There was a strange incongruity in paying them less than the men for the same work. They worked in eight-hour shifts and were required to stand, except during a single half-hour interval. The prospectus of instruction suggested short skirts, thick gloves and boots with low heels, adding that evening dress would not be necessary.
Hotel accommodations were attempted for these "lady" workers, but this proved inadequate, and part of them went to the lodgings with the regular workers. Short skirts were only the first step that promptly led to overalls, and when these English ladies, whom the girls called "Miaows," got well grimed with dust and grease, utterly tired out with handling 12-pound shells and hungry enough to prefer coarse food, they understood the workgirls as never before, and the men, too, and they had a new birth of patriotism. One lady said she found great relief and enthusiasm by thinking of the shells as so many dead Boches or live Tommies.
VARIED OCCUPATIONS OF WOMEN.
Making ammunition and hospital supplies, handling luggage and trunks in baggage rooms, driving motors, conducting trolley cars, carpentry work on wooden houses for the front, are but a few of the occupations in which European women engaged in war service. They have served as lift attendants, ticket sellers, post office sorters, mail carriers, gardeners, dairy lassies, grocery clerks, drivers of delivery wagons and vans, commissionaires. More than a million were added to the industrial workers in England during the first two years of war.
America coming later into the war, its women naturally followed the lead of the English and French along many lines tried and proved to be worth while, but our matrons and maids, famed for their independence and initiative, developed also new lines of patriotic effort. As soon as it was evident that German ambitions included designs upon America, the strong feminine instinct for preservation began to assert itself. Pacifism had no special appeal to the gentler sex at such a time. She got behind the recruiting as if it were her own job, and much of the success of it was due to her efforts.
The Woman's Section of the Navy League may well be described by quoting from its own statement of motive and purpose. "Every mother with sons, every wife with husband, every sister with a brother, feels her heart stand still with the horror of what war may bring to her."
WOMAN'S MANY SERVICES.
These women spread information to arouse interest in the condition of the United States naval forces, aided recruiting for the Naval Reserve, assisted in procuring enrollments for the Naval Coast Reserve, and drawing on their resources provided many needed articles of clothing, equipment and comfort not furnished by the Government. A knitting committee makes sleeveless jackets, helmets, wristlets and mufflers. Comfort kits, games, blankets, underwear, rubber hats, coats and boots are made or bought by the Comfort and Supplies Committee.
The two poles of patriotic service are the production of food and fighting at the front; a world of activity bulges between them. European women are accustomed to farm labor. Millions of peasant women, serfs, all but in name, under the late Russian regime; Balkan women, German and French wives and girls, and, to some extent, the mothers and daughters of the English poor, would have understood Markham's poem better if he had called it, "The Woman With the Hoe."
In the war food crisis the women of America matched the women of the enemy and vied with those of their own allies in persuading mother earth to yield her bounty. In heavy shoes, trousers of jean, rolled-up sleeves and a straw hat, the girls of America here and there turned to the land and took hold of the tasks of the farm.