THE NEW WOMAN MOVEMENT
Every man who enlists at that tent near the post office is going to leave a job somewhere whether it’s at the factory or the doctor’s office or the school teacher’s desk, or whether it’s your husband. That job will have to be taken by a woman. It’s what happened in Europe. It’s what now we may see happen here. A great many women will have a wage envelope who never had it before. That may mean affluence to a housefull of daughters. One, two, three, four wage envelopes in a family where father’s used to be the only one. You even may have to go out to earn enough to support yourself and the babies. Yes, I know your husband’s army pay and the income from investments carefully accumulated through the savings of your married life, will help quite a little. But with the ever rising war cost of living, it may not be enough. It hasn’t been for thousands of homes in Europe. And eventually you too may go to work as other women have. It’s very strange, is it not, for you of all women who have always believed that woman’s place was the home. And you may even have been an “anti,” a most earnest advocate of an ancient régime against which whole societies and associations of what yesterday were called “advanced” women organised their “suffrage” protests.
To-day no one any longer has to believe what is woman’s place. No woman even has anything to say about it. Read everywhere the signs: Women Wanted! Here in New York we are seeing shipload after shipload of men going out to sea in khaki. We don’t know how many boat loads like that will go down the bay. But for an army of every million American men in Europe, there must be mobilised another million women to take their places behind the lines here 3,000 miles away from the guns, to carry on the auxiliary operations without which the armies in the field could not exist.
In the department store where you shopped to-day you noticed an elevator girl had arrived, where the operator always before has been a boy! Outside the window of my country house here as I write, off on that field on the hillside a woman is working, who never worked there before. At Lexington, Mass., I read in my morning paper, the Rev. Christopher Walter Collier has gone to the front in France and his wife has been unanimously elected by the congregation to fill the pulpit during his absence. Sometimes women by the hundred step into new vacancies. The Æolian Company is advertising for women as piano salesmen and has established a special school for their instruction. A Chicago manufacturing plant has hung out over its employment gate the announcement, “Man’s work, man’s pay for all women who can qualify,” and within a week two hundred women were at work. The Pennsylvania railroad, which has rigidly opposed the employment of women on its office staffs, in June, 1917, announced a change of policy and took on in its various departments five hundred women and girls. The Municipal Service Commission in New York last fall was holding its first examination to admit women to the position of junior draughtsmen in the city’s employ. The Civil Service Commission at Washington, preparing to release every possible man from government positions for war service, had compiled a list of 10,000 women eligible for clerical work in government departments.
Like that it is happening all about us. This is the new woman movement. And you’re in it. We all are. I know: you may never have carried a suffrage banner or marched in a suffrage procession or so much as addressed a suffrage campaign envelope. But you’re “moving” to-day just the same if you’ve only so much as rolled a Red Cross bandage or signed a Food Administration pledge offered you by the women’s committee of the Council of National Defence. All the women of the world are moving.
“Suffrage de la morte,” a Senator on the Seine has termed the vote offered the French feminists in the form of a proposition that every man dying on the field of battle may transfer his ballot to a woman whom he shall designate. And the French women have drawn back in horror, exclaiming: “We don’t want a dead man’s vote. We want only our own vote.” Nevertheless it is something like this which is occurring.
And we may shudder, but we may not draw back. It is by way of the place de la morte, that women are moving inexorably to-day into industry and commerce and the professions, on to strange new destinies that shall not be denied.
There on the firing line a bullet whizzes straight to the mark. A man drops dead in the trenches. Some wife’s husband, some girl’s sweetheart who before he was a soldier was a wage earner, never will be more. Back home another woman who had been temporarily enrolled in the ranks of industry, steps forward, enlisted for life in the army of labour.
Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the feminists have asked. But this is not our woman movement. This is His woman movement, who moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. We may not know. And we do not understand. But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were in the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way that is opening for women throughout the world. It is westward to us that this star of opportunity has taken its course directly from above the battlefields of Europe.
A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY LOOKS ON