The problem of the home worker was long her chief province, and since the war she has succeeded in having a minimum wage law passed through the French Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, giving to the women who work at home four or five times as much as they ever received before.
“I do not wish all women to work in factories,” she said to me. “Expectant mothers, women with young children, delicate women, ought to stay at home. And, since they must earn, it is the business of the state to see that they are not cheated.”
Not only did Madame Viollet secure for the home workers a minimum wage, she organized them into a syndicat, or union, to enforce the law, and to raise their own status in various ways. This was a remarkable thing to do, because French women are totally unused to the idea of trade unions. The men rarely admit them to their unions, and the strong woman labor leader of England and the United States is practically unknown. But the home workers are organized now, and after the war we shall pay more for our French embroidered underwear.
CHAPTER XXV
BY WAY OF DIVERSION
I shall never hear that musical classic, Where Do We Go From Here?, without remembering a young lieutenant I tried to be a mother to in France. I really led the young man terribly astray, and but for a bit of luck at the end I might have got him court-martialed.
The whole thing grew out of the fact that so many of the men in France are mobilized that they haven’t enough left for train conductors and station guards. You can travel for hundreds of miles in France and never have your ticket taken up by anybody. I have a collection of French railroad tickets which I bought and used, but never had to show to a conductor.
One of these tickets entitled me to ride first class from Bourges to a certain large American military camp. I bought the ticket one morning last spring and was informed by the polite Frenchman behind the wicket that it would be necessary for me to change at a junction about midway in the journey.
“They allow you barely five minutes to make the change,” he warned me, “but you can not miss the train. It is the Paris express.”
We were slightly delayed, and when I reached the junction I made a quick leap to the station platform and looked around for my train. There were several standing there, so I ran, suit-case in one hand and typewriter in the other, in search of a guard. There was only one, but I hailed him and asked him to indicate the Paris express.
“Platform three,” he exclaimed. “But, hurry, hurry, madame. Already the train he marches.” And surely enough the queer little tin whistle which is a characteristic of French trains was shrilling its starting signal and the doors of the carriages were slamming.