Huts in Hell

by Daniel A. Poling

She was just a slip of a girl; but she smiled at the baby boy in her arms, and said, "His father is in France." She continued: "This is my first day with him in ten months. He is asleep when I get home at night, and he is asleep in the morning when I leave for the shop." And she smiled again as she added: "O, he is a fine sleeper, sir, and the ladies at the church [referring to the nursery] have no trouble with him. It is good, though, to have him in my arms with his eyes open." And, though I blinked my eyes hard as I looked at this brave English girl having an enforced vacation from shell-making because of "back-strain," she had no tears in her eyes.

And in excess of all that her hands find to do, as when Spartan mothers sent their sons away and with the same spirit, Democracy's woman of work is giving her flesh and her blood to be food for the carrion-birds of countries she has never seen, while still beneath her heart she carries the developing life that is the hope of the future.

I saw a great parade in London, one hundred thousand women marching in a vast demonstration after the triumph of suffrage—mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts, little daughters dressed in white, and gray-haired battle-widows of the Crimea. The faces of the marchers were inspiring, but my eyes did not rest upon them. I looked longest at the black masses of men and boys crowding close against the lines that kept the street open for the parade. To the eternal credit of manhood let it be said that the faces of the men were generally faces of old men and that the faces of the boys were the faces of children.

But I saw more than the crowd of men and boys. On those faces I saw the light of discovery, and I seemed to hear a voice, a voice that speaks down through the years from a Roman cross, "Behold thy mother." The clamor of the unparalleled conflict has been the quiet in which for the first time woman's cry for justice has been really heard and fully understood.

Great Britain, the butt of our jokes because of her stolid slowness and stubbornness in an opinion or tradition, saw her window-smashers turn to munition-makers, saw her social butterflies don the garb of Red Cross nurses, saw her women rise to help win the war; and Great Britain was convinced.

And what have we found this "new woman," this woman of war, to be? First of all, we have discovered that she is not new; that she is the woman of old, the woman of yesterday, to-day, and forever.

But, while woman has not changed, her times have; and with intelligent heroism she is fighting against fearful odds, to adjust the machinery of society to meet modern needs. One has declared that already three-fourths of woman's former sphere has slipped away from her. Back at the beginnings of the race she was in all things partner of the man. She not only bore children and reared them; she was armor-bearer as well, tent-maker, planter, tender, and reaper of the harvests.

But gradually changes came. Men no longer spent all of their time in fighting or preparing to fight. They began to relieve women in the fields and to assume more and more the heavier portion of building-operations. Women found more time for the nursery and kitchen, for the loom and spinning-wheel.

As civilization progressed, still fewer men went away to battle, and war became less frequent. Minds with leisure became inventive, and machinery simplified household labors. Even the nursery was invaded; for the cry was no longer, "Give me sons, many sons," but, "Give me fit sons," and the honor in mere numbers in childbearing gave way to the distinction of quality as well.

Then, too, the home itself reached out beyond the pioneer clearing which formerly held all of its activities, until its interests became identified with all the problems of a society no longer bounded by family, village, tribal, or even racial lines. It is as unreasonable to insist that women in their social and political relations to-day remain as they were before the advent of the public bakery, the tailor-shop, the candy-kitchen, the public school, and the legalized saloon as it would be to insist that they go back to the spinning-wheel or that they assume again as a normal occupation the hod-carrying of the builder.