American women have begun to go over the top. They are going up the scaling-ladder and out into All Man's Land. Perhaps love of adventure tempts them, perhaps love of money, or a fine spirit of service, but whatever the propelling motive, we are seeing them make the venture.
There is nothing new in our day in a woman's being paid for her work--some of it. But she has never before been seen in America employed, for instance, as a section hand on a railway. The gangs are few and small as yet, but there the women are big and strong specimens of foreign birth. They "trim" the ballast and wield the heavy "tamping" tool with zest. They certainly have muscles, and are tempted to use them vigorously at three dollars a day.
In the machine shops where more skill than strength is called for, the American element with its quick wits and deft fingers predominates. Young women are working at the lathe with so much precision and accuracy that solicitude as to what would become of the world if all its men marched off to war is in a measure assuaged. In the push and drive of the industrial world, women are handling dangerous chemicals in making flash lights, and T.N.T. for high explosive shells. The American college girl is not as yet transmuting her prowess of the athletic field into work on the anvil, as is the university woman in England, but she has demonstrated her manual strength and skill on the farm with plough and harrow.
Women and girls answer our call for messenger service, and their intelligence and courtesy are an improvement upon the manners of the young barbarians of the race. Women operate elevators, lifting us with safety to the seventh heaven, or plunging us with precision to the depths. There were those at first who refused to entrust their lives to such frail hands, and there are still some who look concerned when they see a woman at the lever; but on the whole the elevator "girl" has gained the confidence of her public, and has gained it by skill, not by feminine wiles, for even men won't shoot into space with a woman at the helm whose sole equipment is charm. With need of less skill than the elevator operator, but more patience and tact in managing human nature, the woman conductor is getting her patrons into line. We are still a little embarrassed in her presence. We try not to stare at the well-set-up woman in her sensible uniform, while she on her part tries to look unconscious, and with much dignity accomplishes the common aim much more successfully than do we. She is so attentive to her duties, so courteous, and, withal, so calm and serious that I hope she will abide with us longer than the "duration of the war."
In short, America is witnessing the beginning of a great industrial and social change, and even those who regard the situation as temporary cannot doubt that the experience will have important reactions. The development is more advanced than it was in Great Britain at a corresponding time, for even before the United States entered the conflict women were being recruited in war industries. They have opened up every line of service. There is not an occupation in which a woman is not found.
When men go a-warring, women go to work.
A distinguished general at the end of the Cuban War, enlarging upon the poet's idea of woman's weeping rôle in wartime, said in a public speech: "When the country called, women put guns in the hands of their soldier boys and bravely sent them away. After the good-byes were said there was nothing for these women to do but to go back and wait, wait, wait. The excitement of battle was not for them. It was simply a season of anxiety and heartrending inactivity." Now the fact is, when a great call to arms is sounded for the men of a nation, women enlist in the industrial army. If women did indeed sit at home and weep, the enemy would soon conquer.
The dull census tells the thrilling story. Before our Civil War women were found in less than a hundred trades, at its close in over four hundred. The census of 1860 gives two hundred and eighty-five thousand women in gainful pursuits; that of 1870, one million, eight hundred and thirty-six thousand. Of the Transvaal at war, this story was told to me by an English officer. He led a small band of soldiers down into the Boer country, on the north from Rhodesia, as far as he dared. He "did not see a man," even boys as young as fifteen had joined the army. But at the post of economic duty stood the Boer woman; she was tending the herds and carrying on all the work of the farm. She was the base of supplies. That was why the British finally put her in a concentration camp. Her man could not be beaten with her at his back.
War compels women to work. That is one of its merits. Women are forced to use body and mind, they are not, cannot be idlers. Perhaps that is the reason military nations hold sway so long; their reign continues, not because they draw strength from the conquered nation, but because their women are roused to exertion. Active mothers ensure a virile race.
The peaceful nation, if its women fall victims to the luxury which rapidly increasing wealth brings, will decay. If there come no spiritual awakening, no sense of responsibility of service, then perhaps war alone can save it. The routing of idleness and ease by compulsory labor is the good counterbalancing some of the evil.
The rapidly increasing employment of women to-day, then, is the usual, and happy, accompaniment of war. But the development has its opponents, and that is nothing new, either. Let us look them over one by one. The most mischievous objector is the person, oftenest a woman, who says the war will be short, and fundamental changes, therefore, should not be made. This agreeable prophecy does not spring from a heartening belief in victory, but only from the procrastinating attitude, "Why get ready?" To prepare for anything less certain than death seems folly to many of the sex, over-trained in patient waiting.
Then there is the official who constantly sees the seamy side of industrial life and who concludes--we can scarcely blame him--that "it would be well if women were excluded entirely from factory life." The bad condition of industrial surroundings bulks large in his mind, and the value of organized work to us mortals bulks small. We are all too inclined to forget that the need for work cannot be eliminated, but the unhealthy process in a dangerous trade can. Clean up the factory, rather than clean out the women, is a sound slogan.
And then comes the objector who is exercised as to the effect of paid work upon woman's charm. Solicitude on this score is often buried in a woman's heart. It was a woman, the owner of a large estate, who when proposing to employ women asked how many men she would have to hire in addition, "to dig, plough and do all the hard work." On learning that the college units do everything on a farm, she queried anxiously, "But how about their corsets?" To the explanation, "They don't wear any," came the regret, "What a pity to make themselves so unattractive!"
I have heard fear expressed, too, lest sex attraction be lost through work on army hats, the machinery being noisy and the operative, if she talk, running the danger of acquiring a sharp, high voice. One could but wonder if most American women work on army hats.
Among the women actually employed, I have found without exception a fine spirit of service. So many of them have a friend or brother "over there," that backing up the boys makes a strong personal appeal. But some of the women who have left factory life behind are adopting an attitude towards the present industrial situation as lacking in vision as in patriotism. Throughout a long discussion in which some of these women participated I was able to follow and get their point of view. To them a woman acting as a messenger, an elevator operator, or a trolley conductor, was anathema, and the tempting of women into these employments seemed but the latest vicious trick of the capitalist. The conductor in her becoming uniform was most reprehensible, and her evident satisfaction in her job suggested to her critics that she merely was trying to play a melodramatic part "as a war hero." In any case, the conductor's occupation was one no woman should be in, "crowded and pushed about as she is." It was puzzling to know why it was regarded as right for a woman to pay five cents and be pushed, and unbecoming for another woman to be paid eighteen dollars and ninety cents a week and run the risk of a jolt when stepping outside her barrier.
But the ideals of yesterday fail to make their appeal. It is not the psychological moment to urge, on the ground of comfort, the woman's right to protection. The contrast between the trenches and the street car or factory is too striking. But it is, however, the exact moment to plead for better care of workers, both women and men, because their health and skill are as necessary in attaining the national aim as the soldiers' prowess and well-being. It is the time to advocate the protection of the worker from long hours, because the experience of Europe has proved that a greater and better output is achieved when a short day is strictly adhered to, when the weekly half-holiday is enjoyed, and Sunday rest respected. The United States is behind other great industrial countries in legal protection for the workers. War requirements may force us to see in the health of the worker the greatest of national assets. Meantime, whether approved or not, the American woman is going over the top. Four hundred and more are busy on aeroplanes at the Curtiss works. The manager of a munition shop where to-day but fifty women are employed, is putting up a dormitory to accommodate five hundred. An index of expectation! Five thousand are employed by the Remington Arms Company at Bridgeport. At the International Arms and Fuse Company at Bloomfield, New Jersey, two thousand, eight hundred are employed. The day I visited the place, in one of the largest shops women had only just been put on the work, but it was expected that in less than a month they would be found handling all of the twelve hundred machines under that one roof alone.
The skill of the women staggers one. After a week or two they master the operations on the "turret," gauging and routing machines. The best worker on the "facing" machine is a woman. She is a piece worker, as many of the women are, and is paid at the same rate as men. This woman earned, the day I saw her, five dollars and forty cents. She tossed about the fuse parts, and played with that machine, as I would with a baby. Perhaps it was in somewhat the same spirit--she seemed to love her toy.
Most of the testers and inspectors are women. They measure the parts step by step, and weigh the completed fuse, carrying off the palm for reliability. The manager put it, "for inspection the women are more conscientious than men. They don't measure or weigh just one piece, shoving along a half-dozen untouched and let it go at that. They test each." That did not surprise me, but I was not prepared to hear that the women do not have so many accidents as men, or break the machines so often. In explanation, the manager threw over an imaginary lever with vigor sufficient to shake the factory, "Men put their whole strength on, women are more gentle and patient."
Nor are the railways neglecting to fill up gaps in their working force with women. The Pennsylvania road, it is said, has recruited some seven hundred of them. In the Erie Railroad women are not only engaged as "work classifiers" in the locomotive clerical department, but hardy Polish women are employed in the car repair shops. They move great wheels as if possessed of the strength of Hercules. And in the locomotive shops I found women working on drill-press machines with ease and skill. Just as I came up to one operator, she lifted an engine truck-box to the table and started drilling out the studs. She had been at the work only a month, and explained her skill by the information that she was Swedish, and had always worked with her husband in their auto-repair shop. All the other drill-press hands and the "shapers," too, were Americans whose husbands, old employees, were now "over there." Not one seemed to have any sense of the unusual; even the little blond check-clerk seated in her booth at the gates of the works with her brass discs about her had in a few months' time changed a revolution into an established custom. She and the discs seemed old friends. Women are adaptable.
The daily round in the Erie Railroad workshops.
The daily round in the Erie Railroad workshops.
The daily round in the Erie Railroad workshops.
But everywhere I gathered the impression that the men are a bit uneasy. A foreman in one factory pointed out a man who "would not have voted for suffrage" had he guessed that women were "to rush in and gobble everything up." I tried to make him see that it wasn't the vote that gave the voracious appetite, but necessity or desire to serve. And in any case, women do not push men out, they push them up. In not a single instance did I hear of a man being turned off to make a place for a woman. He had left his job to go into the army, or was advanced to heavier or more skilled work.
As to how many women have supplanted men, or poured into the new war industries, no figures are available. One guess has put it at a million. But that is merely a guess. I have seen them by the tens, the hundreds, the thousands. The number is large and rapidly increasing. We may know that something important is happening when even the government takes note. The United States Labor Department has recognized the new-comers by establishing a Division of Women's Work with branches in every State. It looks as if these bureaus of employment would not be idle, with a showing of one thousand, five hundred applicants the first week the New York office was opened. It is to be hoped that this government effort will save the round pegs from getting into the square holes.
But even the round peg in the round hole brings difficulties. When Adam Smith asserted that of all sorts of luggage man was the most difficult to move, he forgot woman! The instant women are carried into a new industry, they bring with them puzzling problems. Where shall we put their coats and picture hats, how shall we cover up their hair, what shall we feed them with? They must have lockers and rest rooms, caps and overalls, and above all, canteens. The munition workers, the conductors, in fact, all women in active work, get prodigiously hungry. They have made a regiment of dietitians think about calories. Here is what one of the street railways in New York City offered them on a given day:--
Tomato soup 10c. or with an order 5c.Roast leg of veal 16c.Beef 16c.Lamb fricassee 16c.Ham steak 16c.Liver and onions 16c.Sirloin steak 30c.Small steak 20c.Ham and eggs 20c.Ham omelet 20c.Regular dinnerSoup, meat,Vegetable,Dessert, coffee 25c.Rice pudding 5c.Pie 5c.Cake 5c.Banana or orange 5c.
The canteen is open every hour of the twenty-four, and the women conductors at the end of each run usually take a bite, and then have a substantial meal during the long break of an hour and a half in the middle of the ten-hour day.
Another problem brought to us by women in industry is, how can we house them? The war industries have drawn large numbers to new centers. The haphazard accommodation which men win put up with, won't satisfy women. They demand more, and get more. To attract the best type of women the munition plants are putting up dormitories to accommodate hundreds of workers, and are making their plants more attractive, with rest rooms and hospital accommodation. Take, for instance, the Briggs and Stratton Company, which in order to draw high grade workers built its new factory in one of the best sections of Milwaukee. The workrooms are as clean as the proverbial Dutch woman's doorstep. From the top of the benches to the ceiling the walls are glass to ensure daylight in every corner, and by night the system of indirect lighting gives such perfectly diffused light that not a heavy shadow falls anywhere. And the hospital room and nurse--well, one would rejoice to have an accident daily!
The factory may become the exemplar for the home. The professional woman is going over the top, and with a good opinion of herself. "I can do this work better than any man," was the announcement made by a young woman from the Pacific Coast as she descended upon the city hall in an eastern town, credentials in her hand, and asked for the position of city chemist. There was not a microbe she did not know to its undoing, or a deadly poison she could not bring from its hiding place. The town had suffered from graft, and the mayor, thinking a woman might scare the thieves as well as the bacteria, appointed the chemist who believed in herself. And she is just one of many who have been taking up such work.
Formerly two-thirds of the positions filled by the New York Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations were secretarial or teaching positions; now three-fourths of its applicants have been placed as physicists, chemists, office managers, sanitary experts, exhibit secretaries, and the like. The temporary positions used to outnumber the permanent placements; at present the reverse is true. Of the women placed, four times as many as formerly get salaries ranging above eighteen hundred dollars a year.
The story told at the employment bureaus in connection with professional societies and clubs such as the Chemists' Club is the same. Women are being placed not merely as teachers of chemistry or as routine laboratory workers in hospitals, but also as experimental and control chemists in industrial plants. In the great rolling mills they are testing steel, at the copper smelters they are found in the laboratories. The government has thrown doors wide open to college-trained women. They are physicists and chemists in the United States Bureaus of Standards, Mines, and Soils, sanitary experts in military camps, research chemists in animal nutrition and fertilizers at state experiment stations.
But the industrial barrier is the one most recently scaled. Women are now found as analytical, research or control chemists in the canneries, in dye and electrical works, in flour and paper mills, in insecticide companies, and cement works. They test the steel that will carry us safely on our journeys, they pass upon the chemical composition of the flavor in our cake, as heads of departments in metal refining companies they determine the kind of copper battery we shall use, and they have a finger in our liquid glues, household oils and polishes.
And the awakened spirit of social responsibility has opened new callings. The college woman not only is beginning to fill welfare positions inside the factory, but is acting as protective officer in towns near military camps. Perhaps one of the newest and most interesting positions is that of "employment secretary." The losing of employees has become so serious and general that big industries have engaged women who devote their time to looking up absentees and finding out why each worker left.
And so we see on all hands women breaking through the old accustomed bounds.
Not only as workers but as voters, the war has called women over the top. Since that fateful August, 1914, four provinces of Canada and the Dominion itself have raised the banner of votes for women. Nevada and Montana declared for suffrage before the war was four months old, and Denmark enfranchised its women before the year was out. And when America went forth to fight for democracy abroad, Arkansas, Michigan, Vermont, Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, began to lay the foundations of freedom at home, and New York in no faltering voice proclaimed full liberty for all its people. Lastly Great Britain has enfranchised its women, and surely the Congress of the United States will not lag behind the Mother of Parliaments!
The world is facing changes as great as the breaking up of the feudal system. Causes as fundamental, more wide-spread, and more cataclysmic are at work than at the end of the Middle Ages. Among the changes none is more marked than the intensified development in what one may call, for lack of a better term, the woman movement. The advance in political freedom has moved steadily forward during the past quarter of a century, but in the last three years progress has been intense and striking.
The peculiarity in attainment of political democracy for women has lain in the fact that while for men economic freedom invariably preceded political enfranchisement, in the case of women the conferring of the vote in no single case was related to the stage which the enfranchised group had attained in the matter of economic independence. Nowhere were even those women who were entirely lacking in economic freedom, excluded on that account from any extension of suffrage. Even in discussions of the right of suffrage no reference has ever been made, in dealing with women's claim, to the relation, universally recognized in the case of men, of political enfranchisement to economic status. Serfdom gave way to the wage system before democracy developed for men, and the colored man was emancipated before he was enfranchised. For this reason the coming of women as paid workers over the top may be regarded as epoch-making.
In any case, self-determination is certainly a strong element in attaining any real political freedom.
Complete service to their country in this crisis may lead women to that economic freedom which will change a political possession into a political power. But the requirement is readiness to do, and to do well, the task which offers. Man-power must give itself unreservedly at the front. Women must show not only eagerness but fitness to substitute for man-power. It will hearten the nation, help to make the path clear, if individual women declare that though the call to them has not yet come for a definite service, the time of waiting will not be spent in complaint, nor yet in foolish busy-ness, but in careful and conscientious training for useful work.
Each woman must prepare so that when the nation's need arises, she can stand at salute and say, "Here is your servant, trained and ready." Women are not driven over the top. Through self-discipline, they go over it of their own accord.
No woman is a cross between an angel and a goose. She is a very human creature. She has many of man's sins and some virtues of her own.
Moving up from slavery through all the various forms of serfdom--attachment to the soil, confinement to a given trade, exclusion from citizenship, payment in kind, on to full economic freedom, men have shown definite reactions at each step. Women respond to the same stimuli.
The free man is a better worker than slave or serf. So is the free woman. All the old gibes at her ineptitudes have broken their points against the actualities of her ability as a wage worker. The free man is more alert to obligation, more conscientious in performance, than the bond servant. So is the free woman. With pay envelope, or pension, Eve is a better helpmate and mother than ever before.
The free man carries a lighter heart than the villain. So does the free woman. Men have always borne personal grief more easily than women; observers remarked the fact. The reason is the same. An absorbing occupation, ordered and regarded as important, which brings a return allowing the recipient to patronize what he or she thinks wise, that brings happiness, not boisterous, but dignified. It may be a holocaust through which Eve gains that pay envelope, but the material possession brings gratification nevertheless. It is a tiny straw showing the set of the wind that leisure class British women, however large their unearned bank account, show no reluctance to accept pay for their work, and full responsibility in their new position of employee.
Women are supposed to have liked to serve for mere love of service, for love of child, love of husband. There is, of course, many a subtle relation which can't be weighed and paid for; but toil, even for one's very own hearthstone, can be valued in hard cash. The daughters of Eve, no less than the sons of Adam, react happily to a recognition that expresses itself in a fair wage.
The verdict comes from all sides that women were never more content. Of course they are content. The weight of suppression is being lifted. For many their drudgery is for the first time paid for. Is not that invigorating? The pay envelope is equal to that of men. Is not that a new experience giving self-respect? Eve often finds her pay envelope heavier than that of the man working at her side. Right there in her hand, then, she holds proof that the old prejudice against her as an inferior worker is ill-founded.
Women are finding themselves. Even America's Eve discovers that pains and aches are not "woman's lot." She is under no curse in the twentieth century. With eighteen dollars a week for ringing up fares, and a possible thirty-five for "facing" fuse-parts, nothing can persuade her to be poor-spirited. She radiates the atmosphere, "I am needed!" Doors fly open to her. She is welcome everywhere. No one seems to be able to get too many of her kind. Politicians compete for her favor, employers quarrel over her. It makes her breathe deep to have the Secretary of the Navy summon her to the United States arsenals, pay her for her work, and call her a patriot.
In the well-lighted factory of the Briggs and Stratton Company, Milwaukee, the girls are comfortably and becomingly garbed for work.
In the well-lighted factory of the Briggs and Stratton Company, Milwaukee, the girls are comfortably and becomingly garbed for work.
In the well-lighted factory of the Briggs and Stratton Company, Milwaukee, the girls are comfortably and becomingly garbed for work.
And with the pay envelope women remain clearly human. Their purchases often reflect past denials, rather than present needs or even tastes. When set free one always buys what the days of dependence deprived one of. One of Boston's leading merchants told me that Selfridge in London was selling more jaunty ready-to-wear dresses than ever before. It was part of John Bull's discipline in ante-bellum dependent days to keep his women folk dowdy. The Lancashire lass with head shawl and pattens, the wearer of the universal sailor hat, in these days of independence and pounds, shillings and pence, are taking note of the shop windows. And John is not turning his eyes away from his women folk in their day of self-determination.
But it is not to be concluded that it is all beer and skittles for Eve. With a pay envelope and a vote come responsibilities. Public sympathy has backed up laws cutting down long hours of work for women. The trade unions, with a thought to possible competitors, have favored protecting them from night work. Has Eve been a bit spoiled? Has she let herself too easily be classed with children and allowed a line to be drawn between men and women in industry? Is it a bit of woman's proverbial logic to demand special protection, and at the same time insist upon "equal pay for equal work"?
The hopelessness of attaining the promise of the slogan is well illustrated in the case of a gray haired woman I once met in a London printing shop. In her early days she had been one of the women taken on by the famous printing firm of McCorquodale. That was before protective legislation applied to women. She became a highly skilled printer, earning more than any man in the shop. When there was pressure of work she was always one of the group of experts chosen to carry through the rush order. That meant on occasion overtime or night work. Then she went on to tell me how her skill was checked in her very prime. Regulations as to women's labor were gradually fixed in the law. All the printers in the shop, she said, favored the laws limiting her freedom but not theirs. Soon her wages reflected the contrast. Her employer called her to his office one day and explained, "I cannot afford to pay you as much as the men any longer. You are not worth as much to me, not being able to work Saturday afternoon, at night, or overtime." She was put on lower grade work and her pay envelope grew slight.
This woman was not discussing the value of shorter working hours, she was pointing out that "equal pay" cannot rule for an entire group of workers when restrictions apply to part of the group and not to the whole body. We meet here, not a theory, but an incontrovertible fact. Pay is not equal, and cannot be, where conditions are wholly unequal. Protection for the woman worker means exactly what it would mean for the alien man if by law he were forbidden to work Saturday afternoon, overtime or at night, while the citizen worker was without restriction. The alien would be cut off from advancement in every trade in which he did not by overwhelming numbers dominate the situation, he would be kept to lower grade processes, he would receive much lower pay than the unprotected worker.
What common sense would lead us to expect in the hypothetical case of an alien man, has happened for the woman worker. Oddly enough she has not herself asked for this protection, but it has been urged very largely by women not of the industrial class. Women teachers, doctors, lawyers, women of leisure are the advocates of special legislation for industrial women. And yet in their own case they are entirely reasonable, and ask no favors. The woman teacher, and quite truly, insists that she works as hard and as long hours as the man in her grade of service, and on that sound foundation she builds her just demand for equal pay. Women doctors and lawyers have never asked for other than a square deal in their professions.
It would be well, perhaps, if industrial women were permitted to guide their own ship. They have knowledge enough to reach a safe harbor. There was a hint that they were about to assume the helm when the rank and file of union workers voted down at the conference of the Women's Trade Union League the resolution proposing a law to forbid women acting as conductors. It was also suggestive when a woman rose and asked of the speaker on dangerous trades, whether "men did not suffer from exposure to fumes, acids and dust."
Women have so long been urging that they are people, that they have forgotten, perchance, that men are people also. Men respond to rest and recreation as do human beings of the opposite sex. All workers need, and both sexes should have, protection. But if only one sex in industrial life can have bulwarks thrown up about it, men should be the favored ones just now. They are few, they are precious, they should be wrapped in cotton wool.
The industrial woman should stand unqualifiedly for the exclusion of children from gainful pursuits. Many years ago the British government had Miss Collett, one of the Labor Correspondents of the Board of Trade, make a special study of the influence of the employment of married women on infant mortality. The object was to prove that there was direct cause and effect. The investigator, after an exhaustive study covering many industrial centers, brought back the report, "Not proven." But the statistics showed one most interesting relation. In districts where the prevailing custom permitted the employment of children as early as the law allowed, infant mortality was high, and in districts where few children were employed, infant mortality was low. No explanation of this striking revelation was made in the report, but many who commented on the tables, pointed out that the wide-spread employment of the population in its early years sapped the vitality of the community to such an extent that its offspring were weakened. In other words, the employment of the immature child, more than the employment of that child when grown and married, works harm to the race.
The woman with a pay envelope must not, then, be willing to swell the family budget by turning her children into the wage market. For if she does, she creates a dangerous competitor for herself, and puts in certain jeopardy the virility of her nation. But in this war time women have secured more than new and larger pay envelopes, for each belligerent has reckoned up the woman's worth as mother in coin of the realm. It is enough to turn Eve's head--pay and pensions accorded her all at once.
Allowances to dependents are more, however, than financial expedients. They are part of the psychological stage-setting of the Great War. The fighting man must be more than well-fed, well-clothed, well-equipped, more than assured of care if ill or wounded; he must have his mind undisturbed by conditions at home. Governments now know that there must be no just cause for complaint in the family at the rear, if the man at the front is to be fully effective. In the interest of the fighting line, governments dare not leave the home to the haphazard care of charity.
And so the great belligerents have adopted systems for an uninterrupted flow of money aid to the hearthstone. The wife feels dependence on the nation for which she and her man are making sacrifices, the soldier has a sense of closer relationship with the country's cause for which he fights. Content at home and sense of gratitude in the trenches build up loyalty everywhere. The state allowance answers an economic want and a psychological necessity.
It is part of our national lack of technique that we were slow to make provision for the dependents of enlisted men, and even then were not whole hearted. It may have been our inherited distrust of the conscript that led us to feel that only by his volunteering something will a precious antidote be administered to the spirit of the drafted man. To protect his individualism from taint, the United States soldier must bear part of the financial burden. Europe, on the other hand, is working on a basis of reciprocity. The nation exacts service from the man and gives complete service to his dependents. In America the man is bound to serve the community, but the community is not bound to serve him. And yet in our case there is peculiar need of this even exchange of obligations. The care of parents in the United States falls directly upon their children, while some of our allies had, even before the war, carefully devised laws regulating pensions to the aged.
But first let us get the simple skeleton of the various allowance laws in mind. The scale of the allowance in different countries adapts itself to national standards and varying cost of living. The Canadian allowance seems the most generous. At least one-half of the soldier's pay is given directly to his dependents. The government gives an additional twenty dollars and the donations of the Patriotic Fund bring up the monthly allowance of a wife with three children to sixty dollars. The allowance, as might be expected, is low in Italy. The soldier's wife gets eight-tenths of a lira a day, each child four-tenths lira, and either a father or mother alone eight-tenths lira, or if both are living, one and three-tenths lire together. The British allowance is much higher, the wife getting twelve shillings and sixpence a week. If she has one child, the weekly allowance rises to nineteen and sixpence; if two children, to twenty-four and sixpence; if three, to twenty-eight shillings; and if there are four or more children, the mother receives three shillings a week for each extra child.
Between the extremes of Italy and England stands France, the wife receiving one franc twenty-five centimes a day, each child under sixteen years of age twenty-five centimes, and a dependent parent seventy-five centimes. Japan grants no government allowance. A Japanese official, in response to my inquiry, wrote, "Relations the first and friends the next try to help the dependents as far as possible, but if they have neither relatives nor friends who have sufficient means to help them, then the association consisting of ladies or the municipal officials afford subvention to them."
Under the law passed by Congress in October, 1917, an American private receiving thirty-three dollars a month when on service abroad must allot fifteen dollars a month to his wife, and the government adds to this twenty-five dollars, and if there is one child, an additional ten dollars, with five dollars for each additional child. A man can secure an allowance from the government of ten dollars a month to a dependent parent, if he allots five dollars a month. Such are the bare bones of the allowance schemes of the Allies on the western front
In the United States the general policy of exemption boards, as suggested by the central authorities, is most disciplinary as regards women. Their capacity for self-support is rigidly inquired into. Our men are definitely urging women to a position of economic independence. The aim is, while securing soldiers for the army, to relieve the government of the expense of dependency on the part of women. There is no doubt that our men at least are faced toward the future. No less indicative is it of a new world that the allowance laws of all the western belligerents recognize common-law marriages. In our own law, marriage is "presumed if the man and woman have lived together in the openly acknowledged relation of husband and wife during two years immediately preceding the date of the declaration of war." And the illegitimate child stands equal with the legitimate provided the father acknowledges the child or has been "judicially ordered or decreed to contribute" to the child's support.
Men are feminists. Their hearts have softened even towards the wife's relatives, for the word "parent" is not only broad enough to cover the father, mother, grandparents or step-father and mother of the man, but "of the spouse" also. Thus passeth the curse of the mother-in-law.
One need not be endowed with the spirit of prophecy to foretell that "allowances" in war time will broaden out into motherhood pensions in peace times. It would be an ordinary human reaction should the woman enjoying a pension refuse to give up, on the day peace is declared, her quickly acquired habit of holding the purse strings. That would be accepting international calm at the expense of domestic differences. The social value of encouraging the mother's natural feeling of responsibility toward her child by putting into her hands a state pension is being, let us note, widely tested, and may demonstrate the wisdom and economy of devoting public funds to mothers rather than to crêches and juvenile asylums.
The allowance laws may prove the charter of woman's liberties; her pay envelope may become her contract securing the right of self-determination.
"Employ them." This was the advice given to a large conference of women met to discuss business opportunities for their sex. The advice was vouchsafed by a young lawyer after the problem of opening wider fields to women in the legal profession had been looked at from every angle, only to end in the question, "What can we do to increase their practice?" She spoke with animation, as if she had found the key to the situation, "Employ them." Perhaps more self-accusation than determination to mend their ways was roused by the short and pointed remark.
The advice has wider application. Taking thirty names of women at random, I learned in response to an inquiry that only four had women physicians, two had women lawyers, and only one, a woman dentist. Twenty-five women of large real estate holdings had never even for the most unimportant work secured the services of an architect of their own sex. Further inquiry brought out the fact that of a long list of women's clubs and associations which have built or altered property for their purposes, only one had engaged a woman architect.
Perhaps it is indicative of a lack of nothing more serious than a sense of humor, that we women unite and, apparently without embarrassment, demand that masculine presidents, governors, mayors and legislatures shall appoint women to office. This unabashed faith in the good will of men seems not misplaced, for not only do public men show some confidence in the official capacity of women, but to my inquiry as to whom was due their opportunities to "get on," business women invariably replied, "To men."
However, the loyalty of women to women is increasing, and their solidarity on sound lines of service is a thing of steady growth. Thoughtful women, for instance, do not wish a woman put in a position of responsibility simply because she is a woman, but they are even more opposed to having a candidate of peculiar fitness overlooked merely because she is not a man. While the conscientious and poised women are not willing to urge any and every woman for a given office, they do tenaciously hold that there are positions which cry aloud for women and for which the right women should he found. In conquering a fair field, women will have to pool their brains even more effectively than they have in the past.
Our efforts at combination are a mere mushroom growth compared with the generations of training our big brothers have had in pooling brains. War and the chase gave them their first lessons in cooperation, nor has war been a bad teacher for women.
Just as the Crimean War and our Civil War put Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton and the trained nurse on the map, this war is bringing the medical woman to the fore. Women surgeons and doctors, unlike many other groups, offer themselves fully trained for service. They know they have something to give, and they know the soldiers' need.
According to an official statement, the emergency call of the army for men physicians and surgeons fell two thousand short of being answered. The necessity of the soldier and the skill of the women will no doubt in the end be brought effectively together; for although the government of the United States, like Great Britain in the early days of the war, has left to ever farseeing France the honor of extending hospitality to American women doctors, their strong national organization, with a membership of four thousand, will in time, no doubt, persuade Uncle Sam to take his plucky women doctors over the top under the Stars and Stripes! Organization crystallized about an unselfish desire and skilled ability to serve is irresistible.
The pooling of the brains of women that has been going on on a country-wide scale for more than a half-century bears analyzing. These associations have almost invariably centered about a service to be rendered. Even the first petition for political enfranchisement urged it as the "duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the elective franchise." Unselfishness draws numbers as a magnet draws steel filings. The spirit of service lying at the heart of the great national organizations made possible quick response to new duties immediately upon our entrance into the war. The suffragists said, We wish to serve and we are ready for service. The government used their wide-spread net of local centers for purposes of registrations and war appeals.
Naturally there were many efforts more foolish than effective in the universal rush to help. America was not peculiar in this, nor for the matter of that, were women. War!--it does make the blood course through the veins. Every generous citizen cries aloud, "What can I do?" Perhaps men are a little more voluble than women, their emotions not finding such immediate and approved vent along clicking needles and tangled skeins of wool. On the whole, the initiative and organizing ability of women has stood out supremely.
Of the two departments of the Red Cross which are still left in the command of women, the Bureau of Nursing, with Miss Delano at its head, mobilized immediately three thousand of the fourteen thousand nurses enrolled. The first Red Cross Medical Unit with its full quota of sixty-five nurses completely equipped stood on European soil before an American soldier was there. Of the forty-nine units ready for service, twelve, with from sixty-five to one hundred nurses each, are now in France. Two of the five units organized for the navy, each with its forty active nurses and twenty reserves, are established abroad, and two hundred and thirty nurses are already in active naval service here. Miss Delano holds constantly in reserve fifteen hundred nurses as emergency detachments, a reservoir from which some eight hundred have been drawn for cantonment hospitals. An inflow of nearly one thousand nurses each month keeps the reservoir ready to meet the drain.
The Chapter work-rooms sprang up at a call in the night. No one can help admiring their well-ordered functioning. There may be criticism, grumbling, but the work-room is moving irresistibly, like a well-oiled machine. And women are the motive power from start to finish. The Chapters, with their five million members joined in three thousand units over the United States, are so many monuments to the ability of women for detail. Once mobilized, the women have thus far been able to serve two thousand war hospitals with surgical dressings, and to send abroad thirteen million separate articles packed carefully, boxed, labelled and accounted for on their books.
Not only does this directing of manual work stand to the credit of the Chapters, but they have given courses of lectures in home nursing and dietetics to thirty-four thousand women, and in first aid; ten thousand classes have been held and seventy-five thousand certificates issued to the proficient. Certainly one object of the Red Cross, "to stimulate the volunteer work of women," has been accomplished.
It is difficult to understand why, with such examples of women's efficiency before it, the Red Cross, founded by Clara Barton, places merely two bureaus in the hands of a woman, has chosen no woman as an officer, has put but one woman on its central and executive committee, and not a single woman on its present controlling body, the War Council. It may be that the protest against the centralization of all volunteer effort in the Red Cross, in spite of President Wilson's appeal, was due to the fact that women feared that their energies, running to other lines than nursing and surgical dressings, would be entirely sidetracked.
The honor of the splendid war work of the Young Women's Christian Association belongs to women. The War Work Council of the National Board of Young Women's Christian Associations shows an example of how immediately efficient an established organization can be in an emergency. As one sees its great War Fund roll up, one exclaims, "What money raisers women are!" The immediate demands upon the fund are for Hostess Houses at cantonments where soldiers can meet their women visitors, dormitories providing emergency housing for women employees at certain army centers, the strengthening of club work among the younger girls of the nation, profoundly affected by war conditions, and the sending of experienced organizers to coöperate with the women leaders of France and Russia and to install nurses' huts at the base hospitals of France. It makes one's heart beat high to think of women spending millions splendidly, they who have always been told to save pennies frugally! Well, those hard days were times of training; women learned not to waste.
A very worthy pooling of brains, because springing up with no tradition behind it, was the National League for Woman's Service. In six months it drew to itself two hundred thousand members and built organizations in thirty-nine States, established classes to train women for the new work opening to them, opened recreation centers and canteens at which were entertained on a single Sunday, at one center, eighteen hundred soldiers and sailors. So excellent was its Bureau of Registration and Information for women workers that the United States Department of Labor took over not only the files and methods of the Woman's League for Service, but the entire staff with Miss Obenauer at its head. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, what shall we say of complete adoption of work and workers, with an honorable "by your leave" and outspoken praise! And nothing could show a finer spirit of service than this yielding up of work initiated by a civil society and the willing passing of it into government hands.
Not only the Labor Department has established a special women's division with a woman at its head, but the Ordnance Office of the War Department has opened in its Industrial Service Section a woman's division, putting Miss Mary Van Kleeck in charge.
But still our government lags behind our Allies in mobilizing woman's power of initiative and her organizing faculty. The Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, appointed soon after the outbreak of war, still has no administrative power. As one member of the Committee says, "We are not allowed to do anything without the consent of the Council of National Defense. There is no appropriation for the Woman's Committee. We are furnished with headquarters, stationery, some printing and two stenographers, but nothing more. It is essential that we raise money to carry on the other expenses. The great trouble is that now, as always, men want women to do the work while they do the overseeing."