What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War

by H. G. Wells

There is scarcely a point where women, having been given a chance, have not more than made good. They have revolutionised the estimate of their economic importance, and it is scarcely too much to say that when, in the long run, the military strength of the Allies bears down the strength of Germany, it will be this superiority of our women which enables us to pit a woman at--the censorship will object to exact geography upon this point--against a man at Essen which has tipped the balance of this war.

Those women have won the vote. Not the most frantic outbursts of militancy after this war can prevent them getting it. The girls who have faced death and wounds so gallantly in our cordite factories--there is a not inconsiderable list of dead and wounded from those places--have killed for ever the poor argument that women should not vote because they had no military value. Indeed, they have killed every argument against their subjection. And while they do these things, that paragon of the virtues of the old type, that miracle of domestic obedience, the German haus-frau, the faithful Gretchen, riots for butter.

And as I have before remarked, the Germans counted on the suffragettes as one of the great forces that were to paralyse England in this war.

It is not simply that the British women have so bountifully produced intelligence and industry; that does not begin their record. They have been willing to go dowdy. The mass of women in Great Britain are wearing the clothes of 1914. In 1913 every girl and woman one saw in the streets of London had an air of doing her best to keep in the fashion. Now they are for the most part as carelessly dressed as a busy business man or a clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"--with the air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar cult. She has very high-heeled boots; she shows a leg, she has a short skirt with a peculiar hang, due no doubt to mysteries about the waist; she wears a comic little hat over one brow; there is something of Columbine about her, something of the Watteau shepherdess, something of a vivandiere, something of every age but the present age. Her face, subject to the strange dictates of the mode, is smooth like the back of a spoon, with small features and little whisker-like curls before the ears such as butcher-boys used to wear half a century ago. Even so, she dare not do this thing alone. Something in khaki is with her, to justify her. You are to understand that this strange rig is for seeing him off or giving him a good time during his leave. Sometimes she is quite elderly, sometimes nothing khaki is to be got, and the pretence that this is desired of her wears thin. Still, the type will out.

She does not pass with impunity, the last exponent of true feminine charm. The vulgar, the street boy, have evolved one of those strange sayings that have the air of being fragments from some lost and forgotten chant:

"She's the Army Contractor's Only Daughter,
Spending it now."

Or simply, "Spending it now."

She does not pass with impunity, but she passes. She makes her stilted passage across the arena upon which the new womanhood of Western Europe shows its worth. It is an exit. There is likely to be something like a truce in the fashions throughout Europe for some years. It is in America if anywhere that the holy fires of smartness and the fashion will be kept alive....

And so we come to prophecy.

I do not believe that this invasion by women of a hundred employments hitherto closed to them is a temporary arrangement that will be reversed after the war. It is a thing that was going on, very slowly, it is true, and against much prejudice and opposition, before the war, but it was going on; it is in the nature of things. These women no doubt enter these employments as substitutes, but not usually as inferior substitutes; in quite a number of cases they are as good as men, and in many they are not underselling, they are drawing men's pay. What reason is there to suppose that they will relapse into a state of superfluous energy after the war? The war has merely brought about, with the rapidity of a landslide, a state of affairs for which the world was ripe. The world after the war will have to adjust itself to this extension of women's employment, and to this increase in the proportion of self-respecting, self-supporting women.