Mabel Potter Daggett

“ It is the agony of it all, and the suffering and the sorrow and the grief of it all—and then something more. You creep with the feeling that every one of these men once was builded with such exquisite art and such infinite labour and such toilsome pain and anguish by God and a woman! It is a stupendous task of creation to be done over again when the armies shall have finished their work. Bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, God and woman must rebuild the race. You unto whom a child can be born to-day, to you Parliaments make their prayer! ”

“ We stand in the midst of a scene of desolation that looks like the ruins of some long ago civilisation. Once, before this world that men had builded began to go to pieces, even as the blocks that children pile tumble to a nursery floor, here was a populous busy city of some 120,000 souls. Now our footsteps echo through deserted streets. Not a man or woman or child is in sight. The grass is growing in the pavement there between the streetcar tracks. The Hotel de Ville is only a shell of a building with the outer walls standing. ”

“ Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue Renouard. ”

“ War is not merely the hell that may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a day or a night that ends in death. War is worse. War is that big strong fellow with eyes burned out when he "went over the top," whom I saw learning to walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the Home for the Blind in London. They're teaching him now to make baskets for a living! War is that boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in Regents Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life! War is that peasant from whom to-day I inquired my way in one of the little banlieues of Paris. ”

“ Suddenly in a lifting of the war clouds above the blackest battle smoke, we shall see again His face as a flashing glimpse of some new freedom lights for an instant the darkened heavens above the globe of the world. Already there has been a Russian revolution which may portend the end of a German monarchy. In England a new democracy has buckled on the sword of a dead aristocracy. And a great Commoner is at the helm of state. But with all the freedoms they are winning, there is one for which not the most decorated general has any idea he’s fighting. ”

“ Those are brave men who are dying on all the battlefields for their native lands. But oh, the bravery of these men who must live for their countries! These who have lost their eyes and their arms and their legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, men with brown hair. And these are terrible enough. But the men who have lost their faces! So long as they shall live, in every one's eyes into which they look, they must see a shudder of horror reflecting as in a looking glass their old agony. God in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces! ”

“ The women in industry and commerce and the professions and in government, whom we are seeing in these years of war passing all barriers, will at last make their final stand for what? It is for happiness. Look! Even now, who has the vision to discern, may discover the gates of Eden swinging wide. And when the man in khaki, with the age-old yearning in his heart, "Woman wanted, my woman," comes back to clasp her in his arms once more, these two everywhere shall enter in. For the ultimate programme toward which the modern woman movement to-day is moving is no less than paradise regained! ”

“ A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION
In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once Rheims, at last there is a sound of life. Down the Rue de la Paix, the street of peace, an army supply-wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how pleasant can be the sound even of noise.
Then across the way appears a milk-woman, pushing her cart with four tin cans and jingling a little bell. There are a few people, it seems, still left, employés in the champagne industry, who cling to their homes even though they must live in the cellar. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the man at the front gets back and stands again before the [339] 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. ”

“ The Rising Value of a Baby
You unto whom a child is born to-day, unto you is this written. I bring you glad tidings. Blessed are you among the nations of the earth. Wise men all over the world are hurrying to bring you gifts. Only lift your eyes from the baby at your breast and in your mirror I am sure you shall see the shining aureole about your head. Exalted are you, O, woman among all people. Know that you have become a Most Important Person. Governments are getting ready to give your job a priority it never had before. For you, why you are the maker of men! ”

“ What should a woman do with wages to-day? Why, she has to have them to buy not only a proper breakfast, but to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and the crèche or the maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has to have them to buy a new ribbon for her hat—why, she will go without her bacon to get it! What does a woman have to have wages for to-day? ”

“ This is the critical hour for the new women in commerce to accept the same principle. I know it is difficult to adopt a man's standard of comfortable living on two-thirds a man's pay. And I know of no one to pin carnations in your buttonhole. But somehow the woman in business has got to conserve her energy and concentrate her force in bridging the distance that has in the past separated her from man's pay. There is now the greatest chance that has ever come to her to achieve it—if she prepares herself by every means of self-improvement to perform equal work. ”

“ Every knitted sweater, every package of cigarettes tied with yellow ribbon has been helping votes for women. And now over there he is getting anxious about his job or his home or his children. What can he know at the front about food control or the regulation of school hours in Paris or London or New York? And when there are decisions like that to be made, "I'd like to leave it to Her," the soldier is beginning to conclude. Why, war time is the time for women to be free! The whole world is athrill with the new ideal. ”

“ It was the American man now holding his umbrella over me in the rain, who came yesterday to my steamer chair: "It's going to be dark to-morrow night in London," he said, "and the taxicabs are scarce. You must let me see that you reach your hotel in safety." And I felt as sure a reliance in him as if we'd made mud pies together or he'd carried my books to school. You see, you count on an American man like that.
But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as you go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my passport hard. ”

“ Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the feminists have asked. But this is not our woman movement. This is His woman movement, who moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. We may not know. And we do not understand. But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were in the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way that is opening for women throughout the world. It is westward to us that this star of opportunity has taken its course directly from above the battlefields of Europe. ”

“ When a man could say to the woman the law gave to him, "Come unto me to-night, or I shall not give you money with which to buy shoes for the children to-morrow." Or he may have said, "the slippers for your pretty feet"—when marriage was that way, everything in it divine just died! It shall never be so again.
Hear the new woman. "We shall have more love about marriage and less law," she will say. "And we shall never let them lock us in. Love always laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths who thought they had bolted and barred the Doll's House with ordinance and ritual. ”

“ Azalie de Rigeaux, crooning softly here to her child, is a new figure in life, so new that she has not yet reached the canvas of even the modern masters in art. See just above the curve of her arm where rests the bay's head, the armlet that she wears on her left sleeve. Embroidered on it is that sign of her national enlistment, a bursting bomb. It is important because it is the clue to the new picture. All over the world war has called the woman to the factory. And what shall she do with the baby? Well, the baby is so valuable that the state is not going to let it cry. ”

“ And now they are waited for in plain little white houses where a woman on the front porch shades her eyes with her hand to look down Main Street as far as she can see. And it isn't the woman who can fall on her knees and gather her burden to a hungry heart whose shoulders will bear the heaviest load. It is the woman whose arms are empty never again to be filled!
These are the women whom not even the peace treaty will discharge from their "national service." Every Great Push makes more of them. ”

“ As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in her eyes and the dead man's picture in the locket at her throat.
They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most. There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their 'teens just now coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as the pictured locket! There will be no man's face to fill it! Love that would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood that's falling on the battlefields. ”

“ That's the way affluence seems to have happened to the working class home all over Europe. Prosperity is fairly gilding over every district in which a munitions plant has arisen. And, oh, well, what if it is gilt? Gilt's good for little cheerless dingy houses. Do you know that, next to the war trades, the most flourishing trade in all Europe to-day is the cheap jewelry trade? There are places in London's East End where every other shop or two has come to be a jeweller's shop, with the windows hung splendidly with all the shining trinkets that bring a shining light to women's eyes. ”

“ Edith Russell and the rest I have not heard say it. But from Countess to char woman, you see, this about the wage envelope is certain: It's yours to burn if you care to—or to buy with it what you choose! There are millions of women over this war racked world who have it to-day, who never had it before. And the hand that holds this new wage envelope holds the future of the race in its keeping. Not since that magna charta that the barons wrested from King John, has so powerful a guarantee of liberty been won. It carries with it all the freedoms that the feminists have ever formulated. ”

“ It is the question which women face the world over to-day. Success beckons now along the broad highway of commerce. But the difficult details of living detain us on the way to fame or fortune. And we've got to cut the apron-strings that tie us to yesterday if we would go ahead. Which shall it be, new woman or old? Most of us either in business or the professions cannot be both. ”

“ Germany has announced to the world that she is going to do her worst. And she begins to tune her submarines for the sink-on-sight frightfulness more terrible than any that has preceded. The Dutch boats stop. The Scandinavian boats stop. The American boats stop. The entire ocean is now blanketed in one danger zone.
All the world's a stage of swift-moving events, the greatest and most terrible spectacle that has ever put on since civilisation began. And we in London are spectators before a drop-curtain tight buttoned down at the corners! ”

“ We shall not blot out from civilisation the Prussian military ideal until we have likewise effaced the Prussian maternity ideal of reckless reproduction. That the cradles of the world may never again spill over, the nations must rise from the peace table with a new population policy. In the "birth politics" of the future there must be birth control. When children are scarce, are they dear. See France! The rising value of baby may yet lift the curse of Eve! ”

“ Nations are convinced that those who serve their country should have a voice in directing its destinies. Land after land preparing to extend its franchise for soldiers, as England with her Representation of the People Bill, is reflecting on a real representation. For every country is finding itself face to face with the question with which Asquith first startled Britain, "Then what are you going to do with the women?" Everywhere at the gates of government are deputations like that in England who are saying, "We also serve who stand behind the armies. We too want to be people." ”

“ All the government offices will be "at home" and helpful—when a personal interview has further convinced each that I am clearly not at all a German person nor the dangerous species of the suffragist. Where are the slippers that will match this gown? And which are the beads that will be best? Mine is a hazardous undertaking, you see, that requires all of the art at the command of a woman: I must so state the mission on which I have come that my woman movement may seem pleasing in the eyes of a man—why, possibly a man whose country house even may have been burned in behalf of votes for women! ”