Then--the offered service of the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps in England was spurned. Now--they wear shrapnel helmets while working during Zepplin raids
Then--the offered service of the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps in England was spurned. Now--they wear shrapnel helmets while working during Zepplin raids
Then--the offered service of the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps in England was spurned. Now--they wear shrapnel helmets while working during Zepplin raids
Equipment of the army was obviously the first and pressing obligation. Fields might lie fallow, for food in the early days could easily be brought from abroad, but men had to be registered, soldiers clothed and equipped. It was natural, then, that the new workers were principally used in registration work and in making military supplies.
But in the second year of the war came the conviction that the contest was not soon to be ended, and that the matter of raising food at home must be met. Women were again appealed to. A Land Army mobilized by women was created. At first this work was carried on under a centralized division of the National Service Department, but there has been decentralization and the Land Army is now a department of the Board of Agriculture. It is headed by Miss M. Talbot as director. Under this central body are Women's Agricultural Committees in each county, with an organizing secretary whose duty it is to secure full-time recruits.
The part-time workers in a locality are obtained by the wife of the squire or vicar acting as a volunteer registrar. Many of these part-time workers register to do the domestic work of the lusty young village housewife or mother while she is absent from home performing her allotted task on a nearby farm. The full-time recruits are not only secured by the organizers, but through registrations at every post office. Any woman can ask for a registration card and fill it out, and the postmaster then forwards the application to the committee. The next step is that likely applicants are called to the nearest center for examination and presentation of credentials. When finally accepted they are usually sent for six weeks' or three months' training to a farm belonging to some large estate. The landlord contributes the training, and the government gives the recruit her uniform and fifteen shillings a week to cover her board and lodging. At the end of her course she receives an armlet signifying her rank in the Land Army and is ready to go wherever the authorities send her.
The farmer in Great Britain no longer needs to be converted to the value of the new workers. He knows they can do every kind of farm work as well as men, and are more reliable and conscientious than boys, and he is ready, therefore, to pay the required minimum wage of eighteen shillings a week, or above that amount if the rate ruling in the district is higher.
Equally well organized is the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, familiarly known as the Waacs. The director is Mrs. Chalmers Watson. A would-be Waac goes to the center in her county for examination, and then is assigned to work at home or "somewhere in France" according to training and capacity. She may be fitted as a cook, a storekeeper, a telephone or telegraph operator, or for signalling or salvage work. Let us not say she will supplant a man, but rather set a man free for fuller service.
My niece, a slip of a girl, felt the call of duty at the beginning of the war. Her brothers were early volunteers in Kitchener's Army. They were in the trenches and she longed for the sensation of bearing a burden of hard work. She went to Woolwich Arsenal and toiled twelve hours a day. She broke under the strain, recuperated, and took up munition work again. She became expert, and was in time an overseer told off to train other women. But she was never satisfied, and always anxious to be nearer the great struggle. She broke away one day and went to Southampton for a Waac examination, and found herself one of a group of a hundred and fifty gentlewomen all anxious to enter active service and all prepared for some definite work. They stood their tests, and Dolly--that's the little niece's pet name, given to her because she is so tiny--is now working as an "engine fitter" just behind the fighting lines. Dainty Dolly, whom we have always treated as a fragile bit of Sèvres china, clad in breeches and puttees, under the booming of the great guns, is fitting patiently, part to part, the beating engine which will lift on wings some English boy in his flight through the blue skies of France.
But it must not be supposed that the magnificent service of British women, devoted, efficient and well-organized from top to bottom, realized itself without friction, any more than it will here. There were certainly two wars going on in Great Britain for a long time, and the internal strife was little less bitter than the international conflict. The most active center of this contest of which we have heard so little was in industry, and the combatants were the government, trade unions and women. The unions were doing battle because of fear of unskilled workers, especially when intelligent and easily trained; the government, in sore need of munition hands, was bargaining with the unskilled for long hours and low pay. Finally the government and the unions reluctantly agreed that women must be employed; both wanted them to be skillful, but not too skillful, and above all, to remain amenable. It has been made clear, too, that women enter their new positions "for the war only." At the end of hostilities--international hostilities--women are to hand over their work and wages to men and go home and be content. Will the program be fulfilled?
The wishes of women themselves may play some part. How do they feel? Obviously, every day the war lasts they get wider experience of the sorrows and pleasures of financial independence. Women are called the practical sex, and I certainly found them in England facing the fact that peace will mean an insufficient number of breadwinners to go around and that a maimed man may have low earning power. The women I met were not dejected at the prospect; they showed, on the contrary, a spirit not far removed from elation in finding new opportunities of service. After I had sat and listened to speech after speech at the annual conference of the National Union of Women Workers, with delegates from all parts of the country, presided over by Mrs. Creighton, widow of the late Bishop of London, there was no doubt in my mind that British women desired to enter paid fields of work, and regarded as permanent the great increase in their employment. No regrets or hesitations were expressed in a single speech, and the solutions of the problems inherent in the new situation all lay in the direction of equality of preparation and equality of pay with men.
The strongest element in the women's trade unions takes the same stand. The great rise in the employment of women is not regarded as a "war measure," and all the suggestions made to meet the hardships of readjustment, such as a "minimum wage for all unskilled workers, men as well as women," are based on the idea of the new workers being permanent factors in the labor market.
The same conclusion was reached in the report presented to the British Association by the committee appointed to investigate the "Replacement of Male by Female Labor." The committee found itself in entire disagreement with the opinion that the increased employment of women was a passing phase, and made recommendations bearing on such measures as improved technical training for girls as well as for boys, a minimum wage for unskilled men as well as women, equal pay for equal work, and the abolition of "half-timers." But while it was obvious that the greatest asset of belligerent nations is the labor of women, while learned societies and organizations of women laid down rules for their safe and permanent employment, the British Government showed marked opposition to the new workers. If the Cabinet did not believe the war would be brief, it certainly acted as if Great Britain alone among the belligerents would have no shortage of male industrial hands. At a time when Germany had five hundred thousand women in munition factories, England had but ten thousand.
There is no doubt that the country was at first organized merely for a spurt. Boys and girls were pressed into service, wages were cut down for women, hours lengthened for men. Government reports read like the Shaftesbury attacks on the conditions of early factory days. We hear again of beds that are never cold, the occupant of one shift succeeding the occupant of the next, of the boy sleeping in the same bed with two men, and three girls in a cot in the same room. Labor unrest was met at first by the Munitions War Act prohibiting strikes and lockouts, establishing compulsory arbitration and suspending all trade-union rules which might "hamper production." Under the law a "voluntary army of workers" signed up as ready to go anywhere their labor was needed, and local munition committees became labor courts endowed with power to change wage rates, to inflict fines on slackers, and on those who broke the agreements of the "voluntary army."
To meet the threatening rebellion, a Health of Munition Workers Committee under the Ministry of Munitions was appointed to "consider and advise on questions of industrial fatigue, hours of labor and other matters affecting the physical health and physical efficiency of workers in munition factories and workshops." On this committee there were distinguished medical men, labor experts, members of parliament and two women, Miss R.E. Squire of the Factory Department and Mrs. H.J. Tennant.
The committee was guided by a desire to have immense quantities of munitions turned out, and faced squarely the probability that the war would be of long duration. Its findings, embodied in a series of memoranda, have lessons for us, not only for war times, but for peace times, for all time.
On a seven day week the verdict was that "if the maximum output is to be secured and maintained for any length of time, a weekly period of rest must be allowed." Overtime was advised against, a double or triple shift being recommended.
In July, 1916, the committee published a most interesting memorandum on experiments in the relation of output to hours. In one case the output was increased eight percent by reducing the weekly hours from sixty-eight to fifty-nine, and it was found that a decrease to fifty-six hours per week gave the same output as fifty-nine. It need hardly be said that there was no change in machinery, tools, raw material or workers. All elements except hours of work were identical. Twenty-seven workers doing very heavy work increased their output ten percent by cutting weekly hours from sixty-one to fifty-five. In a munition plant employing thirty-six thousand hands it was found that the sick rate ranged from five to eight percent when the employees were working overtime, and was only three percent when they were on a double shift.
The war has forced Great Britain to carry out the findings of this committee and to consider more seriously than ever before, and for both men and women, the problem of industrial fatigue, the relation of accidents to hours of labor, industrial diseases, housing, transit, and industrial canteens. The munition worker is as important as the soldier and must have the best of care.
While the friction in the ranks of industrial women workers was still far from being adjusted, the government met its Waterloo in the contest with medical women. The service which they freely offered their country was at first sternly refused. Undaunted, they sought recognition outside the mother country. They knew their skill and they knew the soldiers' need. They turned to hospitable France, and received official recognition. On December 14, 1914, the first hospital at the front under British medical women was opened in Abbaye Royaumont, near Creil. It carries the official designation, "Hôpital Auxiliaire 301." The doctors, the nurses, the cooks, are all women. One of the capable chauffeurs I saw running the ambulance when I was in Creil. She was getting the wounded as they came down from the front. The French Government appreciated what the women were doing and urged them to give more help. At Troyes another unit gave the French army its first experience of nursing under canvas.
After France had been profiting by the skill of British women for months, Sir Alfred Keogh, Medical Director General, wisely insisted that the War Office yield and place a hospital in the hands of women. The War Hospital in Endell Street, London, is now under Dr. Flora Murray, and every office, except that of gateman, is filled by women. From the doctors, who rank as majors, down to the cooks, who rank as non-commissioned officers, every one connected with Endell Street has military standing. It indicated the long, hard road these women had traveled to secure official recognition that the doctor who showed me over the hospital told me, as a matter for congratulation, that at night the police brought in drunken soldiers to be sobered. "Every war hospital must receive them," she explained, "and we are glad we are not passed over, for that gives the stamp to our official standing."
It was a beautiful autumn day when I visited Endell Street. The great court was full of convalescents, and the orderlies in khaki, with veils floating back from their close-fitting toques, were carefully and skillfully lifting the wounded from an ambulance. I spoke to one of the soldier boys about the absence of men doctors and orderlies, and his quick query was, "And what should we want men for?" It seems that they always take that stand after a day or two. At first the patient is puzzled; he calls the doctor "sister" and the orderly "nurse," but ends by being an enthusiastic champion of the new order. Not a misogynist did I find. One poor fellow who had been wounded again and again and had been in many hospitals, declared, "I don't mean no flattery, but this place leaves nothink wanting."
The first woman I met on my last visit to England upset my expectation of finding that war pushed women back into primitive conditions of toil, crushed them under the idea that physical force rules the world, and made them subservient. I chanced upon her as she was acting as ticket-puncher at the Yarmouth station. She was well set-up, alert, efficient, helpful in giving information, and, above all, cheerful. There were two capable young women at the bookstall, too. One had lost a brother at the front, the other her lover. I felt that they regarded their loss as one item in the big national accounting. They were heroically cheerful in "doing their bit."
Throughout my stay in England I searched for, but could not find, the self-effacing spinster of former days. In her place was a capable woman, bright-eyed, happy. She was occupied and bustled at her work. She jumped on and off moving vehicles with the alertness, if not the unconsciousness, of the expert male. She never let me stand in omnibus or subway, but quickly gave me her seat, as indeed she insisted upon doing for elderly gentlemen as well. The British woman had found herself and her muscles. England was a world of women--women in uniforms; there was the army of nurses, and then the messengers, porters, elevator hands, tram conductors, bank clerks, bookkeepers, shop attendants. They each seemed to challenge the humble stranger, "Superfluous? Not I, I'm a recruit for national service!" Even a woman doing time-honored womanly work moved with an air of distinction; she dusted a room for the good of her country. Just one glimpse was I given of the old-time daughter of Eve, when a ticket-collector at Reading said: "I can't punch your ticket. Don't you see I'm eating an apple!"
One of the reactions of the wider functioning of brain and muscle which struck me most forcibly was the increased joyfulness of women. They were happy in their work, happy in the thought of rendering service, so happy that the poignancy of individual loss was carried more easily.
This cheerfulness is somewhat gruesomely voiced in a cartoon inPunchtouching on the allowance given to the soldier's wife. She remarks, "This war is 'eaven--twenty-five shillings a week and no 'usband bothering about!" We have always creditedPunchwith knowing England. Truth stands revealed by a thrust, however cynical, when softened by challenging humor.
There was no discipline in the pension system. No work was required. The case of a girl I met in a country town was common. She was working in a factory earning eleven shillings a week. A day or two later I saw her, and she told me she had stopped work, as she had "married a soldier, and 'e's gone to France, and I get twelve and six separation allowance a week." Never did the strange English name, "separation allowance," seem more appropriate for the wife's pension than in this girl's story. Little wonder was it that in the early months of the war there was some riotous living among soldiers' wives!
And the comments of women of influence on the drunkenness and waste of money on foolish finery were as striking to me as the sordid condition itself. The woman chairman of a Board of Poor Law Guardians in the north of England told me that when her fellow-members suggested that Parliament ought to appoint committees to disburse the separation allowances, she opposed them with the heroic philosophy that women can be trained in wisdom only by freedom to err, that a sense of responsibility had never been cultivated in them, and the country would have to bear the consequences. In reply to my inquiry as to how the Guardians received these theories, I learned that "they knew she was right and dropped their plan."
The faith of leading women that experience would be the best teacher for the soldier's wife has been justified. A labor leader in the Midlands told me that an investigation by his trade union showed that only one hundred women in the ten thousand cases inquired into were mis-spending their allowances. And when I was visiting a board school in a poor district of London, and remarked to the head teacher that the children looked well cared for, she told me that never had they been so well fed and clothed. There seemed no doubt in her mind that it was best to have the family budget in the hands of the mother. In the sordid surroundings of the mean streets of great cities, there is developing in women practical wisdom and a fine sense of individual responsibility.
Perhaps of greater significance than just how separation allowances are being spent is the fact that women have discovered that their work as housewives and mothers has a value recognized by governments in hard cash. It makes one speculate as to whether wives in the warring nations will step back without a murmur into the old-time dependence on one man, or whether these simple women may contribute valuable ideas towards the working out of sound schemes of motherhood pensions.
The women of Great Britain are experiencing economic independence, they are living in an atmosphere of recognition of the value of their work as housewives and mothers. Women leaders in all classes give no indication of regarding pensions or remuneration in gainful pursuits as other than permanent factors in social development, and much of the best thought of men as well as women is centered on group experiments in domestic coöperation, in factory canteens, in municipal kitchens, which are a natural concomitant to the wider functioning of women.
Great Britain is not talking about feminism, it is living it. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the national acceptance of the fact than the widespread amusement touched with derision caused by the story of the choleric gentlemen who, on being asked at the time of one of the government registrations whether his wife was dependent upon him or not, roared in rage, "Well, if my wife isn't dependent on me, I'd like to know what man she is dependent on!"
Only second to Britain's lesson for us in the self-reliance of its women, and the thorough mobilization of their labor-power and executive ability, is its lesson in protection for all industrial workers. It stands as one people against the present enemy, and in its effort does not fail to give thought to race conservation for the future.
[2]Through the courtesy of the Editors ofThe Outlook, I am at liberty to use in this and the following chapter, some of the material published in an article by me inThe Outlookof June 28, 1916.
Compared with the friction in the mobilization of woman-power in Great Britain, the readjustment in the lives of women in France was like the opening out of some harmonious pageant in full accord with popular sympathy. But who has not said, "France is different!"
It is different, and in nothing more so than in its attitude toward its women. Without discussion with organizations of men, without hindrance from the government, women filled the gaps in the industrial army. It was obvious that the new workers, being unskilled, would need training; the government threw open the technical schools to them. A spirit of hospitality, of helpfulness, of common sense, reigned.
The French poilu on furlough is put to work harrowing.
The French poilu on furlough is put to work harrowing.
The French poilu on furlough is put to work harrowing.
And it was not only in industry that France showed herself wise. I found that the government had coöperated unreservedly with all the philanthropic work of women and had given them a wide sphere in which they could rise above amateurish effort and carry out plans calling for administrative ability.
When the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises inaugurated its work to bring together the scattered families of Belgium and northern France, and when the Association pour l'Aide Fraternelle aux Évacués Alsaciens-Lorrains began its work for the dispersed peoples of the provinces, an order was issued by the government to every prefect to furnish lists of all refugees in his district to the headquarters of the women's societies in Paris. It was through this good will on the part of the central government that these societies were able to bring together forty thousand Belgian families, and to clothe and place in school, or at work, the entire dispersed population of the reconquered districts of Alsace-Lorraine.
Nor did these societies cease work with the completion of their initial effort. They turned themselves into employment bureaus and with the aid and sanction of the government found work for the thousands of women who were thrown out of employment. They had the machinery to accomplish their object, the Council being an old established society organized throughout the country, and the Association to Aid the Refugees from Alsace-Lorraine (a nonpartisan name adopted, by the way, at the request of the Minister of the Interior to cover for the moment the patriotic work of the leading suffrage society) had active units in every prefecture.
One of the admirable private philanthropies was the canteen at the St. Lazarre station in Paris. I am tempted to single it out because its organizer, Countess de Berkaim, told me that in all the months she had been running it--and it was open twenty-four hours of the day--not a single volunteer had been five minutes late. The canteen was opened in February, 1915, with a reading and rest room. Six hundred soldiers a day have been fed. The two big rooms donated by the railway for the work were charming with their blue and white checked curtains, dividing kitchen from restaurant and rest room from reading room. The work is no small monument to the reliability and organizing faculty of French women.
It was in France, too, that I found the group of women who realized that the permanent change which the war was making in the relation of women to society needed fundamental handling. Mlle. Valentine Thomson, founder of La Vie Féminine, held that not only was the war an economic struggle and not only must the financial power of the combatants rest on the labor of women, but the future of the nations will largely depend upon the attitude which women take toward their new obligations. Realizing that business education would be a determining factor in that attitude, Mlle. Thomson persuaded her father, who was then Minister of Commerce, to send out an official recommendation to the Chambers of Commerce to open the commercial schools to girls. The advice was very generally followed, but as Paris refused, a group of women, backed by the Ministry, founded a school in which were given courses of instruction in the usual business subjects, and lectures on finance, commercial law and international trade.
Mlle. Thomson herself turned her business gifts to good use in a successful effort to build up for the immediate benefit of artists and workers the doll trade of which France was once supreme mistress. Exhibitions of the art, old and new, were held in many cities in the United States, in South America and in England. The dolls went to the hearts of lovers of beauty, and what promised surer financial return, to the hearts of the children.
To do something for France--that stood first in the minds of the initiators of this commercial project. They knew her people must be employed. And next, the desire to bring back charm to an old art prompted their effort. Mlle. Thomson fully realizes just what "Made in Germany" signifies. The peoples of the world have had their taste corrupted by floods of the cheap and tawdry. Germany has been steadily educating us to demand quantity, quantity mountains high. There is promise that the doll at least will be rescued by France and made worth the child's devotion.
In industry, as well as in all else, one feels that in France there has not been so much a revolution as an orderly development. Women were in munition factories even before the war, the number has merely swelled. The women of the upper and lower bourgeois class always knew their husband's business, the one could manage the shop, the other could bargain with the best of them as to contracts and output. Women were trained as bookkeepers and clerks under Napoleon I; he wanted men as soldiers, and so decreed women should go into business. And the woman of the aristocratic class has merely slipped out of her seclusion as if putting aside an old-fashioned garment, and now carries on her philanthropies in more serious and coördinated manner. We know the practical business experience possessed by French women, and so are prepared to learn that many a big commercial enterprise, the owner having gone to the front, is now directed by his capable wife. That is but a development, too, is it not? For we had all heard long ago of Mme. Duval, even if we had not eaten at her restaurants, and though we had never bought a ribbon or a carpet at the Bon Marché, we had heard of the woman who helped break through old merchant habits and gave the world the department store.
But nothing has been more significant in its growth during the war than the small enterprises in which the husband and wife in the domestic munition shop, laboring side by side with a little group of assistants, have been turning out marvels of skill. The man is now in the trenches fighting for France, and the woman takes command and leads the industrial battalion to victory. She knows she fights for France.
A word more about her business, for she is playing an economic part that brings us up at attention. She may be solving the problem of adjustment of home and work so puzzling to women. There are just such domestic shops dotted all over the map of France; in the Paris district alone there are over eighteen hundred of them. The conditions are so excellent and the ruling wages so high, that the minimum wage law passed in 1915 applied only to the sweated home workers in the clothing trade, and not to the domestic munition shops.
A commission which included in its membership a trade unionist, sent by the British government in the darkest days to find why it was that France could produce so much more ammunition than England, found these tiny workshops, with their primitive equipment, performing miracles. The output was huge and of the best. The woman, when at the head, seemed to turn out more than the man, she worked with such undying energy. The commission said it was the "spirit of France" that drove the workers forward and renewed the flagging energies. But even the trade unionist referred to the absence of all opposition to women on the part of organizations of men. Perhaps the spirit of France is undying because in it is a spirit of unity and harmony.
It seemed to me there was one very practical explanation of the unmistakable energy of the French worker, both man and woman. The whole nation has the wise custom of taking meal time with due seriousness. The break at noon in the great manufactories, as well as in the family workshop, is long, averaging one hour and a half, and reaching often to two hours. The French never gobble. Because food is necessary to animal life, they do not on that account take a puritanical view of it. They dare enjoy it, in spite of its physiological bearing. They sit down to it, dwell upon it, get its flavor, and after the meal they sit still and as a nation permit themselves unabashed to enjoy the sensation of hunger appeased. That's the common sense spirit of France.
Of course the worker is renewed, hurls herself on the work again with ardor, and losing no time through fatigue, throws off an enormous output.
Wages perform their material share in spurring the worker. Louis Barthou says that the woman's average is eight francs a day. Long ago--it seems long ago--she could earn at best five francs in the Paris district. She works on piece work now, getting the same rate as men. And think of it!--this must indeed be because of the spirit of France--this woman does better than men on the light munition work, and equals, yes, equals her menfolk on the heavy shells. I do not say this, a commission of men says it, a commission with a trade union member to boot. The coming of the woman-worker with the spirit of win-the-war in her heart is the same in France as elsewhere, only here her coming is more gracious. Twelve hundred easily take up work on the Paris subway. They are the wives of mobilized employees. The offices of the Post, the Telegraph and Telephone bristle with women, of course, for eleven thousand have taken the places of men. Some seven thousand fill up the empty positions on the railways, serving even as conductors on through trains. Their number has swollen to a half million in munitions, and to over half that number in powder mills and marine workshops; in civil establishments over three hundred thousand render service; and even the conservative banking world welcomes the help of some three thousand women.
Has there ever been anything impossible to French women since the time of Jeanne d'Arc? The fields must be harrowed--they have no horses
Has there ever been anything impossible to French women since the time of Jeanne d'Arc? The fields must be harrowed--they have no horses
Has there ever been anything impossible to French women since the time of Jeanne d'Arc? The fields must be harrowed--they have no horses
Out on the land the tally is greatest of all. Every woman from the village bends over the bosom of France, urging fertility. The government called them in the first hours of the conflict. Viviani spoke the word:--
"The departure for the army of all those who can carry arms, leaves the work in the fields undone; the harvest is not yet gathered in; the vintage season is near. In the name of the entire nation united behind it, I make an appeal to your courage, and to that of your children, whose age alone and not their valour, keeps them from the war.
"I ask you to keep on the work in the fields, to finish gathering in the year's harvest, to prepare that of the coming year. You cannot render your country a greater service.
"It is not for you, but for her, that I appeal to your hearts.
"You must safeguard your own living, the feeding of the urban populations and especially the feeding of those who are defending the frontier, as well as the independence of the country, civilization and justice.
"Up, then, French women, young children, daughters and sons of the country! Replace on the field of work those who are on the field of battle. Strive to show them to-morrow the cultivated soil, the harvests all gathered in, the fields sown.
"In hours of stress like the present, there is no ignoble work. Everything that helps the country is great. Up! Act! To work! To-morrow there will be glory for everyone.
"Long live the Republic! Long live France!"
Women instantly responded to the proclamation. Only the old men were left to help, only decrepit horses, rejected by the military requisition. More than once I journeyed far into the country, but I never saw an able-bodied man. What a gap to be filled!--but the French peasant woman filled it. She harvested that first year, she has sowed and garnered season by season ever since. Men, horses, machinery were lacking, the debit yawned, but she piled up a credit to meet it by unflagging toil.
With equal devotion and with initiative and power of organization the woman of leisure has "carried on." The three great societies corresponding with our Red Cross, the Société de Secours aux Blessés, the Union des Femmes de France, and the Association des Dames Françaises, have established fifteen hundred hospitals with one hundred and fifteen thousand beds, and put forty-three thousand nurses in active service. Efficiency has kept pace with this superb effort, as is testified to by many a war cross, many a medal, and the cross of the Legion of Honor.
Up to the level of her means France sets examples in works of human salvage worthy the imitation of all nations. The mairie in each arrondissement has become no less than a community center. The XIV arrondissement in Paris is but the pattern for many. Here the wife of the mayor, Mme. Brunot, has made the stiff old building a human place. The card catalogue carrying information about every soldier from the district, gives its overwhelming news each day gently to wife or mother, through the lips of Mme. Brunot or her women assistants. The work of Les Amis des Orphelins de Guerre centers here, the "adopted" child receiving from the good maire the gifts in money and presents sent by the Americans who are generously filling the role of parent. The widows of the soldiers gather here for comfort and advice.
And the mairie holds a spirit of experiment. It houses not only courage and sympathy, but progress. The "XIV" has ventured on a Cuisine Populaire under Mme. Brunot's wholesome guidance. And so many other arrondissements have followed suit that Paris may be regarded as making a great experiment in the municipal feeding of her people. It is not charity, the food is paid for. In the "XIV" fifteen hundred persons eat a meal or two at the mairie each day. The charge is seventy-five centimes--fifteen cents, and one gets a soup, meat and a vegetable, and fruit.
The world seems to be counselling us that if we wish to be well and cheaply fed we must go where there are experts to cook, where buying is done in quantity, and where the manager knows about nutritive values.
If a word of praise is extended to the maire of the XIV arrondissement for his very splendid work, an example to all France, he quickly urges, "Ah, but Mme. Brunot!" And so it is always, if you exclaim, "Oh, the spirit of the men of France!" and a Frenchman's ears catch your words, he will correct, "Ah, but the women!"
And the women do stand above all other women, they have had such opportunity for heroism. Whose heart does not beat the faster when the names Soisson and Mme. Macherez are spoken! The mayor and the council gone, she assumes the office and keeps order while German shells fall thick on the town. And then the enemy enters, and asks for the mayor, and she replies, "Le maire, c'est moi." And then do we women not like to think of Mlle. Deletete staying at her post in the telegraph office in Houplines in spite of German bombardments, and calmly facing tormentors, when they smashed her instruments and threatened her with death. One-tenth of France in the enemy's hands, and in each village and town some woman staying behind to nurse the sick and wounded, to calm the population when panic threatens, to stand invincible between the people and their conquerors!
It is very splendid!--the French man holding steady at the front, the French woman an unyielding second line of defense. But what of France? Words of praise must not swallow our sense of obligation. Let us with our hundred millions of people face the figures. The death rate in France, not counting the military loss, is twenty per thousand, with a birth rate of eight per thousand. In Paris for the year ending August, 1914, there were forty-eight thousand nine hundred and seventeen births; in the year ending in the same month, 1916, the births dropped to twenty-six thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. The total deaths for that year in all France were one million, one hundred thousand, and the births three hundred and twelve thousand.
France is profoundly, infinitely sad. She has cause. I shall never forget looking into the very depths of her sorrow when I was at Creil. A great drive was in progress, the wounded were being brought down from the front, troops hurried forward. Four different regiments passed as I sat at déjeuner. The restaurant, full of its noonday patrons, was a typical French café giving on the street. We could have reached out and touched the soldiers. They marched without music, without song or word, marched in silence. Some of the men were from this very town; their little sons, with set faces, too, walked beside them and had brought them bunches of flowers. The people in the restaurant never spoke above a whisper, and when the troops passed were as silent as death. There was no cheer, but just a long, wistful gaze, the soldiers looking into their eyes, they into the soldiers'.
But France can bear her burden, can solve her problem if we lift our full share from her bent shoulders. Her women can save the children if the older men, relieved by our young soldiers, come back from the trenches, setting women free for the work of child saving. France can rebuild her villages if her supreme architects, her skilled workers are replaced in the trenches by our armies. France can renew her spirit and save her body if her experts in science, if her poets and artists are sent back to her, and our less great bare their breasts to the Huns.
The military mobilization of Germany was no more immediate and effective than the call to arms for women. On August 1, 1914, the summons went out, and German women were at once part of the smooth running machine of efficiency.
The world says the Kaiser has been preparing for war for forty years. The world means that he has been preparing the fighting force. The sword and guns were to be ready. But the military arm of the nation, the German government believes, is but the first line of attack; the people are the second line, and so they, too, in all their life activities, were not forgotten. The military aristocracy has never neglected the function of women in the state. The definition of their function may differ from ours, but that there is a function is recognized, and it is related to the other vital social organs.
Slowly, through the last half of the nineteenth century, there had grown up clubs among German women focusing on a definite bit of work, or crystallizing about an idea. Germany even had suffrage societies. Politics, however, were forbidden by the government; women were not allowed to hang on the fringe of a meeting held to discuss men's politics. But the women of the Fatherland were free to pool their ideas in philanthropic and hygienic corners, and venture out at times on educational highways. The Froebel societies had many a contest with the government, for to the military mind, the gentle pedagogue's theories seemed subversive of discipline as enforced by spurs and bayonets.
These clubs, covering every trade and profession, every duty and every aspiration of women, were dotted over the German Empire. At last they drew together in a federation. The government looked on. It saw a machine created, and believing in thorough organization, no doubt gave thought to the possibilities of the Bund deutscher, Frauenvereine. At the outbreak of war, Dr. Gertrud Baumer was president of the Bund. She was a leader of great ability, marshalling half a million of women. No other organization was so widespread and well-knit, except perhaps Der Vaterlandische Frauenverein with its two thousand one hundred and fifty branches. It was evangelical and military. The Empress was its patron. Its popular name is the "Armée der Kaiserin."
There the two great national societies stood--one aristocratic, the other democratic, one appealing to the ruling class, the other holding in bonds of fellowship the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, the professional and the industrial woman.
Every belligerent president or premier has faced exactly the same perplexity. What woman, what society, is to be recognized as leader? The question has brought beads of perspiration to the foreheads of statesmen.
France solved the difficulty urbanely. It said "yes" to each and all. It promised coöperation and kept the promise. By affably--always affably and hospitably--accepting this service from one society, and suggesting another pressing need to its competitor, it sorted out capabilities, and warded off duplication. Perhaps this did not bring the fullest efficiency, but the loss was more than made up, no doubt, by a free field for initiative. Britain ignored all existing organizations of women, and after a year and a half of puzzlement created a separate government department for their mobilization. America struck out still another course. It took the heads of several national societies, bound them in one committee, to which it gave, perhaps with the idea of avoiding any danger of friction, neither power nor funds.
Germany faced the same critical moment for decision. The government wanted efficient use of woman-power on the land, in the factory, in the home, and that quickly. It made use of the best existing machinery. Dr. Gertrud Baumer visited the Ministerium des Innern, and on August 1 she issued a call for the mobilization of women for service to the Fatherland in the Nationale Frauendienst. Under the aegis of the government, with the national treasury behind her, Dr. Baumer summoned the women of the Empire. By order, every woman and every organization of women was to fall in line under the Frauendienst in each village and city for "the duration of the war."[3]
In each army district, the government appointed a woman as directress, and by order to town and provincial authorities made the Frauendienst part of local executive affairs.
Among the immediate duties laid upon the Frauendienst by the authorities was the task of registering all needy persons, of providing cheap eating places, opening workrooms, and setting up nurseries for children, especially for those who were motherless and those whose fathers had fallen at the front and whose mothers were in some gainful pursuit. With these duties went the administrative service of coöperating with the government in "keeping up an even supply of foodstuffs, and controlling the buying and selling of food."
Germany anticipated as did no other belligerent the unemployment which would follow a declaration of war, and prepared to meet the condition. A great deal of army work, such as tent sewing, belts for cartridges, bread sacks, and sheets for hospitals, was made immediately available for the women thrown out of luxury trades. In the first month of the war the Frauendienst opened work-rooms in all great centers; machinery was installed by magic and through the six work-rooms in Berlin alone twenty-three thousand women were given paid employment in one week.
Such efforts could not, of course, absorb the surplus labor, for unemployment was very great. Eighty percent of the women's hat-makers and milliners were out of work, seventy-two percent of the workers in glass and fifty-eight percent in china. The Frauendienst investigated two hundred and fifty-five thousand needy cases, and in Berlin alone found sixty thousand women who had lost their employment. Charity had to render help. Here, again, it is an example of the alertness of the organization and its close connection with the government that the Berlin magistracy deputed to twenty-three Hilfscommissionen from the Frauendienst the work of giving advice and charity relief to the unemployed. Knitting rooms were opened, clothing depots, mending rooms, where donated clothing was repaired, and in one month fifty-six thousand orders for milk, five hundred thousand for bread, and three hundred thousand for meals were distributed for the city authorities.
The adjustment to war requirements went on more quickly in Germany than in any other country. Before a year had passed the surplus hands had been absorbed, and a shortage of labor power was beginning to be felt.
And now opens the war drama set with the same scene everywhere. Women hurry forward to take up the burden laid down by men, and to assume the new occupations made necessary by the organization of the world for military conflict. To tell of Germany is merely to speak in bigger numbers. Women in munitions? Of course, well over the million mark. Trolley conductors? Of course, six hundred in Berlin alone before the first Christmas. Women are making the fuses, fashioning the big shells, and at the same heavy machines used by the men. That speaks volumes--the same heavy machines. Great Britain and France have in every case introduced lighter machinery for their women. But, whatever the conditions, in Germany the women are handling high explosives, sewing heavy saddlery, operating the heaviest drill machines. Women have been put on the "hardest jobs hitherto filled by men." In the German-Luxemburg Mining and Furnace Company at Differdingen, they are found doing work at the slag and blast furnaces which had always required men of great endurance. They work on the same shifts as the men, receive the same pay, but are not worked overtime "because they must go home and perform their domestic duties."
One feels the weight of the German system. Patient women shoulder double burdens. They always did.
In the Post and Telegraph department there is an army of fifty thousand women. The telephone service is entirely in their hands, and running more smoothly than formerly. Dr. Käthe Schirmacher declares comfortingly in theKriegsfrauthat "one must not forget that these women know many important bits of information--and keep silent." Women have learned to keep a secret!
One hundred and eighty nurses, experts with the X-ray, were in the front line dressing stations in the early days of the war, and before a week of conflict had passed women were in the Field Post, and Frau Reimer, organizer of official chauffeurs, was on the western line of attack.
Agriculture claims more women than any occupation in Germany. They were always on the farm, perhaps they are happier there now since they themselves are in command. It is said that "the peasants work in the boots and trousers of their husbands and ride in the saddle." War has liberated German women from the collar and put them on horseback!
But strangest and most unexpected of all is the professional and administrative use of women. The government has sent women architects and interior decorators to East Prussia to plan and carry through reconstruction work. Over a hundred--to be exact, one hundred and sixteen at last accounts--have taken the places of men in administrative departments connected with the railways. Many widows who have shown capacity have been put in government positions of importance formerly held by their husbands. Women have become farm managers, superintendents of dairy industries, and representatives of landed proprietors.
The disseminating of all instruction and information for women on war economies was delegated to the League of Women's Domestic Science Clubs. The Berlin course was held in no less a place than the Abgeordnetenhaus, and the Herrenhaus opened its doors wide on Rural Women's Day when Agricultural Week was held at the capital.
When the full history of the war comes to be written, no doubt one reason for Germany's marvelous power to stand so long against the world will be found in her use of every brain and muscle of the nation. This has been for her no exclusive war. Her entire people to their last ounce of energy have been engaged.
And this supreme service on the part of German women seeks democratic expression. From them comes the clearest, bravest word that has reached us across the border. The most hopeful sign is this manifesto from the suffrage organizations to the government: "Up to the present Germany has stood in the lowest rank of nations as regards women's rights. In most civilized lands women already have been given a large share in public affairs. German women have been granted nothing except within the most insignificant limits. In New Zealand, Australia and most American States, and even before the war in Finland and Norway, they had been given political rights; to-day, Sweden, Russia and many other countries give them a full or limited franchise. The war has brought a full victory to the women of England, Canada, Russia and Denmark, and large concessions are within sight in France, Holland and Hungary.
"Among us Germans not only the national but even the commercial franchise is denied, and even a share in the industrial and commercial courts. In the demand for the democratization of German public life our legislators do not seem even to admit the existence of women.
"But during the war the cooperation of women in public life has unostentatiously grown from year to year until to-day the number of women engaged in various callings in Germany exceeds the number of men.
"The work they are doing includes all spheres of male activity; without them it would no longer be possible to support the economic life of the people. Women have done their full share in the work of the community.
"Does not this performance of duty involve the right to share in the building up and extension of the social order?
"The women protest against this lack of political rights, in virtue both of their work for the community and of their work as human beings. They demand political equality with men. They demand the direct, equal and secret franchise for all legislative bodies, full equality in the communes and in legal representation of their interests.
"This first joint pronouncement on women's demands will be followed by others until the victory of our cause is won."
[3]"Die Frauenvereine jeder Stadt verbinden sich für die Dauer des Krieges zur Organization Nationaler Frauendienst die zu Berlin am 1ten August begründet wurde."