A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

After all, this claim to national service is no more than was advanced in the old days when access to the heads of the Government was barred and the hooligans of a great city were allowed to give full rein to their impulses. Then our rulers thought they could dispense with women, to-day we are recognised as indispensable. That is all, but it is very much, and it sets me the question that is the title of this brief paper—What has woman lost and what has woman gained?

She has lost much that was dearest to her, much that life is powerless to replace. All the springs of her being have nourished the love that she has given to her dear ones, to the man who was her choice, to the son who fed upon her life. In many cases she has lived almost entirely in her children, for the ties that bind her to the active pleasures of life grow weak in conflict with the powers of maternity. She has forgotten the brief years in which she lived for herself and savoured all the sweets of existence, she has lived in her children, happy chiefly in their happiness, ambitious only for their future and concerned with the struggle for the freedom of her sex less on account of her own generation than on account of that which is to follow. It is woman's rôle to give, it is man's rôle to take, and custom has staled for him the infinite variety of his taking. And now he has taken so much that made life worth living that she seeks an anodyne for her grief in giving him all that is left to give, the labour of her hands.

This is not only true of the women of England, it applies equally to the women of every belligerent country, friend and foe alike, and it may be said that between the women of the world there is a common sacrifice and a common sympathy. All have suffered, all must continue to suffer, on a scale that this old world of ours, with all its crimes and tragedies beyond number and beyond belief, cannot parallel. It is this truth that steadies our nerves and strengthens our hearts and sets us looking, past the ultimate sacrifice, to what may lie beyond, not for ourselves but for others.

All that we have has been taken or is being demanded of us. Is there in all the world something to which we may look forward with confidence, something that may justify hope? I think there is. Without any sense of pride we may claim that woman has at least vindicated the claims she advanced in those peaceful days that seemingly lie so far behind us. She claimed that she was worthy to play her part in the conduct of national life, that she was in very truth indispensable to it; she was told, by brutal word or brutal deed, that her ambitions outran her capacities. One year of war has given the lie to this assertion. Woman, even before the coming of compulsion, encouraged her dearest to go, if needs be, to their death, in a war for which she has no shadow of responsibility before God or man. Conventions, agreements, treaties, alliances, in all these things she has no share, but as soon as they materialise in war she must pay the heaviest price.

The excitement and glory of a struggle in which the fighter feels that he has surrendered his life to high causes is not for her, she must be content with the pale reflex or with the tragedy. In her heart she may know that man incurs the penalties of his ambitions or bad diplomacy or unpreparedness for upheaval; but those penalties press heavier on women than on men, for, even granting that the love of husband for wife and wife for husband be equal, yet the passion of a mother for her child and her grief when he is snatched from life in the hours when life is unfolding all its possibilities, is something beyond the strength of man to grasp.

But woman has not failed on account of her griefs, she has strangled them—or she has tried to with all the strength that has been given to her—and she has gone out into the market-place and said, "What more do you require of me? Ask and I will give, direct and I will obey." Hers has been the supreme sacrifice, and now at the moment when all that seemed worth striving for had passed, she sees suddenly a fresh horizon, the Pisgah view of the Promised Land.

She realises that man is at last beginning to understand and even to acknowledge her place in the world, that the future cannot repeat the errors of the past, that the day-dawn of her emancipation is visible. This war, reconciling so many differences, rebuking so much pride and bringing so many men and women face to face for the first time in their life with life's actualities, has united all workers, irrespective of class or sex. It is seen now that woman has a part to play in the conduct of the State, and that there are spheres of activity in which women might and must work for the common good. She and man together must build up a new civilisation out of the wrecks of the old one, not only here but throughout the strife-stricken world. Old barriers, time-worn prejudices, a blind conservatism—what part have these in the mental attitude of nations freed from overwhelming peril?

The soul of my sex would be as desolate to-day as the ruined cities of Belgium, Poland, and Servia, were it not for the certain knowledge that our sacrifice has not been made in vain. We have the right to hope that our share in the work of the world is to be acknowledged at last, and that the spheres of our activity are to be widened. In this way, and only thus, we shall be able, in years that have yet to be, to influence thought and to influence action, to bring a humanizing note into the great chord of life. We shall strive through the sisterhood of women towards the brotherhood of man, and we shall be working among those who will be able to see for themselves what one-sided rule and one-sided domination have done for progress and civilisation after their slow ascent to a position that at best left so much to be desired.

The women of my generation will sow where they may not hope to reap, but there is nothing new for woman in this experience. It is her mission in this world to sacrifice herself, from the hour when she accepts motherhood until the end. Her happiness is derived from the contemplation of the happiness of others, she lives in the new lives with which she renews the world. She will leave contentedly to others the prizes for which she laboured in years of peace and suffered through the season of war. It will be sufficient for her dimly to foresee the time when those who have replaced her will give birth to sons with no more pangs than Nature demands, and give birth to daughters in the belief that they will not be widowed or fatherless or childless through catastrophes of man's own making.