A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,

Making not reservation of yourselves,

Still your own foes, deliver you as most

Abated captives to some nation

That won you without blows."

If these lines are really as appropriate as they seem to me, it is because the women of the civilised world and the more leisured section of it are on their trial. There is going to be an unimagined shortage among the best elements of the most highly civilised population, a shortage due in part to the fashion in which responsible women have neglected their duties hitherto. If the pleasure lovers decline their share of child-bearing on the ground that it robs them of long periods of amusement, and if the finest type of women workers refuse on the other grounds raised earlier in this paper, what will be the result? There will be a sharp social cleavage, the few clever exploiters will enchain the unfit who are produced so rapidly, we shall develop a small class that governs and a large class that is ruled, all progress will come to an end, while the conditions obtaining when the industrial era was opened by steam power will be revived with all the attendant horrors in some new and unsuspected guise.

It is well to remember how, following the first trumpet call of war, our hard-won liberties were stripped from us. Some of my American friends say it is because our free institutions were not very deeply rooted, but I am well convinced that if the United States were involved, the results would be much the same. War always dethrones Liberty, and the nation that can set her up again when peace is restored may be congratulated. As a rule the struggle has to begin all over again, for the State advances claims that are incompatible with any kind of freedom that is worth having. Only the will of the people can gain liberty, and to make that will sufficiently strong and effective it must be expressed by the best human material, the children of the best types. So it seems to me that race suicide, evil at all times, becomes in seasons like this an act of treason, not only to the nation but to civilisation and all those ideals upon which civilisation waits.

In the town to which I referred on the first page of this paper, the women who deliberately discarded motherhood might between them have raised a strong company to fight for the rights of the next generation. They were shocked to consider the travail that brought them beyond the reach of want, had they lost sympathy with those who succumbed by the way? Is not the fate of these last the more tragic?

The faults and failures of life are not a divine dispensation. Providence has placed us in a marvellous world, capable of raising far more than is needed to supply the reasonable wants of one and all. That there are misery, injustice, want and inequality must not be charged to the account of Providence, but to the foolishness and immortal greed of man, who cannot deal equitably with the resources of which he is the trustee. The world waxes richer year by year, for we are gathering the power to increase production and to distribute the surplus of one region to supply the deficiency of another. It is a very fair and beautiful world, and we need no more than that all should be permitted to share what is produced. To enforce this distribution, to see that it is enjoyed in peace and tranquillity is the appointed task of a strong and vigorous democracy. The primal duty of women is to give this democracy to the world and keep its strength renewed.

Some may fear that women "condemned to fertility" as one phrased it in my hearing recently, may be unable to take their part in the struggle for emancipation. But surely motherhood enforces the qualifications of women, justifies their claims and provides them with the material to train for future triumphs. Olive Schreiner, in her magnificent book "Woman and Labour," in which, however, she wrote of the birth-rate and its incidents without visualising the possibilities of world war, says that some birds have raised the union of the sexes to a far higher level than humanity has reached. The male and the female share the nest building, the incubation and the feeding of the young, and it was impossible for that fine observer to note any difference in the task of the sexes. So it should be with us and will be when we have developed to that standard. The labours and responsibilities of the home, and the daily work will be a part of the common contract and bond of men and women, and no woman will be disqualified by the fulfilment of her duties in the home more than the man is disqualified by reason of his labours beyond it. We are all conscious of evils that throng the world, we all strive to better them in a degree, few of the most careless fail altogether to be kind in some fashion, however haphazard, but if the women who take life seriously will not only fulfil the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but will do their best to urge their reluctant sisters, a single generation may avail to restore the balance of sanity, equity and progress throughout civilisation.