And Gabrielle Duchene’s flaming poster has sent a light across the sea. The American Federation of Labour has voted: “Resolved that we endorse the movement to obtain from all governments at the time of the signature of the Treaty of Peace, the establishment of an international agreement embodying the principle of equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.”
So? Then no one really expects the new woman in industry to go home after the war. There is a great High Court of the Ages in which man may propose the regulation of the Universe, but God Himself disposes. And that soiled scrap of paper will be, after all, only a scrap of paper in the great whirlwind of economic law that bloweth where it listeth.
CHAPTER VI
The Open Door in Commerce
Something has just happened. A hidden hand has touched a secret spring. A closed door in a blank wall has opened. And one in the long cloak of authority seems to be standing at the threshold pleasantly beckoning the Lady to cross formerly forbidden portals.
For I feel like that, like a little girl living in a fairy tale that is turning true right before my eyes. This morning there has arrived in my mail a letter personally addressed to me from the New York University School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance. It announces that the entrance of the United States into the war has revolutionised American business. That hundreds of thousands of men off for the front are leaving behind them hundreds of thousands of vacancies. That commercial houses are facing a shortage of trained and capable assistants. That to fill the positions which are daily presenting themselves, women must enter business. That to give them the necessary training, this school offers no less than 142 courses from which they may make their preparation for executive positions of responsibility.
It is the first time that I and the League for Business Opportunities for Women to which I belong, have ever thus received a personal invitation to the wide open world of commerce. The League since its inception some five years ago has been alertly engaged in looking, as its name implies, for business opportunities for women. We have always been obliged to look pretty persistently for them. Never before have they been presented to us. Now, see, the way is clear, they tell us, right up the steeps of high finance.
The bursting bombs of war have done it. A ghastly Place aux Dames, it is in truth. But the stage is set. The cue is given. There is not even time to hesitate. Draughted, the long lines come on with steady tread. Now our battalions fall in step with the battalions of the Allies and the Central Powers. For English or Hun or French or Magyar or Russian or Serb or American, the woman movement is one like that. Through the same doorway of opportunity we all of us shall enter in. There are blood stains on the lintel, I know. But this door, for the first time set ajar, is the only way, it appears, between the past and the future. With the invitation from the New York School of Commerce on my desk before me, I too am at the threshold where the centuries meet. Down the vista that stretches before me, I look with long, long thoughts.
MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE
Of the Financial Centre for Women in New York, who stands at the open door in commerce to usher in the women of America.