Now it’s being made over, actually made over! Already woman wins this victory in the Great War. Don’t we all of us know industries where there hasn’t been so much as a nail to hang a woman’s hat on, where it wouldn’t be spoiled, let alone a room in which she could wash her hands, or change her working clothes? But go through Europe now and you will scarcely find any place they haven’t tried the best they could to fix up for woman’s occupancy. She shall have the nicest hook that they can find to hang her hat on. She shall have a whole cupboard, a locker to keep it in, if she’ll only put it there to-day. And oh, ladies, all of you listen, there’s even a mirror to see if it’s on straight! Just a little while ago I stood in a factory “somewhere in France,” where they had built a beautiful retiring room with lavatories and hot and cold water and a row of shining white enamelled sinks. And one day of course some thoughtful woman had brought in her handbag a piece from her cracked looking-glass and fastened it on the wall between two tacks, you know the way you would? A little later, the superintendent of the factory saw it there: “I sent right out,” he told me himself with feeling, “and bought this one.” And he showed me with pride the full length plate-glass mirror that hung on the wall where the little old cracked looking-glass used to be. I think every government in Europe now has mirrors listed among “necessary supplies.” I mention it as significant of the anxious effort to please the feminine fancy.
But the first most important thing that was done in making over industry, was opening the door from the inside for Mrs. Black’s arrival. Every door-keeper to-day has his instructions from higher up not to keep the lady knocking out in the cold. Her coming was in the first instance heralded in England, actually heralded with a flourish of trumpets. That procession of 40,000 women that Mrs. Pankhurst led down the Strand into industry, under the new standard, “For Men Must Fight and Women Must Work,” had flags flying and bands playing. And the English Government paid for the bands. Parliament records show that this Suffrage procession was financed to the extent of 3,000 pounds, which is $15,000. Has there ever been a more revolutionary conversion than this to the Woman’s Cause? For the first time in history, the woman movement is underwritten by Government. It is with this support that it’s going strong all over the world to-day.
The place that is being made for Mrs. Black and her contemporaries is everywhere in the first instance at least, being arranged through Government intervention. With every new push on the front, the soldiers that go down in the awful battalions of death have to be replaced by others, which means that more and more men must be “combed out” of the shops back home. And to employers governments have said: Hire women in their places.
To this employers answered as they have so many times to us when we have asked to be hired: “But women don’t know how.”
You see, it has always been so difficult for us to learn. From the bricklayers and the printers up to the medical men and the lawyers and the ministers, there has always been that gentlemen’s agreement in every trade: “Don’t let her in. And if she gets in, don’t let her up, any higher up than you have to.”
But now over all the world, to every industry that shows a slackening in production, there is issued one common government General Order: “Teach the Women.” And the employer looks questioningly toward the work bench at the figure in the leather apron there, who in some of the most highly skilled trades, has always threatened to take off that apron and walk out of the shop when a petticoat crossed the threshold. There are shops in which there has never been a woman apprentice, because he wouldn’t teach her. Would he now?
The skilled workman was summoned in England to the Home Office for a heart-to-heart talk with the Government. He came from the cotton trade, the woollen and the worsted trade, the bleachers and dyers’ trade, the woodworkers and furnishers’ trade, the biscuit trade, the boot and shoe trade, the engineering trade and a great many others. The Government spoke sternly of its power under martial law. The skilled workman, shifting his cap from one hand to the other, began to understand. But he still stubbornly protested: “Women haven’t the mental capacity for my work.”
“We shall see,” said Government.
“But it will take so long to learn my trade, five years, six years, seven years.”
“Ah, so it will. Very well, then, teach the women a part of your trade at a time, a process in which instruction can be given in the shortest length of time.”