It is impossible to say to what extent man's place in labor was taken by woman in Central Europe during the war. On the farms the women had always done much of the hard work. They had been employed in large numbers in the factories, stores, and offices, so that it was generally a case of employing more women instead of surrendering to them departments which heretofore had been entirely in the hands of men. It is true that women were working on street-car lines as conductors, and in a few cases as drivers, and that more of them found employment in the railroad and postal service, but the work they did was well within the capacity of any healthy woman. Woman's work during the war was to have results quite foreign to those immediately in prospect.
The fact that women were employed in foundries and steel-works, in the manner stated above, is chiefly remarkable for the evidence furnished that woman is able to do much of the work for which in the past she has been thought unsuited, especially if her deficiency in bodily strength is discounted by the use of machinery. At the Weiss works I was told that the women doing heavy work with the aid of mechanical energy were in every respect the equal of the men who had done the same thing before the war.
The war, then, has demonstrated in Central Europe that the woman is far less the inferior of man than was held formerly. To that extent the status of women has been bettered. When a man has seen members of the frail sex fashion steel into shells he is thereafter less inclined to look upon that sex as a plaything which an indulgent Scheme provided for him. Over his mind may then flash the thought that woman is, after all, the other half of humanity—not only the mother of men, but their equal, not a mere complement of the human race, but a full-fledged member of it.
A little later I was the guest of Halideh Edib Hannym Effendi at her private school in the Awret Basar quarter of Stamboul, Constantinople. The Turkish feminist and promoter of education had asked me to take a look at the establishment in which she was training Turkish girls and boys along the lines adhered to in the Occident. She had arrived at the conclusion that the medressi—Koran school system—was all wrong, for the reason that it sacrificed the essential to the non-essential. Though her influence with the Young Turk government and the Sheik-ul-Islam was great, she had not asked that her experiments with Western education be undertaken at the expense of the public. Her father is wealthy.
Several teachers had been invited to the tea. Like Halideh Hannym they were "Young Turk" women, despite the fact that most of them still preferred the non-transparent veil—yashmak—to the transparent silk büründshük.
I commented upon this fact.
"The yashmak does indeed typify the Old Turkey," said Halideh Hannym. "But is it necessary to discard it because one takes an interest in the things identified as progress? To the yashmak are attached some of the best traditions of our race; it comes from a period when the Turk was really great, when he was still the master of a goodly share of Europe—when he ruled, instead of being ruled."