A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

“France can not spare workers now,” said one woman to President Poincaré, who personally visited the wrecked factory to congratulate these heroines.

Such is the metal of French wives and mothers, who have always, until this war, lived rather secluded lives within their own homes. In sheer admiration the French men, who have hitherto monopolized the higher fields of industry, and who have laughed at the idea of women in political life, are now ready to yield to any demands that women may in future put forth.

French women can probably have the vote for the asking. They have not made up their minds, in great numbers, that they want to vote. But the suffrage movement is well started, it has good leaders, women of education and social power, and there is no question as to the outcome.

War has wrought great changes in the status of women in all the countries directly involved, and in France it has almost overturned the whole social theory. The rigid system of chaperonage of girls has been greatly relaxed.

For this the Red Cross has been responsible to a certain degree. Thousands of young women who never in their lives before saw a man except in the presence of their mothers now work in station canteens at all hours of the day and night, cooking, serving, feeding soldiers and refugees, waiting on the sick and weary with tireless devotion.

I have spoken of the dearth of conductors on the French trains. There is one train attendant who never fails, and that is the young woman who collects funds for the Red Cross. Every time a train stops it is boarded by girls and women in white uniforms, who go through all the carriages shaking tin money receptacles. These are about the size and shape of a quart milk bottle, and the girl who holds it neglects nobody. “Pour la Croix Rouge! Pour les blessés!” she cries, and everybody drops small change into the milk bottle’s insatiable maw. In the course of a long journey one contributes rather heavily. But then, one should.

The educated women of France have gone in for hospital nursing as never before. No part of unpreparedness in France was more serious than the neglect of the nursing profession. Formerly almost all nursing was done by the religious orders, and to tell the truth, it was not very scientific nursing. If a sister happened to be a born nurse, so much the better. But even the best of them were untrained in the modern sense.

When the religious orders were broken up in France little or nothing was publicly done to replace the nurses. I visited a house in Paris, a sort of a nurses’ settlement, where for some years a highly educated and philanthropic woman has maintained a small training school of her own.

This woman, whose name, unfortunately, has slipped my memory, lives and works in a crowded quarter of the city where there is much tuberculosis. She established her nurses’ training school in connection with her tuberculosis work, which is extensive. She induced a number of educated girls to take up nursing, and many of them in 1914 went into war work. But they were a drop in the bucket. They were dozens where thousands were needed. So the women had to leave their homes, as our leisured women will have to, if this war outlasts 1918, and made themselves capable and devoted trained nurses.

These are the new women of France, and it would be extraordinary if, after finding freedom from the old restrictions and conventions, they should ever go back to the old ways. I met several women who were as emancipated as any young American feminist, and who seemed very happy in their new independence.