What we soon had contrived to become, thanks largely to Dr. Anna and Mrs. Catt, was a free channel through which we could pour speedily and uninterruptedly any request which came to us from any department of the war machine. We developed a disciplined army with other things to do than knitting and bandage making, gardening and canning, essential and important as these were.
Our most useful service, as I see it, was a growing activity in preventing the machinery of daily life from rusting in the storm of war. Take the women going in droves into industry. For the most part they were as untrained as the boys drafted into the Army, as willing as these to take it, throw themselves away.
Jane Addams had said to me at the beginning of the War: “Everything that we have gained in the way of social legislation will be destroyed. It will throw us back where we were twenty-five years ago.”
That did not seem to me to be necessary nor indeed to be the way things were already going. Take this woman in industry for whom Miss Addams was especially alarmed. Recruiting for munition factories had been pushed before we went into the War by the National League for Woman’s Service, of which Maude Wetmore, a member of the Woman’s Committee, was chairman. As early as March, 1917, the league was at work in the Department of Labor. Soon after war was declared the President and the Secretaries of War and Labor called for general support of labor laws for women as well as for men. Mrs. J. Borden Harriman was soon made chairman of a committee on women in industry of the Council of National Defense. About the same time our committee created a department to handle the problem and was given a tenth member from the ranks of organized women—Miss Agnes Nestor of Chicago, a leader in the glove workers’ union. We were a little concerned about the new appointee, but Miss Nestor from the start was one of the most useful members of the committee—wise and patient in understanding all problems though naturally concentrated chiefly on her own, which were grave enough, because of the rapid multiplication of agencies with their unavoidable rivalries and jealousies.
The determination not only to protect woman in her new capacity but educate her, thrust her ahead, was strong. Representatives of organized women met in Kansas City in June demanding new standards for war contracts. The upshot was that Florence Kelley was made a member of the Board of Control of Labor standards for Army Clothing. Things went rapidly after that. A woman’s division was created in January in the United States Employment Service with Mrs. H. M. Richard at its head. About the same time Mary Van Kleeck was made head of a woman’s branch in the Ordnance Service and our Agnes Nestor, who had by this time become generally recognized for her intelligence and steadiness, was appointed on the newly formed advisory council to the Secretary of Labor in war labor legislation.
Agnes Nestor and Mary Anderson, the present head of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, demonstrated as I had never seen it the education to be had in a labor organization which seeks by arbitration and more arbitration and still more arbitration to improve its situation without weakening the industry by which it lives, one that appeals to force only as a last resort, never as a mere threat.
What all this amounts to is that through the activities of women in and out of industry there was a steady clarification and strengthening of our position.
The chief service of the Woman’s Committee in the matter was seeing that full information of what was going on was sent broadcast. Miss Nestor’s reports reached women in quarters where labor standards had probably never been heard of. In our bulletins we kept up a constant stream of news items of what women were doing in industry not only in this country but in others. To make our vast horde conscious of the needs of sisters at the machine, eager to support what the Government had decided was right and just for her protection, was our aim. We did our part in proving that even in war determined women can not only prevent backward movements but even move forward.
Similar to what we did for the woman in industry was the help we were able to give to the Children’s Bureau. Julia Lathrop, its head, told us how its work was falling behind: playgrounds in many places given up, maternity work shut down. Could we help to stem this backward flow? We turned our machinery at once to the support of the bureau. Women in districts where its work had never been known were aroused to establish nursing centers, look after maternity cases, interest themselves afresh in what was happening to children. It was a work of education as well as of renewal.
Julia Lathrop told me one day just before the committee went out of existence that the work of her bureau had been extended more in the few months that we had been promoting it than it could have been with their machinery in as many years.