DR. ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON OF NEW YORK
Who is organizing the American women physicians for war service.
As she stood there in the ancient Palais de Justice of Paris, her small, well formed head wound round with its black braid, her red lips framing with easy facility the learned legal phrases, her expressive hands accentuating her points with eager gesture, her woman’s figure in the flowing legal robe of black serge with the white muslin cravat, was outlined against a thousand years of history. Eight soldiers with bayonets stood on guard at the rear of the room. The court whom she addressed was seven judges of military rank in splendid military uniform. And her client was a soldier. This is the Conseil de la Guerre. See the epitage, the sash that falls from Suzanne Grinberg’s left shoulder. It is edged with ermine, the sign that she is entitled to plead before the Tribunal of War. It is the first time in the history of the world, here in France, that women lawyers have been empowered to appear in military cases. The Salle de Pas-Perdus, they call the great central promenade at the Palais de Justice. Note that these new women lawyers who wear the ermine walk in the Hall of Lost Footsteps! On the walls of this court house in which Suzanne Grinberg pleads, you may read wreathed in the tricolours of France, “Avocats à la Cour d’Appel de Paris Morts pour la Patrie,” and there follow 127 names.
Only the day before yesterday woman’s capacity for the higher education to fit her for the professions was in grave doubt. Vassar College once stood as the farthest outpost of radical feminism, and Christian women were counselled by their clergymen not to send their daughters there. Even after the moral stigma of a college education had passed, the critics said that anyhow the female mind was not made to master science and Greek and mathematics. And it was only about twenty years ago that Phi Beta Kappa decided to risk the opening of its ranks to college women—of course provided that any of them should be able to attain the high scholarship that it required. The female mind, you know!
Well, at the last Phi Beta Kappa council meeting, the secretary reported to that distinguished body that in the elections of the past three years, women have captured in Phi Beta Kappa an aggregate of 1979 places to 2202 for men. What shall the oldest college fraternity do in the face of this feminine invasion? A letter on my desk says that the committee on fraternity policy has been commissioned to take under advisement this grave situation and report to the council meeting of 1919! So the present Phi Beta Kappa record seems to dispose forever of the old tradition of the mental inferiority of the always challenged sex.
Ladies, right this way for titles, please, one profession after another takes up the call to-day. New York University at its opening last fall registered 110 women in its law school, the largest number ever entered there. Already the American medical women are called and coming. New York City has recently appointed women doctors for nearly every municipal institution. The first mobile hospital unit of American women physicians with a hospital of 100 beds, to be known as the Women’s Oversea Hospital Unit, is now in France. It is backed financially by the National Women’s Suffrage Association. And it goes from that first original outpost of the professional woman’s cause, Elizabeth Blackwell’s New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Meanwhile the entire Medical Women’s National Association is being organised for war service under the direction of Dr. Rosalie S. Morton, who has been made a member of the General Medical Board of the United States Government at Washington. The American Women’s Hospitals are being formed for civilian relief at home and for service with Pershing’s army. From the Surgeon General’s headquarters in Washington the announcement is made: “There will be need for the war service of every woman physician in the United States.”
And through the vast Salle de Pas-Perdus of the world, the professional women are passing. The Lost Footsteps! O, the Lost Footsteps! Forward the advancing columns. Hush, there are ways that are not our ways! On with the new woman movement, but with banners furled before the woe of a world! For all the pæans of our victory are drowned in the dirge of our grief.
CHAPTER VIII
At the Gates of Government
The man in khaki stood at the door. And he held a woman close to his heart in mansion or cottage—in a rose bowered cottage on the English downs, or red roofed behind the yellow walls of France and Italy, or blue trimmed beside a linden tree in Germany, or ikon blessed in Russia. All that he had in the world, his estates, his fields or his vineyards, his flocks or his factory, his shop or his job, his home and his children, he was leaving behind. “I leave them to you, dear,” he said.
The bugles blew. And he kissed her again. Then he went marching down the street in those fateful days of August, 1914, when all the world began going to war.