Perhaps it is indicative of a lack of nothing more serious than a sense of humor, that we women unite and, apparently without embarrassment, demand that masculine presidents, governors, mayors and legislatures shall appoint women to office. This unabashed faith in the good will of men seems not misplaced, for not only do public men show some confidence in the official capacity of women, but to my inquiry as to whom was due their opportunities to "get on," business women invariably replied, "To men."
However, the loyalty of women to women is increasing, and their solidarity on sound lines of service is a thing of steady growth. Thoughtful women, for instance, do not wish a woman put in a position of responsibility simply because she is a woman, but they are even more opposed to having a candidate of peculiar fitness overlooked merely because she is not a man. While the conscientious and poised women are not willing to urge any and every woman for a given office, they do tenaciously hold that there are positions which cry aloud for women and for which the right women should he found. In conquering a fair field, women will have to pool their brains even more effectively than they have in the past.
Our efforts at combination are a mere mushroom growth compared with the generations of training our big brothers have had in pooling brains. War and the chase gave them their first lessons in cooperation, nor has war been a bad teacher for women.
Just as the Crimean War and our Civil War put Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton and the trained nurse on the map, this war is bringing the medical woman to the fore. Women surgeons and doctors, unlike many other groups, offer themselves fully trained for service. They know they have something to give, and they know the soldiers' need.
According to an official statement, the emergency call of the army for men physicians and surgeons fell two thousand short of being answered. The necessity of the soldier and the skill of the women will no doubt in the end be brought effectively together; for although the government of the United States, like Great Britain in the early days of the war, has left to ever farseeing France the honor of extending hospitality to American women doctors, their strong national organization, with a membership of four thousand, will in time, no doubt, persuade Uncle Sam to take his plucky women doctors over the top under the Stars and Stripes! Organization crystallized about an unselfish desire and skilled ability to serve is irresistible.
The pooling of the brains of women that has been going on on a country-wide scale for more than a half-century bears analyzing. These associations have almost invariably centered about a service to be rendered. Even the first petition for political enfranchisement urged it as the "duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the elective franchise." Unselfishness draws numbers as a magnet draws steel filings. The spirit of service lying at the heart of the great national organizations made possible quick response to new duties immediately upon our entrance into the war. The suffragists said, We wish to serve and we are ready for service. The government used their wide-spread net of local centers for purposes of registrations and war appeals.
Naturally there were many efforts more foolish than effective in the universal rush to help. America was not peculiar in this, nor for the matter of that, were women. War!--it does make the blood course through the veins. Every generous citizen cries aloud, "What can I do?" Perhaps men are a little more voluble than women, their emotions not finding such immediate and approved vent along clicking needles and tangled skeins of wool. On the whole, the initiative and organizing ability of women has stood out supremely.
Of the two departments of the Red Cross which are still left in the command of women, the Bureau of Nursing, with Miss Delano at its head, mobilized immediately three thousand of the fourteen thousand nurses enrolled. The first Red Cross Medical Unit with its full quota of sixty-five nurses completely equipped stood on European soil before an American soldier was there. Of the forty-nine units ready for service, twelve, with from sixty-five to one hundred nurses each, are now in France. Two of the five units organized for the navy, each with its forty active nurses and twenty reserves, are established abroad, and two hundred and thirty nurses are already in active naval service here. Miss Delano holds constantly in reserve fifteen hundred nurses as emergency detachments, a reservoir from which some eight hundred have been drawn for cantonment hospitals. An inflow of nearly one thousand nurses each month keeps the reservoir ready to meet the drain.
The Chapter work-rooms sprang up at a call in the night. No one can help admiring their well-ordered functioning. There may be criticism, grumbling, but the work-room is moving irresistibly, like a well-oiled machine. And women are the motive power from start to finish. The Chapters, with their five million members joined in three thousand units over the United States, are so many monuments to the ability of women for detail. Once mobilized, the women have thus far been able to serve two thousand war hospitals with surgical dressings, and to send abroad thirteen million separate articles packed carefully, boxed, labelled and accounted for on their books.
Not only does this directing of manual work stand to the credit of the Chapters, but they have given courses of lectures in home nursing and dietetics to thirty-four thousand women, and in first aid; ten thousand classes have been held and seventy-five thousand certificates issued to the proficient. Certainly one object of the Red Cross, "to stimulate the volunteer work of women," has been accomplished.