Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War

by Mabel Potter Daggett

That woman who crossed the threshold of the Doll’s House awhile ago—you would scarcely recognise her as you meet her to-day anywhere abroad in the world. She has put aside yesterday as it were an old cloak that has just slipped from her shoulders. And she stands revealed as the one of whom some of us have for a long time written and some of us have read. For a generation at least she has been looked for. Now she is here.

You see when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women munition workers and women conductors and women bank tellers and women doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt if there is a statesman anywhere who has leaned to unlock a door of opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realised that he was but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is reshaping the world for mighty ends, rough hewn though they be to-day from the awful chaos of war.

But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and stands again before the cottage rose bowered on the English downs, red roofed in France and Italy, blue trimmed in Germany or ikon blessed in Russia or white porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened to her since. It is woman’s coming of age. Look, she is turning the ring on her finger to-day.

When the man in khaki went away, that ring was sign and symbol of the status assigned to her by all the oldest law books and religious books of the world. And none of the modern ones had been able wholly to eradicate from their pages the point of view that was the most prevailing opinion of civilisation. The most ancient classification of all listed in one category “a man’s house and his wife, his man servant and his maidservant, his ox and his ass and any other possessions that are his.” An English state church has given her in marriage to him “to obey him and serve him.” A German state church has bound her “to be subject to him as to her lord and master.” Christian lands have agreed that a woman when she marries enters into a state of coverture by which they tell us “the husband hath power and dominion over his wife.” Religious teachers from St. Paul to Martin Luther, law givers from Moses to Napoleon have been unanimous on this point, which Napoleon framing his code for France summed up briefly, Woman belongs to man.

This has been the basic assumption of church and state from whose courts of authority each concession of individuality for woman has been won only by process of slow amendment. It is still so subtly interwoven in dogma and statute that there is not yet any land where a woman, though thinking herself free, may not trip against a legal disability that has not yet been dislodged. For Blackstone, the great authority of reference, declares “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated in that of the husband.” And all over the world, all the church councils and all the state courts have not yet been so reformed but that by reversion to type they will hark back to the pronouncement. Man and wife are one—and he is the one. So the man’s mind thinketh.

And the woman’s mind? Since he went away in khaki, it has thought long, long thoughts. When he comes back, this new woman looking into his eyes with the level glance, he will find is a woman who has earned money—in a new world that has been made over for her so that she can. You see all those lines of women in industry and commerce and the professions? Some of them walk up to a paymaster’s window on Saturday night and some of them wait for the checks that arrive in their mail. But it is an experience in common through which all are passing. The open door to the shop and the factory and the counting room, to law or to medicine is the great gateway to the future where dreams shall come true. For the women who have passed through, have arrived at last at the great goal, economic independence.

Now what that means the sociologists could tell. Though they might not think to put it in terms of, for instance, Elsa von Stuttgart’s slippers. They would, I suppose, agree that economic independence is the right to earn one’s living—and be paid for it like a man. One earned it yesterday if one washed the dishes and cooked the meals and reared the children and kept the house for the other person who held the purse. Housekeepers of this class have been the busiest people we have had about us. And yet the census offices administered by men had so little idea of these women’s economic value, that they have been actually listed in government statistical returns as “unoccupied.” So also of course were the other housekeepers who, eliminating some of these most arduous tasks from the long day, nevertheless were not at least idle when they bore a man’s children and presided at his dinner table and entertained his friends and practised generally the graceful art of making a home. When they undertook these duties, there was a church promise, With all my worldly goods, I thee endow. That figure of speech, the law courts reduce to “maintenance,” that is to say, board and clothes. But, so widely disseminated has been the idea that the lady is “unoccupied” that these are generally regarded not in the nature of a recognition of service and a return for value received, but rather as perquisites bountifully bestowed on the recipient. So that frequently her range of choice in the matter has been, we may say, limited.

Frau Elsa von Stuttgart before the war had her board and clothes. But her husband had forbidden her to get her hats at a certain little French shop in Unter den Linden that she had always patronised before her marriage. And with all his money, he decided that one pair of evening slippers would do even for a woman in the social position of a Prussian officer’s wife. They lived in a villa at Zehlendorff that was perfectly equipped with everything that he considered desirable. There was a grand piano of marvellous tone, though she didn’t even play the piano at all. She was a doctor of philosophy, who before her marriage had been a teacher at the High School in Berlin and her hobby, it happened, was books. She liked them in beautiful bindings and she always used to buy them that way. But of course she couldn’t any more because her husband said it was extravagance, quite useless extravagance. Well, really you know, maintenance may be slippers and hats, but it isn’t books after all. And she had a lovely house and a piano of marvellous tone. How hard it was about the slippers, I suppose only a woman can understand. You see Elsa von Stuttgart has pretty feet, small and dainty feet. Every other woman in her set has German feet. “Look at them,” she whispered to me at a kaffee klatch one day in 1914. And I did. And I knew why her soul loved little satin slippers better than Beethoven or Lizst. She has them now once more. The house with the grand piano is closed and her husband is with his regiment. Elsa von Stuttgart in a class room is lecturing on philosophy again. She has rented a small apartment the walls of which are lined with books. You think the slippers a luxury for war-time perhaps? Well, she wrote me that she has done penance for them in extra meatless days to atone for the price.

In France the Countess Madelaine de Ranier lived in a château of the old aristocracy. And she had a fortune of hundreds of thousands of francs but not a sou to spend as she pleased. You would have thought that she had everything that heart could wish, until you caught unawares the wistful expression in her eyes when they forgot their smiling. Madelaine de Ranier, having no children of her own, would have loved to write checks for the charities that took care of other people’s children. But she couldn’t. It was a very large dot that she had brought to her husband. But by the laws of France he administered it. Out of the income, he of course paid her bills. The third year of her marriage there occurred to her the idea for a confidential arrangement which she made with her dressmaker for doubling on the bills submitted for her evening gowns and dividing the proceeds accruing. It was the Countess’ only source of ready money. She kept it in the secret drawer of her jewel case, these few francs that she could count her own, among her costly articles of adornment valued at thousands. To-day the Count is somewhere on the Somme and Madelaine de Ranier is daily at a desk in Paris directing the great commercial house in which her dot and the family fortune are invested. I saw her in the winter of 1917. Her eyes were sparkling. From the large income that she now handles, she had just written off a contribution to the Orphans of France Fund for the nation. And nobody had said, “You must not,” or equally as authoritatively, “I do not wish it.”

In England there is Edith Russell, Dr. Edith Russell she really is. She gave up her profession when she married, to devote herself wholly to home making in the great house in Cavendish Square, London. It requires nine servants and careful planning to meet the expenses, even though her husband turns over to her all of his income. “Can’t we go out to Hampstead to a smaller house instead?” she asked him one day, laying her housekeeping accounts before him. She was trying somehow to plan for a financial surplus. The Malthusian League was in need of funds and she used to be one of its most earnest workers. But her husband said: “Not at all.” Even if there were indeed hundreds of pounds available, he did not approve of the League’s principles anyhow. Now Dr. Edith Russell in response to her country’s call is back on the staff of the borough health department in the medical work in which she was engaged before her marriage. And she is again a Malthusian League contributor. You see, it’s her own money now, not her husband’s.