Possibly women’s organizations of all types are but providing ever-widening channels through which woman’s moral energy may flow, revivifying life by new streams fed in the upper reaches of her undiscovered capacities. In either case, we may predict that to control old impulses so that they may be put to social uses, to serve the present through memories hoarding woman’s genuine experiences, may liberate energies hitherto unused and may result in a notable enrichment of the pattern of human culture.
CHAPTER V
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—CHALLENGING WAR
I was sharply reminded of an obvious division between high tradition and current conscience in several conversations I held during the great European war with women who had sent their sons to the front in unquestioning obedience to the demands of the State, but who, owing to their own experiences, had found themselves in the midst of that ever-recurring struggle, often tragic and bitter, between two conceptions of duty, one of which is antagonistic to the other.
One such woman,[1] who had long been identified with the care of delinquent children and had worked for many years towards the establishment of a Children’s Court, had asked me many questions concerning the psychopathic clinic in the Juvenile Court in Chicago, comparing it to the brilliant work accomplished in her own city through the coöperation of the university faculty. The Imperial government itself had recently recognized the value of this work and at the outbreak of the war was rapidly developing a system through which the defective child might be discovered early in his school career, and might not only be saved from delinquency but such restricted abilities as he possessed be trained for the most effective use. “Through all these years,” she said, “I had grown accustomed to the fact that the government was deeply concerned in the welfare of the least promising child. I had felt my own efforts so identified with it that I had unconsciously come to regard the government as an agency for nurturing human life and had apparently forgotten its more primitive functions.
[1] The following conversation is a composite made from several talks held with each of two women representing both sides of the conflict. Their opinions and observations are merged into one because in so many particulars they were either identical or overlapping. Both women called themselves patriots, but each had become convinced of the folly of war.
“I was proud of the fact that my son held a state position as professor of Industrial Chemistry in the University, because I knew that the research in his department would ultimately tend to alleviate the harshness of factory conditions, and to make for the well-being of the working classes in whose children I had become so interested.
“When my son’s regiment was mobilized and sent to the front I think that it never occurred to me, any more than it did to him, to question his duty. His professional training made him a valuable member of the Aviation Corps, and when, in those first weeks of high patriotism his letters reported successful scouting or even devastating raids, I felt only a solemn satisfaction. But gradually through the months, when always more of the people’s food supply and constantly more men were taken by the government for its military purposes, when I saw the state institutions for defectives closed, the schools abridged or dismissed, women and children put to work in factories under hours and conditions which had been legally prohibited years before, when the very governmental officials who had been so concerned for the welfare of the helpless were bent only upon the destruction of the enemy at whatever cost to their fellow-citizens, the State itself gradually became for me an alien and hostile thing.
“In response to the appeal made by the government to the instinct of self-preservation, the men of the nation were ardent and eager to take any possible risks, to suffer every hardship, and were proud to give their lives in their country’s service. But was it inevitable, I constantly asked myself, that the great nations of Europe should be reduced to such a primitive appeal? Why should they ignore all the other motives which enter into modern patriotism and are such an integral part of devotion to the state that they must in the end be reckoned with?
“I am sure that I had reached these conclusions before my own tragedy came, before my son was fatally wounded in a scouting aëroplane and his body later thrown overboard into a lonely swamp. It was six weeks before I knew what had happened and it was during that period that I felt most strongly the folly and waste of putting men, trained as my son had been, to the barbaric business of killing. This tendency in my thinking may have been due to a hint he had given me in the very last letter I ever received from him, of a change that was taking place within himself. He wrote that whenever he heard the firing of a huge field-piece he knew that the explosion consumed years of the taxes which had been slowly accumulated by some hard-working farmer or shopkeeper, and that he unconsciously calculated how fast industrial research would have gone forward, had his department been given once a decade the costs of a single day of warfare, with the government’s command to turn back into alleviation of industrial conditions the taxes which the people had paid. He regretted that he was so accustomed to analysis that his mind would not let the general situation alone but wearily went over it again and again; and then he added that this war was tearing down the conception of government which had been so carefully developed during this generation in the minds of the very men who had worked hardest to fulfill that conception.
“Although the letter sounded like a treatise on government, I knew there was a personal pang somewhere behind this sombre writing, even though he added his old joking promise that when their fathers were no longer killed in industry, he would see what he could do for my little idiots.