Chapter 4
In industry, as well as in all else, one feels that in France there has not been so much a revolution as an orderly development. Women were in munition factories even before the war, the number has merely swelled. The women of the upper and lower bourgeois class always knew their husband's business, the one could manage the shop, the other could bargain with the best of them as to contracts and output. Women were trained as bookkeepers and clerks under Napoleon I; he wanted men as soldiers, and so decreed women should go into business. And the woman of the aristocratic class has merely slipped out of her seclusion as if putting aside an old-fashioned garment, and now carries on her philanthropies in more serious and coördinated manner. We know the practical business experience possessed by French women, and so are prepared to learn that many a big commercial enterprise, the owner having gone to the front, is now directed by his capable wife. That is but a development, too, is it not? For we had all heard long ago of Mme. Duval, even if we had not eaten at her restaurants, and though we had never bought a ribbon or a carpet at the Bon Marché, we had heard of the woman who helped break through old merchant habits and gave the world the department store.
But nothing has been more significant in its growth during the war than the small enterprises in which the husband and wife in the domestic munition shop, laboring side by side with a little group of assistants, have been turning out marvels of skill. The man is now in the trenches fighting for France, and the woman takes command and leads the industrial battalion to victory. She knows she fights for France.
A word more about her business, for she is playing an economic part that brings us up at attention. She may be solving the problem of adjustment of home and work so puzzling to women. There are just such domestic shops dotted all over the map of France; in the Paris district alone there are over eighteen hundred of them. The conditions are so excellent and the ruling wages so high, that the minimum wage law passed in 1915 applied only to the sweated home workers in the clothing trade, and not to the domestic munition shops.
A commission which included in its membership a trade unionist, sent by the British government in the darkest days to find why it was that France could produce so much more ammunition than England, found these tiny workshops, with their primitive equipment, performing miracles. The output was huge and of the best. The woman, when at the head, seemed to turn out more than the man, she worked with such undying energy. The commission said it was the "spirit of France" that drove the workers forward and renewed the flagging energies. But even the trade unionist referred to the absence of all opposition to women on the part of organizations of men. Perhaps the spirit of France is undying because in it is a spirit of unity and harmony.
It seemed to me there was one very practical explanation of the unmistakable energy of the French worker, both man and woman. The whole nation has the wise custom of taking meal time with due seriousness. The break at noon in the great manufactories, as well as in the family workshop, is long, averaging one hour and a half, and reaching often to two hours. The French never gobble. Because food is necessary to animal life, they do not on that account take a puritanical view of it. They dare enjoy it, in spite of its physiological bearing. They sit down to it, dwell upon it, get its flavor, and after the meal they sit still and as a nation permit themselves unabashed to enjoy the sensation of hunger appeased. That's the common sense spirit of France.
Of course the worker is renewed, hurls herself on the work again with ardor, and losing no time through fatigue, throws off an enormous output.
Wages perform their material share in spurring the worker. Louis Barthou says that the woman's average is eight francs a day. Long ago--it seems long ago--she could earn at best five francs in the Paris district. She works on piece work now, getting the same rate as men. And think of it!--this must indeed be because of the spirit of France--this woman does better than men on the light munition work, and equals, yes, equals her menfolk on the heavy shells. I do not say this, a commission of men says it, a commission with a trade union member to boot. The coming of the woman-worker with the spirit of win-the-war in her heart is the same in France as elsewhere, only here her coming is more gracious. Twelve hundred easily take up work on the Paris subway. They are the wives of mobilized employees. The offices of the Post, the Telegraph and Telephone bristle with women, of course, for eleven thousand have taken the places of men. Some seven thousand fill up the empty positions on the railways, serving even as conductors on through trains. Their number has swollen to a half million in munitions, and to over half that number in powder mills and marine workshops; in civil establishments over three hundred thousand render service; and even the conservative banking world welcomes the help of some three thousand women.
Out on the land the tally is greatest of all. Every woman from the village bends over the bosom of France, urging fertility. The government called them in the first hours of the conflict. Viviani spoke the word:--
"The departure for the army of all those who can carry arms, leaves the work in the fields undone; the harvest is not yet gathered in; the vintage season is near. In the name of the entire nation united behind it, I make an appeal to your courage, and to that of your children, whose age alone and not their valour, keeps them from the war.
"I ask you to keep on the work in the fields, to finish gathering in the year's harvest, to prepare that of the coming year. You cannot render your country a greater service.
"It is not for you, but for her, that I appeal to your hearts.
"You must safeguard your own living, the feeding of the urban populations and especially the feeding of those who are defending the frontier, as well as the independence of the country, civilization and justice.
"Up, then, French women, young children, daughters and sons of the country! Replace on the field of work those who are on the field of battle. Strive to show them to-morrow the cultivated soil, the harvests all gathered in, the fields sown.
"In hours of stress like the present, there is no ignoble work. Everything that helps the country is great. Up! Act! To work! To-morrow there will be glory for everyone.
"Long live the Republic! Long live France!"
Women instantly responded to the proclamation. Only the old men were left to help, only decrepit horses, rejected by the military requisition. More than once I journeyed far into the country, but I never saw an able-bodied man. What a gap to be filled!--but the French peasant woman filled it. She harvested that first year, she has sowed and garnered season by season ever since. Men, horses, machinery were lacking, the debit yawned, but she piled up a credit to meet it by unflagging toil.
With equal devotion and with initiative and power of organization the woman of leisure has "carried on." The three great societies corresponding with our Red Cross, the Société de Secours aux Blessés, the Union des Femmes de France, and the Association des Dames Françaises, have established fifteen hundred hospitals with one hundred and fifteen thousand beds, and put forty-three thousand nurses in active service. Efficiency has kept pace with this superb effort, as is testified to by many a war cross, many a medal, and the cross of the Legion of Honor.
Up to the level of her means France sets examples in works of human salvage worthy the imitation of all nations. The mairie in each arrondissement has become no less than a community center. The XIV arrondissement in Paris is but the pattern for many. Here the wife of the mayor, Mme. Brunot, has made the stiff old building a human place. The card catalogue carrying information about every soldier from the district, gives its overwhelming news each day gently to wife or mother, through the lips of Mme. Brunot or her women assistants. The work of Les Amis des Orphelins de Guerre centers here, the "adopted" child receiving from the good maire the gifts in money and presents sent by the Americans who are generously filling the role of parent. The widows of the soldiers gather here for comfort and advice.
And the mairie holds a spirit of experiment. It houses not only courage and sympathy, but progress. The "XIV" has ventured on a Cuisine Populaire under Mme. Brunot's wholesome guidance. And so many other arrondissements have followed suit that Paris may be regarded as making a great experiment in the municipal feeding of her people. It is not charity, the food is paid for. In the "XIV" fifteen hundred persons eat a meal or two at the mairie each day. The charge is seventy-five centimes--fifteen cents, and one gets a soup, meat and a vegetable, and fruit.
The world seems to be counselling us that if we wish to be well and cheaply fed we must go where there are experts to cook, where buying is done in quantity, and where the manager knows about nutritive values.
If a word of praise is extended to the maire of the XIV arrondissement for his very splendid work, an example to all France, he quickly urges, "Ah, but Mme. Brunot!" And so it is always, if you exclaim, "Oh, the spirit of the men of France!" and a Frenchman's ears catch your words, he will correct, "Ah, but the women!"
And the women do stand above all other women, they have had such opportunity for heroism. Whose heart does not beat the faster when the names Soisson and Mme. Macherez are spoken! The mayor and the council gone, she assumes the office and keeps order while German shells fall thick on the town. And then the enemy enters, and asks for the mayor, and she replies, "Le maire, c'est moi." And then do we women not like to think of Mlle. Deletete staying at her post in the telegraph office in Houplines in spite of German bombardments, and calmly facing tormentors, when they smashed her instruments and threatened her with death. One-tenth of France in the enemy's hands, and in each village and town some woman staying behind to nurse the sick and wounded, to calm the population when panic threatens, to stand invincible between the people and their conquerors!
It is very splendid!--the French man holding steady at the front, the French woman an unyielding second line of defense. But what of France? Words of praise must not swallow our sense of obligation. Let us with our hundred millions of people face the figures. The death rate in France, not counting the military loss, is twenty per thousand, with a birth rate of eight per thousand. In Paris for the year ending August, 1914, there were forty-eight thousand nine hundred and seventeen births; in the year ending in the same month, 1916, the births dropped to twenty-six thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. The total deaths for that year in all France were one million, one hundred thousand, and the births three hundred and twelve thousand.
France is profoundly, infinitely sad. She has cause. I shall never forget looking into the very depths of her sorrow when I was at Creil. A great drive was in progress, the wounded were being brought down from the front, troops hurried forward. Four different regiments passed as I sat at déjeuner. The restaurant, full of its noonday patrons, was a typical French café giving on the street. We could have reached out and touched the soldiers. They marched without music, without song or word, marched in silence. Some of the men were from this very town; their little sons, with set faces, too, walked beside them and had brought them bunches of flowers. The people in the restaurant never spoke above a whisper, and when the troops passed were as silent as death. There was no cheer, but just a long, wistful gaze, the soldiers looking into their eyes, they into the soldiers'.
But France can bear her burden, can solve her problem if we lift our full share from her bent shoulders. Her women can save the children if the older men, relieved by our young soldiers, come back from the trenches, setting women free for the work of child saving. France can rebuild her villages if her supreme architects, her skilled workers are replaced in the trenches by our armies. France can renew her spirit and save her body if her experts in science, if her poets and artists are sent back to her, and our less great bare their breasts to the Huns.
V
MOBILIZING WOMEN IN GERMANY
The military mobilization of Germany was no more immediate and effective than the call to arms for women. On August 1, 1914, the summons went out, and German women were at once part of the smooth running machine of efficiency.
The world says the Kaiser has been preparing for war for forty years. The world means that he has been preparing the fighting force. The sword and guns were to be ready. But the military arm of the nation, the German government believes, is but the first line of attack; the people are the second line, and so they, too, in all their life activities, were not forgotten. The military aristocracy has never neglected the function of women in the state. The definition of their function may differ from ours, but that there is a function is recognized, and it is related to the other vital social organs.
Slowly, through the last half of the nineteenth century, there had grown up clubs among German women focusing on a definite bit of work, or crystallizing about an idea. Germany even had suffrage societies. Politics, however, were forbidden by the government; women were not allowed to hang on the fringe of a meeting held to discuss men's politics. But the women of the Fatherland were free to pool their ideas in philanthropic and hygienic corners, and venture out at times on educational highways. The Froebel societies had many a contest with the government, for to the military mind, the gentle pedagogue's theories seemed subversive of discipline as enforced by spurs and bayonets.
These clubs, covering every trade and profession, every duty and every aspiration of women, were dotted over the German Empire. At last they drew together in a federation. The government looked on. It saw a machine created, and believing in thorough organization, no doubt gave thought to the possibilities of the Bund deutscher, Frauenvereine. At the outbreak of war, Dr. Gertrud Baumer was president of the Bund. She was a leader of great ability, marshalling half a million of women. No other organization was so widespread and well-knit, except perhaps Der Vaterlandische Frauenverein with its two thousand one hundred and fifty branches. It was evangelical and military. The Empress was its patron. Its popular name is the "Armée der Kaiserin."
There the two great national societies stood--one aristocratic, the other democratic, one appealing to the ruling class, the other holding in bonds of fellowship the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, the professional and the industrial woman.
Every belligerent president or premier has faced exactly the same perplexity. What woman, what society, is to be recognized as leader? The question has brought beads of perspiration to the foreheads of statesmen.
France solved the difficulty urbanely. It said "yes" to each and all. It promised coöperation and kept the promise. By affably--always affably and hospitably--accepting this service from one society, and suggesting another pressing need to its competitor, it sorted out capabilities, and warded off duplication. Perhaps this did not bring the fullest efficiency, but the loss was more than made up, no doubt, by a free field for initiative. Britain ignored all existing organizations of women, and after a year and a half of puzzlement created a separate government department for their mobilization. America struck out still another course. It took the heads of several national societies, bound them in one committee, to which it gave, perhaps with the idea of avoiding any danger of friction, neither power nor funds.
Germany faced the same critical moment for decision. The government wanted efficient use of woman-power on the land, in the factory, in the home, and that quickly. It made use of the best existing machinery. Dr. Gertrud Baumer visited the Ministerium des Innern, and on August 1 she issued a call for the mobilization of women for service to the Fatherland in the Nationale Frauendienst. Under the aegis of the government, with the national treasury behind her, Dr. Baumer summoned the women of the Empire. By order, every woman and every organization of women was to fall in line under the Frauendienst in each village and city for "the duration of the war." [3]
In each army district, the government appointed a woman as directress, and by order to town and provincial authorities made the Frauendienst part of local executive affairs.
Among the immediate duties laid upon the Frauendienst by the authorities was the task of registering all needy persons, of providing cheap eating places, opening workrooms, and setting up nurseries for children, especially for those who were motherless and those whose fathers had fallen at the front and whose mothers were in some gainful pursuit. With these duties went the administrative service of coöperating with the government in "keeping up an even supply of foodstuffs, and controlling the buying and selling of food."
Germany anticipated as did no other belligerent the unemployment which would follow a declaration of war, and prepared to meet the condition. A great deal of army work, such as tent sewing, belts for cartridges, bread sacks, and sheets for hospitals, was made immediately available for the women thrown out of luxury trades. In the first month of the war the Frauendienst opened work-rooms in all great centers; machinery was installed by magic and through the six work-rooms in Berlin alone twenty-three thousand women were given paid employment in one week.
Such efforts could not, of course, absorb the surplus labor, for unemployment was very great. Eighty percent of the women's hat-makers and milliners were out of work, seventy-two percent of the workers in glass and fifty-eight percent in china. The Frauendienst investigated two hundred and fifty-five thousand needy cases, and in Berlin alone found sixty thousand women who had lost their employment. Charity had to render help. Here, again, it is an example of the alertness of the organization and its close connection with the government that the Berlin magistracy deputed to twenty-three Hilfscommissionen from the Frauendienst the work of giving advice and charity relief to the unemployed. Knitting rooms were opened, clothing depots, mending rooms, where donated clothing was repaired, and in one month fifty-six thousand orders for milk, five hundred thousand for bread, and three hundred thousand for meals were distributed for the city authorities.
The adjustment to war requirements went on more quickly in Germany than in any other country. Before a year had passed the surplus hands had been absorbed, and a shortage of labor power was beginning to be felt.
And now opens the war drama set with the same scene everywhere. Women hurry forward to take up the burden laid down by men, and to assume the new occupations made necessary by the organization of the world for military conflict. To tell of Germany is merely to speak in bigger numbers. Women in munitions? Of course, well over the million mark. Trolley conductors? Of course, six hundred in Berlin alone before the first Christmas. Women are making the fuses, fashioning the big shells, and at the same heavy machines used by the men. That speaks volumes--the same heavy machines. Great Britain and France have in every case introduced lighter machinery for their women. But, whatever the conditions, in Germany the women are handling high explosives, sewing heavy saddlery, operating the heaviest drill machines. Women have been put on the "hardest jobs hitherto filled by men." In the German-Luxemburg Mining and Furnace Company at Differdingen, they are found doing work at the slag and blast furnaces which had always required men of great endurance. They work on the same shifts as the men, receive the same pay, but are not worked overtime "because they must go home and perform their domestic duties."
One feels the weight of the German system. Patient women shoulder double burdens. They always did.
In the Post and Telegraph department there is an army of fifty thousand women. The telephone service is entirely in their hands, and running more smoothly than formerly. Dr. Käthe Schirmacher declares comfortingly in the _Kriegsfrau_ that "one must not forget that these women know many important bits of information--and keep silent." Women have learned to keep a secret!
One hundred and eighty nurses, experts with the X-ray, were in the front line dressing stations in the early days of the war, and before a week of conflict had passed women were in the Field Post, and Frau Reimer, organizer of official chauffeurs, was on the western line of attack.
Agriculture claims more women than any occupation in Germany. They were always on the farm, perhaps they are happier there now since they themselves are in command. It is said that "the peasants work in the boots and trousers of their husbands and ride in the saddle." War has liberated German women from the collar and put them on horseback!
But strangest and most unexpected of all is the professional and administrative use of women. The government has sent women architects and interior decorators to East Prussia to plan and carry through reconstruction work. Over a hundred--to be exact, one hundred and sixteen at last accounts--have taken the places of men in administrative departments connected with the railways. Many widows who have shown capacity have been put in government positions of importance formerly held by their husbands. Women have become farm managers, superintendents of dairy industries, and representatives of landed proprietors.
The disseminating of all instruction and information for women on war economies was delegated to the League of Women's Domestic Science Clubs. The Berlin course was held in no less a place than the Abgeordnetenhaus, and the Herrenhaus opened its doors wide on Rural Women's Day when Agricultural Week was held at the capital.
When the full history of the war comes to be written, no doubt one reason for Germany's marvelous power to stand so long against the world will be found in her use of every brain and muscle of the nation. This has been for her no exclusive war. Her entire people to their last ounce of energy have been engaged.
And this supreme service on the part of German women seeks democratic expression. From them comes the clearest, bravest word that has reached us across the border. The most hopeful sign is this manifesto from the suffrage organizations to the government: "Up to the present Germany has stood in the lowest rank of nations as regards women's rights. In most civilized lands women already have been given a large share in public affairs. German women have been granted nothing except within the most insignificant limits. In New Zealand, Australia and most American States, and even before the war in Finland and Norway, they had been given political rights; to-day, Sweden, Russia and many other countries give them a full or limited franchise. The war has brought a full victory to the women of England, Canada, Russia and Denmark, and large concessions are within sight in France, Holland and Hungary.