"The bravest battle that ever was fought,
Shall I tell you where and when?
On the maps of the world you will find it not;
'Twas fought by the mothers of men."
And this woman of war is the woman of work. As, in the brave days of old, woman, free of spirit as she was free of limb, carried the extra weapons of her mate into the heart of the conflict, and inspired him to superhuman deeds, bearing equal share with him in the front of battle, so the woman of to-day, for the first time in long generations given equal freedom with man to do the world's work, has sprung to the side of her mate. In the factories of England, in the fields of Russia, in the mills and mines of France, on the firing line itself, and in the Red Cross behind every bloody trench of the war-mad world, she is giving herself, body, mind, and soul, for the preservation of the institutions of her people.
I have seen her pushing her cart through the streets of Rennes and Tours, bearing great loads down the highways of Brittany, tilling fields with the first glimpse of spring, close behind the lines. She is in all places, for her tasks are the tasks of the universal need.
But England gave me my best opportunity to study carefully the woman of work. A girl sold me my ticket at Liverpool; another took it. A girl gathered the baggage together at the Paddington station in London. Young women were at the desk of the hotel—not a man in sight anywhere. Women are conductors on the London trams and guards as well as ticket-sellers in the tubes. I saw them doing the heaviest labor of canal-boats and harbor tugs. They were ploughing in the country and driving munition-vans in the cities. In one of the greatest shell-factories I saw scores of young women at lathes, and other scores managing intricate machinery with deftness and precision. What price the next generation will pay for these strained bodies—some of the loads are necessarily heavy ones—I do not know, but womanhood asks no questions when the voice of sacrifice calls.
One is impressed by the number of wedding-rings worn by the women of work; thousands of wives, yes, and widows, of soldiers are serving Britain in these new ways. Many must add their earnings to the scant home store, and so the babies are cared for by grandparents or public nurseries while the mothers labor for the cause the father fights for or may have died for. In munition-factories matrons are provided who look after the interests of the younger girls. Of course, grave moral problems are arising from these new and complicated relations of women to the world that has for so long been man's world exclusively. These problems will not be solved in a day.
After three years of war 4,766,000 women were employed in England, or 1,421,000 more than were employed in 1914. The number of women workers is increasing at the rate of 18,000 every week. The Minister of Munitions announces that from "sixty to eighty per cent of the machine work on shells, fuses, and trench-warfare supplies is now performed by women. They have been trained in aëroplane-manufacture, gun-work, and in almost every other branch of manufacture."
In a statement made later, in the House of Commons, the Minister of Munitions referred to the fact that nearly one thousand large guns were destroyed or captured, and between four and five thousand machine guns destroyed or captured, in the great German offensive which began on the twenty-first of March, 1918, and that in this same period the ammunition lost amounted to about the total production of from one to three weeks. But he declared that the loss had been more than made up in less than one month, and that nine-tenths of the huge output of shells which was then sufficient for the continuation of an intensive battle throughout the summer was due to the labor of three-quarters of a million women.
I heard a great iron-merchant say: "Ah! sir, the women are saving the country. When I myself urged a holiday upon them,—and not in a year have they taken one,—they said: 'What will our men at the front do when we stop? Will the Germans sit back and rest too? We will have our holiday when the war is over and the lads come home.'"