Chapter 7

It is difficult to understand why, with such examples of women's efficiency before it, the Red Cross, founded by Clara Barton, places merely two bureaus in the hands of a woman, has chosen no woman as an officer, has put but one woman on its central and executive committee, and not a single woman on its present controlling body, the War Council. It may be that the protest against the centralization of all volunteer effort in the Red Cross, in spite of President Wilson's appeal, was due to the fact that women feared that their energies, running to other lines than nursing and surgical dressings, would be entirely sidetracked.

The honor of the splendid war work of the Young Women's Christian Association belongs to women. The War Work Council of the National Board of Young Women's Christian Associations shows an example of how immediately efficient an established organization can be in an emergency. As one sees its great War Fund roll up, one exclaims, "What money raisers women are!" The immediate demands upon the fund are for Hostess Houses at cantonments where soldiers can meet their women visitors, dormitories providing emergency housing for women employees at certain army centers, the strengthening of club work among the younger girls of the nation, profoundly affected by war conditions, and the sending of experienced organizers to coöperate with the women leaders of France and Russia and to install nurses' huts at the base hospitals of France. It makes one's heart beat high to think of women spending millions splendidly, they who have always been told to save pennies frugally! Well, those hard days were times of training; women learned not to waste.

A very worthy pooling of brains, because springing up with no tradition behind it, was the National League for Woman's Service. In six months it drew to itself two hundred thousand members and built organizations in thirty-nine States, established classes to train women for the new work opening to them, opened recreation centers and canteens at which were entertained on a single Sunday, at one center, eighteen hundred soldiers and sailors. So excellent was its Bureau of Registration and Information for women workers that the United States Department of Labor took over not only the files and methods of the Woman's League for Service, but the entire staff with Miss Obenauer at its head. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, what shall we say of complete adoption of work and workers, with an honorable "by your leave" and outspoken praise! And nothing could show a finer spirit of service than this yielding up of work initiated by a civil society and the willing passing of it into government hands.

Not only the Labor Department has established a special women's division with a woman at its head, but the Ordnance Office of the War Department has opened in its Industrial Service Section a woman's division, putting Miss Mary Van Kleeck in charge.

But still our government lags behind our Allies in mobilizing woman's power of initiative and her organizing faculty. The Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, appointed soon after the outbreak of war, still has no administrative power. As one member of the Committee says, "We are not allowed to do anything without the consent of the Council of National Defense. There is no appropriation for the Woman's Committee. We are furnished with headquarters, stationery, some printing and two stenographers, but nothing more. It is essential that we raise money to carry on the other expenses. The great trouble is that now, as always, men want women to do the work while they do the overseeing."

Perhaps holding the helm has become second nature to men simply because they have held the helm so long, but I am inclined to think they have a very definite desire to have women help steer the ship. Surely the readiness with which they are sharing their political power with women, would seem to indicate their wish for cooperation on a plan of perfect equality.

In any case, it is not necessary to hang on the skirts of government. America has always shown evidence of greater gift in private enterprise than state action. Perhaps women will demonstrate the national characteristic. It was farsightedness and enterprise that led the Intercollegiate Bureaus of Occupations, societies run for women by women, to strike out in this crisis and open up new callings for their clients, and still better, to persuade colleges and schools to modify curricula to meet the changed demands.

Women are often passed over because they are not prepared.

The Bureaus have found the demand for women in industrial chemistry and physics, for instance, to be greater than the supply because the graduates of women's colleges have not been carried far enough in mathematics, and in chemistry have been kept too much to theoretical text-book work. For example, the head of a certain industry was willing to give the position of chemist at his works to a woman. He needed some one to suggest changes in process from time to time, and to watch waste. He set down eight simple problems such as might arise any day in his factory for the candidates to answer. Some of the women, all college graduates, who had specialized in chemistry, could not answer a single problem, and none showed that grip of the science which would enable them to give other than rule of thumb solutions. He engaged a man.

In answering the questionnaire which the New York Bureau of Occupations sent to one hundred and twenty-five industrial plants, the manager in almost every case replied, in regard to the possibility of employing women in such positions as research or control chemists, that applicants were "badly prepared." As hand workers, too, women are handicapped by lack of knowledge of machinery. In this tool age, high school girls are cut off from technical education, although they are destined to carry on in large measure our skilled trades. I am told that in Germany many factories had to close because only women were available as managers, and they had not been fitted by business and technical schools for the task.

If women individually are looking for a soft place, if they are afraid, as one manager expressed it, "to put on overalls and go into a vat," even when their country is so in need of their service, it is futile for them to ask collectively for equal opportunity and equal pay; if they individually fail to prepare as for a life work, regarding themselves as but temporarily in business or a profession, their collective demand upon the world for a fair field and no favor will be as ineffective as illogical.

The doors stand wide open. It rests with women themselves as to whether they shall enter in.

To the steady appeals of the employment bureaus, backed by the stern facts of life, the colleges are yielding. On examination I found that curricula are already being modified. None but the sorriest pessimist could doubt the nature of the final outcome, on realizing the pooling of brains which is going on in such associations as the Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations and the League for Business Opportunities. They work to the end of having young women not only soundly prepared for the new openings, but sensitive to the demands of a world set towards stern duty.

Not only is there call for a pooling of brains to look after the timid and unready, but there is need of combination to open the gates for the prepared and brave. Few who cheered the Red Cross nurses as they made their stirring march on Fifth Avenue, knew that those devoted women would, on entering the Military Nurse Corps, find themselves the only nurses among the Allies without a position of honor. The humiliation to our nurses in placing them below the orderlies in the hospitals is not only a blow to their esprit de corps, but a definite handicap to their efficiency. A nurse who was at the head of the nursing staff in a state hospital wrote from the front: "There is one thing the Nursing Committee needs to work for, and work hard, too, and that is, to make for nurses the rank of lieutenant. The Canadians have it, why not the Americans? You will find that it will make a tremendous difference. You see, there are no officers in our nursing personnel. One of our staff says we are the hired extras! It is really a great mistake." Uncle Sam may merely be waiting for a concentrated drive of public opinion against his tardy representatives.

And why should it be necessary to urge that while scores of young men are dashing to death in endeavors to learn to fly, there are women unmobilized who know how to soar aloft in safety? They have never, it is true, been submitted to laboratory tests in twirlings and twistings, but they reach the zenith. Two carried off the records in long distance flights, but both have been refused admission to the Flying Corps. Will it need a campaign to secure for our army this efficient service? Must women pool their brains to have Ruth Law spread her protecting wings over our boys in France?

To any one who realizes the significance of the military situation as it stands, and who is cognizant of the contrast between Germany's use of her entire people in her national effort, and the slow mobilization of woman-power among the Allies and entire lack of anything worthy the name of mobilization of the labor-power of women in the United States, there will come a determination to bury every jealousy between woman and woman, all prejudice in men, to cut red tape in government, with the one object of combining all resources.

The full power of our men must be thrown into military effort. And, then, if as a nation we have brains to pool, we will not stand niggling, but will throw women doctors in to render their service, grant to the nurse corps what it needs to ensure efficiency, throw open the technical schools to girls as well as to boys, modify the college course to meet the facts of life. Each woman unprepared is a national handicap, each prejudice blocking the use of woman-power is treachery to our cause.

As to the final outcome of united thought and group action among women, no one can doubt. Contacts will rub off angles, capable service will break down sex prejudice and overcome government opposition. But there is not time to wait for the slow development of "final outcomes."

Women must pool their brains against their own shortcomings, and in favor of their own ability to back up their country now and here.

IX

"BUSINESS AS USUAL"

It is a platitude to say that America is the most extravagant nation on earth. The whole world tells us so, and we do not deny it, being, indeed, a bit proud of the fact. Who is there among us who does not respond with sympathetic understanding to the defense of the bride reprimanded for extravagance by her mother-in-law (women have mothers-in-law), "John and I find we can do without the necessities of life. It's the luxuries we must have." One of the obstacles to complete mobilization of our country is extravagance. And at the center of this national failing sits the American woman enthroned.

Europe found it could not allow old-time luxury trades to go on, if the war was to be won. "Business as usual" is not in harmony with victory.

I remember the first time I heard the slogan, and how it carried me and everyone else away. The Zeppelins had visited London the night before. A house in Red Lion Mews was crushed down into its cellar, a heap of ruins. Every pane of glass was shattered in the hospitals surrounding Queen's Square, and ploughed deep, making a great basin in the center of the grass, lay the remnants of the bomb that had buried itself in the heart of England. The shops along Theobald's Road were wrecked, but in the heaps of broken glass in each show window were improvised signs such as, "Don't sympathize with us, buy something." The sign which was displayed oftenest read, "Business as usual."

The first I noticed was in the window of a print shop, the owner a woman. I talked to her through the frame of the shattered glass. She looked very pale and her face was cut, but she and everyone else was calm. And no one was doing business as usual more composedly than a wee tot trudging along to school with a nasty scratch from a glass splinter on her chubby cheek.

"Business as usual" expressed the fine spirit, the courage, the determination of a people. As the sporting motto of an indomitable race, it was very splendid. But war is not a sport, it is a cold, hard science, demanding every energy of the nation for its successful pursuit. In proportion as our indulgence in luxury has been greater than that of any European nation, our challenge to every business must be the more insistent. There must be a straight answer to two questions: Does this enterprise render direct war service, or, if not, is it essential to the well-being of our citizens?

But the discipline will not come from the gods. Nor will our government readily turn taskmaster. The effort must come largely as self-discipline, growing into group determination to win the war and the conviction that it is impossible to achieve victory and conserve the virility of our people, if any considerable part of the community devotes its time, energy and money to creating useless things. A nation can make good in this cataclysm only if it centers its whole power on the two objects in view: military victory, and husbanding of life and resources at home.

Let me hasten to add that the act of creating a thing does not include only the processes of industry. The act of buying is creative. The riot of luxury trades in the United States will not end so long as the American woman remains a steady buyer of luxuries. The mobilization of women as workers is no more essential to the triumph of our cause, than the mobilization of women for thrift. The beginning and end of saving in America rests almost entirely in the hands of women. They are the buyers in the working class and in the professional class. Among the wealthy they set the standard of living.

Practically every appeal for thrift has been addressed to the rich. I am not referring to the supply of channels into which to pour savings, but to appeals to make the economies which will furnish the means to buy stamps or bonds. Those appeals are addressed almost wholly to the well-to-do, as for example, suggestions as to reducing courses at dinner or cutting out "that fourth meal."

Self-denial, no doubt, is supposed to be good for the millionaire soul, but to such it is chiefly recommended, I think, as an example sure of imitation. What the rich do, other women will follow, is the idea. But the steady insistence that we fight in this war for democracy has put into the minds of the people very definite demands for independence and for freedom.

In such a democratic world the newly adopted habits of the wealthy will not prove widely convincing. Economy needs other than an aristocratic stimulus.

I do not mean to under-estimate the value of economy in the well-to-do class. There is no doubt that shop windows on Fifth Avenue are a severe commentary upon our present intelligence and earnestness of purpose. No one, I think, would deny that it would be a service if the woman of fashion ceased to drape fur here, there and everywhere on her gowns except where she might really need the thick pelt to keep her warm, and instead saved the price of the garment which serves no purpose but that of display, and gave the money in Liberty Bonds to buy a fur-lined coat for some soldier, or food for a starving baby abroad. And overburdened as the railways are with freight and ordinary passenger traffic, I am sure the general public will not fail to appreciate to the full a self-denial which leads patrons of private cars, Pullman and dining coaches to abandon their self-indulgence.

Undoubtedly economy among the rich is of value. I presume few would gainsay that it would have been well for America if the use of private automobiles had long since ceased, and the labor and plants used in their making turned to manufacturing much-needed trucks and ambulances. But while not inclined to belittle the work of any possible saving and self-sacrifice on the part of those of wealth, it seems to me that the most fruitful field for war economy lies among simple people. Thrift waits for democratization.

We of limited means hug some of the most extravagant of habits. The average working-class family enjoys none of the fruits of coöperation We keep each to our isolated family group, while the richer a person is the more does she gather under her roof representatives of other families. Her cook may come from the Berri family, the waitress may be an Andersen, the nurse an O'Hara.

The poor might well practice the economy of fellowship.

The better-off live in apartment houses where the economy of central heating is practised, while the majority of the poor occupy tenements where the extravagance of the individual stove is indulged in. The saving of coal is urged, but the authorities do not seek to secure for the poor the comfort of the true method of fuel saving.

The richer a family is, the more it saves by the use of skilled service. The poor, clinging to their prejudices and refusing to trust one another, do not profit by coöperative buying, or by central kitchens run by experts. Money is wasted by amateurish selection of food and clothing, and nutritive values are squandered by poor cooking.

Unfortunately Uncle Sam does not suggest how many War Saving Stamps could be bought as a result of economy along these lines.

The woman with the pay envelope may democratize thrift. She knows how hard it is to earn money, and has learned to make her wages reach a long way. Then, too, she has it brought home to her each pay day that health is capital. She finds that it is economy to keep well, for lost time brings a light pay envelope. Every woman who keeps herself in condition is making a war saving. There has been no propaganda as yet appealing to women to value dress according to durability and comfort rather than according to its prettiness, to bow to no fashion which means the lessening of power. To corset herself as fashion dictates, to prop herself on high heels, means to a woman just so much lost efficiency, and even the most thoughtless, if appealed to for national saving, might learn to turn by preference in dress, in habits, in recreation, to the simple things.

The Japanese, I am told, make a ceremony of going out from the city to enjoy the beauties of a moonlight night. We go to a stuffy theatre and applaud a night "set." Nature gives her children the one, and the producer charges his patrons for the other. A propaganda of democratic war economy would teach us to delight in the beauties of nature.

In making the change from business as usual to economy, Europe suffered hardship, because although the retrenchments suggested were fairly democratic it had not created channels into which savings might be thrown with certainty of their flowing on to safe expenditures. Europe was not ready with its great thrift schemes, nor had the adjustments been made which would enable a shop to turn out a needed uniform, let us say, in place of a useless dress.

Definite use of savings has been provided for in the United States. The government needs goods of every kind to make our military effort successful. Camps must be built for training the soldiers, uniforms, guns and ammunition supplied. Transportation on land and sea is called for. The government needs money to carry on the industries essential to winning the war.

If a plucky girl who works in a button factory refuses to buy an ornament which she at first thought of getting to decorate her belt, and puts that twenty-five cents into a War Saving Stamp, all in the spirit of backing up her man at the front, she will not find herself thrown out of employment; instead, while demands for unnecessary ornamental fastenings will gradually cease, she will be kept busy on government orders.

Profiting by the errors of those nations who had to blaze out new paths, the United States knit into law, a few months after the declaration of war, not only the quick drafting of its man-power for military service, but methods of absorbing the people's savings. If we neither waste nor hoard, we will not suffer as did Europe from wide-spread unemployment. There is more work to be done than our available labor-power can meet.

There is nothing to fear from the curtailment of luxury; our danger lies in lack of a sound definition of extravagance. Uncle Sam could get more by appeals to simple folk than by homilies preached to the rich. The Great War is a conflict between the ideals of the peoples. 'Tis a people's war, and with women as half the people. The savings made to support the war must needs, then, be made by the people, for the people.

There has been no compelling propaganda to that end. The suggestion of mere "cutting down" may be a valuable goal to set for the well-to-do, but it is not a mark to be hit by those already down to bed rock. The only saving possible to those living on narrow margins is by coöperation, civil or state.

It is a mad extravagance, for instance, to kill with autos children at play in the streets. A saving of life could easily be achieved through group action, by securing children's attendants, by opening play-grounds on the roofs of churches and public buildings, by shutting off streets dedicated to the sacred right of children to play. This would be a war saving touching the heart and the enthusiasm of the people.

Central municipal heating is not a wild dream, but a recognized economy in many places. Municipal kitchens are not vague surmisings, but facts achieved in the towns of Europe. They are forms of war thrift. In America no such converting examples of economy are as yet given, and not an appeal has been made to women to save through solidarity.

Uncle Sam has been commendably quick and wise in offering a reservoir to hold the tiny savings, but slow in starting a democratic propaganda suggesting ways of saving the pennies.

If business as usual is a poor motto, so is life as usual, habits as usual.

X

"AS MOTHER USED TO DO"

Man's admiration for things as mother used to do them is as great an obstacle as business as usual in the path of winning the war and husbanding the race. The glamour surrounding the economic feats of mother in the past hides the shortcomings of today.

I once saw one of her old fortresses, a manor home where in bygone days she had reigned supreme. In the court yard was the smoke house where she cured meat and fish. In the cellar were the caldrons and vats where long ago she tried tallow and brewed beer. And there were all the utensils for dealing with flax. In the garret I saw the spindles for spinning cotton and wool, and the hand looms for weaving the homespun. In her day, mother was a great creator of wealth.

But then an economic earthquake came. Foundations were shaken, the roof was torn off her domestic workshop. Steam and machinery, like cyclones, carried away her industries, and nothing was left to her but odds and ends of occupations.