Mabel Potter Daggett

“ But at Rheims when we arrive, I notice that all our automobile tires are quite intact. We enter the city through the great bronze gate, the finishing ornaments of which have been nicked off by German shells. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are the grimmest outposts of all that mark the winning of the woman’s cause. But they star the map of Europe to-day—the Women’s War Hospitals.
Out of the night darkness that envelops a war-ridden land, a bell sounds a faint alarm. From bed to bed down the white wards there passes the word in a hoarse whisper: “The convoy, the convoy again.” Instantly the whole vast house of pain is at taut attention. Boyish women surgeons, throwing aside the cigarettes with which they have been relaxing overstrained nerves, hastily don white tunics and take their place by the operating tables. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In her level glance there will flash an understanding of life that never was in woman’s eyes before in all the ages of sorrow since the angel fixed up the flaming swords that shut her out of Eden. For in the white silence where she has found her soul, she has heard even the closest whisper of God. If man before missed it, why, maternity was naturally the matter that he could not know and could not understand. This is the new revelation, that maternity shall be made more divine! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every way I turn I am looking on men with broken bodies and women with broken hearts. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 a baby may yet lift the curse of Eve! ”

“ 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? ”

“ And with bandaged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to death before the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, as did Edith Cavell in Belgium who went with her red cross to immortality. All the world has been breathless before the figure of the woman who dies to-day for her country like a soldier. No one knew that the Red Cross would be carried to these heights of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaughter began, it was accepted as a matter of course that woman’s place was going to be at the bedside of the wounded soldier. ”

“ You see, captains of industry don’t. Even so much as an office boy who aspires to become a captain of industry doesn’t. And the woman in the office who spends her evenings mending her stockings and washing her handkerchiefs, misses, say, the moving pictures where the man in the office is adding to his stock of general information. This tendency to revert to type has been the fatal handicap of the past. By the faint beginnings of an intention to discard it, you differentiate the new woman in commerce from her predecessor the business woman. ”

“ WOMEN WANTED AFTER THE WAR
Read the answer in the columns of “Casualties” appearing in the daily papers from Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London and now New York. How many millions of men have been drafted from industry into the awful battalions of death, no government says. But we at least know with too, too terrible certainty, that the jobs to which no man will ever return from the front, now number millions and millions. And there is going to be a world to be rebuilded! Every nation must enlist all of its resources if it is to hold its own in the international markets of the future. ”

“ In the dimmed rays of the carefully hooded light at the entrance, the girl chauffeur in khaki deftly swings into place the great vehicle with her load of human freight. A nurse in a flowing headdress, ghostly white against the night, alights from the rear step. The wreckage inside of what has been four men, now dead, dying or maimed, is passed out. Groans and sharp cries of pain mingle with the rasping of the motor as the ambulance rolls on to make way for another. ”

“ Would it be possible to extend labour’s eight-hour day, they had asked. The Trade Unions, when asked, had said it would be a great tax on the physique of men. It was more than they were equal to under ordinary circumstances. But, well, as an emergency measure, and for the duration of the war only, Union rules would be suspended to permit of overtime. But even then the Government decided on the eight-hour limit for women, in exceptional circumstances permitting twelve hours. But an employer working women longer should be liable to arrest! ”

“ 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. She who stepped out of the Doll’s House stands at the threshold of a new earth. Something very much more than little satin slippers and books and fur coats and their own money is coming to women! ”

“ A press bureau, you see, is prepared to pass promptly propaganda on the battles of the Somme. But dare one risk, say, a pamphlet on the breast feeding of infants? Propaganda about the rising value of a baby! Dear, dear, it might, for all a man could tell, be treason, seditious material calculated to give aid and comfort to the enemy! Already to my inquiries about maternity measures in Paris, have I not been answered suspiciously: “But why do you ask? This matter it is not of the war.”
My emasculated data at last are ready for review by le chef du service de la presse. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. And the rest must always watch fearfully, furtively looking down Main Street as the years of strife wear on. Who shall say whether she too may be conscripted to “carry on” for life. For this is the way of war with women. ”

“ After all, who are the real food controllers of a nation? Could a minister of finance, for instance, bring up a family on, say, 20 shillings a week? Yet there were women in every nation doing that before they achieved fame on the firing line and in the making of munitions. Last spring, as the food question became a gravely determining factor in the war, it began to be more and more apparent that the feminine mind trained to think in terms of domestic economy, might have something of value to contribute to questions of state. Why let Germany monopolise this particular form of efficiency? ”

“ 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. O God, the price we pay! ”

“ It is the hand that hurled the stone that cracked the windows of houses of government around the world.
To-day, as England’s most active recruiting agent, the greatest leader of the woman’s cause is calling men to the colours to win the war. Had she once a slogan, Votes for Women? ’Tis a phrase forgot. In the public squares of London since the war, her countrymen have heard from Mrs. Pankhurst only “Work for Women.” Round and round, you see, the world has turned. ”

“ For a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war-times one has to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a most harmless, pleasant person? ”

“ Already the world is being forced to a new deal for childhood. The sins of the fathers are being lifted from the children on whom society in the past has so heavily visited them. A baby has broken no law. Why brand it, then, as “illegitimate”? War babies crying in all lands have brought statesmen to startled attention. Government after government has arranged for what is called the “separation allowance” to go to the woman [377] at home to whom the soldier at the front knows that it belongs—even though she has no marriage lines to show. ”

“ We are sixteen people who wander like disembodied spirits from the gay days of old through these great empty rooms that once rang with the joy of hundreds of tourists on their pleasure-jaunts over the world. There are no games. There is no dancing. There is no band. There are no steamerchairs on deck. At sundown we are closed in tight behind iron shutters. No one may so much as light a cigaret outside. ”

“ At one of these industrial canteens at a factory in the suburbs of Paris, I sat down to dinner with 600 working people. The chef, who had shown me with pride through his great store-rooms of supplies, apologised for the day’s menu: He was humiliated that there would be neither rabbits nor chicken, but with a war-market one did the best they could. The a la carte bill of fare proceeded from hors-d’œuvres through entrées and roasts to salads and to dessert and cheese, and there was wine on every table. You selected, of course, what you wished to pay for. ”

“ There are the Red Cross returns that say in the first six months alone of the war there were 2,146,000 men killed in battle and 1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures, however, of cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There is a living figure that may not be. See the woman in black all over Europe and to-morrow we shall meet her in Broadway. There are so many of her in every belligerent land over there that her crêpe veil flutters across her country’s flag like the smoke that dims the landscape in a factory town. ”

“ 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 [197] 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. ”

“ In Finland, for instance, where the position of women has been in many respects as advanced as anywhere in the world, even a woman member of Parliament at her marriage reverts to type, as it were: though she still sits in Parliament, she passes under the guardianship of her husband! In Sweden, she lost her vote: for that country, in 1862 the first to grant the municipal franchise to women, cautiously withheld it until 1909 from married women. There is, indeed, almost no land in which marriage does not in some way limit for the rest of her life a woman’s participation in world affairs. ”

“ 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. ”