“Dear old-fashioned girl,” I reply, “women no longer have to smash a way anywhere. They’ll even be sending after you if you don’t come.”
When the militants of England signed with their government the truce which abrogated for the period of the war the Cat and Mouse Act with which they had been pursued, it was the formal announcement to the world of the cessation of suffrage activities while the nations settled other issues. From Berlin to Paris and London, feminists acquiesced in the decision arrived at in Kingsway. It seemed indeed that the woman’s cause was going to wait. But is it not written: “Whoso loseth his life,” etc., “shall find it.”
Women Wanted! Women Wanted! “Listen,” I say to the Soul of a Suffragette, as we stand in the Strand. “You hear it? And it’s like that in the Avenue de l’Opéra and in Unter den Linden and in Petrograd and now in Broadway. To every woman, it is her country’s call to service.”
I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the door of the Doll’s House opened. She who stood at the threshold where the tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to lines of gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then the clock on her mantel ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries that only God himself had planned. The force primeval that had held her in bondage, this it was that should set her free. As straight as ever she went before to the altar and the cook stove and the cradle, she stepped out now into the wide wide world, the woman behind the man behind the gun.
“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “not all the political economists from John Stuart Mill to Ellen Key could have accomplished it. Not even your spectacular martyrdom was able to achieve it. But now it is done. For lo, the password the feminists have sought, is found. And it is Love—not logic!”
There are, the statisticians tell us, more than twenty million men numbered among the embattled hosts out there at the front where the future of the human race is being fought for. Modern warfare has most terrible engines of destruction. But with all of these at command, there is not a brigade of soldiers that could stand against their foes without the aid of the women who in the last analysis are holding the line.
Who is it that is feeding and clothing and nursing the greatest armies of history? See that soldier in the trenches? A woman raised the grain for the bread, a woman is tending the flocks that provided the meat for his rations to-day. A woman made the boots and the uniform in which he stands. A woman made the shells with which his gun is loaded. A woman will nurse him when he’s wounded. A woman’s ambulance may even pick him up on the battlefield. A woman surgeon may perform the operation to save his life. And somewhere back home a woman holds the job he had to leave behind. There is no task to which women have not turned to-day to carry on civilisation. For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most ancient occupation—and women to every other.
“All the suffrage flags are furled?” questions My Suffragette incredulously, as we pass through the streets where once her banners waved most militantly. “Gone with your broad arrows of yesterday,” I affirm. “And you should see our modern styles.”
NEW COSTUMES FOR NEW WOMEN
When women stood at the threshold listening breathlessly that August day, there was one costume ready and laid out by the nations for their wear in every land. Coronets and shimmering ball gowns, cap and gown in university corridors and plain little home made dresses in rose bowered cottages were alike exchanged for the new uniform and insignia. And the woman who set the sign of the red cross in the centre of her forehead appeared in her white gown and her flowing white head dress all over Europe as instantaneously as a new skirt ever flashed out in the pages of a fashion magazine. To her, every country called as naturally, as spontaneously as a hurt child might turn to its mother. She it is who has worn the red cross to her transfiguration in this new Woman Movement with one of the largest detachments in hospital service. See her on the sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Dardanelles, insisting on “wounded soldiers first” as she passes her charges to safety, and waiting behind herself goes quietly under the water. And with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman’s place was going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. Even as the troops buckled on sword and pistol and the departing regiments began to move, it was made sure that she should be waiting for them on their return.