The greatest care should have been exercised to have selected the strong and able-bodied, the older women and the women of the characteristic worker-type (corresponding to the sterile female-worker of the bee-hive), for the rougher and the more exhausting tasks. The young wives and mothers and the young girls should have been rigorously excluded from such.
Of all human prerogatives, the greatest is that of being preserved, by class, by ability, by means, or by privilege, from gravitating to levels of work that coarsen and debase; or that, at all events, do not exercise and foster the development of higher tastes and faculty. And this human privilege is, in proportion to their degrees of civilisation, accorded to women by all civilised peoples. As men have stood between them and the perils of battle and shipwreck, the slaying of wild beasts, pioneering, exploring, and the like, so they have stood between them and the coarsest, ugliest, and most debasing industrial functions.
Nevertheless, Feminist anger at restriction whatsoever in the matter of employment ignores all cause for gratitude on the part of the sex, that, being at man's mercy as she is, civilised woman is no longer (as the woman of inferior civilisations is still) a beast of heavy burden. Far otherwise, indeed, Feminism aims at nothing so much as to repudiate her established privileges, abolish all distinctions, and to make woman once again that beast of burden the chivalry of man—at first instinctive, later magnanimous—has progressively rescued her from being.
And yet the degree to which sex is defined in Labour (as in Life) is at the same time the gauge and the cause of human development. Wheresoever are found low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress, there the women are employed in men's work. Wheresoever women are employed in men's work, there are low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress.
"Thank Heaven for the War!" Feminists have said, however, "because it has enabled our sex to prove its worth—by enabling us to quit ourselves like men. The world knows now that women can conduct omnibuses, drive ploughs, clean stables, kill chickens, ring and slaughter pigs, quite as well as men can."
It is as painful as it is amazing to find intelligent and cultured persons so blinded by the obsessions of their creed as to suppose that in ploughing and hoeing and making munitions, women are doing finer and more valuable work than they had been doing previously; that the woman bus-conductor is a more important person than the children's nurse; that to drive a cab or clean a boiler is a nobler occupation than the teaching of music or the cleansing of clothes; that to spread manure is more dignifying than to make beds; to amputate the limbs of wounded soldiers is superior to the subtler, far more difficult art of medically treating the complex ills of women and children.
That these other employments have been demanded by the times, is undeniable; as, too, that honour and credit are due to those who well and capably responded to the exigencies of the hour. But this does not, in the least degree, lessen the illogic of the claim that such response to the cruder and less-civilised demands of War proved woman's value more than did the devotion and efficiency she was previously showing in the far more complex and progressive arts of Peace. The main value of her War-work was that it fitted the times. But the times have been woefully out of joint!
III