CHAPTER XXIVPOUR LA PATRIE
Inone of the most widely read of French magazines I came across a story which illustrates the wonderful spirit and loyalty of the French mother. She loves her children with a devotion unsurpassed anywhere. But more deeply and more deathlessly she loves France.
The story was contained in an article written by a French correspondent who witnessed the repatriation at Evian-les-Bains of a large number of women and children long held prisoners by the Germans. Among them was a woman and her two little boys, Jean, aged five, and Gilbert, three. The mother was in the last stages of tuberculosis, and she had just managed to live long enough to get her children to Evian. Then she died. But before she died she said to the French Red Cross representative who had promised to care for the little ones: “I want you to make workmen of them. The country will so much need skilled workers.”
This heroic mother, who with her last breath dedicated her children to the rebuilding of France, was a simple, plain woman of the people. It is hardly likely that she had ever said a single word about patriotism.She lived it, and so do all French women. And there, I verily believe, is the secret of the vitality and the unconquerable strength of the French nation. At their mother’s knee the men of France learn that the first love and allegiance of their hearts and lives are due their country. They never forget that lesson.
I do not know who ever invented the fiction that French women are not maternal. It is true that they do not, as a rule, have many children, but that is easily understood when one studies the French economic and social conditions. In all families outside the wage earning class the girl children must be provided with dowries. It is the custom, and a dowerless girl has a difficult time getting married. Also, under French law, all children inherit equally their parents’ estate. Land holdings, as a rule, are very moderate, and if there were many children it would be impossible to educate and equip them for life.
It has never been the custom, as with us, for girls of the middle classes to earn their living. Until very recently thejeune fille, the young, unmarried girl, hardly ever went out unescorted. The prototype of our American college bred, tennis playing, independent, self-supporting girl did not exist in France. The one ideal of the gently reared French girl was marriage and a home. And in the home she became a real power.
Theoretically all women are powers in their homes. The power of the French wife and mother is not theoretical, it is real, it is legalized. A Frenchmanwho does not consult his wife in every business matter is the exception. A son who does not refer all his affairs to his mother’s consideration is a bad son. Under French law the family council, which includes near relatives as well as fathers and mothers, settles most questions involving minor children. It is in the family council where marriages are arranged and marriage contracts agreed upon.
Women rule these family councils to a very great extent. Their voices in all domestic matters are listened to with respect. You will see bearded men give up a cherished project, even a love match, becauseMamancould not be persuaded of its wisdom. A man can not legally marry without his mother’s consent until he is twenty-five years old.
Because of their great power in the home French women have not left the domestic life to the same extent that English and American women have done. They have not insisted on entering all the trades and professions. They have not demanded the vote. But the war has brought great changes into French life, and the women of France will never again be as they were before. They, too, must go out and work. They must accept the responsibilities of political life. They must socialize their maternal love. They are doing it already.
When the Germans invaded northern France in 1914, when most of the men were swept away into the fighting, the women assumed the burden not only of family life but of community life as well. Oftenthe German commander, entering a town or village and demanding the presence of the mayor, would be met by a stout, gray-haired matron who would calmly announce, “I am the mayor.”
So she was, and had been sincemonsieur le mairehad been mobilized, or perhaps murdered by the invading Huns. Many a French town and village with its hapless population has been saved from utter annihilation by the intrepid courage and determination of a woman in authority. More than once the woman was a nun.
France knows better than ever of what stuff its women are made, and the future status of the women is absolutely theirs to decide. There is plenty of evidence that they will decide on more independence and a wider range of activities.
I visited French munitions works, including the famous Citroen factory in Paris, where shells for France’s celebrated 75’s are turned out. I sat down at luncheon in the vast canteen of the factory with thousands of workers, fully half of them women. Before the war most of those women would have been engaged in sewing work at home, at very low wages. Seclusion of women went with family self-respect.
Now the girls were working in a shell factory. They were in overalls, some of them, and they were doing men’s work. All through this tremendous establishment I met girls driving motor shell carriers at high speed. I saw them working in the flaming forge rooms. I saw them cutting through steel bars withacetylene torches. I saw them at lathes shaping shells. I saw them making bullets. They work ten hours a day, where eight had been the legal limit before the war. They do not complain. It is for France,pour la patrie.
There has not been, as there was in England, a great pouring into industry of the women of the middle classes. The women workers were recruited from the home workers and from the luxury trades, so-called. There were many more of these in France, which was the finery mine for all the world, than in other countries. Thousands of girls and women who made clothes and hats andbijouxwere thrown out of work and were easily transferred to the munitions trades.
They seem to like the change. They are a much more coquettish class than the English workers. They do not wear any hats, as a rule, but they spend a good part of their wages on their hair. Even in the factory a girl in overalls working at a forge has her black hair elaborately coiffured and shining with brilliantine. Usually her hair is dressed with bright pins and sidecombs. What the French working girls would do if the war lasts long enough to exhaust the world’s supply of rhinestone combs I really do not know.
The French woman who escorted me through the Citroen factory deplored the fact that the working girls are beginning to wear dressy clothes and high heeled boots. It did not used to be so, she said. I pointed out that the girls formerly hadn’t the moneyto buy these things, and that the evils of democracy were cured only by more democracy. Women can’t learn, all at once, how to spend wisely.
The women of the French middle classes and those of the old aristocracy have gone into war work, if not into war industries. The advent of so many more women in factory work brought a new sense of responsibility to the more fortunately placed women. They have done a great deal for the workers to keep them in health and strength, to take care of the children of married workers, and even to raise wages.
The Citroen factory is such a model establishment that it has been written about in half a dozen American papers and magazines. It pays very good wages, and the minimum for piece work, eight francs a day—about a dollar and forty-five cents—is shared by men and women alike. Most of the workers average ten and twelve francs a day.
In this factory an excellent noon meal is served at cost, about thirty cents, with wine extra. The meal is prepared by professional cooks in spotless kitchens and it is well served. But not every factory has a canteen, and many have been established and are maintained by women of wealth for the benefit of the workers. I visited one of these in company with the principal founder, formerly a woman of the exclusive “great world,” but now a hard and indefatigable worker.
“These girls must have good food,” she said. “It is a tradition in France, and if we lose it we losesomething national. We who have time must feed those who have no time except for toil.”
The luncheon served at this canteen was as dainty, and it was perhaps even more carefully composed, than an expensive repast in a Fifth avenue tea room. The rich lady and her American guest sat down and ate it with the girls from the munitions factory a block away, and we enjoyed it as much as they did.
Every American woman knows the beautifully embroidered French underwear, which over here is rather expensive but in France could once be purchased for very little. The Paris “white sales” before the war was the trade event of the year for women. But what few women took into consideration when buying this lovely underwear so cheaply was that the women who made the garments received appallingly low wages for their work.
The underwear was made by women working at home. Pride kept them from leaving home, and besides, there were often young children to care for. So the home workers toiled far into the night, sewing and embroidering the dainty things that were to adorn the soft bodies of richer women. For their long toil they often received less than a franc a day.
I met the woman who was chiefly responsible for the alleviation of this great blot on the civilization of France. Her name is Madame Viollet, and she has devoted her life to the problems of the poor, in much the same wholehearted way as Jane Addams, JuliaLathrop, Lillian Wald and other well-known American women have. Like them she lives with her poor.
The problem of the home worker was long her chief province, and since the war she has succeeded in having a minimum wage law passed through the French Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, giving to the women who work at home four or five times as much as they ever received before.
“I do not wish all women to work in factories,” she said to me. “Expectant mothers, women with young children, delicate women, ought to stay at home. And, since they must earn, it is the business of the state to see that they are not cheated.”
Not only did Madame Viollet secure for the home workers a minimum wage, she organized them into asyndicat, or union, to enforce the law, and to raise their own status in various ways. This was a remarkable thing to do, because French women are totally unused to the idea of trade unions. The men rarely admit them to their unions, and the strong woman labor leader of England and the United States is practically unknown. But the home workers are organized now, and after the war we shall pay more for our French embroidered underwear.