In work for the welfare of the fighting forces the women of every part of the country took a very prominent part. The War Camp Community Service, described in “Big-Brothering the Fighting Forces,” was carried on largely by their efforts. Organizations of women of many kinds drew together women of similar occupations for welfare work or brought together those of the greatest variety for the same ends. The Stage Women’s War Relief, composed of actresses, made and sent abroad or to hospitals at home great quantities of comfort kits, knitted articles, bandages, hospital supplies, dainties to tempt the appetite of convalescents, clothing for refugees, cigarettes and tobacco. The members of the Young Women’s Christian Association were to be found in active work for the war in nearly all the camps and cantonments of the United States, and also in France, and even in the frozen north of Russia, where in several cities their Hostess Houses and canteens offered cheer and comfort to soldiers and sailors.
The Association established a War Work Council which devised and carried out methods by which it could aid in the prosecution of the war. Its Hostess Houses in camps and cantonments were links between the men in training and the life they had put behind them, where their relatives and friends could meet them in pleasant surroundings. The type of the Hostess House was created for the Y. W. C. A. by a woman architect at the beginning of the war and was planned for the special needs which the Association foresaw. It combined the features of restaurant, reading and lounging rooms, and sleeping rooms for relatives who might have to stay overnight in the camp, while its semblance was that of a pleasant country club. The Hostess Houses were the scenes of many war weddings, of occasional christenings, of first meetings between returning happy soldier or sailor fathers and their children born in their absence, and they were sometimes a welcome refuge for mother or wife, sister or sweetheart, summoned to the camp by the fatal illness of a loved one.
The Association had a total of almost one hundred and fifty Hostess Houses in this country, in the camps and cantonments for both white and colored troops, in which were over four hundred workers. In France it carried on fifteen of these or similar houses for American women directly engaged in war work, such as those in the Signal Corps, and for women connected with the British auxiliary organizations, twenty-one for nurses in base hospitals and eighteen for French women working in munition factories, offices, stores and for the American army. The Y. W. C. A. gave much assistance also in the providing of emergency housing for women engaged in work for the war in this country, while its endeavors for the improving of morale and the inculcating of American ideals among foreign born and colored women and girls aided in rousing their patriotic spirit. It operated War Service Industrial Clubs with cafeterias and recreation halls and a variety of entertainments and classes for study in centers of war industry where women were employed.
A Woman’s Division was instituted by the Young Men’s Christian Association at the end of our first war year and during the next seven months its work grew to important proportions. Carefully chosen for the service, the women were given just before they sailed a week of intensive training for their duties on the other side. Instruction in hygiene taught them how to keep themselves fit under conditions that would call for all their strength; their knowledge of French was freshened; they had lectures on the kind of cooking needed for canteen work and talks on the geography, history, customs and characteristics of France, in order to give them a degree of sympathetic understanding of the people among whom they would have to work; they were encouraged to practice any sort of special facility for the entertainment of groups of men which they might possess; and they were expected to be accomplished dancers before they were enlisted. On the other side they worked in canteens and were especially useful in the recreation centers described in “Big-Brothering the Fighting Forces,” of which twenty-six were organized in different parts of France. In these recreation camps, or “leave areas,” in the “Y” centers in Paris and other French cities, in canteens in camps and behind the front lines, the Red Triangle women made and poured coffee and chocolate and tea, distributed candy, cakes, gum, cigarettes and tobacco, provided Christmas boxes, sang, danced, recited, played games and did whatever the moment demanded for the welfare and the entertainment of the American fighting men. The women practically created the service of the “leave areas,” which was something entirely new in warfare. They went with the canteens to the front lines, advanced with the Army of Occupation through Luxemburg and Alsace, and settled down with it in Germany. They worked also with the American forces in England and Scotland, Russia and Italy. After the armistice, when many of the men secretaries of the Y. M. C. A. began to return to their neglected business in the United States, the women took over more and more of the canteen and other work. When hostilities ended, a thousand women were engaged in Red Triangle work overseas and so important was their service that in response to the call for them that number was doubled during the next three months, and the Association was then still recruiting, training and sending them to France.
Three organizations enlisted women as automobile drivers for war service,—the Motor and Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross, the Motor Corps of America and the Motor Corps of the National League for Woman’s Service. Together they had an estimated membership of several thousand women, most of whom were women of leisure who owned their own cars and were glad to give for the country’s needs their own time and work and the service of their automobiles. Before being received in either of the organizations they had to undergo a course of intensive training averaging six weeks and including revolver shooting, first aid treatment, surgery clinics as a test and training for the nerves, clinics for the handling of the insane because mentally unbalanced soldiers had to be transferred by ambulance from transport to hospital, military drill twice a week and a course in mechanics. A member of a woman’s motor corps had to know how her car was built and be able to take it apart, if necessary, and put it together again and if it balked to discover what was the matter and apply the needed remedy. The Motor Corps women served both at home and overseas and they drove trucks, ambulances and cars. Their service was ready for any war organization that needed them, their vehicles plied between transports and hospitals, carried convalescent soldiers out for an airing, were on duty at cantonments and camps and answered many similar calls. Their rules demanded at least nine hours per day on duty, but actual service often stretched to fifteen or twenty hours out of the twenty-four.
The National League for Woman’s Service, by which one of these corps was recruited and directed, was organized for patriotic purposes two months before America entered the war and upon that event was ready to begin active work in the coördinating of women’s organizations and the enlisting and directing of all manner of women’s resources and abilities that would aid the nation in the prosecution of the war. Its organization spread into almost every state of the Union and numbered 300,000 members. Its Motor Corps Service, which was recognized by the Surgeon General of the Army, had throughout the country seventy-eight chapters with a membership of about five hundred women car owners. Its social and welfare division established many soldiers’ and sailors’ club rooms and club houses, with reading and lounging rooms, billiard and pool tables, dances and entertainments, and classes in French and English. It also conducted classes for the instruction of women in occupational therapy and handicraft who worked in hospitals and camps, recruited and trained women to serve as nurses’ aids, and coöperated with the War Camp Community Service in many ways. Its members worked in canteens and clubs, gave their services in workrooms where clothing and supplies were made for hospitals and for soldiers and sailors, distributed the thousands upon thousands of flower donations made to hospitals by florists, worked with the Food Administration by distributing food pledges, establishing emergency and community kitchens and providing experts in home economics who gave instruction in food conservation. The League collected books, magazines, games and tobacco for the fighting forces, recruited a Woman’s Reserve Camouflage Corps which gave some important services, enlisted the aid of authors and artists for the publicity needs of one or another department of the Government, and served, in general, as a means of mustering and directing the resources and abilities of women for war work.
Women’s clubs of every sort all over the country had their war service committees, or mobilized all their members for that purpose, and these were closely linked together through their federations so that their work, which included assistance for every war making and war assisting agency of Government or people, could be done without overlapping or waste. Women’s colleges and women students in co-educational institutions also took up war work, as described in “Feeding the Nations.” As the men students of the colleges mobilized for training for the war in the Students’ Army Training Corps, the women students mobilized for work to uphold the war. The Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, with membership spread all through the Union, organized itself for war effort with especial reference to the task of bringing home to people everywhere the fundamental issues involved in the war, the necessity of fighting it through to a completely victorious conclusion and the dangers that would lurk in a premature peace. The Association coöperated with the Committee on Public Information, held college women’s rallies, formed local speakers’ bureaus, helped to procure trained workers for various forms of national service, set on foot a movement to provide in colleges preparatory nursing courses for women, and worked with and for all of the war sustaining agencies of the Government.
Coöperating with all these and with the many other women’s organizations for war effort and comprehending in its nation-wide scope all the women of the country was the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, which interlocked in effective team-work all organizations of women and, reaching out to almost every community in the land, inspired those outside such organizations to definite, regular, organized effort for war service especially fitted for women’s hands. It served solely among women, just as the Council of National Defense, of which it was a part, joined in team-work all war sustaining and war producing agencies and organized the communities, as told in “Organizing the Nation.”
The Woman’s Committee was created in April, 1917, and very soon had its divisions organized in each of the forty-eight states and also in Alaska, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the District of Columbia. Upon each State Committee were represented both the state-wide women’s organizations and the women not connected with any organization, and these committees organized the states into small units. Over 15,000 of these subordinate units had been formed and were at work by mid-summer of 1918, including 2,500 counties and 8,500 cities, towns and townships and, in addition, many thousand smaller units, such as school districts, wards, precincts, city blocks. These small units brought the organization into direct touch with women everywhere and enlisted them as individuals and as groups in the great army of patriotic women who were giving everything in their power for the prosecution of the war.
In half or more of the states women registered for war work, stating the amount of time they could give, the special service for which they were fitted and the kinds of work they could do. When the request came for volunteers for any particular service, or when it became known that there was some new need for woman’s assistance, the leader of each unit knew just where to look for the necessary help. The Woman’s Committee, from its central offices in Washington to the members of local units in city block or country district, worked with the Food Administration for the increased production and the conservation of food and, similarly, gave their help to the conservation program of the Fuel Administration. So also, they coöperated with the War Camp Community Service and the Training Camp Commissions, with the Liberty Loan and War Savings Stamps campaigns, aided in the campaign to recruit nurses and in that to secure workers for the ship yards, and helped to find trained women workers who were needed at once by the rapidly expanding departments and the new boards and commissions at Washington.