. -“I shall nevair forget! I shall nevair forget!” she told me brokenly, -in the gay little pink calico office. And the beautiful brown eyes -of the little French major, successful army surgeon, were suddenly -suffused with woman’s tears. - - -WHAT SCOTTISH WOMEN DOCTORS DID - -Like this the woman war doctor began. Before the first year of the -great conflict was concluded, there was not a battle front on which -she had not arrived. And the Scottish Women’s Hospitals have appeared -on five battle fronts. Organised by the Scottish Federation of the -National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and supported by the -entire body of constitutional suffragists under Mrs. Fawcett of London, -they afford spectacular evidence of how completely the forces of the -woman movement of yesterday have been marshalled into formation for -the winning of the new woman movement of to-day. Dr. Elsie Inglis[2] -the intrepid leader of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, like a general -disposing her troops to the best strategic advantage, has literally -followed the armies of Europe, placing her now indispensable auxiliary -aid where the world’s distress at the moment seems greatest. There -have been at one time as many as twelve of the Scottish hospitals in -simultaneous operation. Sometimes they are forced to pick up their -entire equipment and retreat with the Allies before the onslaught of -the Hun hordes. Sometimes they have been captured by the enemy, only -eventually to reach London and start out once more for new fields to -conquer. - -[2] Died 1917. - -These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan trimmings and the sign of -the thistle embroidered on their hats and their epaulets, have crossed -the vision of the central armies with a frequency that has seemed, to -the common soldier at least, to partake of the supernatural. Bulgarian -prisoners brought into the Scottish Women’s Hospital operating at -Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up into the doctors’ faces -in amazement to inquire: “Who are you? We thought we had done for -you. There you were in the south. Now here you are in north. Are you -double?” Of this work in the north, in the Dobrudja from where they -were obliged to retreat into Russia, the Prefect of Constanza said in -admiration: “It is extraordinary how these women endure hardship. They -refuse help and carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies.” - -At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish women left their first -record of efficiency at Calais. Their hospital there in the Rue -Archimede, operated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest percentage -of mortality for the epidemic of enteric fever. In France the hospital -at Troyes under Dr. Louise McElroy was so good that it received an -official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika to be regularly -attached to the French army, this being one of the very few instances -on record where a voluntary hospital has been so honoured. The -Scottish Hospital under Dr. Francis Ivins, established in the deserted -old Cistercian abbey at Royaumont, is one of the show hospitals of -France. When the doctors first took possession of the ancient abbey -they had no heat, no light but candles stuck in bottles, no water but -that supplied by a tap in the holy fountain, and they themselves slept -on the floor. But eventually they had transformed the great vaulted -religious corridors into the comfortable wards of Hôpital Auxiliarie -301. They might, the French Government had said, have the “_petite -blessé_.” They would be entrusted with operations on fingers and toes! -And every week or so, some French general ran down from Paris to see -if they were doing these right. But within two months the War Office -itself had asked to have the capacity of the hospital increased from -100 to 400 beds. And the medical department of the army had been -notified to send to Royaumont only the “_grande blessés_.” At the end -of the first week’s drive on the Somme, all of the other hospitals were -objecting that they could receive no more patients: their overworked -staffs could not keep up with the operations already awaiting them in -the crowded wards. “But,” said the French Government, “see the Dames du -Royaumont! Already they have evacuated their wounded and report to us -for more.” - -[Illustration: - - MISS NANCY NETTLEFOLD - - Leader in the campaign to admit women to the practise of law in - England. -] - -It was in Serbia that four Scottish hospitals behind the Serbian -armies on the Danube and the Sava achieved a successful campaign in -spite of the most insurmountable difficulties. Here under the most -primitive conditions of existence, every service from bookkeeping to -bacteriology, from digging ditches to drawing water was done by women’s -hands. It was not only the wounded to whom they had to minister. They -came into Serbia through fields of white poppies and fields of equally -thick white crosses over fresh graves. They faced a country that was -overcome with pestilence. All the fevers there are raged through the -hospitals where patients lay three in a bed, and under the beds and -in the corridors and on the steps and on the grass outside. After -months of heartbreaking labour when the plague had finally abated, the -enemy again overran Serbia and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, hastily -evacuating, retreated to the West Moravian Valley. Some of the doctors -were taken prisoners and obliged to spend months with the German and -Austrian armies before their release. Others joined in the desperate -undertaking of that remarkable winter trek of the entire Serbian -nation fleeing over the mountains of Montenegro. Scores perished. But -the Scottish women doctors, ministering to the others, survived. Dr. -Curcin, chief of the Serbian medical command, has said: “As regards -powers of endurance, they were equal to the Serbian soldiers. As -regards morale, nobody was equal to them. In Albania I learned that the -capacity of the ordinary Englishwoman for work and suffering is greater -than anything we ever knew before about women.” - -Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. Where, oh, where -are all those earlier fabled disabilities of the female sex for the -practice of the profession of medicine? A very celebrated English -medical man, returning recently from the front, found a woman resident -physician in charge of the London hospital of whose staff he was -a particularly distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly -tendered his resignation, only to be told by the Board of Directors -practically to forget it. And he had to. - -Why man, you see you can’t do that sort of thing any more! Yesterday, -it is true, a woman physician was only a woman. To-day her title to her -place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven great London -hospitals that never before permitted so much as a woman on their -staff, now have women resident physicians in charge. Five of them are -entirely staffed by women. The British Medical Research Commission -is employing over a score of women for the highly scientific work of -pathology. When one of those Scottish Women’s Hospitals on its way to -Serbia was requisitioned for six weeks to assist the British army at -Malta where the wounded were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities -there, at length reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided that -the Malta military hospitals in the future could not do without the -woman doctor. They sent to London for sixty of her. And the War -Office reading their report asked for eighty more for other military -hospitals. By January, 1915, professional posts for women doctors were -being offered at the rate of four and five a day to the London School -of Medicine for Women, and they hadn’t graduates enough to meet the -demand! - -Like that the nations have capitulated. The woman physician’s place -in Europe to-day is any place she may desire. Russia, which before -the war, would not permit a woman physician on the Petrograd Board -of Health because its duties were too onerous and too high salaried -for a woman, had by 1915 mobilised for war service even all of her -women medical students of the third and fourth years. France has Dr. -Marthe Francillon-Lobre, eminent gynecologist, commanding the military -hospital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue de Monceau, -Paris. In Lyons the _medecin-en-chef_ of the military hospital is Dr. -Thyss-Monod who was nursing a new baby when she assumed her military -responsibilities. Everywhere the woman doctor rejected of the War -Office of yesterday is now counted one of her country’s most valuable -assets. And so precious is she become to her own land, that she may not -be permitted to leave for any other. “Over there” the governments of -Europe have ceased to issue passports to their women doctors. - -You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. Medical associations -will no longer bar you as in America until the seventies and in England -until the nineties. Salaried positions will not be denied you. Clinical -and hospital opportunities will not be closed to you. You of to-day -will no more be elbowed and jostled aside. You will not even be crowded -out from anywhere. For there is room everywhere. Oh, the horror and -the anguish of it, room everywhere. And every day of the frightful -world conflict they are making more of it. Great Britain alone has sent -10,000 medical men to the front. America, they say, is sending 35,000. - -Hurry, hurry, urges this the first profession in which the women’s -battalions have actually arrived as it hastily clears the way for -you. The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, not to be -outdone by any institution now bidding for women’s favour, has rushed -up an “emergency” plant, a new $200,000 building. The London School of -Medicine has erected a thirty thousand pound addition and the public -appeal for the funds was signed by Premier Asquith himself. The nations -to-day are waiting for the women who shall come out from the colleges -equipped for medical service. - - -A PLACE IN EVERY PROFESSION - -And after the most arduous profession of all, how about the others? If -a woman can be a doctor at a battle front, how long before she can be a -doctor of divinity? At the City Temple in London on a Sunday in March, -1917, a slender black robed figure preceded an aged clergyman up the -pulpit steps. With one hand resting on the cushioned Bible she stood -silhouetted against the black hanging at the back of the pulpit, her -face shining, illumined. By the time that the white surpliced choir had -ceased chanting “We have done those things that we ought not to have -done,” the ushers were hanging in the entrance corridor the great red -lettered signs “Full.” - -The house was packed to the last seat in the gallery to hear Miss -Maude Royden, one of England’s leading suffragists, “preach.” This -church is nearly 300 years old and only once before, when Mrs. Booth -of the Salvation Army was granted the privilege, has a woman ever -spoken from its pulpit. Some six months since, Maude Royden has now -been appointed pulpit assistant at the City Temple, the first woman -in England to hold such a position. Dr. Fort Newton, the pastor, in -announcing the innovation, declared: “We want the woman point of view, -the woman insight and the woman counsel.” The City Temple is not an -Episcopalian Church. But even the established church has recently heard -an archbishop cautiously pronounce the opinion that “we may invite -our church women to a much larger share in the Christian service than -has been usual.” You see there are 2000 English clergymen enrolled -as chaplains at the front. Laywomen were last year permitted to make -public addresses in the National Mission of Repentance. They thus -ascended the chancel steps. A committee of bishops and scholars—and -one woman—has now been appointed to see how much farther women may be -permitted to go on the way to the pulpit itself. A few of the smaller -churches in America have a woman minister in charge. But from the -arduous duties of the highest ecclesiastical positions women in all -lands are still “protected.” High established places are of course the -last to yield. Theology continues to be the most closed profession. -But Maude Royden in the pulpit of the London City Temple, the highest -ecclesiastical place to which a woman anywhere in the world has yet -attained, has, we may say, captured an important trench. - -In the field of science the opposing forces are even more steadily -falling back before the advancing woman movement. One of the most -conservative bodies, the Royal Astronomical Society of England, has -added a clause to its charter permitting women to become fellows. The -Royal Institute of British Architects has also decided to accept women -as fellows and in 1917 the Architectural Association for the first time -opened its doors to women students. Germany even has several women -architects employed in military service, among them Princess Victoria -of Bentheim. Russia, in 1916, admitted women to architecture and -engineering. - -Chemistry is distinctly calling women in all lands. Sheffield -University, England, in 1916 announced for the first time courses in -the metallurgical department for training girls as steel chemists to -replace young men who have been “combed out” of Sheffield’s large -industrial works. Firms in Leeds, Bradford and South Wales are filling -similar vacancies with women. Bedford College of London University -had last year started a propaganda to induce young women to study -chemistry. In 1916 there were some twelve graduates in the chemical -department and the college received applications from the industrial -world for no less than 100 women chemists. So insistent was the demand -that even Woolwich Arsenal was willing to take a graduate without -waiting for her to get her degree. Women are wanted too in physics -and bacteriology. A London University woman has been appointed to a -position at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and there -were last year, at this one university, offers of twenty positions for -women physicists that could not be filled. All over the world now, -in trade journals are beginning to appear advertisements for women -chemists and physicists. - -Even in the teaching profession there is the record of new ground won. -Women have of course been longest admitted to this the poorest paid -profession, and in it they have been relegated to the poorest paid -places. But now over in Europe, note that one-third of all the masters -in the German upper high schools are enlisted in the army and with the -consent of the Department of Education women are for the first time -being appointed to these places, in some instances even at the same -salaries as were received by the men whom they replace. Russia had in -the first year of the war opened the highest teaching positions in -that country to women, by a special act of the Duma providing that -“their salaries shall equal those of men in the same position.” Russia -also in 1915 had her first woman college professor, Mme. Ostrovskaia, -occupying the chair of Russian history at the University of Petrograd. -In 1916 Mlle. Josephine Ioteyko, a celebrated Polish scientist, had -been invited to lecture at the College de France in Paris. In 1917 -Germany had its first woman professor of music, Fraulein Marie Bender, -at the Royal High School of Music in Charlottenburg. And in the same -year England had appointed its first woman to an open university chair, -when Dr. Caroline Spurgeon was made professor of English literature at -Bedford College. - -[Illustration: - - _Albert Wyndham, Paris_ - - MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG - - Celebrated woman lawyer of Paris who pleads cases before the _Conseil - de la Guerre_. The privilege thus accorded the French women lawyers - marks an epoch in history. It is the first time in the world that - women have conducted cases before a military tribunal. -] - -In each country like this, where the opposing professional lines -begin to show a weakened resistance, surely, sometimes silently, -but irresistibly and inevitably, the new woman movement is taking -possession. Next to medicine the legal profession, one may say, is at -present the scene of active operations. The woman movement in law, as -in medicine, began for all the world in the United States. It was in -1872 that one Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago knocked at the tight shut -doors of the legal profession in the State of Illinois. Of course her -request was refused. Public opinion blushed that a woman should be -guilty of such effrontery, and the learned judges of the court rebuked -the ambitious lady with their finding that: “The natural and proper -timidity which belongs to the female sex unfits it for many of the -occupations of civil life. And the harmony of interests which belong -to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting -a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.” Syracuse -University, which gave to the world the first woman physician, also -graduated Belva A. Lockwood, who in 1879 was the first woman to be -permitted to practise law before the Supreme Court of the United -States. Every State but Virginia has now admitted women to the practice -of law. There are something over 1000 women lawyers in the United -States. Their way in and their way up has been attended with the same -difficulties that women encountered just about a generation ahead of -them in the medical profession. The University of Michigan was one of -the first institutions to admit women to its law school on the same -terms as men. The Women’s Law class at New York University was started -in the nineties. Many law colleges, as Boston, Buffalo and Cornell, -have since opened their doors. It was in 1915 that Harvard University -announced the Cambridge Law School, the first graduate law school in -America exclusively for women, and the only graduate law school open to -them in the East. - -But opportunities for professional advancement for women in law have -been exceedingly limited. It is on the judge’s bench, in every land, -that their masculine colleagues have most stubbornly refused to move -up and make room. So it is noteworthy that Georgiana P. Bullock was -in 1916 made a Judge of the Woman’s Court in Los Angeles, the first -tribunal of its kind in the world. A few women have been allowed a -place as judges in the children’s courts. Catherine Waugh McCulloch -of Chicago, who some years ago as justice of the peace was the first -woman anywhere in the world to have arrived at any judicial office, -scored another victory in December, 1917, when she was made a master in -chancery, the first woman to receive such an appointment. Litta Belle -Hibben, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles in 1915, and Annette -Abbot Adams, assistant United States district attorney in San Francisco -in the same year, were the first women to arrive at these appointments. -Helen P. McCormick, in 1917 assistant district attorney in New York, -is the first woman in the more conservative East to become a public -prosecutor. There is a reason for this advance. Could a woman really -be accepted as an expert in the interpretation of laws, so long as she -was permitted no share in making them? With the pressure of the woman -movement at the gates of government resulting in enfranchisement, that -handicap of civic inferiority is being removed. - -Like this even in the United States farthest from the war zone, the -rear guard of the women’s lines in the legal profession are moving. At -the front “over there,” every country reports distinct progress. Even -a deputation of Austrian women have been to their department of state -to demand admission to the legal profession. In October, 1917, on a -petition from the German Association of Women Lawyers, the Prussian -Ministry of Justice made the first appointment of women in the Central -Berlin law courts, three women having legally qualified there as law -clerks. In Russia directly after the revolution one of the first -reforms secured by the Minister of Justice was the admission of women -lawyers to the privilege of conducting cases in court on equal terms -with the men of the profession. The Italian Parliament in 1917 passed -a bill granting to women in that country the right to practise law. - -Specially significant is the legal situation in England, the land -where Chrystabel Pankhurst, denied the opportunity to practise law, -became instead a smashing suffragette. Now, see the vacant places in -the London law courts where day by day women clerks are appearing with -all of the duties, though not yet the recognition, as solicitors. -And the English Parliament at last is considering a bill which shall -permit women to be admitted to this branch of the legal profession in -England. This bill really should be known as Nancy Nettlefold’s bill. -The year that Nancy Nettlefold arrived at her twenty-first birthday -and was presented at court, Cambridge University announced in June, -1912, that she had taken the law tripos, her place being between the -first and second man in the first class honours list. And she at -the time determined to make the winning of the legal profession her -contribution to the woman’s cause. With four other English women, -who have also passed brilliant law examinations, she has financed -and worked indefatigably in the campaign to that end. To-day they -have that conservative organ of public opinion, the London _Times_, -urging in favour of their case: “Many prejudices against women have -been shattered in this war. And there is no stronger theoretical case -against the woman lawyer as such than against the woman doctor.” -The bill permitting women to enter the Law Society has passed a -second reading in the House of Lords, Lord Buckmaster, its sponsor, -declaring: “The true sphere of a woman’s work ought to be measured by -the world’s need for her services and by her capacity to perform that -work.” - -And the world’s need presses steadily, inexorably day by day. France -had called 1500 men lawyers to the colours when the War Office sent -a brief notice to the bar association of Paris: “On account of the -absence of so many men at the front,” read the summons, “women lawyers -are wanted in the Ministry of War.” Women have been in the legal -profession in France since 1900. There are 52 women lawyers in Paris. -But their practice has been limited largely to women clients. Madame -Miropolsky has made a reputation as a divorce lawyer. Madame Maria -Verone is the prominent barrister of the Children’s Court. A year ago I -heard Avocat Suzanne Grinberg plead a case before a tribunal which up -to 1914 had never listened to a woman’s voice. - -[Illustration: - - DR. ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON OF NEW YORK - - Who is organizing the American women physicians for war service. -] - -As she stood there in the ancient Palais de Justice of Paris, her -small, well formed head wound round with its black braid, her red lips -framing with easy facility the learned legal phrases, her expressive -hands accentuating her points with eager gesture, her woman’s figure -in the flowing legal robe of black serge with the white muslin cravat, -was outlined against a thousand years of history. Eight soldiers -with bayonets stood on guard at the rear of the room. The court whom -she addressed was seven judges of military rank in splendid military -uniform. And her client was a soldier. This is the Conseil de la -Guerre. See the epitage, the sash that falls from Suzanne Grinberg’s -left shoulder. It is edged with ermine, the sign that she is entitled -to plead before the Tribunal of War. It is the first time in the -history of the world, here in France, that women lawyers have been -empowered to appear in military cases. The Salle de Pas-Perdus, they -call the great central promenade at the Palais de Justice. Note that -these new women lawyers who wear the ermine walk in the Hall of Lost -Footsteps! On the walls of this court house in which Suzanne Grinberg -pleads, you may read wreathed in the tricolours of France, “_Avocats à -la Cour d’Appel de Paris Morts pour la Patrie_,” and there follow 127 -names. - -Only the day before yesterday woman’s capacity for the higher education -to fit her for the professions was in grave doubt. Vassar College once -stood as the farthest outpost of radical feminism, and Christian women -were counselled by their clergymen not to send their daughters there. -Even after the moral stigma of a college education had passed, the -critics said that anyhow the female mind was not made to master science -and Greek and mathematics. And it was only about twenty years ago that -Phi Beta Kappa decided to risk the opening of its ranks to college -women—of course provided that any of them should be able to attain the -high scholarship that it required. The female mind, you know! - -Well, at the last Phi Beta Kappa council meeting, the secretary -reported to that distinguished body that in the elections of the past -three years, women have captured in Phi Beta Kappa an aggregate of 1979 -places to 2202 for men. What shall the oldest college fraternity do -in the face of this feminine invasion? A letter on my desk says that -the committee on fraternity policy has been commissioned to take under -advisement this grave situation and report to the council meeting of -1919! So the present Phi Beta Kappa record seems to dispose forever of -the old tradition of the mental inferiority of the always challenged -sex. - -Ladies, right this way for titles, please, one profession after another -takes up the call to-day. New York University at its opening last fall -registered 110 women in its law school, the largest number ever entered -there. Already the American medical women are called and coming. -New York City has recently appointed women doctors for nearly every -municipal institution. The first mobile hospital unit of American women -physicians with a hospital of 100 beds, to be known as the Women’s -Oversea Hospital Unit, is now in France. It is backed financially -by the National Women’s Suffrage Association. And it goes from that -first original outpost of the professional woman’s cause, Elizabeth -Blackwell’s New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Meanwhile the -entire Medical Women’s National Association is being organised for war -service under the direction of Dr. Rosalie S. Morton, who has been made -a member of the General Medical Board of the United States Government -at Washington. The American Women’s Hospitals are being formed for -civilian relief at home and for service with Pershing’s army. From the -Surgeon General’s headquarters in Washington the announcement is made: -“There will be need for the war service of every woman physician in the -United States.” - -And through the vast Salle de Pas-Perdus of the world, the professional -women are passing. The Lost Footsteps! O, the Lost Footsteps! Forward -the advancing columns. Hush, there are ways that are not our ways! On -with the new woman movement, but with banners furled before the woe of -a world! For all the pæans of our victory are drowned in the dirge of -our grief. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT - - -The man in khaki stood at the door. And he held a woman close to his -heart in mansion or cottage—in a rose bowered cottage on the English -downs, or red roofed behind the yellow walls of France and Italy, -or blue trimmed beside a linden tree in Germany, or ikon blessed in -Russia. All that he had in the world, his estates, his fields or his -vineyards, his flocks or his factory, his shop or his job, his home and -his children, he was leaving behind. “I leave them to you, dear,” he -said. - -The bugles blew. And he kissed her again. Then he went marching down -the street in those fateful days of August, 1914, when all the world -began going to war. - -So in land after land she took up the trust and the burden that the -man who marched away had left her, to “carry on” civilisation. It was -the woman movement that was to be under the flags of all nations. Ours -too now flies behind the battle smoke. A little while since and our -men commenced to stand in khaki on our front porches, then went down -the front walk to join the long brown lines passing along Main Street -on their way to France. At Washington they told us why it had to be. -“They were going,” the President himself explained, “to fight for -Democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority, to have a -voice in their own government.” In the name of liberty, we too pass -under the rod. But we fall in line to catch step with the women’s -battalions of the world. We shall see them moving triumphantly even -on the very strongholds against which the woman’s cause of yesterday -dashed itself most vainly. - -The tasks of the world were one by one being handed over to women -by men who were taking up arms instead. By solemn proclamation of -church and state, the patriotic duty of thus releasing every possible -citizen for military service was profoundly impressed on the women of -every nation. Only there was still one function that no country was -asking them to assume. In England a thoughtful woman filling in her -registration paper stating the national service that she could render, -wrote down her qualifications like this: “Possessed of a perfectly good -mentality and a University training, prepared to relieve a member of -Parliament who wishes to go to the front.” - -But the lady wasn’t called. Whole brigades of women swung out across -the threshold of the home into industry. Regiment after regiment went -by into commerce. Companies passed into the professions. Cohorts even -crossed the danger zone for duty right up to the firing line. But -government was still reserved for men. Could a woman vote? O, my -lords, the legislative hall was not woman’s place! - -Then the armies of Europe got into action. Even as their primitive -forefathers had done, the men of the modern world came together to -put liberty to the test of the sword. They fight for the freedoms -their leaders have formulated—and for another they did not know and -did not understand. A freedom that was enunciated from Holloway jail -and turbulently contested in London streets is also being fought to a -finish in front line trenches even along the Somme and the Aisne and -the Yser. - -Sergeant Jones of Company C of the 14th regiment of the Cold Stream -Guards was a combatant. He was a British soldier bravely defending his -flag against the Huns. And he found himself up against a great deal -more that his enemies also equally face, the most revolutionary force -that the world has ever known in this Great War that is overturning the -destinies and opinions of individuals and the decrees of the social -order as lightly and as easily as the dynasties of kings. - -Sergeant Jones was bowled completely over. A German bullet hit him, -and another and another. For weeks thereafter he was wandering on -the borderlands of death. At length he was drifting back to earth -in a roseate blur of warmth and soft comfort. Slowly his mind began -to establish again the realities of existence. The roseate blur -straightened away and away from beneath his chin: it was the cherry -red comforter that covered his bed at Endell Street Hospital, London. -Rip Van Winkle himself came back with no more wonderment. The sergeant -awoke, a soldier literally in the hands of women. - -He couldn’t so much as bathe his own face. A woman in a white -headdress, with a red cross in the centre of her forehead, was doing it -for him. When he opened his eyes again, a girl orderly in a blue tunic -was saying, “You can smoke if you want to.” And she began propping -pillows softly about his shoulders. There was a queer numb feeling -along his side. He couldn’t find his right hand. “Never mind,” the girl -said hastily. She placed the cigarette between his lips and held the -lighted match. He smoked and began to remember that he had gone over -the top. He pulled gently again for his right hand. He tried to draw up -his left leg. At the least movement, somewhere outside the numb, tight -bound area of him, there were answering stabs and twinges of pain. He -wanted to flick the ashes from his cigarette. As he turned his head and -his left hand found the tray on the little bedside stand, he glimpsed -a long row of cherry red comforters that undulated in irregular lines. -From where he lay, he could see still, white faces, bandaged heads, an -arm in a sling, a man in a convalescent uniform clumsily trying out -crutches. The man in the very next bed to his own lay moaning with -face upturned to the light, hollow, empty, staring sockets where the -eyes had been. In the bed beyond was a man with his face sewed up in -an awful twisted seam that was the writhing caricature of the agony -that had slashed it. A sickening sensation of nausea swept over the -sergeant. God in heaven, he thought, then how much was the matter with -him? - -A woman was coming down the room, pausing now and then by the side of -a cherry red comforter. By the waving mass of her red brown hair, she -was a woman, but not such as the sergeant had seen before. His mother -wore a black dress and his wife’s, he remembered, was a blue silk -for Sundays and at home, why he supposed it was calico beneath their -gingham aprons. But this woman was in khaki as surely as ever he had -been. - -Now she reached his bed. She stood looking down on him with an air -of proprietorship, almost of possession. “How are you, this morning, -Sergeant Jones?” she asked, with firm professional fingers reaching -authoritatively for the pulse in his left wrist. Without waiting for -a reply, she was proceeding calmly to turn back the covers. “We have -a little work to do here, I think,” she said, gently grasping—could -the sergeant be sure—it seemed to be his left leg. “The dressings, you -know,” she was saying easily. - -“But, but, ’er—the doctor,” he gasped in protest. - -“I am the doctor,” she answered. - -Of the female of the species, Sergeant Jones of course had heard. He -had never before seen one. “I’ll be—” he started to say. But he wasn’t. -Then he would have jerked away. But he couldn’t. “I want a doctor, a -real one,” he blurted out angrily. - -A shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the woman’s eyes. -Often she had seen them like this. “I am the surgeon in charge, the -commanding military officer here,” she replied evenly. “After awhile, -I’m sure you won’t mind.” - -She went quietly on unwinding him. He heard her scissors snip. She was -going to take some stitches. Once or twice she had to hurt horribly. -She did it with deft precision. With the same quick motions, the -sergeant had seen his wife at home roll out a pudding crust or flap -a pancake. It was the convincing sureness of the woman who knows her -business. Could a woman be a doctor, after all? The strips of linen had -piled in a blood stained heap on the floor. With an effort the sergeant -steadied his voice: “What is there left of me?” he asked. - -The doctor smoothed his pillow first. “Sergeant,” she said very gently, -“you have one perfectly good arm. I think there will be one leg. Last -week the other—” But the sergeant did not have to hear the rest of the -sentence. When he struggled back from somewhere in a black abyss, the -hand that last week had held the surgeon’s knife was softly smoothing -back the damp locks of hair from his cold forehead. She drew the cherry -red comforter up and patted it about his shoulders with the infinite -sympathy that speaks in a woman’s touch. She leaned over him with a -glance that signalled courage and understanding. Then she left him to -fight the fight he had to fight in the grim grey light of that London -day for his own readjustment to the cruelty of existence. Was he glad -that a woman was a doctor? She had saved his life. - -There were weeks of convalescence. The hospital librarian in khaki -stopped beside his cherry red comforter. He turned his face to the -wall. There was nothing she could do for him. But in time he came to -watch for her on her rounds as he did for the doctor. Finally he asked -for books and magazines and the papers. And the news of the day that -she brought him, flared with just two topics, War and Woman. The one -was man’s universal activity, the other was his Great Discovery. You -know how pleased a boy is with a Christmas toy he finds will go with -some new unexpected action? Women were in all kinds of unprecedented -action. - - -THE NEW WOMAN’S SLOGAN - -The girl orderly in the blue tunic dressed Sergeant Jones one day for -the convalescent soldiers’ outing. A girl chauffeur of the Woman’s -Reserve Ambulance Corps picked him up in her arms like a child and -set him on the seat beside her and took her place at the wheel. Could -a woman drive a car? She shot hers in and out of the tangled maze of -the London traffic as easily as a girl he had seen send a croquet ball -through a wicket. Other cars whizzed by with women at the wheel. Great -motor vans, with a woman on the high driver’s seat, swung safely past. -Fleets of motor busses came careening along with girl conductors in -short skirts balancing jauntily in command on the rear platforms. The -bus marked “Woolwich Special” drew up at the Haymarket curb to take on -a load of women munition workers going out for the night shift at the -great arsenal. High on a ladder against a building here in Cockspur -Street, two girl window cleaners stand at work in tunic and trousers. -Girl footmen are opening the doors of carriages before the fashionable -shops of Oxford Street. Girl operators are running the lifts. Girl -messengers in government uniform are going in and out of Whitehall. - -A kingdom is in the hands of its women. Round and round the world has -turned since yesterday. - -Here in Trafalgar Square a crowd of a thousand people hang on the words -that a woman is speaking. Jones had never heard Mrs. Pankhurst; he had -forbidden his wife to when she came to their town. Rampant, women’s -rights females were against the laws of God and England. This, the arch -conspirator of them all, he pictured in his mind’s eye as permanently -occupied in burning country residences and bombing cathedrals and -engaging in hand to hand conflicts with the London police. - -Now wouldn’t it take your breath away? Here she was doing nothing -at all of the kind. A very well gowned lady stood directly between -the British lions, her slender figure outlined against the statue of -Nelson. Her clear, ringing tones carried over the listening throng to -Jones and his comrades in the Women’s Reserve Ambulance car. One small -hand frequently came down into the palm of the other in the emphatic -gesture that in times past brought two continents to attention. It is -the hand that hurled the stone that cracked the windows of houses of -government around the world. - -To-day, as England’s most active recruiting agent, the greatest leader -of the woman’s cause is calling men to the colours to win the war. Had -she once a slogan, Votes for Women? ’Tis a phrase forgot. In the public -squares of London since the war, her countrymen have heard from Mrs. -Pankhurst only “Work for Women.” Round and round, you see, the world -has turned. - -A puzzled Sergeant Jones asked the next day for a book about the woman -movement. It was Olive Schreiner’s “Woman and Labour” the librarian in -khaki brought him. “But I wanted to know about the suffragettes, the -suffragettes. Did you ever hear of them?” he questioned. So Rip Van -Winkle might have asked, I suppose, why, say, for women who once wore -hoop skirts. - -The woman beside the hospital bed smiled inscrutably for an instant. -“Sergeant,” she said with a level glance, “I was one, a militant, -Sergeant,” she added evenly. “And the doctor was in Holloway jail, and -your nurse. And the girl who drove your car yesterday was a hunger -striker and—” She stopped. The truce! By the pact that was signed in -Kingsway, the most radical suffragists in the world, along with all the -others, were war workers now in their country’s cause and not their own. - -The woman in khaki was still. Jones stared. She was dropping no bombs. -Only the armies were smashing. Nothing about here was broken but -men—and women were mending them! - -At length they had the sergeant patched up as well as they could. He -would never again work at his skilled trade. But they pinned a medal -for valour on his coat lapel. And they sent him back to his wife in the -north of England. The woman who met him at the door fell on her knees: -“My dear, my dear!” She gathered him from a wheel chair into her arms -with a sob. The man who had gone out in khaki was home again. - -“Mustered out of the service,” his papers read. But his wife will never -be! - -Mustered out of service. So was the man with the twisted face, who -never again can smile. And so was the man with the blinded eyes, whose -little daughter on sunny days leads him to the Green Park where he sits -on a bench and talks to the squirrels. Just so I have seen him sitting -in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Just so he sits in the Tiergarten by -the side of the River Spree. He is going to be “re-educated” to keep -chickens. And Sergeant Jones shall learn basket weaving for a living! -Oh, and there are thousands of others! - -After each great drive on the front, they are passing through the -hospitals to the cottage rose bowered and red roofed, to the blue -trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage. And now they are waited -for in plain little white houses where a woman on the front porch -shades her eyes with her hand to look down Main Street as far as she -can see. And it isn’t the woman who can fall on her knees and gather -her burden to a hungry heart whose shoulders will bear the heaviest -load. It is the woman whose arms are empty never again to be filled! - -These are the women whom not even the peace treaty will discharge from -their “national service.” Every Great Push makes more of them. And the -rest must always watch fearfully, furtively looking down Main Street -as the years of strife wear on. Who shall say whether she too may be -conscripted to “carry on” for life. For this is the way of war with -women. - -Like this, the trust and the burden have rested heavier and heavier on -woman’s heart and hands. Millions of men will never be able to lift it -for her again. No one knows when the others will. Men must fight and -women must work. - -So many men are with the flag at the front. So many men are under the -crosses, the acres of crosses with which battle fields are planted. So -many men are in wheel chairs and on crutches. Women are carrying on in -the home, in industry, in commerce and in the professions. Then why not -in the State? - -[Illustration: - - MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON - - For fifty years leader of the Constitutional Suffragists, whose cause - triumphed in 1918 when Parliament granted the franchise to English - women. -] - -Little by little, in every land, a voice began to be heard. It was the -voice of the man with the flag, and the man with the twisted face, and -the man with the blinded eyes, and the voice of Sergeant Jones. It -said what the sergeant said, when from his wheel chair by the window -where his wife had placed it, he took his pen in hand and wrote back to -Endell Street hospital: “Women are wonderful. I didn’t know before. -Now I wouldn’t be afraid for you even to have the vote.” - -And curiously enough, what the man in the wheel chair and the man in -the Green Park and the Tuileries and the man with the flag was saying, -the newspapers began to repeat as if it had been syndicated round the -world. The _Matin_ had it in Paris, the _Times_ in London and the -_Tageblatt_ in Berlin. You read it in all languages: “The women are -wonderful. We didn’t know before.” - - -GREATEST DRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY - -Then couldn’t a woman who could cast a shell, cast a vote? Parliaments -trembled on the verge of letting her try. - -It wouldn’t be at all the difficult undertaking it used to look to -those women of yesterday, whose place was in the home pouring afternoon -tea or embroidering a flower in a piece of lace. Why, to-day they would -scarcely have to go out of their way at all to the polls! They could -just stop in as easily as not, as they went down the street to their -day’s work in shop and office and factory. Sergeant Jones’s wife is -out of the home now anyway from six o’clock in the morning until seven -at night making munitions. Some one must support her family, you know. -Well, all over the world a new call began. Simultaneously in every -civilised land, through the crack in the window of the government house -where man gathered with his fellow man, you could hear it. In some -lands yet it is only a murmur of dissent. But in many lands now it -is a rising chorus of consent: “Women wanted in the counsels of the -nation!” - -At the gates of government, the new woman movement has arrived. And not -through the broken window is it entering in. Without benefit of even -a riot, suffrage walking very softly and sedately is going through an -open door. In England, a gentleman holds it ajar, a gentleman suave and -smiling and bowing the ladies to pass! - -Democracy, the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice -in their own government, is breaking through apparently on all the -fronts at once. It is a most remarkable coincidence. In August, 1917, -Parliament in England removed the “grille,” the brass lattice barring -the ladies’ gallery in the House of Commons and symbolising what had -been the English woman’s position. The _Times_, commenting on the -proceeding, characterised it as a “domestic revolution.” In the same -month in India 5000 Hindus were applauding Shimrati Pandita Lejjawati -who at Jullundur had come out on a public platform to urge that her -country abolish purdah! - -But the great drive for Democracy that now thrills around the world at -the International Suffrage Alliance headquarters, began unmistakably -in Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst in the old days never staged a raid on the -houses of Parliament more spectacularly. Just see the gentleman bowing -at the open door! It is Mr. Asquith, the former leader who for years -held the Parliamentary line against all woman’s progress. And smiling -right over his shoulder stands Mr. Lloyd George, the present premier. -Oh, well! The girl in the green sweater who horsewhipped one member of -Parliament, at the Brighton races, is driving a Red Cross ambulance in -Flanders. The quiet little woman in a grey coat, who fired the country -house of another in 1912, is rolling lint bandages. Sergeant Jones’s -wife has become a bread winner. Soldiers are not afraid for women to -vote. And cabinet ministers take courage! - -There is a town in the north of England with a monument erected to a -shipwrecked crew: “In memory of 17 souls and 3 women,” says the marble -testimonial. That categorical classification to which the English ivy -clings is about to be changed. Six million English women are about to -be made people![3] - -[3] Bill passed by House of Lords and received King’s sanction, Feb. 6, -1918. - -At the outbreak of hostilities, politicians the world over hastened -to declare woman’s suffrage a “controversial” question that must be -put aside during the war. And every government engaged said to its -suffragists: “We’re in so much trouble, for heaven’s sake don’t you -make us any more.” - -“Well, we won’t,” the women agreed, as the organisations in land after -land called off their political campaigns. It was for his sake—the -man in khaki. And in every land, the trained women of the suffrage -societies assembled their countrywomen to stand ready with first aid -for him. Day by day, week after week, now year after year, they have -been feeding the nation’s defenders, clothing them, nursing them, -passing up ammunition to them. To-day there isn’t an army that could -hold the field but for the women behind the men behind the guns. - -In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National -Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, had been a member of the -committee that in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for -the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl of twenty then. It -was a cause, you see, to which she had given a lifetime, that she -now laid aside. With the summons, “Let us show ourselves worthy of -citizenship,” she turned 500 women’s societies from suffrage propaganda -and Parliamentary petitioning to hospital and relief work. - -But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic leader of the Woman’s -Social and Political Union who had first smashed suffrage into the -front page of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms to give -her country’s claims precedence above her own, that the world realised -that there was a new formation in the lines of the woman movement. - -Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Holloway jail recuperating from a -hunger strike, when there came to her from her government the overtures -for a peace parley. When the authorities offered her release for all -of the suffragettes in prison and amnesty for those under sentence, -she ran up the Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In no -uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, “I who have been against the -government, am now for it. Our country’s war shall be our war.” - -For a minute after that proclamation, you could have heard a pin drop -in the great assembly hall of the smashing suffragettes. Then in a -burst of applause she had them with her: they would follow their -leader. Some few at first drew back in consternation. Had their late -leader lost her mind? The girl in the green sweater looked dazed: “I -was in the front ranks of her body guard when we stormed Buckingham -Palace,” she murmured. A very few were angry: “She’s selling out the -cause,” they exclaimed bitterly. - -But she wasn’t. The greatest little field marshal the woman movement -has ever known, was leading it to final victory. - -When Kitchener announced, “We shall not be able to win this war until -women are doing nearly everything that men have done,” it was the -woman who had organised raids on Parliament who now organised the -woman labour of a nation. On the day that she led 40,000 women down -the Strand to man the factories of England and turned Lincoln’s Inn -House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a munitions employment -bureau, opponents of the woman’s cause the world over began an orderly -retirement from their front line trenches. The next morning the London -_Post_ announced: “We stand on the threshold of a new age.” - -We do. You see, you could not have practically the men of all nations -in arms for Democracy without their finding it. And some of them who -buckled on their armour to go far crusading for it, are coming to the -conviction that there is also Democracy to be done at home. When the -history of these days at length is written, it will come to be recorded -that the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose -authority they submit, was practically assured by the events of 1917. - -In that year, the women who came to petition the English Parliament for -citizenship, got what they had for fifty years been asking in vain. For -the women who with Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Despard of -the Women’s Freedom League now stood at the gates of government were: -women shell makers and howitzer makers, pit brow lassies, chain makers, -textile workers, railway engine cleaners, women motor lorry drivers -in khaki, women letter carriers, women window cleaners, women bus -conductors, women engineers, women clerks, women in the civil service, -women tailors, women bakers, women bookbinders, women teachers, women -army nurses, women army doctors, women dentists, women chemists, and -women farm labourers. Among them was the wife of the man with the -twisted face and the wife of the man with the blinded eyes and the wife -of Sergeant Jones. - -The capitulation of the English Government was assured in the -recantations of its greatest men. Ex-premier Herbert H. Asquith spoke -first: “I myself,” he declared, “as I believe many others, no longer -regard the woman suffrage question from the standpoint we occupied -before the war.... I have said that women should work out their own -salvation. They have done it. The woman’s cause in England now presents -an unanswerable case.” - -Mr. Lloyd George agreed: “The place of woman,” he said, “is altered -for good and all. It would be an outrage not to give her the vote. -The further parliamentary action now involved may be regarded as a -formality.” - -General French, former commander of the British armies, the brother -of Mrs. Despard and of Mrs. Harley who died at the front, crossed the -Channel to announce his conversion to the woman’s cause through “the -heroism, the endurance and the organising ability of the women on the -battlefields of France and Belgium.” - -The press of the country burst into print with a new confession of -faith. The _Observer_ declared: “In the past we have opposed the claim -on one ground and one ground alone—namely, that woman by the fact of -her sex was debarred from bearing a share in national defence. We were -wrong.” The _Daily Mail_: “The old argument against giving women the -franchise was that they were useless in war. But we have found out that -we could not carry on the war without them.” The _Evening News_: “In -the home woman has long been a partner—not always in name, perhaps, but -generally in practice. Now she is a partner in our national effort. -And if she demands a partner’s voice in the concerns of the firm, who -shall say her Nay?” The _Northern Daily Telegraph_: “The duties of -citizenship are fulfilled by women to the uttermost. The continuance -of the sex disqualification would be a cruel crime and a blind folly -as well.” The _Referee_: “Women have earned a right to be heard in the -nation’s councils. The part they have played in winning the war is -their victory.” - -Like this, the cause that yesterday was rejected and most bitterly -assailed of men was now championed by the nation. This was a kingdom -saying Votes for Women. Field Marshal Pankhurst would never again have -to. Her war-time strategy had won. When Mr. Asquith rose in the House -of Commons himself to move the woman’s suffrage resolution, it had -ceased to be a “controversial” question. The measure was passed by an -overwhelming majority. - - -RECORD YEAR FOR SUFFRAGE CAUSE - -The domestic reform that was begun in England has echoed round the -world. See that which had come to pass in 1917: Four other nations, -France, Italy, Hungary and the United States had suffrage measures -before their parliaments. Members of the Reichstag were warning that -Germany cannot avoid it if she would keep up in efficiency with the -rest of the world. King Albert announced that it should be one of his -first acts for a restored Belgium to confer citizenship on its women. -Holland and Canada have just accomplished it in limited measure. -Russia and Mexico in the throes of revolution have actually achieved -it. Women have for the first time taken their seats in the governing -bodies of three nations, Hermila Galindo in the Congress of Mexico, -Mrs. McKinney and Lieutenant Roberta Catherine McAdams in Canada and -Jeanette Rankin in the United States. A woman, the Countess Sophia -Panin, has been a cabinet minister in Russia. And for the first time -since civilisation began, a woman, Dr. Poliksena Schiskina Yavein, as -a member of the Council of 61 at Petrograd, has assisted in writing a -nation’s constitution. - -[Illustration: - - MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER - - One of the feminist leaders in Paris to whose appeal for votes for - women the French government is listening to-day. -] - -On with Democracy! Nations are convinced that those who serve their -country should have a voice in directing its destinies. Land after -land preparing to extend its franchise for soldiers, as England -with her Representation of the People Bill, is reflecting on a real -representation. For every country is finding itself face to face with -the question with which Asquith first startled Britain, “Then what are -you going to do with the women?” Everywhere at the gates of government -are deputations like that in England who are saying, “We also serve who -stand behind the armies. We too want to be people.” - -And some one else wants them to be. From the training camps to the -trenches, the supporting column of the man in khaki stretches. Every -knitted sweater, every package of cigarettes tied with yellow ribbon -has been helping votes for women. And now over there he is getting -anxious about his job or his home or his children. What can he know -at the front about food control or the regulation of school hours in -Paris or London or New York? And when there are decisions like that to -be made, “I’d like to leave it to Her,” the soldier is beginning to -conclude. Why, war-time is the time for women to be free! The whole -world is athrill with the new ideal. - -See the lines of women arriving before the government houses. Theresa -Labriola voices the demand of the National Federation in Italy: -“Women,” she says, “form the inner lines of defence for the nations. -We need the ballot to make our lines strong.” Yes, yes, agrees her -country. You shall begin right away with the municipal franchise. And -Premier Boselli and the Italian Parliament are proceeding to get it -ready. - -In France, Mme. Dewitt Schlumberger and Mme. Charles LeVerrier for the -Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, present the “unanswerable -case.” The senate on the Seine, looking out, sees many women wearing -long crêpe veils in the delegation before its doors. “Let us give -them,” says a member of the Chamber of Deputies in a burst of poetic -chivalry, “the suffrage _de la morte_: every soldier dying on the -battle field shall be permitted to designate the woman relative he -wishes to have carry on his citizenship for him.” Very gently the women -of France declined the suffrage of the dead. Presenting a carefully -prepared brief that was the review of their war work, they said, “We -can vote for ourselves, please.” And who else shall? There are whole -communes with most of the men dead. There are villages with not -so much as a man to be made mayor, and a woman filling the office -instead. The French Chamber of Deputies has before it a bill to confer -the municipal franchise on women. “It is an act of justice,” says -ex-Premier Viviani. The _Droit du Peuple_ declares, “After the war, -many homes will be maintained by women who will perform men’s tasks and -fulfil men’s obligations. They ought to have men’s rights.” - -Canada, too, thought to reward her women with a vicarious vote. The -“next of kin” franchise was devised, by which the Government has -conferred on the wife or widow, mother, sisters and daughters of men -in the service the right to vote. But the delegations of women outside -the government house at Ottawa do not go away. They still wait. “We -also serve,” they repeat. And the country, in which no less than five -provinces last year gave to all of their women full citizenship, has -promised now to prepare the full direct federal franchise. - -In Mittel Europa, Rosika Schwimmer is marshalling the feminist forces. -Under her leadership, a great deputation has marched to the Town Hall -in Budapest. The resolution there presented for universal suffrage was -carried by the Burgomaster to the Emperor. In reply, the Hungarian -Feminist Union has received the assurance of the prime minister that -the Government will introduce a measure extending the franchise to -a limited class of women. At Prague, Austria, the Town Council has -appointed a committee to draw up a new local government franchise -which shall include women. The free town of Hamburg, Germany, preparing -to enlarge its franchise in recognition of the self-sacrifice of -soldiers, hears the voice of Helene Lange and 27,000 women. They are -reminding the Hamburg Senate that women, too, who have borne the -burdens of war, will wish to devote themselves to reconstruction -and in order to fulfil the duties of citizens, they claim citizens’ -rights. The Prussian Diet has before it the petition of Frau Minna -Cauer and the Frauenstimmrechtsbund urging that suffrage for women be -included in the projected franchise reform. The Reichstag arranging a -Representation of the People Bill has at last referred the petition of -the Reichverbund, the German National Union for Woman Suffrage, “for -consideration” _zur kenntnisnahme_, which is the first indication of -their change of attitude before the women’s offensive. The Socialists -in the Reichstag are urging: “Women suffrage is marching triumphantly -through other lands. Can Germany afford to fall behind the other -nations, with her women less fully equipped than the rest for the -struggle for existence?” Meanwhile, Germany, as other countries, is -depending more and more upon her women. Two leading cities, Berlin -and Frankfort-on-Main, both have women appointed to their municipal -committees. Frau Hedwig Heyl, that woman behind the food control policy -for the Empire, who has turned her great chemical factory on the -Salzufer to canning meat for the army, says: “Woman suffrage in Germany -is a fruit not yet ripe for the picking. I water the tree,” she adds -significantly. - -Holland has seen in The Hague 4,000 women assembled in the Binnehof, -the public square before the House of Parliament. On their behalf, -Dr. Aletta Jacobs, president of the Vereenigingvoor Vronwenkeisrecht, -presented to Premier Cort Van der Linden a petition with 164,696 -signatures, asking for citizenship for women. “Society,” Dr. Jacobs -told him, “can only gain when the forces and energy of its women, now -concentrated on the struggle for the vote, can be used along with -men’s in finding a solution for the many social problems for which -the insight of both is necessary.” And the Dutch Parliament, making -over its Constitution to enlarge the franchise for men, decided on -the amazing plan about women, “We will try them first, as members of -Parliament. And if we find they can make the laws, afterward we shall -let them vote for law makers.” So the new Dutch constitution gives -to women the “passive” franchise, which is the right to hold all -administrative offices, including representation in Parliament. There -is also removed an old prohibitory clause, so that the way is now -clear for the introduction of a measure for the “active” franchise for -women—if it is found the dinner doesn’t burn while they are sitting in -Parliament. - -A South African Party Congress, for the first time it has ever listened -to women, has received a delegation who urge: “Half the population of -the country is composed of women. Can you any longer afford to do -without our point of view in your national deliberations?” The Grand -Council of Switzerland is considering a bill which is before it, -proposing to give women the franchise in communal affairs. Mexico is -struggling toward national freedom with her women at the side of her -men. It was not even considered necessary to incorporate in the new -constitution the woman suffrage provision suggested by Hermila Galindo -at the national convention. The new Mexican Federal constitution states -explicitly that “Voters are those Mexicans who are 21 if unmarried and -over 18 if married and possessed of an honest means of livelihood.” And -under this constitution, in the March, 1917, elections, Mexican women -quietly voted as a matter of course along with the other citizens. - -[Illustration: - - DR. POLIKSENA SCHISKINA YAVEIN - - Who led 45,000 women to the duma in Petrograd to make their calling to - citizenship sure. -] - -In all of Russia’s turbulent revolutionary unrest, none of the divers -parties struggling for supremacy there, denies the claim of half -the race to the freedom which it is hoped ultimately to establish. -The Provisional government’s first announcement was for universal -suffrage. But the Russian women weren’t going to take any chance. -They remembered a French revolution that also proclaimed “universal” -suffrage and has not yet done anything of the kind. The Russian League -for the Defence of Women’s Rights said, “Let’s be certain about this. -We want our calling to citizenship made sure.” So Dr. Schiskina Yavein, -the president of the League, led 45,000 women to the Imperial Duma in -Petrograd. As their spokesman she told the government: “At this time -of national crisis we should have no confusion of terms. Without the -participation of women, no franchise can be universal. We have come for -an official declaration concerning the abolition of all limitations -with regard to women. We demand a clear and definite answer to two -questions: Are women to have votes in Russia? And are women to have a -voice in the Constituent Assembly which only in that case can represent -the will of the people? We are here to remain until we receive the -answer.” - -Well, the answer came. It was an unconditional affirmative, received -in turn from the men who came out from the government house to reply -to the waiting women: M. V. Rodzianko, president of the Imperial -Duma; N. S. Tchkeidze, president of the Council of Workingmen’s and -Soldiers’ Deputies, and Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of -Ministers. And when the preliminary parliament of the Russian Republic -was opened at Petrograd in October, 1917, the chair was offered to -Madame Breshkovsky, the celebrated “Little Grandmother” of the Russian -Revolutionaries, as the senior member of the council. - -In New York City on election night of November, 1917, the newsboys -shrilled out a new cry, “The wimmin win!” “The wimmin win!” It was like -a victory at Verdun or the Somme. The cables throbbed with the news -that New York State, where the woman movement for all the world began -ninety years before, had made its over three million women people. It -is now only a question of time when all other American women will be. -New York State carries with it almost as many electoral votes as all -of the 17 previous States combined, which have conferred on women the -Presidential franchise. The strongest fortress of the opposition is -fallen. And President Wilson has already recommended women suffrage to -the rest of the States as a war measure for immediate consideration. - -It was from the hand of Susan B. Anthony that the torch of freedom was -received by every leader of the woman movement now carrying it. On her -grave at Rochester, N. Y., we have already laid the victory wreath. -For Democracy, the right of women to have a voice in the government to -whose authority they submit, is about to be established in the earth! - -“One thing that emerges from this war, I feel absolutely convinced,” -(it is Mr. Lloyd George, Premier of England, who is speaking in a -public address), “is the conviction that women must be admitted to a -complete partnership in the government of nations. And when they are -so admitted, I am more firmly rooted than ever in the confident hope -that they will help to insure the peace of nations and to prevent -the repetition of this terrible condition of things which we are now -deploring. If women by their enfranchisement save the world one war, -they will have justified their vote before God and man.” - -There is a story that the anti-suffragists started. But it’s our best -suffrage propaganda now. A farmer’s wife in Maine, who had cooked the -meals and swept the house, and washed the children and sent them to -school, and hoed the garden and fed the chickens, and worked all the -afternoon in the hayfield, and was now on her way to the barn to finish -her day’s work with the milking, was accosted by an earnest agitator, -who asked her if she didn’t want the vote. But the farmer’s wife shook -her head: “No,” she answered, “if there’s any one little thing the men -can be trusted to do alone, for heaven’s sake, let ’em!” - -But is there? From the rose bowered cottage, the cottage red roofed and -the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage, and the plain -little white house somewhere off Main Street, there is a rising to the -question. - -Lest we forget, this war was made in the land where woman’s place was -in the kitchen! - -And the mere housewifely mind asks, Could confusion be anywhere worse -confounded than in the government houses of the world to-day? - -Hark! You cannot fail to hear it! The cry of the nations is now sharp -and clear. It is the cry of their distress: “Women wanted in the -counsels of state.” - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY - - -You unto whom a child is born to-day, unto you is this written. I bring -you glad tidings. Blessed are you among the nations of the earth. Wise -men all over the world are hurrying to bring you gifts. Only lift -your eyes from the baby at your breast and in your mirror I am sure -you shall see the shining aureole about your head. Exalted are you, -O, woman among all people. Know that you have become a Most Important -Person. Governments are getting ready to give your job a priority it -never had before. For you, why you are the maker of men! - -The particular commodity that you furnish has been alarmingly -diminished of late. It is clear what has happened with the present -world shortage of sugar: we pay 11c and 16c a pound where once we paid -four. The world shortage in coal has increased its cost in certain -localities almost to that of a precious metal, so that in Paris within -the year it has sold for $80 a ton. It is just as the political -economists have always told us, that the law of supply and demand fixes -prices. That which becomes scarce is already made dear. - -Thus is explained quite simply over the world to-day the rising value -of a baby. Civilisation is running short in the supply of men. We -don’t know exactly how short. There are the Red Cross returns that -say in the first six months alone of the war there were 2,146,000 -men killed in battle and 1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures, -however, of cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There is a -living figure that may not be. See the woman in black all over Europe -and to-morrow we shall meet her in Broadway. There are so many of her -in every belligerent land over there that her crêpe veil flutters -across her country’s flag like the smoke that dims the landscape in -a factory town. It is the mourning emblem of her grief unmistakably -symbolising the dark catastrophe of civilisation that has signalled -Parliaments to assemble in important session. Population is being -killed off at such an appalling rate at the front that the means for -replacing it behind the lines must be speeded up without delay. To-day -registrar generals in every land in white-faced panic are scanning the -figures of the birth rates that continue to show steadily diminishing -returns. And in every house of government in the world, above all the -debates on aeroplanes and submarines and shipping and shells, there is -the rising alarm of another demand. Fill the cradles! In the defence of -the state men bear arms. It is women who must bear the armies. - -Whole battalions of babies have been called for. If we in America have -had no requisitions as yet, it is because we have not yet begun to -count our casualty costs. L’Alliance Nationale pour L’Accroissement -de la Population Française is calling on the French mothers for at -least four children apiece during the next decade. Britain’s Birth -Rate Commission wants a million new babies from Scotland alone. The -Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungs Politik, which is the society for -increase of population organised at a great meeting in the Prussian -Diet House, has entered its order with the German women for a million -more babies annually for the next ten years. And that is the “birth -politics” of men. - -Then to the proposals of savants and scientists, sociologists and -statesmen, military men and clergymen and kings, there has been -entered a demurrer. Governments may propose, Increase and multiply. -She-who-shall-dispose overlays their falling birth rate figures with -the rising death rate statistics. And there is tragedy in her eyes: -“What,” she asks, “have you done with my children? The babies that I -have given you, you have wasted them so!” - -Is it not true? Even now along with the war’s destruction of life on -the most colossal scale known to history, children throughout the -world are dying at a rate that equals the military losses. In England -a hundred thousand babies under one year of age and a hundred thousand -more that do not succeed in getting born are lost annually. In America -our infant mortality is 300,000 a year. In Germany it is half a million -babies who die annually. The economics of the situation to a woman -is not obscure. Conservation of the children we already have, is the -advice of the real specialist in repopulation. One other suggestion -she contributes. She has made it practically unanimously in all lands. -In the Prussian Diet House it was one speaking with authority as the -mother of eight who interpolated: “Meine Herren, if you would induce -women to bring more children into the world you must make life easier -for mothers.” “Messieurs, Messieurs,” called the Union Française pour -le Suffrage des Femmes to the Société pour la Vie with its curious -proposal of money grants in reward to fathers of large families, “to -get children, you must cultivate mothers!” “Gentlemen,” declared the -Duchess of Marlborough at a great public meeting on race renewal held -in the Guild Hall, London, “care of the nation’s motherhood is the war -measure that will safeguard the future of the state.” - -These amendments in birth politics offered on behalf of the Most -Important Person have been practically adopted the world over. -Chancellors of the Exchequer are everywhere busy writing off -expenditures from the taxes running into millions, in support of -nation-wide campaigns for the conservation of the child. Maternity from -now on in every land takes the status of a protected industry. Britain -is ready to devote two and one-half million dollars a year to schools -for mothers. France has voted a “wards of the nation” bill, to provide -for the care of 700,000 war orphans, at a cost to the state which -it is estimated will mean an outlay of two hundred million dollars. -Public provisions for motherhood and infancy are proceeding apace -with provisions for the armies. If you are going to have a baby in -Nottingham, England, a public health visitor comes round to see that -you are perfectly comfortable and quite all right. And the municipality -that is thus anxiously watching over your welfare solicitously inquires -through a printed blank on which the reply is to be recorded, “Have -you two nightgowns?” In Berlin large signs at the subway and elevated -stations direct you to institutions where rates are moderate, or even -the Kaiser himself will be glad to pay the bill. Similar facilities are -offered by the government of France in the “Guide des Services Gratuits -Protegeant la Maternite,” with which the walls of Paris are placarded. -Even the war baby, whose cry for attention not all the ecclesiastical -councils and the military tribunals commanding “Hush” has been able to -still, at last is too valuable to be lost. And every Parliament has -arranged to extend the nation’s protection on practically equal terms -to all children, not excluding those we have called “illegitimate,” -because somebody before them has broken a law. - - -FINANCING MATERNITY - -You see, yesterday only a mother counted her jewels. To-day states -count them too. Even Jimmie Smith in, we will say, England, who before -the war might have been regarded as among the least of these little -ones, has become the object of his country’s concern. Jimmie came -screaming into this troublous world in a borough of London’s East End, -where there were already so many people that you didn’t seem to miss -Jimmie’s father and some of the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie -belongs to one of those 300,000 London families who are obliged to live -in one and two room tenements. Five or six, perhaps it was five, little -previous brothers and sisters waited on the stair landing outside the -door until the midwife in attendance ushered them in to welcome the new -arrival. Now Jimmie is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either -soldiers of war or soldiers of industry. And however you look at the -future, his country’s going to need Jimmie. He is entered in the great -new ledger which has been opened by his government. The Notification of -Births Act, completed by Parliament in 1915, definitely put the British -baby on a business basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six hours -of its advent, be listed by the local health authorities. Jimmie was. - -And he was thereby automatically linked up with the great national -child saving campaign. Since then, so much as a fly in his milk is a -matter of solicitude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it’s heard -in Westminster. And it’s at least worried about there. Though all the -King’s councillors and all the King’s men don’t yet quite know what -they’re to do with the many problems of infancy and complications of -pregnancy with which they are confronted, now that these are matters -for state attention. - -A first and most natural conclusion that they reached, as equally has -been the case in other lands, was that the illness of babies was due -to the ignorance of mothers. Well, some of it is. And that has proven -a very good place to begin. For every one else, from a plumber to a -professor, there has always been training. Only a mother was supposed -to find out how by herself. Now she no longer has to. The registration -of Jimmie’s birth itself brought the Health Visitor, detailed from the -public health department of the borough, for her first municipal call -on his mother. She found Mrs. Smith up and trying to make gruel for -herself. After serious expostulation, the maternity patient was induced -to return to bed, where she belonged. Gruel, the white-faced woman who -sank back on the pillow insisted, was easy. Why, probably she should -not have minded it at all. Only that day before yesterday she had -gotten up to do a bit of wash and had fainted at the tub. She hadn’t -seemed to be just right since. Neither had the baby. - -The visitor leaned across the bed and removed a “pacifier” from the -baby’s mouth. “But he has to have it,” said the mother, “he cries so -much. All my children had it.” Looking round at them, the visitor saw -that it was true. Each exhibited some form of the facial malformation -that substantiated the statement. And one was deaf from the adenoid -growth. And one was not quite bright. This was, of course, no time for -a medical lecture beyond Mrs. Smith’s comprehension. But the effort was -made to impress her with the simple statement of fact that a pacifier -really was harmful for a child. There were inquiries about the baby’s -feeding. No, of course, it was not being done scientifically. Well, -the mother was told, if he were fed at regular intervals he would be -in better condition not to cry all the time. And of course she herself -must not get tired. It was Mrs. Smith’s first introduction to the -practice of mothercraft as an art. At the school for mothers recently -opened in the next square, where the Health Visitor had her enrolled -within a month, her regular instruction began. - -The schools for mothers are now being established as rapidly as -possible throughout the country. It is not an absolutely new -enterprise. The first one in England, from which all the others are -being copied, had been started in London by an American woman who had -married an Englishman, Mrs. Alys Russell, a graduate of Bryn Mawr. -Women recognised at once the value of the plan. It was only a question -of popularising and paying for it. This the war has accomplished. -Government will now defray 50 per cent. of the cost of a school under -the operation of either voluntary agencies or borough authorities. -Already 800 schools have been opened. Some of the most successful -are at Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow, under municipal direction. -Parliament, you see, by financing it has established the school for -mothers as a national institution. - -The “infant consultation” is the feature about which its activities -centre. Jimmie was taken regularly for the doctor’s inspection and -advice and there is on file there at the school a comprehensive record -in which is entered every fact of his family history and environment -and his own physical condition, with the phenomena of its changes -from week to week. The weekly weighing indicated very accurately -his progress. And the week that his weary mother’s milk failed, the -scales reported it. The modified milk was carefully prescribed but -the next week’s weighing indicated that Mrs. Smith wasn’t getting the -ingredients together right. The Health Visitor was assigned to go -home with her and show her just how. Like that, Jimmie was constantly -supervised. When the doctor at the consultation, tapping the little -distended abdomen with skilled fingers, announced, “This baby is -troubled with colic,” Mrs. Smith said he had been having it a good -deal lately. Well, a little questioning corrected the difficulty. The -trouble was pickles, and he never had them after that. Also he never -had the summer complaint, which the former Smith babies always had in -September. - -You see, there is no proper cupboard at Jimmie’s house. There is -only the recess beside the chimney, and flies come straight from -the manure heap at the back of the house to the milk pitcher on the -shelf. Mrs. Smith didn’t know that flies mattered. She knows now, and -at the school she has learned that you protect the baby from summer -complaint by covering the pitcher with a muslin cloth. She also has -learned how to make the most ingenious cradle that ever was contrived. -It’s constructed from a banana box, but it perfectly well serves the -purpose for which it was designed. That Jimmie should sleep alone, is -one of the primary directions at the school. Of course, it is clear -that this is hygienically advisable, and there is another reason: these -crowded London areas are so crowded that even the one bed the family -usually possesses is also overcrowded. With some five other children -occupying it with their mother, there was danger that Jimmie would -some night be smothered. “Overlaying,” as it is called, is the reason -assigned in the death certificate for the loss of a good many London -babies. - - -BETTER BABIES ARE PRODUCED - -Jimmie in his banana cradle slept better than any of the other babies -had. He had a little more air. Also he was cleaner than the others, -because his mother had learned that dirt and disease germs are -dangerous. But it is not easy, you should know, to keep children clean -where every pint of water you wash them in must be carried up stairs -from the tap on the first floor and down stairs again to the drain. A -frequent bath all around in the one stewpan that perforce must serve -for the purpose is out of the question. But there was a real wash basin -now among the new household furnishings that Mrs. Smith was gradually -acquiring. There are so many things that one goes without when one’s -husband is an ordinary labourer at the limit line of 18s. a week. But -when he becomes a soldier and you get your regular separation allowance -from the government, you begin to rise in the social scale. Mrs. -Smith, like so many others of the English working class women, now -during the war was “getting on her feet.” And some of the improvement -in family life was certainly registering in that chart card at the -school consultation that recorded Jimmie’s progress. - -When his father, home from Flanders on furlough, held him on his knee, -it was a better baby than he had ever held there before. For one thing -it was a heavier baby: children in this district used to average -thirteen pounds at one year of age. And now those whose attendance -at the consultations is regular average sixteen and seventy-five -hundredths pounds. Also Jimmie was a healthier baby. He hadn’t rickets, -like the first baby, who had suffered from malnutrition. What could you -do when there was a pint of milk a day for the family and the baby had -“what was left”? He hadn’t tuberculous joints, like the second baby. He -hadn’t died of summer complaint, like the third and the fifth babies. -And he hadn’t had convulsions, like the seventh baby, who had been born -blind and who fortunately had died too. Yes, when one counts them up, -there have been a good many, and if some hadn’t died, where would Mrs. -Smith have put them all? The six that there are, seem quite to fill two -rooms and the one bed. - -Still in the course of time there was going to be another baby. -Governments crying, “Fill the cradles,” seem not to see those that are -already spilling over. But the development of birth politics has at -last arrived at an important epoch—important to all the women in the -world—in the recognition of the economic valuation of maternity. It -has dashed acquiescent compliance in a world old point of view most -tersely expressed in that religious dictum of Luther: “If a woman die -from bearing, let her. She is only here to do it.” Mrs. Smith will -not die from bearing to-day if her government can help it—nor any -other mother in any other land. Instead, all science and sociology are -summoned to see her through. The rising value of a baby demonstrates -clearly that you cannot afford to lose a maker of men. The British -Government and the German Government and the French Government, -speeding up population, are now taking every precaution for the -protection of maternity. The mortality record for women dying in child -birth in England has been about 6,000 a year. In Germany it has been -10,000. There was also in addition to this death rate a damage rate. -The national health insurance plan inaugurated by several countries -before the war was beginning to reveal it: the claims for pregnancy -disabilities, the actuaries reported, were threatening to swamp the -insurance societies. New significance was added to these phenomena when -there began to be the real war necessity for conserving population. - -The Registrar General, laying the case before Parliament in England, -found it suddenly strengthened by a book presented by the Women’s -Co-operative Guild. The volume constitutes one of the most amazing -documents that ever found a place in any state archives. It is entitled -“Maternity,” and is a symposium constituting the cry of woman in -travail. A compilation of 160 letters written by members of this -working women’s organisation recounting the personal experiences of -each in childbirth, it reflects conditions under which motherhood is -accomplished among the 32,000 members of the Guild. “Maternity,” with -its simple, direct annals of agony is a classic in literature, a human -document recommended for all nations to study. The gentlemen in the -House of Commons, who had turned its tragic pages, looked into each -other’s faces with a new understanding: there was more than maternal -ignorance the matter with infant mortality! And a new population -measure was determined on. - -“These letters” impressively announced the Right Honourable Herbert -Samuel, “give an intimate picture of the difficulties, the miseries, -the agonies that afflict many millions of our people as a consequence -of normal functions of their lives. An unwise reticence has hitherto -prevented the public mind from realising that maternity presents a -whole series of urgent social problems. It is necessary to take action -to solve the problems here revealed. The conclusion is clear that it -is the duty of the community so far as it can to relieve motherhood of -its burdens.” So you will now find the maternity centre being erected -next door to the school for mothers. The Government in 1916, announcing -that it would assume also 50 per cent. of this expense, sent a circular -letter to all local authorities throughout the kingdom, urgently -recommending the new institution “in spite of the war need for economy -at the present time in all other directions.” - -[Illustration: - - HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH - - Formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt of New York, who is leading the movement - in England for the conservation of the nation’s childhood. -] - -STARTING THE BABY RIGHT - -Mrs. Smith was automatically registered from the school for mothers -to the books of the maternity centre when the Health Visitor learned -that it was time. The medical authorities report that 40 per cent. of -the total deaths of infants occur within a month after birth and are -due very largely to conditions determined by the state of the mother’s -health. A specific trouble is maternal exhaustion. Mrs. Smith, under -weekly observation at the ante-natal clinic, was discovered to be -hungry. She didn’t know it herself, because she had so long been that -way. It gets to be a sort of habit with the working class woman, who -must feed her husband first, because he is the bread winner. He has the -meat and the children have the soup, and she is very likely to have the -bread and tea. The clinic doctor, looking Mrs. Smith over, wrote out -a prescription. It wasn’t put up in a bottle. It was put on a plate. -Mrs. Smith was to attend the mothers’ dinner, served every day at the -centre. The mother, being the medium of nourishment for the child, the -good food that she would get here would do more than any dosing that -might be done afterward to ensure the right kind of constitution for -the coming little British citizen. In the “pre-natal class,” under the -instruction of a sewing teacher and with municipal patterns furnished -by the city of London, she made better baby clothes than she had ever -had before. The materials, bought at wholesale, are furnished at cost -price, the entire layette at 10s. to be paid for by a deposit of 6d. a -week. - -As time went on, Mrs. Smith’s headaches became more severe. Carrying -water and coal upstairs greatly aggravated the heart trouble she had -had since Jimmie’s birth. Suddenly dizzy one day, she nearly fell from -a chair on which she was standing to wash the windows. The next morning -her feet were so swollen she could with difficulty get on her shoes. -Her neighbour on the lower landing remarked, “Of course, you’ll have to -be worse before you’re better.” And she herself knew no other way. - -But the ante-natal clinic did. The doctor wrote kidney trouble on her -attendance card. That, of course, was the technical diagnosis. He might -have said it another way had he written “overwork” and “overbearing.” -It was a long time since Mrs. Smith had been strong. She had nursed two -of the children with measles right up to the day that the seventh had -arrived. Three months later, with the eighth expected, she was going -out charring. Her husband was out of work. The 30 shillings maternity -benefit that would be coming to her from the national insurance -department on the birth of her baby, would have to be supplemented -somehow in order to meet all the additional expenses of the occasion. -Well, the eighth baby was a miscarriage instead. Then there was the -ninth, and then there was Jimmie, in quick succession. And with the -five others and trying to keep up with all that she was learning at -the school for mothers should be done for children, why it was more -than one pair of hands was equal to. She had now reached the verge of -collapse. - -The clinic doctor was telling her gravely that she must have medical -attendance at once. The business of a centre is to supply supervision, -but for medical treatment the patient is referred to her own physician. -Mrs. Smith didn’t have one. Half the babies of the kingdom are brought -into the world by midwives. Mrs. Smith could not afford a doctor. Well, -Parliament could. The bill, presented by the physician in whose care -she was now placed, was paid half by the national government and half -by the health department of this borough. It is an arrangement which is -considered a good investment by the national treasury. Without this aid -Mrs. Smith would have died in convulsions and a new baby might never -have been born. Careful feeding and careful doctoring obviated both -disasters and carried the case to a triumphant conclusion. The baby -is here. On his first birthday anniversary he tipped the scales at 20 -pounds. - -Mrs. Smith counts it a confinement _de luxe_ that brought him. For the -first occasion in her maternal history she did not have to get out of -bed to do the washing. For two weeks she just “laid up” while a Home -Help took the helm in her household. The Home Help is an adaptable -person in a clean blouse and a clean apron, who comes in each morning, -and cooks and scrubs, and washes, and gets the children off to school. -Her wages of 13s. a week were paid half by the centre and half by Mrs. -Smith through her weekly 6d. contribution to the Home Help Society. But -there was a greater event than even the Home Help. A “bed to yourself -to have a baby in,” is the dream of luxury to which the working class -woman with her new war-time allowance looks forward. Mrs. Smith, -carefully saving out a shilling here from the “coal and lights,” and -another shilling there, perhaps, from “clothes and boots,” painfully -accumulating the little fund, had achieved the bed of her ambition. -And neighbours from the length of the square and around the next -turning came in to look at her as she lay in state, as it were, the new -improved baby by her side. - -There are improved babies like Mrs. Smith’s arriving every day in -England. They are not all among the working class. They are reported -with increasing frequency, as at Nottingham and Huddersfield, among -the artisan class. Even comparatively well-to-do mothers in the best -of homes have not in the past been always accustomed to the skilled -medical supervision during pregnancy which is now afforded without -cost. It is Parliament’s plan to have the new maternity service as -available for the entire population as is public education for school -children. The city of Bradford exhibits the ideal of a complete -municipal system now in successful operation: an infants’ department -occupying a new three-story building, with a consultation to which -600 mothers come weekly; a maternity department with the ante-natal -clinic; a maternity hospital, announced as “the first of its kind” in -the world; a staff of municipal midwives for service in the homes; a -cooking depot, from which meals in heat-proof vessels distributed by -motor vans are dispensed to 500 expectant mothers daily; and a staff of -20 women health visitors to connect the homes of Bradford with all of -this municipal maternity service. - -Still England’s comprehensive scheme of assistance to mothers grows. -Down the street, Mrs. Smith noticed one day another new institution -that has been started. It is a municipal _crèche_, for which the -Government pays 75 per cent. of the cost of operation. The sign in the -window says that it is a nursery for the care and maintenance of the -children of munition workers. Three meals are provided, and the charge -is 6d. a day. Just around the corner, the Labour Exchange has out a -sign, “8,000 women wanted at once for shell-filling factories. Age 16 -to 40. No previous experience necessary. Fill the factories and help to -win the war.” - -And Mrs. Smith is thinking. The school for mothers has taught her -to. Do you know that the number of children who survive the first -year in good health is 71 per cent. in homes where the wage income is -over 20s. a week and it drops to 51 per cent. in homes where the wage -income is less than 20s. a week? The sociologists have also some very -interesting figures that were compiled at Bradford. In 1911 the infant -mortality rate there in houses that rented for six pounds and less was -163 in 1,000; house rent six to eight pounds, infant mortality, 128; -house rent eight to twelve pounds, infant mortality, 123; house rent -over twelve pounds, infant mortality, 88. And here in London infant -mortality is over 200 per 1,000 in one-room tenements, as compared with -100 in tenements of four rooms and upwards. Now, Mrs. Smith, I don’t -suppose, has ever seen those figures. But she doesn’t need to. She -understands why the small white hearse goes so continuously up and down -some streets. She knows perfectly well that there will be more light -and air for her children in three or four rooms than in two. Also that -the rent will cost her 9s. 6d. a week, where now she pays 4s. 6d. But -in a factory there are women earning 25 and 30s. a week, and even up to -two pounds a week. Mrs. Smith is thinking. - - -THE MADONNA IN INDUSTRY - -Meanwhile over in France Azalie de Rigeaux, at half-past ten this -morning, will step aside from the lathe where she turns fuses, to -retire for say half-an-hour for another service. Azalie de Rigeaux is -a munitions worker in trousers in a Usine le Guerre in a _banlieu_ of -Paris. See her now as she takes her baby in her arms and seats herself -in a low chair by a small crib. A wedding-ringed hand opens her working -blouse from the throat downward, the black lines of the cloth fold -away from her bosom, revealing in lovely contrast the white, satiny -texture of her skin. And she, too, even as you, a mother anywhere in -the world, smiles happily into her baby’s eyes as she holds him to -her breast. It is a mother and child picture the like of which you -will not find in any gallery of Europe. Azalie de Rigeaux, crooning -softly here to her child, is a new figure in life, so new that she has -not yet reached the canvas of even the modern masters in art. See just -above the curve of her arm where rests the bay’s head, the armlet that -she wears on her left sleeve. Embroidered on it is that sign of her -national enlistment, a bursting bomb. It is important because it is the -clue to the new picture. All over the world war has called the woman to -the factory. And what shall she do with the baby? Well, the baby is so -valuable that the state is not going to let it cry. - -It is France that makes the security for maternity gilt-edged. By the -gifts they are bringing here, one would say that this is the country -that to-day takes precedence of all others in its appreciation of the -rising value of a baby. As every one has heard, there has not in a long -time, in generations indeed, been a surplus of babies in France. As -a matter of fact, they have always been scarce. And they are so dear -that the passion for the child is the distinctive national trait. This -building in which Azalie de Rigeaux nurses her child to-day was erected -at a cost of 75,000 francs. It stands in the factory yard, adjacent -to the shop in which women make shells. In this sunny high-ceilinged -room, with plenty of sunlight and air, rows and rows of dimpled babies -sleep in the blue cribs with the dainty white cover-lids. Four times -a day the mothers from the shop across the way, as Azalie de Rigeaux -has now, come to nurse them. Outside the long French windows there is a -large French “jardin,” where the older children, in blue and pink check -aprons, play. The nursery dining-room has a low table with little low -chairs, where they come to their meals. Nourishing broths and other -foods are prepared in a shining, perfectly equipped kitchen. There is -a white bathroom with porcelain basins and baths of varying sizes; on -the long shelf across the room are the separate baskets that hold the -individual brushes. Each child, on arrival in the morning, is given a -bath and a complete change of clothes. Once a week they are weighed. -The doctor and the staff of trained nurses are alert to detect the -least deviation from normal. Scientific supervision like this costs the -firm 1 franc 35 centimes per day per child. To Azalie de Rigeaux and -the other mothers in their employ, it is free. - -It is this _crèche_ at Ivry-sur-Seine which is the model recommended by -the ministry of munitions to the factories of France. The last feature -to make this, a national institution, absolutely complete, has been -added. It was the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes that one -day held a conference with the ministry of munitions. “Gentlemen,” they -said, “a mother who must go home from a factory to stand over a wash -tub, gets so tired that the baby’s source of nourishment is imperilled. -And when a baby languishes, a future soldier may be lost.”—A state -department was at instant attention—“Gentlemen,” it was pointed out, -“there is one thing more that you must do.” Well, they have done it. In -this model babies’ building at Ivry-sur-Seine there is a steam laundry -in which two women are kept constantly employed, so that there shall be -no night laundry work for the child whom the mother takes home. There -are washed eight hundred diapers a day. You see there is nothing that -the Government will not do for a child in France. Nothing is too much -trouble. - -Even her employers will be equally as pleased as the state if Azalie -de Rigeaux shall decide to give another citizen to France. They have -told me so. “Why, it is patriotism,” the factory owner explained to me, -as we stood there among the whirring belts and the revolving wheels -of a thousand machines in this Usine de Guerre. “Don’t you see,” he -patiently elucidated, “I’m sure if she will only have the baby every -one else should do what they can.” - -This is what they do for Azalie de Rigeaux. She comes directly -under the protection of L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et -Infantile, which, as you will read on all the walls of Paris, is -organised “to secure to all pregnant women adequate and suitable -nourishment, proper housing accommodations, relief from overwork and -skilled medical advice, all of the social, legal and medical protection -to which she is entitled in a civilised society.” A visitor will arrive -from the nearest Mairie to inform the prospective mother of all the -aids that are available for her. All of the municipally subsidised -institutions have had their accommodations increased since the war. -There are the Municipal Maternity Hospitals, where care is free, or -there is the Mutualité Maternelle, the self-supporting maternity club -through which one may make arrangements for accouchement. There are -free meals for mothers at the Cantines Maternelles, which are spread -over Paris. Are there other children in the family, so that their -care is a burden to the mother? She must not tire herself with the -housework. They will be taken to the country at municipal expense -and she shall go to a Refuge to rest in preparation for the coming -confinement. There are free layettes to be had at every Mairie. A -limousine will even take the lady to a hospital if necessary. The -military automobiles of the army are subject to requisition for this -purpose by L’Office Central d’Assistance Maternelle et Infantile of -Paris. - -There is also definite financial assistance. The Government will pay -to Azalie de Rigeaux ten francs and fifty centimes a week for four -weeks before and four weeks after the confinement, with an additional -three francs fifty centimes a week if she nurses the child. To this her -employer tells me he will add his bonus for the baby, 105 francs if -she has been in his employ for one year, 135 francs after three years, -and after six years it will be 165 francs. All indications point to -market quotations on the French baby rising even higher. Prof. Pinard, -the celebrated _accoucher_ of Paris, who has assisted into the world -so many babies that he should know their value as much as any man may, -is saying they are really worth more. Through the Academy of Medicine -in France he is recommending to the Senate a measure providing for a -payment to a mother, from the time that gestation begins until the -child is one year old, of five francs a day. - - -IT MEANS THE LIBERATION OF THE MOTHER - -But most significant to the woman movement of all lands is the welcome -that the Usine de Guerre is extending to Azalie de Rigeaux. Of all the -making over they have been doing for us in industry, this is perhaps -the most revolutionary in its effects on the whole social structure. -For when industry takes the baby, it means the passing of the wage -envelope to a whole class of the population whose arms were hitherto -literally too burdened to reach for it. Here at Ivry-sur-Seine they do -not shake their heads and say, “Oh, you might have a baby. We prefer to -employ a man who won’t.” On the contrary preference in employment is -given to a woman who has a child. The only person who takes precedence -of her is the woman with two children or, of course, with three. From -the day that she signifies she is going to have another, she becomes an -object of special solicitude. She will be shielded from any injurious -strain. Because it may not be well for her to stand at the lathe, she -will be transferred to the gauging department, where she may remain -continuously seated. And, while the gauging department’s regular rate -of pay is but 50 centimes an hour, her own job’s rate of pay, 60, 70, -80 centimes an hour, whatever it may be, will be continued. - -“But isn’t it an interruption to your business to have employés -who every now and then have to stop to have a baby?” I asked the -French manufacturer. “Ah, no, Madame,” he replied, “surely it is no -disturbance at all. It is nothing even if a woman should wish to be -absent for two or three months. Is she not serving her country? We -simply arrange a large enough staff of employés so that always there -are some to fill the gaps. Maternity is something that may be estimated -by percentage. We count on it that Camille here will probably have a -baby in July. Etienne, next to her, may have one in September. Well, by -the time a substitute employé is finished with taking Camille’s place, -she will be required in Etienne’s place, then, perhaps, in Azalie’s -place. It is very easy, I say, to arrange.” - -And it is because the rising value of a baby makes it worth while. -It is in France, where maternity has always been important, that all -of the institutions for the welfare of the child now being rushed -to completion in other lands have been originally invented. We in -America, in some of our large cities, have started the “clinic” and -the “consultation” and the _crèche_. Italy is inaugurating them. -Russia sent to Paris for specific information about them before the -war. Germany’s “Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Haus” in Berlin, a veritable -“laboratory of the child,” from which the child culture system -adapted from France has been developed for the Empire, is a monument -to the national thoroughness, which, making military preparation for -the conquest of the world, made maternity preparation on almost as -comprehensive a scale. - -Industry to-day beckoning the woman, you see, Parliament is bound to -provide for the child. Mrs. Smith in England—or in America or anywhere -else—you need not hesitate. - -Azalie de Rigeaux’s baby is, what is it one shall say, as good as gold -all day long. Do you know that he is so well regulated that there is -no deviation from his perfection save on Mondays when he gets back to -the _crèche_ fretful and perhaps a little inclined to be colicky after -a week end at home? At that munitions _crèche_ down your street the -babies shall have a bath every day and no one will have to carry the -water toilsomely upstairs by the pint. Think of the dainty cribs to -sleep in and the beautiful green garden to play in! There are three -meals a day that never fail. You can easier pay for those meals than -cook them. How many skilled vocations are you trying to follow in your -home! The graduate of a school for mothers, you are doing, the best -you can, more than the winner of a Cambridge tripos would attempt to -undertake! Cooking and sewing and nursing, laundry work and scrubbing -and child culture, that is the gamut of the achievements you are trying -to accomplish. Oh, Mrs. Smith, one trade in the factory is easier. What -artisan can be good at his job if he must also putter with half a -dozen others? Well, the world is no longer going to ask it of you, the -maker of men! - - -THE CHILD’S CHANCE DEPENDS ON FAMILY INCOME - -Tradition may still rise to protest: But the home! You wouldn’t abolish -the home! I think you would if you had seen it, Mrs. Smith’s home. -Child mortality in her street is at the rate of 200 per 1,000. I know -a home in the other end of London that is as lovely as a poet’s dream. -Child mortality in this district is 40 per 1,000. There is a great -house facing a park. There are three children in it. They have a day -nursery and a night nursery and a school room all to themselves. They -are cared for by a head nurse, and an assistant nurse, a governess, and -a mother who now and then comes to caress them and see that they are -happy. There are, you see, four women—to say nothing of the household -staff of eight servants indirectly contributing to the same service—to -care for three children in the West End. - -In the East End Mrs. Smith has only one pair of hands to do for seven, -and she is no super-woman. They live in two rooms that the fiercest -all the time scrubbing could not keep clean. The discoloured walls are -damp with mildew. You can see the vermin in the cracks. There isn’t any -pantry. There isn’t any sink. There isn’t so much as a cook stove, only -an open grate. _There isn’t any poetry in a home on less than a pound a -week!_ - -Down the street is the way out to the new home that Mrs. Smith’s wage -envelope will help to build. There will be at least 4 rooms and the -children away during the day under expert care. The little children of -the rich in the West End nursery have no more scientific supervision -than the municipal _crèche_ will afford Mrs. Smith for hers. I know -she will not longer personally wash their faces and wipe their noses. -Even when she tries to, as you may have noticed in any land, she -cannot possibly do those tasks as often as they should be done. The -mere physical needs of children, any one else can attend to. But only -a mother can love them. Hadn’t we better conserve her more for that -special function? The rising value of a baby begins to demand it. - -And don’t worry about the effect of factory employment on her -health. Two government commissions of experts, one in France and one -in England, tell us it’s all right after all. Both report that a -properly arranged factory is as good a place as any for a woman. Some -significant figures presented to England’s Birth Rate Commission show -that the proportion of miscarriages is among factory workers 9.2 per -cent. as compared with 16 per cent. among women doing housework in -the home. Hard work and heavy work, you see, are just as harmful in -Mrs. Smith’s kitchen as they might be anywhere else—and not nearly so -well paid! Really, in spite of its historic setting there is no sacred -significance attaching to the figure of a woman bending over a washtub -or on her knees scrubbing a floor. Let us venerate instead Azalie de -Rigeaux nursing her child in a Usine de Guerre! After the schools for -mothers and the maternity clinics have done what they may to reduce -infant mortality, the mothers in industry may do some more. Take your -babies in your arms, Mrs. Smith, and flee from that stalking spectre of -poverty that has already snatched four of them to the grave. The door -of the municipal _crèche_ stands ajar! - -Like this, the world is making ready for reconstruction. Let there be -every first aid for the maker of men. We await one more measure: Mrs. -Smith must never again have ten babies when she lives in two rooms—nor -Frau Schmidt in Berlin. This unlimited increase that crowds children -from the cradle to the coffin, in the haste to make room for more, has -been the fatal force that has impelled nations teeming with too many -people to make war for territorial expansion. We shall not blot out -from civilisation the Prussian military ideal until we have likewise -effaced the Prussian maternity ideal of reckless reproduction. That -the cradles of the world may never again spill over, the nations must -rise from the peace table with a new population policy. In the “birth -politics” of the future there must be birth control. When children are -scarce, are they dear. See France! The rising value of a baby may yet -lift the curse of Eve! - -Then shall we be ready to repopulate right. After the battles are won -and man’s work of conquest is done, woman’s war work will only have -begun. I have stood in the cathedral at Rheims and in the stricken -silence looked with sickening dismay on the destruction of the -beautiful temple of worship builded with such exquisite art and such -infinite labour. But I assure you not all the cathedrals of Europe -piled in a single colossal ruin, broken sculptured saint on saint, can -stir the beholder with the poignant pain of one war hospital! There -in the whitewashed wards with the smell of blood and ether, where the -maimed lie stiff and still and the dying moan and the mad rave in wild -delirium, stand there and your soul shall shrivel in horror at the -destruction of men! It is the agony of it all, and the suffering and -the sorrow and the grief of it all—and then something more. You creep -with the feeling that every one of these men once was builded with -such exquisite art and such infinite labour and such toilsome pain and -anguish by God and a woman! It is a stupendous task of creation to be -done over again when the armies shall have finished their work. Bone of -her bone and flesh of her flesh, God and woman must rebuild the race. -You unto whom a child can be born to-day, to you Parliaments make their -prayer! - -Not a captain of industry who assembles the engines of war, not a -general who directs the armies, may do for his country what you can -do who stand beside its cradles. The cry that rings out over Empires -bleeding in the throes of death is the oldest cry in the world. Women -wanted for maternity! - - - - -CHAPTER X - -THE RING AND THE WOMAN - - -That woman who crossed the threshold of the Doll’s House awhile ago—you -would scarcely recognise her as you meet her to-day anywhere abroad in -the world. She has put aside yesterday as it were an old cloak that has -just slipped from her shoulders. And she stands revealed as the one of -whom some of us have for a long time written and some of us have read. -For a generation at least she has been looked for. Now she is here. - -You see when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though -no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women -munition workers and women conductors and women bank tellers and women -doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt -if there is a statesman anywhere who has leaned to unlock a door of -opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realised that he was -but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is reshaping the -world for mighty ends, rough hewn though they be to-day from the awful -chaos of war. - -But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and -stands again before the cottage rose bowered on the English downs, red -roofed in France and Italy, blue trimmed in Germany or ikon blessed in -Russia or white porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her -to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length -and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall -see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when -he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened -to her since. It is woman’s coming of age. Look, she is turning the -ring on her finger to-day. - -When the man in khaki went away, that ring was sign and symbol of -the status assigned to her by all the oldest law books and religious -books of the world. And none of the modern ones had been able wholly -to eradicate from their pages the point of view that was the most -prevailing opinion of civilisation. The most ancient classification of -all listed in one category “a man’s house and his wife, his man servant -and his maidservant, his ox and his ass and any other possessions that -are his.” An English state church has given her in marriage to him “to -obey him and serve him.” A German state church has bound her “to be -subject to him as to her lord and master.” Christian lands have agreed -that a woman when she marries enters into a state of coverture by which -they tell us “the husband hath power and dominion over his wife.” -Religious teachers from St. Paul to Martin Luther, law givers from -Moses to Napoleon have been unanimous on this point, which Napoleon -framing his code for France summed up briefly, Woman belongs to man. - -This has been the basic assumption of church and state from whose -courts of authority each concession of individuality for woman has been -won only by process of slow amendment. It is still so subtly interwoven -in dogma and statute that there is not yet any land where a woman, -though thinking herself free, may not trip against a legal disability -that has not yet been dislodged. For Blackstone, the great authority of -reference, declares “the very being or legal existence of the woman is -suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated in that of -the husband.” And all over the world, all the church councils and all -the state courts have not yet been so reformed but that by reversion to -type they will hark back to the pronouncement. Man and wife are one—and -he is the one. So the man’s mind thinketh. - -And the woman’s mind? Since he went away in khaki, it has thought long, -long thoughts. When he comes back, this new woman looking into his eyes -with the level glance, he will find is a woman who has earned money—in -a new world that has been made over for her so that she can. You see -all those lines of women in industry and commerce and the professions? -Some of them walk up to a paymaster’s window on Saturday night and some -of them wait for the checks that arrive in their mail. But it is an -experience in common through which all are passing. The open door to -the shop and the factory and the counting room, to law or to medicine -is the great gateway to the future where dreams shall come true. For -the women who have passed through, have arrived at last at the great -goal, economic independence. - -Now what that means the sociologists could tell. Though they might -not think to put it in terms of, for instance, Elsa von Stuttgart’s -slippers. They would, I suppose, agree that economic independence is -the right to earn one’s living—and be paid for it like a man. One -earned it yesterday if one washed the dishes and cooked the meals and -reared the children and kept the house for the other person who held -the purse. Housekeepers of this class have been the busiest people we -have had about us. And yet the census offices administered by men had -so little idea of these women’s economic value, that they have been -actually listed in government statistical returns as “unoccupied.” So -also of course were the other housekeepers who, eliminating some of -these most arduous tasks from the long day, nevertheless were not at -least idle when they bore a man’s children and presided at his dinner -table and entertained his friends and practised generally the graceful -art of making a home. When they undertook these duties, there was a -church promise, With all my worldly goods, I thee endow. That figure -of speech, the law courts reduce to “maintenance,” that is to say, -board and clothes. But, so widely disseminated has been the idea that -the lady is “unoccupied” that these are generally regarded not in the -nature of a recognition of service and a return for value received, -but rather as perquisites bountifully bestowed on the recipient. So -that frequently her range of choice in the matter has been, we may say, -limited. - -Frau Elsa von Stuttgart before the war had her board and clothes. But -her husband had forbidden her to get her hats at a certain little -French shop in Unter den Linden that she had always patronised before -her marriage. And with all his money, he decided that one pair of -evening slippers would do even for a woman in the social position of -a Prussian officer’s wife. They lived in a villa at Zehlendorff that -was perfectly equipped with everything that he considered desirable. -There was a grand piano of marvellous tone, though she didn’t even -play the piano at all. She was a doctor of philosophy, who before -her marriage had been a teacher at the High School in Berlin and her -hobby, it happened, was books. She liked them in beautiful bindings -and she always used to buy them that way. But of course she couldn’t -any more because her husband said it was extravagance, quite useless -extravagance. Well, really you know, maintenance may be slippers and -hats, but it isn’t books after all. And she had a lovely house and a -piano of marvellous tone. How hard it was about the slippers, I suppose -only a woman can understand. You see Elsa von Stuttgart has pretty -feet, small and dainty feet. Every other woman in her set has German -feet. “Look at them,” she whispered to me at a _kaffee klatch_ one day -in 1914. And I did. And I knew why her soul loved little satin slippers -better than Beethoven or Lizst. She has them now once more. The house -with the grand piano is closed and her husband is with his regiment. -Elsa von Stuttgart in a class room is lecturing on philosophy again. -She has rented a small apartment the walls of which are lined with -books. You think the slippers a luxury for war-time perhaps? Well, she -wrote me that she has done penance for them in extra meatless days to -atone for the price. - -In France the Countess Madelaine de Ranier lived in a château of the -old aristocracy. And she had a fortune of hundreds of thousands of -francs but not a sou to spend as she pleased. You would have thought -that she had everything that heart could wish, until you caught -unawares the wistful expression in her eyes when they forgot their -smiling. Madelaine de Ranier, having no children of her own, would -have loved to write checks for the charities that took care of other -people’s children. But she couldn’t. It was a very large dot that she -had brought to her husband. But by the laws of France he administered -it. Out of the income, he of course paid her bills. The third year -of her marriage there occurred to her the idea for a confidential -arrangement which she made with her dressmaker for doubling on the -bills submitted for her evening gowns and dividing the proceeds -accruing. It was the Countess’ only source of ready money. She kept -it in the secret drawer of her jewel case, these few francs that she -could count her own, among her costly articles of adornment valued at -thousands. To-day the Count is somewhere on the Somme and Madelaine de -Ranier is daily at a desk in Paris directing the great commercial house -in which her dot and the family fortune are invested. I saw her in the -winter of 1917. Her eyes were sparkling. From the large income that she -now handles, she had just written off a contribution to the Orphans of -France Fund for the nation. And nobody had said, “You must not,” or -equally as authoritatively, “I do not wish it.” - -In England there is Edith Russell, Dr. Edith Russell she really is. She -gave up her profession when she married, to devote herself wholly to -home making in the great house in Cavendish Square, London. It requires -nine servants and careful planning to meet the expenses, even though -her husband turns over to her all of his income. “Can’t we go out to -Hampstead to a smaller house instead?” she asked him one day, laying -her housekeeping accounts before him. She was trying somehow to plan -for a financial surplus. The Malthusian League was in need of funds and -she used to be one of its most earnest workers. But her husband said: -“Not at all.” Even if there were indeed hundreds of pounds available, -he did not approve of the League’s principles anyhow. Now Dr. Edith -Russell in response to her country’s call is back on the staff of the -borough health department in the medical work in which she was engaged -before her marriage. And she is again a Malthusian League contributor. -You see, it’s her own money now, not her husband’s. - -Up in the north of England there is a factory town where the largest -works in November, 1914, hung out a notice that any women who before -their marriage had been employed there would be taken back. Mrs. Webber -was. The regular weekly wage is so much better than the occasional -charing which was all that she had been able to get to supplement her -husband’s frequent unemployment. Her children are among those who have -been since the war transferred at school from the free list to the -paid dinners. Before the war there were 11,000 children in this town -to be supplied with free school dinners. Now since their mothers work -outside the home, this figure has dropped to 2,370. Mrs. Webber also -is one of those women who have been shopping. All over Europe they -have been doing it. From Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London, -delighted shop keepers report that women who never had money before are -spending it. The curate in the parish to which Mrs. Webber belongs—Mrs. -Webber used to char for his wife, but is no longer available—told me -that these working classes have gone perfectly mad about money and -the reckless expenditure of it. And I asked him how and he said: “Why -cheese, they all of them have it for supper now. And the woman in that -house, the third from the end of the row,” he pointed it out from his -study window, “has a fur coat.” It was Mrs. Webber’s house the curate -mentioned. - - -HIS PERSONALITY—AND HERS - -Well now, you see, to Elsa von Stuttgart in Berlin, it may be little -satin evening slippers, and to Madelaine de Ranier in Paris it may be -orphans of France, and to Dr. Edith Russell in London it may be the -great reform for which the Malthusian League is organised, and to Mrs. -Webber it may be school dinners and cheese and a fur coat—but to all of -them it’s economic independence. Mrs. Webber says, “A shilling of your -own is worth two that ’e gives you.” Edith Russell and the rest I have -not heard say it. But from Countess to char woman, you see, this about -the wage envelope is certain: It’s yours to burn if you care to—or to -buy with it what you choose! There are millions of women over this war -racked world who have it to-day, who never had it before. And the hand -that holds this new wage envelope holds the future of the race in its -keeping. Not since that magna charta that the barons wrested from King -John, has so powerful a guarantee of liberty been won. It carries with -it all the freedoms that the feminists have ever formulated. She who -stepped out of the Doll’s House stands at the threshold of a new earth. -Something very much more than little satin slippers and books and fur -coats and their own money is coming to women! - -Let us see. You would have been astounded, I believe, if Elsa von -Stuttgart had attempted to dictate to her husband his hats or his -slippers. Anyway, Herr von Stuttgart would. You would not have -expected Edith Russell to have suggested across the breakfast table: -“My dear, the propaganda of such and such a society to which you belong -is not pleasing to me. I do not care to have you support it.” Why, -either gentleman would have been a henpecked husband to have permitted -any such interference with his personal liberty. Not even in America -would any wife so presume to dare. It is quite likely that a lady -living in New York could announce over the coffee cups, “My dear, we -will move to Long Island to-day.” And the voice behind the newspaper -would probably agree without a demurrer, “I’ll be out on the 4:30 -train.” Probably also he has never heard how many pairs of slippers she -has, and all he knows about her hats is their price. But after all, it -is only by the privilege he permits her that the lady can put it over -like this. At any moment that he cares to assert it, he still holds the -balance of power in this household. - -Because man and wife are one, he who carries the purse is the one. It’s -only the new purse in the family that can alter the situation anywhere -in the world. She who carries it is another one, with her personal -liberty too. In the last analysis, it is only a person who can pay the -rent who can talk with assertion about where “we” shall live and how. - -No economist in any university chair understands this any more clearly -than does Mrs. Webber, who once lived in two rooms and now lives in -three _because she can pay the rent_! The new purse in her family -has raised the whole scale of living for her and for her children. -Yesterday her personality was merged and submerged in that of a -husband to whose standard of maintenance she was limited. To-day she -is emerging with a wage envelope in her hand and a personality of her -own, as is likewise Elsa von Stuttgart and Edith Russell and Madelaine -de Ranier. Society may be tremendously startled to find them at last -counted so that one and one in the marriage relation shall make two. -When in this great world war, that autocracy with its divine right of -kings that has ruled and wrecked civilisation shall have been swept -from the throne, there is another autocracy with its “divine” authority -of one sex over the other that is going into the scrap-heap of old -systems. - -Through the events of these war days already it is clear that such an -eternal purpose runs. Nobody thought of it when woman was called from -the home in all lands. But there has really begun the casting off of -that ancient chrysalis of “coverture.” Have you by chance yet met among -your acquaintances the woman who is refusing to part with her own name? -Mary McArthur, the great English labour leader, is the wife of Mr. -Anderson, a member of Parliament and she is the mother of a baby. But -she has never ceased to be herself. “You call yourself Miss McArthur,” -a curious inquirer remarked to her one day, “and yet they say your cook -tells that you are very respectable.” - -There are numbers of women like this in London and in New York, who -are preferring their own identity to that of their husbands. The -German and Scandinavian women going a little farther say, “Let us at -mature age take an adult title.” Master Jones, you know, does not -wait for the day of his marriage to emerge from his adolescence as -“Mr.” Jones, Fraulein is but a diminutive, “little Frau,” a prefix of -immaturity. Rosika Schwimmer, touring America for a lecture bureau, -assured inquiring reporters: “Of course I am Frau Schwimmer. Why -shouldn’t I be? I have passed my 35th birthday.” The Imperial Union -of Women Suffragists of Germany in convention assembled, not long ago -decided to adopt the adult title Frau for all women of mature age, the -“unity title,” they call it. In this first faint stirring, there is -significance of wide changes. - -She whose identity had so disappeared at the altar, that the law -actually wrote her down on the statute books as _civiliter mortua_, one -“civilly dead,” is about to be restored to the status of an individual. -The long road, along which the woman movement of yesterday made its -slow way, is now at the sharpest turning. - -The struggle of women in all lands to be released from the -discriminations that have limited their human activities set free -the spinster some time ago. The point of view that is now generally -accepted about her, and without contravention in the most advanced -countries, was most definitely formulated some sixty years ago in -Scandinavia. There they put on the statute books a law abolishing the -previous male guardianship over unmarried women and permitting a -person “of staid age and character” to manage her own affairs. At first -this was a privilege to be granted only on special appeal to the king. -But at last the right of self-government at 21 was established for all -unmarried women. So radical a departure from custom was of course not -accomplished without misgivings. There were those who feared that for -a woman to manage her own affairs, was not in accordance with true -womanly dignity and the dictates of religion. They said, The majority -of women do not want it. Why, then, give them a responsibility they do -not wish or ask for? But in spite of those objections, the spinster -came to be recognised as a responsible individual. - -For so long now has the world been accustomed to seeing her going -about, doing as she pleases almost as any other adult, that we have -forgotten that she ever couldn’t. She can acquire education. She can -own property. She has been able for some time now to get into a great -many occupations and professions: only her difficulty was to get up. -And there has been that limitation to her income. It has remained -stationary at a figure seldom passing two-thirds that of a man’s -income. The teaching profession affords statistics that are world-wide -testimony to the situation that has prevailed from, say, Newark, N. J., -to Archangel, Russia: there have been women school teachers working -for a less wage than the man school janitor: there have been women -professors at the head of high school departments at a salary less -than that of the men subordinates whom they directed. Still, in all of -her personal affairs, a spinster in every country has been for a long -time now as free as the rest of the people. - - -SIGNING AWAY HER FREEDOM - -Then, on the day that the ring is slipped on her finger, she has put -her name to a contract that has more or less signed away her liberty, -according to the part of the world in which she happens to live. In -Finland, for instance, where the position of women has been in many -respects as advanced as anywhere in the world, even a woman member of -Parliament at her marriage reverts to type, as it were: though she -still sits in Parliament, she passes under the guardianship of her -husband! In Sweden, she lost her vote: for that country, in 1862 the -first to grant the municipal franchise to women, cautiously withheld -it until 1909 from married women. There is, indeed, almost no land in -which marriage does not in some way limit for the rest of her life a -woman’s participation in world affairs. She may have lost property -rights, personal rights, political rights, or perhaps she has lost her -job, her right to work and be paid for it. At any rate, she must look -around to determine how many of these things may have happened to her. -Any of them that haven’t, are special exemptions from that universal -ruling of all nations that a woman on marriage enters into a state -of coverture, with its accompanying legal disability. “Disability” -is defined by Dicey’s “Digest” as the “status of being an infant, -lunatic, or married woman.” And there you are. - -It was from that predicament that the earliest woman’s rights’ -associations sought to extricate the woman who had taken the wedding -veil and ring. Susan B. Anthony’s first most famous achievement back -in the sixties was a law establishing the right of a married woman -in New York State to the ownership of her own clothes! By specific -enactments since then, one and another of the rights to which other -human beings are naturally born have been bestowed on married women. -The most clearly defined of these, and the most widely recognised at -last, are the right to their separate property and the right to their -own earnings, which prevails in most of the United States. The Married -Women’s Property Act accomplished it in England. In France, after 14 -years of agitation for it, Mme. Jeanne Schmall and the Société l’Avant -Courriere in 1907 at last secured the law giving to the married woman -the free disposition of her salary. But these concessions it is not -easy to disentangle from that basic notion, which is warp and woof of -the whole fabric of law, that a married woman has passed under the -guardianship of her husband. - -For in Germany and Scandinavia and France, “separate property” to -ensure her title to it, must be specially secured to her by an -antenuptial contract. In Sweden, her earnings are hers, only if they -remain in cash. In France she is permitted to invest them in bonds, -provided first she either makes affidavit before a notary proving -her ownership or brings a written permit from her husband. In the -State of Washington, the supreme attempt to confer equality on woman -finds expression in the statute: “All laws which impose or recognise -civil disabilities upon a wife which are not imposed or recognised -as existing as to the husband, are abolished.” But in spite of that -most laudable effort, the end is not yet attained. For the State of -Washington is still enmeshed in the community property system, by which -the management and control of the common property in marriage is vested -in the husband. And although the law has been distinctly framed that -a married woman is entitled to her own earnings, it practically takes -them away from her by requiring her to count them in with the community -property which is under her husband’s control. The atomic theory, you -see, was not more firmly fixed in science than is this idea that has -been embedded in the social structure that a married woman is legally, -civilly, and politically a minor! - -Even in these United States, where the mention of the “subjection of -woman” raises a smile, so largely has it by the grace of the American -man been permitted to become a dead letter, the _employment_ of married -women has remained against public policy. Many boards of education -have by-laws about it. Even these women teachers who commit matrimony -and conceal it are almost invariably later on detected and dropped -from the pay roll when found guilty of maternity. Business houses have -shared in the prejudice. A Chicago bank as lately as 1913 adopted a -rule requiring the resignation of woman employés on marriage. Because -the married woman, the bank president said, “should be at home, not at -a typewriter or an adding machine.” Similarly a United States civil -service regulation reads: “No married woman will be appointed to a -classified position in the postal service, nor will any woman occupying -a classified position in the postal service be reappointed to such -position when she shall marry.” - -A world has been arranged, you see, on the assumption of the complete -eclipse of the personality of the married woman—with the burden resting -on her to disprove it in the legal situations where she has come to be -recognised as an individual. Custom prefers that a married woman should -be a dependent person. It was an idea that fifty years of feminist -bombardment had not dislodged from the popular mind. Now in four years -of war, it has crumbled. - -“Women wanted,” called the world in need, wanted even though married! -And out of the seclusion and separation to which she was hitherto -consigned, the woman with the ring has come to find her wage envelope. -All regulations against her employment are now rescinded in Europe, -as soon they will be here. The working woman in particular has been -given her release. The state, you remember, will now cook her meals and -care for her children. And it was all a mistake that attributed infant -mortality to the industrial employment of mothers. Now it is found that -a wife’s wage envelope really reduces infant mortality by improving -environment. There will be fewer of Mrs. Webber’s children, you know, -dying in three rooms than in two! - -The ban on the married woman in the civil service and in the -professions is lifted. The Association of Austrian Women’s -Organisations in their 1916 convention passed the resolution demanding -the abolition of the “celibacy clause” for women office holders. And -although no country has as yet formally erased this from the statute -books, governments have at least tacitly consented to remember it -no more against a woman that she has married. That is why Dr. Edith -Russell is again practising medicine in the public health service -and Prof. Elsa von Stuttgart is teaching philosophy. Especially in -medicine is it recognised that the married woman physician is more -than ever fitted for a part in the campaign for the conservation of -child life. And if she is also a mother, so much the better. Why was -it never thought of before? Of course a person who has had a baby is -the real expert who knows more about it than the person who never can -have one. Women formerly dropped from the civil service on account of -marriage have been recalled all over Europe. Even Germany has opened -to them post, telegraph, and railway positions. So many masters in -Germany’s upper high schools are at the front, that married women have -been called to these positions. Hundreds of married women have been -reinstated in the school rooms of England. Detroit, Mich., the other -day repealed its regulations which forbade the employment of married -women as teachers in the public schools. It is Russia that has led -all lands in her recognition of the woman teacher, not only refusing -longer to penalise her for marriage but actually, as we have seen, -establishing for her the principle of equal pay for equal work. - - -WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MINOR - -Like this, the married woman has to-day been welcomed in industry, -in commerce, and in the professions. This person of affairs abroad -in the world a minor! It is more than a disability that she herself -must endure. It becomes an annoyance to the world to have her so. -According to Bacon’s Abridgement, a very imposing volume, it is still -written that “the law looks upon husband and wife but as one person and -therefore allows but of one will between them, which is placed in the -husband.” But you see what a far cry it is from the woman in London -or Paris or Berlin to “the one” on the western front. How is she to -“obey” that man in the Vosges or on the Somme since she cannot have -telegraphic communication about her daily movements? And without it, -the French woman was left in a helpless tangle in the Napoleonic code. - -Madelaine de Ranier at the head of a great business concern in Paris -found herself forbidden to sign a check, unable to open a bank account. -The Count had enlisted on the second day after war was declared and he -had left with her a sum of gold. When it was exhausted and she faced -the need of funds, she was unable to negotiate a loan on valuable -bonds that she owned. Oh, the bonds were all right. The difficulty was -that she was a married woman. And though very rich, she nevertheless -was obliged to turn to friends who relieved her immediate financial -necessities. Now in the drawer of her office desk there is a legal -paper bearing the seal of France: across the bottom is printed “_Bon -pour autorisation maritale_” and beneath is the Count’s signature. -Until he had consented to make this arrangement, sending on from the -front this “authorisation of the husband,” she was prohibited from -transacting any business. For a married woman in France might not sell -property or mortgage it or acquire it or sign a business contract or -go to law without the consent of her husband! Women acting temporarily -as mayors of some of the French villages, from which almost the -entire male population has been mobilised, have found it necessary -in order to execute municipal papers to turn to a male citizen for -his signature, even though he might not be able to write and could -only make his mark. Finally in 1916, the situation came up, for legal -decision. The validity of a building contract entered into by a French -woman was questioned in court. The judge after mature deliberation -rendered a decision that although the woman was not empowered to sign -the contract, yet as she had acted with the tacit consent of her -husband and in his interest and that of the country, the court would -uphold the validity of the act. “It is necessary,” he said, “that for -the welfare of France, women shall take the place of men and perform -duties which have hitherto been considered outside their sphere.” The -Union Fraternelle des Femmes at once began pressing Parliament for -the removal from the statute books of the requirement for “_maritale -autorisation_.” And not long ago the Chamber of Deputies passed the -bill granting to married women for the period of the war, permission to -demand from the courts the right to do without this legal formality. -Italy in 1917 completely swept away this same ancient restriction. The -bill introduced by the Italian Minister of Justice, Signor Sacchi, -abrogated not only _maritale autorisation_, but “every other law which -in the field of civil and commercial rights curtails the capacities of -Italian women.” Speaking for the measure in Parliament, Signor Sacchi -declared it an “act of justice—of reparation almost, to which women -have now more right than ever.” - -But these civil disabilities have not been limited to Latin countries. -You may find them anywhere as a hang-over from past ages. It is simply -the natural corollary to that old doctrine of coverture that the acts -of the dependent person should lack authority before the law. Even in -the State of Washington, a wife may not sue alone in a court of law to -recover personal damages: her husband must join with her in the suit. -Everywhere in the professions and in business, woman’s progress has -been blocked because the courts, looking into the law books, found the -status of this person in question. If her protected position more or -less prevents her from entering into legal contracts, doubt is cast -on all of her agreements. What prudent business man would wish to -engage in a business transaction with her? There are provisions of the -Married Women’s Property Act in England, which make her not liable to -imprisonment for refusal to pay her debts. And who would choose to be -represented in a court of law by an advocate who, though to-day in -clear possession of all of her capacities, may to-morrow cease to be -“responsible” before the law? For any woman, though not yet married, -is always subject to that liability! That was what the courts of the -United States decided when the first women began to apply for admission -to the legal profession. And it is to correct the position in which -women are placed by the common law that their admission to the practice -of law in America has been by the slow process of an “enabling act” -from State to State. In England, where this common law still bars -the way, their present appeal now before Parliament is significantly -entitled “A Bill to remove disqualifications on the ground of sex or -marriage for the admission of persons as solicitors.” - -There is still another “disability” which is causing to-day perhaps -the most world-wide concern of all. A spectacular figure has been -silhouetted against the background of the great war. In the tranquil -days of peace, a woman might have been all her life married to a man -of differing nationality without making the discovery that she had -thereby lost her own: by law when she married, she became of her -husband’s nationality. When the troops began to march in 1914, a wife -like this suddenly found herself a woman without a country. Frightened -English women married to Germans resident in London, panic-stricken -German women married to Englishmen who happened to be resident in -Berlin, knew not which way to turn for a haven from the terrors of war. -Pronounced aliens in their home land, their position was even worse -than that of, the woman of actual enemy birth who was stranded in a -foreign country when the war burst. She could at least go home. But -where should a woman who was married to an enemy alien go? - -Her own country turned on her coldly with the declaration, His people -are your people. And nowhere in the world would she be so little -welcome as among his people now at war with and bitterly hostile to -hers. There are instances where these women have been obliged to find -refuge in neutral countries. In some lands they have been permitted to -remain in the place of their birth, but under police espionage. A man -and his wife, you know, are one. And if he controls her absolutely, -from her slippers to her principles, is it likely that she will dare to -be a free agent in her war sympathies? As a matter of fact, this war -has developed that she is always more or less under the cold suspicion -even of relatives and neighbours, of having along with the loss of her -own nationality lost also her patriotism. Who shall say but that in -obedience to her husband she may be a spy? I stood at the desk in the -Bow Street Police Station registering my arrival in London one war day, -when a timid voice of inquiry at my side also addressed the sergeant: -“I want to ask,” she said diffidently, “if I could possibly have my -mail sent here to police headquarters? You see, it’s letters from my -husband interned here in England because he’s a German. I’m an English -woman. But every boarding house in London where I try to live, as soon -as that envelope marked ‘Enemy Internment Camp’ arrives in my mail, -turns me out.” - -Like this, the “alien wife” has to be shunted about in many lands -to-day. Even a woman who has not so lost her nationality may not travel -without all of the credentials of her marital status to establish it. -If you apply for a passport at Washington, you are asked for your -husband’s birth certificate and under some conditions your marriage -certificate. A married man is not asked for his. Why this inquiry into -your personal affairs? Because it is tacitly assumed that you are so -under the authority of another person that there is no knowing what he -may make you do. By all law and religion you have been taught to obey -him. Then if he told you to blow up a ship, would you? The only way to -make sure that you are a “safe” person to be at large, is to make sure -of your husband’s loyalty. For your identity is not your own, you see, -it’s his. If he happens to be French or Russian or German or Hottentot, -so you must be. - - -WOMAN’S COMING OF AGE - -That’s the way that men have made the world. Now see it beginning to -be made over. Women everywhere are crying out in their conventions -and associations that the married woman’s own nationality should be -restored to her. America is the first country to take action about it. -And here, because women have arrived at the halls of government, it -is more than resolution and petition. The United States Congress has -before it a bill proposing the repeal of the law compelling women to -relinquish their American citizenship on marriage to foreigners. The -bill was introduced, let us note, by the Hon. Jeanette Rankin, the -first woman to be a member of the national law-making body. - -What was it man said a little while ago: “You do not need a vote, my -dear. I will represent you in government and make the laws for you.” -So all over the world he did. But isn’t it plain now that he made a -mess of some of the laws he made for her? It is a conviction that has -crystallised simultaneously in all countries that woman in her present -independent sphere of activity has won her right to self-determination -in all matters personally important to her. That is why measures -for her enfranchisement are so universally under way. Let her vote -for herself. Let her represent herself. No one else has been able -successfully to do this for her. And it may be that now she will be -able to make better arrangements for herself than others have for her -in this world where certainly a great deal has gone wrong. - -So we have arrived at woman’s coming of age. She who used to be by the -most ancient family law passed as a chattel from the guardianship of a -father to that of a husband, is now to be an individual. It is only now -that she could be. In a way they were right yesterday who refused to -regard her as a responsible person. For she wasn’t. Under the coercion -of coverture, she even had to think the way that pleased the person who -paid her bills! To-day with a wage envelope in one hand and a ballot in -the other, she is as much of a human being as any one else is. As such, -she is in a position to find the full status of her own personality. -For the first time since history began, she will be under no one else’s -authority. - -No greater revolution than this will have been wrought by the Great -World War. It is going to be safe to permit to wives in all lands that -they retain their own nationality. The reason is clear: because no one -can compel this new woman, even though she is a wife, to be a spy, or -anything else that she does not wish to be. _Or anything else that she -does not wish to be!_ - -In those words, the woman movement of to-day full-throated carols a -hope for humanity that has not echoed before in all the epics or the -sagas or the inspired revelations since the fall of man. Who giveth -this woman in marriage? She who was a bondwoman now is free. And church -and state shall hear her terms! - -Oh, yes, they shall! For a reform of the institution on which society -rests is all that will prevent a rebellion against it. What do -women want? This woman who turns the ring on her finger? Read the -publications that during the past decade have said: _The Free Woman_, -edited by Dora Marsden in England; Minna Cauer’s _Die Frauenbewegung_ -and Marie Stritt’s _Die Frauenfrage_ and Helene Stocker’s _Die Neue -Generation_ in Germany; _La Française_, edited by Jane Misme in France; -and Margaret Sanger’s _The Woman Rebel_ in New York; the teachings of -Dr. Alice Vickerey in London and of Dr. Aletta Jacobs in Amsterdam. -There were even women in the radical vanguard of that woman movement of -yesterday who were ready to end marriage if it were not mended. - -The world—and man who made it—had no adequate conception of the hurt -that was smothered and smouldering in the heart of her over whom he -exercised his dominion and power. Windows were heard smashing in -England. Over in Germany there had begun a breaking with less noise -about it, so that the world in general did not know. In the Kaiser’s -kingdom right in the face of the mailed fist, traditions not to be -so easily repaired as glass were being shattered. But it was the -suffragette outburst in London that caught public attention. Thoughtful -men who honestly wanted to know—and never could understand—turned to -each other with the question, Why do women do this? And no man could -tell. - -Gentlemen, come with me. There is sitting in Westminster in 1910 a -Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce. Not yet even have their -findings changed English law. But the commission was appointed to make -inquiry into these matters in response to a rising feeling of unrest -over the present arrangements. Witnesses, to give evidence that it may -be determined what ought to be done, are in 1910 being called. This -government commission, it should be noted, quite contrary to precedent, -includes among the churchmen and statesmen who have been appointed to -decide the question, also two women. One of them, the Lady Francis -Balfour, is interrogating a witness whom she has summoned to the stand -because she has a particular point that she wishes to elucidate. He is -the Bishop of Birmingham, whose church insists that at marriage the -woman passes indissolubly into the power of the husband. To the man, it -is permitted that he may divorce her for adultery. But so long as these -two shall live, not even for that offence on his part may she have -release. He may beat her. He may flay her soul. But she is his—unless -she gets all of these details spread on the public records and the -judges of the courts decide that there are enough of them legally to -constitute “cruelty.” Then, for adultery together with this cruelty on -the part of a husband, a few English women have been allowed divorce. -But it is very difficult and very expensive and very offensive to the -clergy when it has been actually accomplished. - -The Lady Francis Balfour is speaking. To the Bishop of Birmingham she -is saying: “Let me take a concrete case. You may have a woman who is a -Christian and you may have her husband ill using her in some sort of -way. We have had evidence put before us, which is of course known to -us all, that there are even men who live on the prostitution of their -wives. Now, is that not a contract which has been broken on the one -side in the worst possible way? Are they twain one flesh? Is that for -better and for worse?” - -Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.” - -Lady Francis Balfour: “And is that wife to stick to that husband, she -being a Christian, and to do as he commands her?” - -Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.” - - -WHAT WOULD MEN HAVE DONE? - -That’s all, gentlemen. You and I will go. There will be other witnesses -and days of testimony. But isn’t this enough? What would you yourselves -do if your church and your state handed you over body and soul, like -this, to any other human being to have and to hold and to exercise this -power and dominion over you? I don’t believe you’d ever stop at all to -parade and respectfully to petition about it. I think you’d be mobbing -and rioting and bombing right away. And if they had arrested you and -put you in Holloway Jail, you’d have raised the roof and torn down the -whole social structure! - -Well, in England women broke windows. In Germany, as I have said, they -broke more. “Your statutes have limited the liberties of the woman who -marries. Then you shall never limit us,” was the gauntlet thrown down -to society by the extremists. They were university women, some of them -with doctor of philosophy degrees, who scathingly refused the ring -and faced free love instead. They were quite frank about it—and quite -fearless. I have talked with them there in Berlin. They looked at me as -clear eyed, when they told me of what they had done, as any women who -have walked ringed and veiled down a church aisle into legal wedlock. -Well, they seemed to think it was the only way, to act directly instead -of to agitate. - -And they got out the book of the church ritual that they had -repudiated. And they turned to a paragraph and said to me, Read. And I -read: “The woman’s will, as God says, shall be subject to the man and -he shall be her master: that is, the woman shall not live according -to her free will ... and must neither begin nor complete anything -without the man. Where he is, there must she be and bend before him as -her master, whom she shall fear and to whom she shall be subject and -obedient.” - -So I write it here, gentlemen, for you to see. And again, I submit, -What would you do if they had said it that way to you? Be fair. Could -any ring have held you? - -It was natural, I think, that revolt should be most bitter in England -and in Germany, the two countries where women were driven to the verge -of desperation. A Frenchman may hold the reins of his authority so -gaily that a woman with skill evades them. And the dear American man -will pass them right over to you if you’re a woman of any judgment -and _finesse_ at all. But in those lands where a wife must not only -promise to obey, but also they made her, the eruption was due. Action -and reaction are equal in the old law of physics, and you can pretty -accurately measure the rebound by that. It was because the ring hurt -worse in Germany than anywhere else in the world, that they just tore -it off. But the marriage strike that was started in Germany wasn’t -staying there. - -In nearby Sweden, a woman who is a very prominent lawyer and a man -who is a university professor, decided to do with an announcement in -a newspaper instead of a ceremony in a church—and the lady remains -a lawyer. It was the only way that she could. The law of that land -places the woman, on the day that she marries, under her husband’s -guardianship, and pronounces her incompetent thereafter to act as an -attorney in court! The newspaper announcement as it is now used in -Scandinavia is called the “conscience marriage.” - -There were also Anglo-Saxon women who had rebelled. In London, an -Oxford graduate who had done with window breaking told me quite -candidly that she was living what she called the “unorthodox life.” -And there were others in her particular London suburb. In New York -City, even, there are women who have preferred the “free union.” - -You see how near it was to being wrecked, this an institution more -revered by society than all of the cathedrals and art galleries. Only -this war, probably, could have averted the disaster. Now this new -woman, with her wage envelope and her vote, has become articulate. She -can speak as one who can pay the rent, about how “we” shall live. - -Oh, it’s not either Hampstead or Long Island. Never mind for a while -whether the lace curtains will be long enough or shall the floors be -done over. Yesterday her domain was the home. To-day it’s the wide, -wide world to be set to order. For the first time she’s facing her -destiny, with the right to decide more than the parlour carpet or her -satin slippers or even her sociological principles. - -How “we” shall live and love together, is the question for -consultation. And there is statute and dogma and custom and convention -and tradition to be done over. These have been handed down until they -are many of them past all usefulness. Some of them are moth-eaten and -quite outworn. None of them, please note this, gentlemen, none of -them is of her selection. Just think of that. There’s not a code in -the world that was formulated by a woman. The creeds that have come -from Rome and Wittenberg and Westminster were not even submitted for -woman’s inspection. And marriage was made for her by law courts and -church councils to which she was not even asked. There was not so much -as a by-your-leave to the lady, in the matter of her most intimate -personal concern. Oh, isn’t this clearly where the reconstruction of -civilisation shall commence? - - -MAKING OVER MARRIAGE - -Only for the man in khaki to come home again it waits. Then with the -new woman, together at last, they can build the new world aright. For -never again shall we permit any such skewed and twisted and one-sided -job as that of the past. “Dear,” she will say, “you did it as well as -you could, probably, that old world. But the trouble was, that you did -it alone.” - -And with a little whimsical smile, she’ll quote for him the old proverb -that “two heads are better than one.” Then perhaps they will walk in -the garden in the evening. And with her hand in his arm, she will speak -as she never could speak before—as a free woman who has found her soul! -There were things, I think, that God forgot when he talked to Moses and -to St. Paul. But now he’s told them to her. - -Listen: “Marriage,” she will say, “marriage, dear, we must make over so -that it shall be something very sweet and very sacred.” - -Oh, it wasn’t always that yesterday. There are women who know it -wasn’t. When a man could say to the woman the law gave to him, “Come -unto me to-night, or I shall not give you money with which to buy -shoes for the children to-morrow.” Or he may have said, “the slippers -for your pretty feet”—when marriage was that way, everything in it -divine just died! It shall never be so again. - -Hear the new woman. “We shall have more love about marriage and less -law,” she will say. “And we shall never let them lock us in. Love -always laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths who thought -they had bolted and barred the Doll’s House with ordinance and ritual. -For how love cometh, we may not say, who are mute before so much as -the mystery of the tint of the rose or the perfume of the lilies in -June. Nor how love goeth, dare we define. Presumptuous mortals who have -thought to hold back love with law and enactment, have made of marriage -an empty form, echoing with the mockery of the happiness that fled.” - -Well, we will say that she is talking like this under the stars. The -next morning at breakfast she will come right to the point. And I -know where she will begin. “That old doctrine of coverture,” she will -say, “take it away!” There is a place for the relics of an antiquated -civilisation. In the museum of the Tower of London they have in a glass -case the little model of the rack and thumb screw. The executioner’s -block and the headsman’s axe is an important and impressive exhibit. -And there are the coats of mail of early warriors. It is customary, -I believe, to put there all things that are passing into desuetude: -a hansom cab went in the other day. Now let them take also this -ancient doctrine of coverture, and put it in a glass case for future -generations to wonder at its barbarity. Then may the marriage contract -be rewritten with a really free hand. - -How it will be done all over the world, we even at present may -prophesy. See already Scandinavia. The northern sky was alight -with the forecast of woman’s freedom, even before this war broke. -Contemporaneously with the enfranchisement of women up there, completed -in Denmark only in 1915, almost the first act of governments in which -all of the people were for the first time represented, was to appoint a -marriage commission. On it are both men and women from the three lands, -Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. It is still at work revising the marriage -laws. The task is not completed. But there are important sections of -the new code ready: they have taken the “obey” out of the marriage -service; they have stipulated for divorce by mutual consent, that is by -request of the parties interested, who are to be let out of wedlock as -simply and as easily as they were let in. Further personal rights and -property rights are all being defined and arranged on the new basis of -equality of morality and duty and responsibility and on the assumption -that the wife is a separate personality from her husband. - -The nearby country of Finland, where the woman movement has always kept -step with Scandinavia, has also taken similar action. The Law Committee -of the Finnish Parliament had in 1917 appealed to local authorities and -other qualified bodies for suggestions on the subject of the reform of -the marriage laws. Seven women’s associations united in formulating -the pronouncement which was returned. There is no paragraph about -divorce for the reason that Finland has already accomplished divorce -by mutual consent. For the rest, it is probably the most complete -presentment available of the new woman’s point of view. This is what -she asks:— - -1. That the guardianship of the husband shall cease, and the married -woman have an equal right of action in all legal matters, even against -her husband; that she shall have the right to plead in courts of law -and to carry on business independently. - -2. That the married couple shall have equal responsibilities and rights -as regards the children and provide for them together. - -3. That the husband and wife shall have equal right to represent the -family in public matters. If either party uses this right improperly, -it can be taken from him or her by the courts on the demand of the -other party. - -4. If either husband or wife should be a cause of danger to the -other, the party who is endangered shall have the right to separate -from the other. The courts shall be empowered to decide whether the -circumstances are such as to entitle the complaining party to receive -maintenance. - -5. That if a married couple separates, the party who retains the care -of the child shall decide the question of the child’s education. If -this right be misused, the other party shall have the right to appeal -to the courts for rectification. - -6. That if any labour contract or business be conducted by one of the -parties to the detriment of the family, the other party shall have the -right of appeal to the courts with the object of annulling the contract -or forbidding the business. - -7. That in regard to the property of married couples, there shall be -three possible alternative methods of arrangement: (a) Joint possession -in the case of earned income. (b) Joint possession of every description -of property. (c) Separation of property. - -8. Several points must be taken into consideration in regard to the -working of these different methods of arrangement: (a) That the -distinction between real and other descriptions of property shall -cease. (b) That each party shall have control over his or her separate -property and the income derived from it and over all earned income. -(c) That each party shall be bound to contribute to the maintenance -of the family in proportion to his or her means, either in work or in -financial resource. (d) That in case of joint possession, the whole -income, earned or unearned, of each party shall belong to the common -family fund. (e) That in the case of joint possession, both parties -shall have equal rights of disposition. These rights shall be used -by them jointly in such a manner that neither party shall be able -to dispose of the property without the consent of the other, and no -transaction can take place without the consent of both parties. (f) -That the party who gives the chief labour and attention to the home -shall have a due share of the common property and of the earned -income, with full power to defray his or her personal expenses and -those of the home. - -9. Before marriage, the contracting parties shall agree on which of -the three systems the property shall be arranged. This agreement shall -be capable of alteration after marriage with due legal formalities and -safeguards. - -10. Husband and wife shall inherit from each other on the same footing -with the children. - -This memorial from the Finnish women coincides perfectly in spirit -with the new laws in process of construction for Scandinavia. When the -Dutch Parliament, which has just conferred a new measure of suffrage -on the women of the Netherlands, was in 1917 debating the matter, an -alarmed reactionary rose to object: “But how can married women vote? -For married women are not free. They are like soldiers in barracks, who -have lost the liberty to express their thoughts.” - - -THE NEW FATHERHOOD - -Sir, that’s just the point. But the liberty that was lost, is found. No -one, as we have seen, is going to compel this new woman to be anything -that she does not want to be. Let us not forget this now as she goes on -talking. For she is coming presently to that which is at the heart of -the whole woman question, nay, more, the human question. - -“Dear,” she is going to say, “there is that which matters more than all -the rest for us now to decide. It’s the children, the children are -on my mind.” Then she is going to emphasise how important it is that -parenthood shall be equalised. By the laws that men have made about it, -quite universally, equally in fact in England and Germany and France -and Italy and Russia and the United States, the father is the only -parent. His will decides its religion, its education, and all of the -conditions under which the child shall be reared. There are a few of -the United States, most notably those where women vote and one or two -others in which pressure has been brought to bear by the feminists, -where the law has been corrected. Also in Scandinavia and in Australia, -as soon as women have come into the vote, one of their first efforts -has been to establish what is known as “equal guardianship,” the right -of a married mother to her own child. To an unmarried mother, by a -strange perversity in the statutes of men, is conceded not only all the -right to the child but there is put upon her all of the responsibility -of its parenthood. - -The new woman is not going to rest content to have it stand that -way. Already the world is being forced to a new deal for childhood. -The sins of the fathers are being lifted from the children on whom -society in the past has so heavily visited them. A baby has broken no -law. Why brand it, then, as “illegitimate”? War babies crying in all -lands have brought statesmen to startled attention. Government after -government has arranged for what is called the “separation allowance” -to go to the woman at home to whom the soldier at the front knows -that it belongs—even though she has no marriage lines to show. So the -War Office pen writes off one discrimination. Of children who used to -be called “illegitimate,” 50,000 born annually in England and 180,000 -born annually in Germany will now be entitled to start life with equal -financial government aid that the others get. - -It is the first step in the direction of the new arrangements about -parenthood. The polite fiction that used to pass, that there were any -children without fathers, is going to be ruled out of court. Of all -the laws that have been written that evidence the difference in the -point of view of men and women, see the illegitimacy laws. Napoleon put -it in his code “_La recherche de la paternité est interdite_,” and it -was only in 1913 that the feminists of France, led by Margaret Durand, -succeeded in getting that edict modified so that a woman in France -is no longer “forbidden” to look for the father of her child. Up in -Norway, where women vote, they put on the statute books in 1915 a very -different law: it commands that the father of the child shall be found. -This is the famous law framed by Johan Castberg, minister of justice, -and inspired by his sister-in-law, Fru Kathe Anker Moler. The draft of -the bill was submitted in advance to the women’s clubs of the country: -the National Women’s Council of Norway stamped it with the seal of -approval. So that there can be no doubt but that it has put the matter -as a woman thinketh. Even the title of the new law significantly omits -all objectionable reference: it is a “Law Concerning Children whose -Parents have not Married Each Other.” They are equally entitled to a -father’s name and support and to an inheritance in his property as -are any other kind of children. The father must be found! Not even if -the paternity is a matter of doubt among three men or six men or any -several men, can any of them, or all of them, escape behind “_exceptio -plurium_,” which in other lands affords them protection. In Norway, -they are every one of them a party to the possible obligation. And -the financial responsibility of fathering the child in question is -distributed _pro rata_ among them. What the Norwegian law accomplishes, -you see, is the abolition of anonymous paternity. - -Like this, there is a great deal in the laws and the religion and the -public opinion of the world of yesterday that will need revision. -Lastly, there is that which is of more significance than all the rest. -Way back in the beginning of things, the lady who was called Eve, you -remember as the Sunday school lesson ran, got the world into a lot of -trouble, it was said, by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. -Too little knowledge, some one else has told us, may prove a dangerous -thing. But there is a Latin proverb on which a school of therapeutics -is founded, “_Similia similibus curantur_.” Then, if “like cures like,” -what we need to-day is more knowledge to make right the ancient wrong -that afflicts the earth! Well, we have it. - - -THE WHISPER OF GOD - -This new woman will look back into the dear eyes that search hers. In -her level glance there will flash an understanding of life that never -was in woman’s eyes before in all the ages of sorrow since the angel -fixed up the flaming swords that shut her out of Eden. For in the white -silence where she has found her soul, she has heard even the closest -whisper of God. If man before missed it, why, maternity was naturally -the matter that he could not know and could not understand. This is -the new revelation, _that maternity shall be made more divine_! There -has been a halo about it in song and picture and story. But we want to -put a halo on in London’s east end and New York’s east side. Creation -itself is to be corrected. - -Doesn’t it need to be? See how many men, it is being discovered -to-day, are not well enough made for soldiers. England is obliged to -reject 25% of her men as physically unfit. America is reported to have -rejected 29%. The other nations cannot show any better figures. If in -the great arsenals that are manufacturing munitions of war, one shell -in four turned out was spoiled, the industry would have to be at once -investigated and put on a more efficient basis than that. Quite likely -the mistake might be discovered to be “speeding up.” There had been an -effort to turn out too many shells. If fewer shells are made, they can -be better made. And you will get just as many in the end. For by the -present process, all these shells that fail, you see, do not count in -the real output. - -It’s just like this about people. We’ve been trying to have too many. -When Mrs. Smith in London or in New York or Frau Schmidt in Berlin, -has six or eight or more children in, say, two rooms, some of them are -going to have rickets and some of them are going to have tuberculosis -and some of them are going into penal institutions. So that when -you come to want them for the army, you find that one in four has -failed. Why, even chickens would. A poultry fancier does not presume -to try to raise a brood of chickens in quarters too crowded for their -development. He measures his poultry house and determines how many -chickens he can accommodate with enough air and space—and how many he -can afford to feed. He limits the flock accordingly. Mrs. Smith in -London or New York and Frau Schmidt in Berlin, can too! - -Fire and electricity and other useful forces we have long since -obtained the mastery over and turned from a menace to a blessing to -mankind. But another even mightier force has ravaged the world like -unchained lightning. Because it has not been controlled. Men thought -that it must not be. So the fear of its consequences has haunted -homes in every land since the pronouncement, “I will greatly multiply -thy conceptions.” All of the great religious teachers said that you -must not take the misery out of maternity. It was meant to be there. -And science, which had accomplished miracles in mitigating other -suffering, stood afar off from the woman in childbirth. So much as -an anæsthetic to deaden the pain was forbidden, until quite recent -times, as an interference with the will of the Almighty. It was Queen -Elizabeth of England who broke that taboo. By virtue of her royal -authority, she demanded chloroform. And got it. Her daring could then, -of course, be followed by other women. Newer iconoclasts are calling -for twilight sleep, that achieves maternity in a dream. Add birth -control. And we shall be out of the trouble in which the unhappy lady -called Eve so long ago involved all of her daughters. - -Birth control means, instead of a maternity that is perpetual, -unregulated and haphazard and miserable, a maternity that is -intelligently directed and limited. So that it shall be volitional. -The rising value of a baby at last requires that people shall be as -carefully produced as the shells we are making with such infinite -accuracy. Most of all, it is important that there shall not be too many -babies lest some of them not well done shall be only worthless and -good for nothing. You see, you have to think about quality as well as -quantity when you are counting for a final output. Russia, which had a -birth rate of 50 per thousand, the highest birth rate in Europe, is the -nation whose military defences have crumpled like paper. It was France, -with a birth rate of 28 per thousand, the lowest in Europe, that held -the line for civilisation at the Marne. And it was Germany, which has -always imposed on its women as a national service the speeding up of -population, that plunged the world into the agony of this war. Because -55% of the families of Berlin live in one-room tenements and there is -nowhere to put the babies that have kept on coming, Germany reached -out for the territory of her neighbours. The pressure of population -too large for too narrow boundaries is as certain in its consequences -as is the pressure of steam in a tea kettle with the spout stopped up. -There’s sure to be an explosion. Germany exploded. Back of her military -system, it is her maternity system that is responsible for the woe of -the world to-day. It’s plain that the way not to have war anywhere ever -again is not to have too many babies! - -John Stuart Mill, the great economist who two generations ago looked -into the future and saw a vision of the woman movement that would be, -said: “Little advance can be expected in morality until the production -of large families is regarded in the same light as drunkenness or any -other physical excess.” And he added: “Among the probable consequences -of the industrial and social independence of women, I predict a great -diminution of the evil of overpopulation.” John Stuart Mill meant Mrs. -Webber and Mrs. Smith. Two children to be enjoyed instead of ten to be -endured, is an ideal of family policy possible of attainment even in -the east ends and the east sides of the world. For to Mrs. Webber or to -Mrs. Smith, handling her own wage envelope, no one any more may say, -“I shall not give you money for shoes to-morrow unless—” Volitional -motherhood is the final truth that shall make women free. No one can -compel the new woman to be anything that she does not wish to be, not -even to be a mother until she chooses the time. - -After that curse pronounced upon Eve, there was a promise: “The seed -of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head!” “We can do it, dear.” -That’s what the new woman will say triumphantly to the man who comes -back to her from the Great War. Together they will take up the task of -making, not only a new earth, but a new race! - -And I think he will be glad for what she tells him. The wonder is, not -so much that women in the past were willing to endure the “subjection -of women,” but that men consented to it. A bird in a cage can of course -be made to eat out of the hand of the owner who feeds it. But see the -bird that is free and will come at your call! - -The women in industry and commerce and the professions and in -government, whom we are seeing in these years of war passing all -barriers, will at last make their final stand for what? It is for -happiness. Look! Even now, who has the vision to discern, may discover -the gates of Eden swinging wide. And when the man in khaki, with the -age-old yearning in his heart, “Woman wanted, my woman,” comes back -to clasp her in his arms once more, these two everywhere shall enter -in. For the ultimate programme toward which the modern woman movement -to-day is moving is no less than paradise regained! It may even, I -think, have been worth this war to be there. - - -THE END - - -Transcriber’s Notes - -Page 27—changed l’Opera to l’Opéra - -Page 27, Page 49—changed de identitie to de identité - -Page 50—changed Medaille to Médaille - -Page 64—changed Endel Street, London to Endell Street, London - -Page 95—changed Blessés Militairs to Blessés Militaires - -Page 106—changed leggins to leggings - -Page 112, Page 127—changed attache to attaché - -Page 145—changed commune of Exoudon to commune of Exoudun - -Page 208—changed grey and while to grey and white - -Page 145, Page 210—changed President Poincare to President Poincaré - -Page 247—changed perservered to preserved - -Page 248—changed Harvard University a few years - incorporated to Harvard University a few years later incorporated - -Page 251—changed Edinborough to Edinburgh - -Page 251—changed Aldeborough, Suffolk to Aldeburgh, Suffolk - -Page 299, Page 304—changed Dr. Poliksena Shiskina Yavein to Dr. Poliksena - Schiskina Yavein - -Page 302—changed zur kenntisnahme to zur kenntnisnahme - -Page 304—changed Hermila Galinda to Hermila Galindo - -Page 323—changed invesment to investment - -Page 328—changed minstry to ministry - -Page 330—changed Mutualite to Mutualité - -Page 377—changed paternite to paternité - -Page 382—changed there is not where to there is nowhere - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN WANTED *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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