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 farmyards 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 percus-
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