I know I am tired, terribly tired of doing difficult things and saving my life from day to day. But I have not realised how near collapse I am until I drop in a chair before the Editor’s deck in the office of the Pictorial Review. I, who have been so crazy to get to the country where there is still free speech, that I had insanely hoped to stand in Broadway and shout, have suddenly lost my voice. I can only report in a whisper!
My chief looks at me in concern. “For God’s sake, girl,” he says, “go somewhere and go to bed!”
CHAPTER III
Her Country’s Call
One Thousand Women Wanted! You may read it on a great canvas sign that stretches across an industrial establishment in lower Manhattan. The owner of this factory who put it there, only knows that it is an advertisement for labour of which he finds himself suddenly in need. But he has all unwittingly really written a proclamation that is a sign of the times.
Across the Atlantic I studied that proclamation in Old World cities. Women Wanted! Women Wanted! The capitals of Europe have been for four years placarded with the sign. And now we in America are writing it on our sky line. All over the world see it on the street-car barns as on the colleges. It is hung above the factories and the coal mines, the halls of government and the farm-yards and the arsenals and even the War Office. Everywhere from the fireside to the firing line, country after country has taken up the call. Now it has become the insistent chorus of civilisation: Women Wanted! Women Wanted!
But yesterday the great war was a phenomenon to which we in America thrilled only as its percussions reverberated around the world. Now our own soldiers are marching down Main Street. But their uniforms still are new. Wait. Soon here too one shall choke with that sob in the throat. Oh, I am walking again in the garden of the Tuileries on a day when I had seen war without the flags flying and the bands playing. It was dead men and disabled men and hospitals full and insane asylums full and cemeteries full. “You have to remember,” said a voice at my side, “that all freedoms since the world began have had to be fought for. They still have to be.”
So I repeat it now for you, the women of America, resolutely to remember. And get our your Robert Brownings! Read it over and over again, “God’s in his heaven.” For there are going to be days when it will seem that God has quite gone away. Still He hasn’t. Suddenly in a lifting of the war clouds above the blackest battle smoke, we shall see again His face as a flashing glimpse of some new freedom lights for an instant the darkened heavens above the globe of the world. Already there has been a Russian revolution which may portend the end of a German monarchy. In England a new democracy has buckled on the sword of a dead aristocracy. And a great Commoner is at the helm of state. But with all the freedoms they are winning, there is one for which not the most decorated general has any idea he’s fighting. I am not sure but it is the greatest freedom of all: when woman wins the race wins. The new democracy for which a world has taken up arms, for the first time since the history of civilisation began, is going to be real democracy. There is a light that is breaking high behind all the battle lines! Look! There on the horizon in those letters of blood that promise of the newest freedom of all. When it is finished—the awful throes of this red agony in which a world is being reborn—there is going to be a place in the Sun for women.
Listen, hear the call, Women Wanted! Women Wanted! Last Spring the Government pitched a khaki colored tent in your town on the vacant lot just beyond the post office, say. How many men have enlisted there? Perhaps there are seventy-five who have gone from the factory across the creek, and the receiving teller at the First National Bank, and the new principal of the High School where the children were getting along so well, and the doctor that everybody had because they liked him so much.
And, oh, last week at dinner your own husband had but just finished carving when he looked across the table and said: “Dear, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going to get into this fight to make the world right.” You know how your face went white and your heart for an instant stopped beating. But what I don’t believe you do know is that you are at this moment getting ready to play your part in one of the most tremendous epochs of the world. It is not only Liège and the Marne and Somme, and Haig and Joffre and Pétain and Pershing who are making history to-day. Keokuk, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Mich., and Little Falls, N. Y., are too—and you and the woman who lives next door!