Mobilizing Woman-Power

by Harriot Stanton Blatch

But whatever the conclusions as to the wisest method of building up population, there is no doubt that government and individuals will make strict valuation of the essentials and non-essentials in national life. In our poverty we will test all things in the light of their benefit to the race and hold fast that which is good.

The opinions of women will weigh in this national accounting. There will be no money to squander, and women to a unit will stand behind those men who think a recreation field is of more value than a race track. It will be the woman's view, there being but one choice, that it is better to encourage fleetness and skill in boys and girls than in horses. If we have just so much money to spend and the question arises as to whether there shall be corner saloons or municipal kitchens, public sentiment, made in good measure by women, will eschew the saloon.

The things that lend themselves to the husbanding of the race will draw as a magnet those who have borne the race. The tired world will need for its rejuvenation a broadened and deepened medical science. Women are too wise to permit sanitation and research to fall to a low level. On the contrary, they will wish them to be more thorough. There will be economy along the less essential lines to meet the cost.

The flagging spirit needs the inspiration of art and music. To secure them in the future, state and municipal effort will be demanded. Women are born economizers. They have been trained to pinch each penny. With their advent into political life, roads and public buildings will cost less. Through careful saving, funds will be made available for the things of the spirit.

One of the men conductors on the New York street railways somewhat reproachfully remarked to me, "No one ever came to look at the recreation room and restaurant at the car barns until women were taken on. Men don't seem to count." Is the reproach deserved? Have women been narrow in sympathy? Perhaps we have assumed that men can look out for themselves. They could, but in private life they never do. Women have to do the mothering. A trade-unionist is ready enough to regulate wages and hours, but he gives not a thought to surroundings in factory and workshop.

An act of protection generally starts with solicitude about a woman or child. Factory legislation took root in their needs. There was no mercy for the man worker. His only chance of getting better conditions was when women entered his occupation, and the regulation meant for her benefit indirectly served his interest.

"Men suffer more than women in certain dangerous trades, but I did not suppose you were generous enough to care anything about them," came in answer to an inquiry at a labor conference at the end of a most admirable paper on women in dangerous trades, given by one of the doctors in the New York City Department of Health. He was speaking to an audience of working women. I doubt if his hearers had given a thought to men workers.

Perhaps this is natural, since there has been going on at the same time with the development of factory legislation in America a strong propaganda directed especially at political freedom for women. We have been laying stress on the wrongs of woman and demanding very persistently and convincingly her rights. The industrial needs and rights of the man have been overlooked.

With increasing numbers of women entering the industrial world, with ever widening extension of the vote to women, and the consequent quickening of public responsibility, together with the recent experience of Europe demonstrating the importance of care for all workers, both men and women, there is ground for hope that even the United States, where protective legislation is so retarded in development, will enter upon wide and fundamental plans for conservation of all our human resources.

Protection of the worker, housing conditions, the feeding of factory employees and school children, play grounds and recreation centers, will challenge the world for first consideration. These are the social processes which command most surely the hearts and minds of women. The churning which the war has given humanity has roused in women a realization that upon them rests at least half the burden of saving civilization from wreck. Here is the world, with such and such needs for food, clothing, shelter, with such and such needs for sanitation, hospitals, and above all, for education, for science, for the arts, if it is not to fall back into the conditions of the Middle Ages. How can women aid in making secure the national position? Certainly not by idleness, inefficiency, an easy policy of laissez faire. They must labor, economize, and pool their brains.