Taking Title in the Professions
They are the grimmest outposts of all that mark the winning of the woman’s cause. But they star the map of Europe to-day—the Women’s War Hospitals.
Out of the night darkness that envelops a war-ridden land, a bell sounds a faint alarm. From bed to bed down the white wards there passes the word in a hoarse whisper: “The convoy, the convoy again.” Instantly the whole vast house of pain is at taut attention. Boyish women surgeons, throwing aside the cigarettes with which they have been relaxing overstrained nerves, hastily don white tunics and take their place by the operating tables. Women physicians hurry from the laboratories with the anesthetics that will be needed. Girl orderlies, lounging at leisure in the corridors, remove their hands from their pockets to seize the stretchers and rush to their line-up in the courtyard. The gate keeper turns a heavy iron key. From out the darkness beyond, the convoy of grey ambulances reaching in a continuous line from the railway station begins to roll in.
On and on they come in great waves of agony lashed up by the latest seething storm of horror and destruction out there on the front. In the dimmed rays of the carefully hooded light at the entrance, the girl chauffeur in khaki deftly swings into place the great vehicle with her load of human freight. A nurse in a flowing headdress, ghostly white against the night, alights from the rear step. The wreckage inside of what has been four men, now dead, dying or maimed, is passed out. Groans and sharp cries of pain mingle with the rasping of the motor as the ambulance rolls on to make way for another.
The last drive in the trenches has been perhaps a particularly terrible one. All night like this, every night for a week, for two weeks, the rush for human repairs may go on. Men broken on the gigantic wheel of fate to which the world is lashed to-day will be brought in like this, battalion after battalion to be mended by women’s hands. The appalling distress of a world in agony has requisitioned any hands that know how, all hands with the skill to bind up a wound.
It is very plain. You cannot stand like this in a woman staffed hospital in the war zone without catching a vision of the great moving picture spectacle that here flashes through the smoke of battle. Hush! From man’s extremity, it is, that the Great Director of all is himself staging woman’s opportunity.
The heights toward which the woman movement of yesterday struggled in vain are taken at last. The battle has been won over there in Europe. Between the forces of the Allies and the Kaiser, it is, that another fortress of ancient prejudice has fallen to the waiting women’s legions. It was entirely unexpected, entirely unplanned by any of the embattled belligerents. Woman had been summoned to industry. The proclamation that called her went up on the walls of the cities almost as soon as the call of the men to the colours. There were women porters at the railway stations of Europe, women running railroads, women driving motor vans, women unloading ships, women street cleaners, women navvies, women butchers, women coal heavers, women building aeroplanes, women doing danger duty in the T. N. T. factories of the arsenals, and in every land women engaged in those 96 trades and 1701 jobs in which the British War Office authoritatively announced: “They have shown themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex.”
Let the lady plough. Teach her to milk. She can have the hired man’s place on the farm. She can release the ten dollar a week clerk poring over a ledger. She can make munitions. Her country calls her. But the female constitution has not been reckoned strong enough to sit on the judge’s bench. And Christian lands unanimously deem it indelicate for a woman to talk to God from a pulpit. From the arduous duties of the professions, the world would to the last professional man protect the weaker sex.
Then, hark! Hear the Dead March again! As inexorably as in the workshops and the offices, it began to echo through the seminaries and the colleges, through the laboratories and the law courts. Listen! The sound of marching feet. The new woman movement is here too at the doors. High on the walls of Leipzig and the Sorbonne, of Oxford and Cambridge and Moscow and Milan, on all of the old world institutions of learning, the long scrolls of the casualty lists commenced to go up. Whole cloisters and corridors began to be black with the names of men “dead on the field of honour.” And civilisation faced the inexorable sequel. Women at last in the professions now are taking title on equal terms with men.
The doors of a very old established institution in Fifty-ninth Street, New York, swung open on a day last autumn. And a line of young women passed through. They went up the steps to take their place—for the first time that women had ever been there—in the class rooms of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. There is perhaps a little awkward moment of surprise, of curiosity. A professor nods in recognition to the new comers. The class of 1921 smiles good naturedly. An incident is closed.