Mabel Potter Daggett

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate-glass mirrors and the canteen dining-rooms done in pink, and blue, and duck's-egg green and the new uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in industry! Oh, gentlemen, after all, why should she go home? For the new place in industry is the most comfortable place in which she has ever been in the world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk about the factory as so unhealthful for a woman. But you see, that was because no man knew how hard was domestic labour: he had never done it. ”

“ 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! ”

“ And I am glad when the captain hums a gay little French tune and holds out his glass a second time: "Give us again 'Vive la France.'"
The sun is dipping red in the west when we turn to leave Rheims and Joan of Arc bravely flying the French flag before its crumbling cathedral. There is the rumble of guns once more at the front. Then the winter dusk rapidly envelops the road along which we are speeding. It is the same road to Epernay. But now it is alive with traffic. Under the protecting cover of the soft darkness, all sorts of vehicles are passing. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is with madame at his side that the thrifty shop keeper of France has always made his way to success.
The terrible eternal purpose that flashes like zigzag lightning through the black war clouds of Europe, again appears. From the old civilisation reduced to its elements on the battle fields, a new world is slowly taking shape. And in it, the new man and the new woman shall make the new money power—together. ”

“ There are three meals a day that never fail. You can easier pay for those meals than cook them. How many skilled vocations are you trying to follow in your home! The graduate of a school for mothers, you are doing, the best you can, more than the winner of a Cambridge tripos would attempt to undertake! Cooking and sewing and nursing, laundry work and scrubbing and child culture, that is the gamut of the achievements you are trying to accomplish. Oh, Mrs. Smith, one trade in the factory is easier. What artisan can be good at his job if he must also putter with half a dozen others? ”

“ 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! ”

“ It is France that makes the security for maternity gilt-edged. By the gifts they are bringing here, one would say that this is the country that to-day takes precedence of all others in its appreciation of the rising value of a baby. As every one has heard, there has not in a long time, in generations indeed, been a surplus of babies in France. As a matter of fact, they have always been scarce. And they are so dear that the passion for the child is the distinctive national trait. This building in which Azalie de Rigeaux nurses her child to-day was erected at a cost of 75,000 francs. ”