Not for her long ages of devoted duty to the nation's sick and helpless, for rearing and safeguarding its priceless infant and child-life, for administering its homes—fashioning, cleansing, beautifying, contriving, making the utmost of its means and ends—Not for her inestimable services as man's good comrade and wise counseller, his love and friend and faithful help, in sorrow, evil and adversity; not even for her age-long, arduous labours and achievements in Religion, Charity, Reform. For none of these, her great intrinsic and eternal ministries to Life and to Humanity, has man now set her by him in the Van of Things.
But for filling shells and felling trees, for turning lathes and driving motors, ploughing fields and lighting street-lamps—all valuable duties, it is true, in the crisis we have passed through, and indispensable to carrying on the nation's business. Yet what a drop from the supreme and tender to the trite and banal, from the vital and essential to the merely incidental, is seen in this belated recompense.
Not woman, Generatrix of Humanity and inspiration of all that is fairest in Humanity, has been now honoured—but woman the bus-conductor, ticket-clipper, clerk and agricultural labourer, woman in breeches and workman's overall, woman whom German frightfulness had dislocated for a space from her high lot and labours; twisting her powers awry to fit a hideous revulsion of barbarism.
How, if the gods ever laugh at the fantastic tricks of poor mankind, they must now have laughed (or wept) over the opportunity that one sex had—and forfeited—to requite the other's finest merit.
How deeply-moving and far-reaching in its impulse and its inspiration would have been the tribute, had it been made in reverent gratitude to the mothers-of-men who had saved the world by mothering the men who saved the Empire—For achievement stamped with the high and unique quality of service that woman alone could have rendered. And not because, when tested by men's standards, she proved herself a worthy second-best in doing things that men have always done.
The gods must long have wept, I think, that men had thought so lightly of the women living every day beside them, surrendering their lives and powers, their interests, desires and individuation; toiling over cooking-pans and wash-tubs, tied for years to children's cots, for life to some or another person's sick-bed; smothering talents, impulse, hopes, impatiences, to find the soft and simple word; solacing, inspiring, making-believe above an aching spirit and a breaking heart that all was fair and well with the world. And, moreover, in every generation making these beautiful fictions ever a fraction more truth and less fiction. For the gods alone know how that kindlier, purer and more tender Home-environment which women have created in men's stony-hearted cities involves the most laborious, heart-wearing, complex and widest exercise of faculty of any human task.
Women themselves had long been tiring of it; stung to the soul and mortified by centuries of man's ingratitude—when not contempt. Nevertheless, where love and duty did not, chains of custom and tradition bound them faithful to their oars.
Till German Frightfulness releasing them, the cry is now:
Since you can do something better and more profitable than merely to row the old Galley of Life—since you can do men's work, forsooth, come out into the market-place and help us pay our big War-Bill!
And yet—Whither will drift the Galley of Life when its rowers put their strength elsewhere?