Women and War Work

by Helen Miller Moyes

The war has made more of our fathers and mothers realize the right of their daughters to education and training, and there are very few parents in our country now, who think a girl needs to know nothing very practical, and has no need to go in for a profession. Our women's colleges have more students than ever and the war has done great things in breaking down these old conventional ideas. The war, in fact, has shaken the very foundations of the old Victorian beliefs in the limited sphere of women to atoms. Our sphere is now very much more what every human being's sphere is and ought to be—the place and work in which our capacity, ability or genius finds its fullest vent—and there is no need to worry about restricting women or anyone else to particular spheres—if they cannot do it, they cannot fill the sphere, and that test decides. The dear old Victorian dugouts grow fewer and fewer in number, but we never must forget that the great powers of women have not come in a night, miraculously, in the war. They are the result of long years of patient work before, and we women, who have had these great opportunities, must see to it that we nobly carry on the traditions of teaching and training and qualifying ourselves for service, bequeathed to us from older generations.

One thing, too, despite the war tasks and strain, we have not lost sight of the fact that the great fundamental tasks of keeping the house, guarding and seeing to the children must be well done. Just for a little, some of our tasks of child welfare had fewer workers, but many of the women realized the value of all these tasks as supreme, and took up the work freely. Child welfare work in particular the Suffrage woman organized and worked, Glasgow Suffragists taking on the visiting of babies, always done there, in a whole ward of the city, and in other towns they started Day Nurseries.

Lord Rhondda at the Local Government Board instituted Baby week and we hope to found a Ministry of Health very soon. So in the War we have realized even more vividly how great and valuable and important these tasks of women are. A very great amount of work for child welfare has been done by our women in the war, and our infant death rate is going still lower.

The war has done a great service in drawing women of all the Allied Nations together—a service whose greatness and magnitude it is not easy to fully realize. French and English men and women know so much more of each other now. Our hospitals in France, our Canteens for French Soldiers, as well as our own, our women and the French women working side by side in our army clerical departments and ordnance depots in France, the Belgians and French who are among us in such large numbers, make us known to each other. In Serbia we have made many friends and in Italy and Russia and Romania, all links for the future, and helps to wider knowledge and understanding. It is on understanding the hopes of the world rest, and we women have a great part to play in that.

With America our link has always been very great and all the help, and gifts, and service America gave us before it entered the war, have been very precious to us. American women have given Hospitals and ambulances and everything possible in the way of succour and of service, and have died with our women in nursing service, as the men have in our ranks.

Massachusetts sent a nurse to France, Miss Alice Fitzgerald, in memory of Edith Cavell, which shows the unity of your feeling and ours on that tragic execution, and her work under our War Office in Queen Alexandra's Imperial Army Nursing Service with the British Expeditionary Force, as well as the work of all the American nurses we have had helping us, is another link in the great chain. Our own great Commonwealth of Nations are nearer to each other than ever before. There were even people among us who thought a little as the enemy did that our Dominions would not stand by us—stupid and blind people.

It is their fight as well as ours—the common fight of all free peoples, and all our united nations stand together, including those who only a few years ago were fighting us as brave foes.

We have learned so much in great ways and in small ways, in economies and in the care of all our resources, too. We women are more careful in Britain now. We save food, and grow more, and produce more, and maids and mistresses work together to economize and help. We gather our waste paper and sell it or give it to the Red Cross for their funds, give our bottles and our rags, waste no food and save and lend our money. We could not have been called a thrifty nation before the war—we are much more thrifty now, in many ways, though there are still things we could learn.

In the Women's Army and in so much of our work we are learning discipline and united service—learning what it means to be proud of your corps and to feel the uniform you wear or the badge is something you must be worthy of—and it goes back to being worthy of your own flag and of the ideals for which we all stand in these days.

And the young wives who are married and left behind, who bear their children with their husbands far away in danger, who have had no real homes yet, but who wait and hope, they are very wonderful in their courage and pluck—and, most of all, everywhere, our women, like our men, wisely refuse to be dreary. There are enough secret dark hours, but in our work we carry on cheerfully, the women know the soldiers' slogan, "Cheero," and to Britain and to "somewhere on the fronts," the same message goes and comes.