Women Wanted/Chapter 3
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 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 Jofrre 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 today 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 aegis 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 Francais, the Union des Femmes de France and the Société Secours aux Blessés Militairs, 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 
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 housemaid 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 byproducts 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, today 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 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 today 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 29,000 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 leggins. 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 worldwide 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 Endel 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 attache 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?