Their surgeons have stood at the operating table a week at a stretch with only an hour or two of sleep each night. Their doctors have battled with epidemics of typhoid and plague. Their ambulance girls have brought in the wounded from the battlefield under shell-fire. Hospitals have been conducted under bombardment with all the patients carried to the cellar. Hospitals have been captured by the enemy. Hospitals have been evacuated at command with the patients loaded on trains or motor cars or bullock wagons for retreat with the army. There were forty-six British women who shared in the historic retreat of the Serbian army three hundred miles over the Plain of Kossovo and the mountains of Albania. Men and cattle perished by the score. But the women doctors, freezing, starving, sleeping in the fields, struggling against a blinding blizzard with an amazing physical endurance and a dauntless courage, all came through to Scutari. Out on the far-flung frontiers of civilisation, the woman in khaki who has done these things is memorialised. At Mladanovatz, the Serbians have erected a fountain with the inscription: “In memory of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and their founder, Dr. Elsie Inglis.”
SUFFRAGISTS LED ALL THE REST
When the great call, “Women wanted,” first commenced in all lands, there were those who stood with reluctant feet at the threshold simply because they did not know how to step out into the new wide world of opportunity stretching before them. In this crisis it was to the suffragists that every government turned. Who else should organise? These women, like My Suffragette, had devoted their lives to assembling cohorts for a cause! The Assoziazione per la Donna in Italy, as the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises in France, promptly responded by offering their office machinery as registration bureaus through which women could be drafted into service. It was the suffrage association at Budapest, Hungary, that filled the order from the city government for five hundred women street sweepers. The Vaterlandischer Frauenverein assembled 25,000 women in Berlin alone to take the course of training arranged for helferinnen, assistants in all phases of relief work. But it was in England where the woman movement of yesterday had reached its highest point in organisation that the woman movement for to-day was best equipped to start. Britain counted among the nation’s resources no less than fifty separate suffrage organisations, one of which alone, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was able to send out its instructions to over 500 branches! And the mobilisation of the woman power of a nation was under way on a scale that could have been witnessed in no other era of the world.
The woman who has been enlisted in largest numbers in England as in other lands is the woman who at her country’s call hung up the housewife’s kitchen apron in plain little cottages to put on a new uniform with a distinctive feature that has been hitherto conspicuously missing from women’s clothes. It has a pocket for a pay envelope. “See,” I say to My Suffragette, “you would not know her at all, now, would you?”
She came marching through the streets of London on July 17, 1915, in one of the most significant detachments mustered for the new woman movement, 40,000 women carrying banners with the new device: “For men must fight and women must work.” And industry, in which she was enlisting, presented her with a new costume. The Ministry of Munitions in London got out the pattern. Employers of labour throughout the world are now copying it. There isn’t anything in the chorus more attractive than the woman who’s walked into the centre of the stage in shop and factory wearing overall trousers, tunic and cap. Some English factories have the entire woman force thus uniformed and others have adopted only the tunic. Here are girl window cleaners with pail and ladder coming down the Strand wearing the khaki trousers. The girl conductor of the omnibus that’s just passed has a very short skirt that just meets at the knees her high leather leggings. The girl lift operators at the stores in Oxford Street are in smart peg-top trousers. In Germany the innovation is of course being done by imperial decree, a government order having put all the railway women in dark grey, wide trousers. In France the new design is accepted slowly. The girl conductor who swings at the open door of the Paris Metro with a whistle at her lips, wears the men employé’s cap but she still clings to her own “tablier.”
That July London procession organised by the suffragists, led in fact by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, in response to labour’s call, “Women wanted,” is the last suffrage procession of which the world has heard. And it is the most important feminist parade that has ever appeared in any city of the world. For it was a procession marching straight for the goal of economic independence. It was the vanguard of the moving procession of women that in every country is still continuously passing into industry. Germany in the first year of war had a half million women in one occupation alone, that of making munitions. France has 400,000 “munitionettes.” Great Britain in 1916 had a million women who had enlisted for the places of men since the war began. In every one of Europe’s warring countries and now in America, women are being rushed as rapidly as possible into commerce and industry to release men. In Germany nearly all the bank clerks are women. The Bank of France alone in Paris has 700 women clerks. In England women clerks number over 100,000. And the British Government is steadily advertising: Wanted, 30,000 women a week to replace men for the armies.
“Who works, fights,” Lloyd George has said, in the English Parliament. English women enlisting for agriculture have been given a government certificate attesting: “Every woman who helps in agriculture during the war is as truly serving her country as is the man who is fighting in trenches or on the sea.”
“But,” protests the bewildered woman from only the other day, “they told us that women didn’t know enough to do man’s work, that she wasn’t strong enough for much of anything beyond light domestic duty like washing and scrubbing and cooking and raising a family of six or eight or ten children.”
“Nothing that anybody ever said about women before August, 1914,” I answer, “goes to-day. All the discoveries the scientists thought they had made about her, all the reports the sociologists solemnly filed over her, all the limitations the educators laid on her and all the jokes the punsters wrote about her—everything has gone to the scrap-heap as repudiated as the one-time theory that the earth was square instead of round. Everything they said she wasn’t and she couldn’t and she didn’t, she now is and she can and she does.”
IT IS UNIVERSAL SERVICE