Even women who do not need to work for pay are working without it and adding to the demonstration of what women can do. See the colonel’s lady taking the place of Julie O’Grady at the lathe for week-end work in the munition factories to release the regular worker for one day’s rest in seven. Lady Lawrence in a white tunic and wearing a diamond wrist watch is in charge of the canteen at the Woolwich Arsenal, supervising the serving of kippers and toast at the tea hour for the 2,000 women employés. Lady Sybil Grant, Lord Rosebery’s daughter, is the official photographer to the Royal Naval Air Service at Roehampton. The Countess of Limerick, assisted by fifty women of title, among them Lady Randolph Churchill, is running the Soldiers’ Free Refreshment Buffet at the London Bridge Station. The Marchioness of Londonderry, directing the Military Cookery Section of the Women’s Legion, has given to her nation the woman army cook who has recently replaced 5,000 men. Women of world-wide fame have cheerfully turned to the task that called. Beatrice Harraden, celebrated author of “Ships That Pass in the Night,” is in the uniform of an orderly at the Endell Street War Hospital, where she has done a unique service in organising the first hospital library for the patients. May Sinclair, whose recent book, “The Three Sisters,” is one of the great contributions to feminist literature, is enrolled as a worker at the Kensington War Hospital Supply Department. She has invented the machine used there to turn out “swabs” seven times faster than formerly they were made by hand.
There is the greatest diversity in war service. One of the first calls answered by the suffragists was for an emergency gang of 300 women from the metropolis to supervise the baling of hay for the army. Lloyd George has been supplied with a woman secretary and a woman chauffeur, the latter a girl who was a celebrated hunger striker before the war. In the royal dockyards and naval establishments there are 7,000 women employed. Through the Woman’s National Land Service Corps 5,000 university and other women of education have been recruited to serve as forewomen of detachments of women farm labourers. The army last spring was asking for 6,000 women at the War Office to assist in connection with the work of the Royal Flying Corps. Oh, the list of what women are doing to-day is as indefinitely long as everything that there is to be done.
And the woman movement sweeps on directly toward the gates of government. See the woman war councillor who recently arrived in 1916. She came into view first in Germany, where Frau Kommerzienrat Hedwig Heyl of Berlin is a figure almost as important as is the Imperial Chancellor. The daughter of the founder of the North German Lloyd Line, herself the president of the Berlin Lyceum Club and the manager of the Heyl Chemical Works, in which she succeeded her late husband as president, Frau Heyl knows something of organisation. And she it is who has been responsible more than any other of the Kaiser’s advisers for the conservation of the food supply which keeps the German armies strong against a world of its opponents. The second day after war was declared, in conference with the Minister of the Interior, she had formulated the plan that by night the Government had telegraphed to every part of Germany: there was formed the Nationaler Frauendien to control all of the activities of women during the war. She was placed at the head of the Central Commission. It was the Nationaler Frauendien that made the suggestions which the Government adopted for the conservation of the food supply. And it was they who were entrusted with organising the food supplies of the nation and educating the women in their use to the point of highest efficiency. As a personal contribution to this end, Frau Heyl has published a War Cook Book, arranged an exhibit of substitute foods for war use, and has turned one section of her chemical works into a food factory from which she supplies the government with 6,000 pounds of tinned meat a day for the army.
After all, who are the real food controllers of a nation? Could a minister of finance, for instance, bring up a family on, say, 20 shillings a week? Yet there were women in every nation doing that before they achieved fame on the firing line and in the making of munitions. Last spring, as the food question became a gravely determining factor in the war, it began to be more and more apparent that the feminine mind trained to think in terms of domestic economy, might have something of value to contribute to questions of state. Why let Germany monopolise this particular form of efficiency? And England in 1917 called to its Ministry of Food two women, Mrs. Pember Reeves, one of its radical suffragists, and Mrs. C. S. Peel, the editor of a woman’s magazine and a cook book.
About the same time each of the warring nations decided that the mobilised women forces everywhere could be most efficiently directed by women. Germany appointed as an attaché for each of the six army commands throughout the empire a woman who is to serve as “Directress of the Division for Women’s Service.” From Dr. Alice Salomon in the Berlin-Potsdam district to Fraulein Dr. Gertrude Wolf in the Bavarian War Bureau, each of these new appointees is a feminist leader from that woman movement of yesterday. In France the enrolment of French women is under the direction of Mme. Emile Boutroux and Mme. Emile Borel. In England the highest appointment for a woman since the war is the calling of Mrs. H. J. Tennant, the prominent suffragist, to be Director of the Woman’s Department of National Service. America, preparing to enter the great conflict in the spring of 1917, at the very outset organised a Woman’s Division of the National Defence Council and called to its command Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the great suffrage leader.
It’s a long way back to the Doll’s House, isn’t it, with woman’s place to-day in the workshop and the factory, the war hospital, the war zone and the war office? And now they are calling women to the electorate. Russia has spoken, England has spoken. America is making ready. Doesn’t Mr. Kipling want to revise his verses: “When man gathers with his fellow braves for council, he does not have a place for her”?
It really has ceased to be necessary for woman any longer to plead her cause. Every government’s doing it for her. The woman movement now is both called and chosen. And the British Government is the most active feminist advocate of all. The greatest brief for the woman’s cause that ever was arranged is a handsome volume on “Women’s War Work,” issued by the British War Office, as a guide to employers of labour throughout the United Kingdom. This famous publication lists exactly ninety-six trades and 1,701 jobs which the Government says women can do just as well as men, some of them even better. A second publication issued in London with the approval of the War Office, sets forth in more literary form “Women’s Work in Wartime,” and is dedicated to “The Women of the Empire, God save them every one.”
It was in 1916 that I talked with a German gentleman who is near enough to the Kaiser to voice the point of view from that part of the world. “Women from now on are going to have a more important place in civilisation than they ever have held before,” affirmed Count von Bernstorff as we sat in his official suite at the Ritz Hotel in New York. “In the ultimate analysis,” he spoke slowly and impressively, “in the ultimate analysis,” he repeated, “it is the nation with the best women that’s going to win this war.”
“Do you know what I think?” says the Soul of a Suffragette as we stand before the Great Push. “I think that whoever else wins this war, woman wins.”
Her country’s call? Listen: there is a higher overtone—her man’s call. Is it not the woman behind the man behind the gun who has achieved her apotheosis?