Women Wanted! Women Wanted! I am hearing it again over there. Outside the windows of my London hotel in Piccadilly, a shaft of sharp white light played against the blackness of the London sky. Down these beams that searched the night for enemy Zeppelins, a woman’s figure softly moved. And as I looked, the close drawn curtains of my room, it seemed, parted and she stepped lightly across the window sill. She was gowned in a quaint, old-time costume. “They’re not wearing them to-day,” I smiled.
She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with the broad arrows of Holloway jail. There were women, you know, who suffered and died in that prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to be the way of the cross for the woman’s cause.
“You ought to see the new styles,” I said. “Governments are getting out so many new decorations for women.”
“Tell me,” she answered. “Up in heaven we have heard that it is so. And I have come to see.”
So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette and I, to look on the Great Push of the new woman movement that is swinging down the twentieth century in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of the road and all the gates ahead are open wide. No ukase of parliament or king halts it. No church dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans do not mob it. No, indeed! The applauding populace that’s crying “Place aux dames” would not tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I don’t think there’s any one left in the world who would want to so much as pull out a hairpin of this triumphant processional.
You see, it’s so very different from the woman movement of yesterday. That was the crusade of the pioneers who gave their lives in the struggling service of an unpopular ideal. Who wanted feminists free to find themselves? Even women themselves came haltingly as recruits. But this is a pageant, with Everywoman crowding for place at her country’s call. And who would not adore to be a patriot? It is with flying colors, albeit to the solemn measures of a Dead March that the new columns are coming on.
It is the Woman Movement against which all the parliaments of men shall never again prevail. Majestically, with sure and rhythmic tread, it is moving, not under its own power of propaganda, but propelled by fearful cosmic forces. At the compulsion of a sublime destiny accelerated under the ægis of a war office press bureau, suffragists pro and anti alike are gathered in. Theirs no longer to reason why. For see, they are keeping step, always keeping step with the armies at the front!
There is a new offensive on the Somme. There is a defeat at the Yser, a victory at Verdun or Marne. The dead men lie deep in the trenches! The war office combs out new regiments to face the hell-fire of shrapnel and the woman movement in all nations joins up new recruits to fill the vacant places from which the men, about to die, are steadily enlisted. See the sign of the times. I point it out to My Suffragette: “Women Wanted.” With each year of war the demand becomes more insistent. Women Wanted! Women Wanted!
“But they didn’t used to be,” she gasps in amazement.
And of course, I too remember when the world was barricaded against everywhere a woman wanted to go beyond the dishpan and the wash tub and the nursery. It all seems now such a long while ago.