# Women Wanted/Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII
At the Gates of Government
The man in khaki stood at the door. And he held a woman close to his heart in mansion or cottage—in a rose bowered cottage on the English downs, or red roofed behind the yellow walls of France and Italy, or blue trimmed beside a linden tree in Germany, or ikon-blessed in Russia. All that he had in the world, his estates, his fields or his vineyards, his flocks or his factory, his shop or his job, his home and his children, he was leaving behind. "I leave them to you, dear," he said.
The bugles blew. And he kissed her again. Then he went marching down the street in those fateful days of August, 1914, when all the world began going to war.
So in land after land she took up the trust and the burden that the man who marched away had left her, to "carry on" civilisation. It was the woman movement that was to be under the flags of all nations. Ours too now flies behind the battle smoke. A little while since and our men commenced to stand in khaki on our front porches, then went down the front walk to join the long brown lines passing along Main Street on their way to ​France. At Washington they told us why it had to be. "They were going," the President himself explained, "to fight for Democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority, to have a voice in their own government." In the name of liberty, we too pass under the rod. But we fall in line to catch step with the women's battalions of the world. We shall see them moving triumphantly even on the very strongholds against which the woman's cause of yesterday dashed itself most vainly.
The tasks of the world were one by one being handed over to women by men who were taking up arms instead. By solemn proclamation of church and state, the patriotic duty of thus releasing every possible citizen for military service was profoundly impressed on the women of every nation. Only there was still one function that no country was asking them to assume. In England a thoughtful woman filling in her registration paper stating the national service that she could render, wrote down her qualifications like this: "Possessed of a perfectly good mentality and a University training, prepared to relieve a member of Parliament who wishes to go to the front."
But the lady wasn't called. Whole brigades of women swung out across the threshold of the home into industry. Regiment after regiment went by into commerce. Companies passed into the professions. Cohorts even crossed the danger zone for duty right up to the firing line. But government was still reserved for men. Could a woman vote? ​O, my lords, the legislative hall was not woman's place!
Then the armies of Europe got into action. Even as their primitive forefathers had done, the men of the modern world came together to put liberty to the test of the sword. They fight for the freedoms their leaders have formulated—and for another they did not know and did not understand. A freedom that was enunciated from Holloway jail and turbulently contested in London streets is also being fought to a finish in front line trenches even along the Somme and the Aisne and the Yser.
Sergeant Jones of Company C of the 14th regiment of the Cold Stream Guards was a combatant. He was a British soldier bravely defending his flag against the Huns. And he found himself up against a great deal more that his enemies also equally face, the most revolutionary force that the world has ever known in this Great War that is overturning the destinies and opinions of individuals and the decrees of the social order as lightly and as easily as the dynasties of kings.
Sergeant Jones was bowled completely over. A German bullet hit him, and another and another. For weeks thereafter he was wandering on the borderlands of death. At length he was drifting back to earth in a roseate blur of warmth and soft comfort. Slowly his mind began to establish again the realities of existence. The roseate blur straightened away and away from beneath his chin: it was the cherry red comforter that covered his bed at ​Endel Street Hospital, London. Rip Van Winkle himself came back with no more wonderment. The sergeant awoke, a soldier literally in the hands of women.
He couldn't so much as bathe his own face. A woman in a white headdress, with a red cross in the centre of her forehead, was doing it for him. When he opened his eyes again, a girl orderly in a blue tunic was saying, "You can smoke if you want to." And she began propping pillows softly about his shoulders. There was a queer numb feeling along his side. He couldn't find his right hand. "Never mind," the girl said hastily. She placed the cigarette between his lips and held the lighted match. He smoked and began to remember that he had gone over the top. He pulled gently again for his right hand. He tried to draw up his left leg. At the least movement, somewhere outside the numb, tight bound area of him, there were answering stabs and twinges of pain. He wanted to flick the ashes from his cigarette. As he turned his head and his left hand found the tray on the little bedside stand, he glimpsed a long row of cherry red comforters that undulated in irregular lines. From where he lay, he could see still, white faces, bandaged heads, an arm in a sling, a man in a convalescent uniform clumsily trying out crutches. The man in the very next bed to his own lay moaning with face upturned to the light, hollow, empty, staring sockets where the eyes had been. In the bed beyond was a man with his face sewed up in an awful twisted seam ​that was the writhing caricature of the agony that had slashed it. A sickening sensation of nausea swept over the sergeant. God in heaven, he thought, then how much was the matter with him?
A woman was coming down the room, pausing now and then by the side of a cherry red comforter. By the waving mass of her red brown hair, she was a woman, but not such as the sergeant had seen before. His mother wore a black dress and his wife's, he remembered, was a blue silk for Sundays and at home, why he supposed it was calico beneath their gingham aprons. But this woman was in khaki as surely as ever he had been.
Now she reached his bed. She stood looking down on him with an air of proprietorship, almost of possession. "How are you, this morning, Sergeant Jones?" she asked, with firm professional fingers reaching authoritatively for the pulse in his left wrist. Without waiting for a reply, she was proceeding calmly to turn back the covers. "We have a little work to do here, I think," she said, gently grasping—could the sergeant be sure—it seemed to be his left leg. "The dressings, you know," she was saying easily.
"But, but, 'er—the doctor," he gasped in protest.
"I am the doctor," she answered.
Of the female of the species, Sergeant Jones of course had heard. He had never before seen one. "I'll be—" he started to say. But he wasn't. Then he would have jerked away. But he couldn't. "I want a doctor, a real one," he blurted out angrily.
​A shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the woman's eyes. Often she had seen them like this. "I am the surgeon in charge, the commanding military officer here," she replied evenly. "After awhile, I'm sure you won't mind."
She went quietly on unwinding him. He heard her scissors snip. She was going to take some stitches. Once or twice she had to hurt horribly. She did it with deft precision. With the same quick motions, the sergeant had seen his wife at home roll out a pudding crust or flap a pancake. It was the convincing sureness of the woman who knows her business. Could a woman be a doctor, after all? The strips of linen had piled in a blood stained heap on the floor. With an effort the sergeant steadied his voice: "What is there left of me?" he asked.
The doctor smoothed his pillow first. "Sergeant," she said very gently, "you have one perfectly good arm. I think there will be one leg. Last week the other—" But the sergeant did not have to hear the rest of the sentence. When he struggled back from somewhere in a black abyss, the hand that last week had held the surgeon's knife was softly smoothing back the damp locks of hair from his cold forehead. She drew the cherry red comforter up and patted it about his shoulders with the infinite sympathy that speaks in a woman's touch. She leaned over him with a glance that signalled courage and understanding. Then she left him to fight the fight he had to fight in the grim grey light of that London day for his own readjustment to the ​cruelty of existence. Was he glad that a woman was a doctor? She had saved his life.
There were weeks of convalescence. The hospital librarian in khaki stopped beside his cherry red comforter. He turned his face to the wall. There was nothing she could do for him. But in time he came to watch for her on her rounds as he did for the doctor. Finally he asked for books and magazines and the papers. And the news of the day that she brought him, flared with just two topics, War and Woman. The one was man's universal activity, the other was his Great Discovery. You know how pleased a boy is with a Christmas toy he finds will go with some new unexpected action? Women were in all kinds of unprecedented action.
THE NEW WOMAN'S SLOGAN
The girl orderly in the blue tunic dressed Sergeant Jones one day for the convalescent soldiers' outing. A girl chauffeur of the Woman's Reserve Ambulance Corps picked him up in her arms like a child and set him on the seat beside her and took her place at the wheel. Could a woman drive a car? She shot hers in and out of the tangled maze of the London traffic as easily as a girl he had seen send a croquet ball through a wicket. Other cars whizzed by with women at the wheel. Great motor vans, with a woman on the high driver's seat, swung safely past. Fleets of motor busses came careening along with girl conductors in short skirts balancing jauntily in command on the rear platforms. The ​bus marked "Woolwich Special" drew up at the Haymarket curb to take on a load of women munition workers going out for the night shift at the great arsenal. High on a ladder against a building here in Cockspur Street, two girl window cleaners stand at work in tunic and trousers. Girl footmen are opening the doors of carriages before the fashionable shops of Oxford Street. Girl operators are running the lifts. Girl messengers in government uniform are going in and out of Whitehall.
A kingdom is in the hands of its women. Round and round the world has turned since yesterday.
Here in Trafalgar Square a crowd of a thousand people hang on the words that a woman is speaking. Jones had never heard Mrs. Pankhurst; he had forbidden his wife to when she came to their town. Rampant, women's rights females were against the laws of God and England. This, the arch conspirator of them all, he pictured in his mind's eye as permanently occupied in burning country residences and bombing cathedrals and engaging in hand to hand conflicts with the London police.
Now wouldn't it take your breath away? Here she was doing nothing at all of the kind. A very well gowned lady stood directly between the British lions, her slender figure outlined against the statue of Nelson. Her clear, ringing tones carried over the listening throng to Jones and his comrades in the Women's Reserve Ambulance car. One small hand frequently came down into the palm of the other in the emphatic gesture that in times past brought two ​continents to attention. 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.
A puzzled Sergeant Jones asked the next day for a book about the woman movement. It was Olive Schreiner's "Woman and Labour" the librarian in khaki brought him. "But I wanted to know about the suffragettes, the suffragettes. Did you ever hear of them?" he questioned. So Rip Van Winkle might have asked, I suppose, why, say, for women who once wore hoop skirts.
The woman beside the hospital bed smiled inscrutably for an instant. "Sergeant," she said with a level glance, "I was one, a militant, Sergeant," she added evenly. "And the doctor was in Holloway jail, and your nurse. And the girl who drove your car yesterday was a hunger striker and—" She stopped. The truce! By the pact that was signed in Kingsway, the most radical suffragists in the world, along with all the others, were war workers now in their country's cause and not their own.
The woman in khaki was still. Jones stared. She was dropping no bombs. Only the armies were ​smashing. Nothing about here was broken but men—and women were mending them!
At length they had the sergeant patched up as well as they could. He would never again work at his skilled trade. But they pinned a medal for valour on his coat lapel. And they sent him back to his wife in the north of England. The woman who met him at the door fell on her knees: "My dear, my dear!" She gathered him from a wheel chair into her arms with a sob. The man who had gone out in khaki was home again.
"Mustered out of the service," his papers read. But his wife will never be!
Mustered out of service. So was the man with the twisted face, who never again can smile. And so was the man with the blinded eyes, whose little daughter on sunny days leads him to the Green Park where he sits on a bench and talks to the squirrels. Just so I have seen him sitting in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Just so he sits in the Tiergarten by the side of the River Spree. He is going to be "re-educated" to keep chickens. And Sergeant Jones shall learn basket weaving for a living! Oh, and there are thousands of others!
After each great drive on the front, they are passing through the hospitals to the cottage rose bowered and red roofed, to the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage. 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. 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.
Like this, the trust and the burden have rested heavier and heavier on woman's heart and hands. Millions of men will never be able to lift it for her again. No one knows when the others will. Men must fight and women must work.
So many men are with the flag at the front. So many men are under the crosses, the acres of crosses with which battle fields are planted. So many men are in wheel chairs and on crutches. Women are carrying on in the home, in industry, in commerce and in the professions. Then why not in the State?
MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON
For fifty years leader of the Constitutional Suffragists, whose cause triumphed in 1918 when Parliament granted the franchise to English women.
And curiously enough, what the man in the wheel chair and the man in the Green Park and the Tuileries and the man with the flag was saying, the newspapers began to repeat as if it had been syndicated round the world. The Matin had it in Paris, the Times in London and the Tageblatt in Berlin. You read it in all languages: "The women are wonderful. We didn't know before."
GREATEST DRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY
Then couldn't a woman who could cast a shell, cast a vote? Parliaments trembled on the verge of letting her try.
It wouldn't be at all the difficult undertaking it used to look to those women of yesterday, whose place was in the home pouring afternoon tea or embroidering a flower in a piece of lace. Why, to-day they would scarcely have to go out of their way at all to the polls! They could just stop in as easily as not, as they went down the street to their day's work in shop and office and factory. Sergeant Jones's wife is out of the home now anyway from six o'clock in the morning until seven at night making munitions. Some one must support her family, you know. Well, all over the world a new call began. Simultaneously in every civilised land, through the crack in the window of the government house where man gathered with his fellow man, you could hear it. In some lands yet it is only a ​mur of dissent. But in many lands now it is a rising chorus of consent: "Women wanted in the counsels of the nation!"
At the gates of government, the new woman movement has arrived. And not through the broken window is it entering in. Without benefit of even a riot, suffrage walking very softly and sedately is going through an open door. In England, a gentleman holds it ajar, a gentleman suave and smiling and bowing the ladies to pass!
Democracy, the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, is breaking through apparently on all the fronts at once. It is a most remarkable coincidence. In August, 1917, Parliament in England removed the "grille," the brass lattice barring the ladies' gallery in the House of Commons and symbolising what had been the English woman's position. The Times, commenting on the proceeding, characterised it as a "domestic revolution." In the same month in India 5000 Hindus were applauding Shimrati Pandita Lejjawati who at Jullundur had come out on a public platform to urge that her country abolish purdah!
But the great drive for Democracy that now thrills around the world at the International Suffrage Alliance headquarters, began unmistakably in Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst in the old days never staged a raid on the houses of Parliament more spectacularly. Just see the gentleman bowing at the open door! It is Mr. Asquith, the former leader who for years held the Parliamentary line against ​all woman's progress. And smiling right over his shoulder stands Mr. Lloyd George, the present premier. Oh, well! The girl in the green sweater who horsewhipped one member of Parliament, at the Brighton races, is driving a Red Cross ambulance in Flanders. The quiet little woman in a grey coat, who fired the country house of another in 1912, is rolling lint bandages. Sergeant Jones's wife has become a bread winner. Soldiers are not afraid for women to vote. And cabinet ministers take courage!
There is a town in the north of England with a monument erected to a shipwrecked crew: "In memory of 17 souls and 3 women," says the marble testimonial. That categorical classification to which the English ivy clings is about to be changed. Six million English women are about to be made people!
At the outbreak of hostilities, politicians the world over hastened to declare woman's suffrage a "controversial" question that must be put aside during the war. And every government engaged said to its suffragists: "We're in so much trouble, for heaven's sake don't you make us any more."
"Well, we won't," the women agreed, as the organisations in land after land called off their political campaigns. It was for his sake—the man in khaki. And in every land, the trained women of the suffrage societies assembled their countrywomen ​to stand ready with first aid for him. Day by day, week after week, now year after year, they have been feeding the nation's defenders, clothing them, nursing them, passing up ammunition to them. To-day there isn't an army that could hold the field but for the women behind the men behind the guns.
In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, had been a member of the committee that in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl of twenty then. It was a cause, you see, to which she had given a lifetime, that she now laid aside. With the summons, "Let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship," she turned 500 women's societies from suffrage propaganda and Parliamentary petitioning to hospital and relief work.
But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic leader of the Woman's Social and Political Union who had first smashed suffrage into the front page of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms to give her country's claims precedence above her own, that the world realised that there was a new formation in the lines of the woman movement.
Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Holloway jail recuperating from a hunger strike, when there came to her from her government the overtures for a peace parley. When the authorities offered her release for all of the suffragettes in prison and amnesty for those under sentence, she ran up the Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In ​no uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, "I who have been against the government, am now for it. Our country's war shall be our war."
For a minute after that proclamation, you could have heard a pin drop in the great assembly hall of the smashing suffragettes. Then in a burst of applause she had them with her: they would follow their leader. Some few at first drew back in consternation. Had their late leader lost her mind? The girl in the green sweater looked dazed: "I was in the front ranks of her body guard when we stormed Buckingham Palace," she murmured. A very few were angry: "She's selling out the cause," they exclaimed bitterly.
But she wasn't. The greatest little field marshal the woman movement has ever known, was leading it to final victory.
When Kitchener announced, "We shall not be able to win this war until women are doing nearly everything that men have done," it was the woman who had organised raids on Parliament who now organised the woman labour of a nation. On the day that she led 40,000 women down the Strand to man the factories of England and turned Lincoln's Inn House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a munitions employment bureau, opponents of the woman's cause the world over began an orderly retirement from their front line trenches. The next morning the London Post announced: "We stand on the threshold of a new age."
We do. You see, you could not have practically ​the men of all nations in arms for Democracy without their finding it. And some of them who buckled on their armour to go far crusading for it, are coming to the conviction that there is also Democracy to be done at home. When the history of these days at length is written, it will come to be recorded that the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose authority they submit, was practically assured by the events of 1917.
In that year, the women who came to petition the English Parliament for citizenship, got what they had for fifty years been asking in vain. For the women who with Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Despard of the Women's Freedom League now stood at the gates of government were: women shell makers and howitzer makers, pit brow lassies, chain makers, textile workers, railway engine cleaners, women motor lorry drivers in khaki, women letter carriers, women window cleaners, women bus conductors, women engineers, women clerks, women in the civil service, women tailors, women bakers, women bookbinders, women teachers, women army nurses, women army doctors, women dentists, women chemists, and women farm labourers. Among them was the wife of the man with the twisted face and the wife of the man with the blinded eyes and the wife of Sergeant Jones.
The capitulation of the English Government was assured in the recantations of its greatest men. Ex-premier Herbert H. Asquith spoke first: "I myself," he declared, "as I believe many others, no ​longer regard the woman suffrage question from the standpoint we occupied before the war. . . . I have said that women should work out their own salvation. They have done it. The woman's cause in England now presents an unanswerable case."
Mr. Lloyd George agreed: "The place of woman," he said, "is altered for good and all. It would be an outrage not to give her the vote. The further parliamentary action now involved may be regarded as a formality."
General French, former commander of the British armies, the brother of Mrs. Despard and of Mrs. Harley who died at the front, crossed the Channel to announce his conversion to the woman's cause through "the heroism, the endurance and the organising ability of the women on the battlefields of France and Belgium."
The press of the country burst into print with a new confession of faith. The Observer declared: "In the past we have opposed the claim on one ground and one ground alone—namely, that woman by the fact of her sex was debarred from bearing a share in national defence. We were wrong." The Daily Mail: "The old argument against giving women the franchise was that they were useless in war. But we have found out that we could not carry on the war without them." The Evening News: "In the home woman has long been a partner—not always in name, perhaps, but generally in practice. Now she is a partner in our national effort. And if she demands a partner's voice in the ​concerns of the firm, who shall say her Nay?" The Northern Daily Telegraph: "The duties of citizenship are fulfilled by women to the uttermost. The continuance of the sex disqualification would be a cruel crime and a blind folly as well." The Referee: "Women have earned a right to be heard in the nation's councils. The part they have played in winning the war is their victory."
Like this, the cause that yesterday was rejected and most bitterly assailed of men was now championed by the nation. This was a kingdom saying Votes for Women. Field Marshal Pankhurst would never again have to. Her wartime strategy had won. When Mr. Asquith rose in the House of Commons himself to move the woman's suffrage resolution, it had ceased to be a "controversial" question. The measure was passed by an overwhelming majority.
RECORD YEAR FOR SUFFRAGE CAUSE
MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER
One of the feminist leaders in Paris to whose appeal for votes for women the French government is listening today.
On with Democracy! 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."
And some one else wants them to be. From the training camps to the trenches, the supporting column of the man in khaki stretches. 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.
See the lines of women arriving before the government houses. Theresa Labriola voices the demand of the National Federation in Italy: "Women," she says, "form the inner lines of defence for the nations. We need the ballot to make our lines strong." Yes, yes, agrees her country. You shall begin right away with the municipal franchise. And Premier Boselli and the Italian Parliament are proceeding to get it ready.
In France, Mme. Dewitt Schlumberger and Mme. Charles LeVerrier for the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, present the "unanswerable case." The senate on the Seine, looking out, sees many women wearing long crêpe veils in the delegation before its doors. "Let us give them," says a member of the Chamber of Deputies in a burst of poetic chivalry, "the suffrage de la morte: every soldier dying on the battle field shall be permitted to designate the woman relative he wishes to have carry on his citizenship for him." Very gently the women of France declined the suffrage of the dead. Presenting a carefully prepared brief that was the review of their war work, they said, "We can vote for ourselves, please." And who else shall? There are whole communes with most of the men ​dead. There are villages with not so much as a man to be made mayor, and a woman filling the office instead. The French Chamber of Deputies has before it a bill to confer the municipal franchise on women. "It is an act of justice," says ex-Premier Viviani. The Droit du Peuple declares, "After the war, many homes will be maintained by women who will perform men's tasks and fulfil men's obligations. They ought to have men's rights."
Canada, too, thought to reward her women with a vicarious vote. The "next of kin" franchise was devised, by which the Government has conferred on the wife or widow, mother, sisters and daughters of men in the service the right to vote. But the delegations of women outside the government house at Ottawa do not go away. They still wait. "We also serve," they repeat. And the country, in which no less than five provinces last year gave to all of their women full citizenship, has promised now to prepare the full direct federal franchise.
In Mittel Europa, Rosika Schwimmer is marshalling the feminist forces. Under her leadership, a great deputation has marched to the Town Hall in Budapest. The resolution there presented for universal suffrage was carried by the Burgomaster to the Emperor. In reply, the Hungarian Feminist Union has received the assurance of the prime minister that the Government will introduce a measure extending the franchise to a limited class of women. At Prague, Austria, the Town Council has appointed a committee to draw up a new local government ​franchise which shall include women. The free town of Hamburg, Germany, preparing to enlarge its franchise in recognition of the self-sacrifice of soldiers, hears the voice of Helene Lange and 27,000 women. They are reminding the Hamburg Senate that women, too, who have borne the burdens of war, will wish to devote themselves to reconstruction and in order to fulfil the duties of citizens, they claim citizens' rights. The Prussian Diet has before it the petition of Frau Minna Cauer and the Frauenstimmrechtsbund urging that suffrage for women be included in the projected franchise reform. The Reichstag arranging a Representation of the People Bill has at last referred the petition of the Reichverbund, the German National Union for Woman Suffrage, "for consideration" zur kenntisnahme, which is the first indication of their change of attitude before the women's offensive. The Socialists in the Reichstag are urging: "Women suffrage is marching triumphantly through other lands. Can Germany afford to fall behind the other nations, with her women less fully equipped than the rest for the struggle for existence?" Meanwhile, Germany, as other countries, is depending more and more upon her women. Two leading cities, Berlin and Frankfort-on-Main, both have women appointed to their municipal committees. Frau Hedwig Heyl, that woman behind the food control policy for the Empire, who has turned her great chemical factory on the Salzufer to canning meat for the army, says: "Woman suffrage in Germany is a fruit not yet ripe ​for the picking. I water the tree," she adds significantly.
Holland has seen in The Hague 4,000 women assembled in the Binnehof, the public square before the House of Parliament. On their behalf, Dr. Aletta Jacobs, president of the Vereenigingvoor Vronwenkeisrecht, presented to Premier Cort Van der Linden a petition with 164,696 signatures, asking for citizenship for women. "Society," Dr. Jacobs told him, "can only gain when the forces and energy of its women, now concentrated on the struggle for the vote, can be used along with men's in finding a solution for the many social problems for which the insight of both is necessary." And the Dutch Parliament, making over its Constitution to enlarge the franchise for men, decided on the amazing plan about women, "We will try them first, as members of Parliament. And if we find they can make the laws, afterward we shall let them vote for law makers." So the new Dutch constitution gives to women the "passive" franchise, which is the right to hold all administrative offices, including representation in Parliament. There is also removed an old prohibitory clause, so that the way is now clear for the introduction of a measure for the "active" franchise for women—if it is found the dinner doesn't burn while they are sitting in Parliament.
A South African Party Congress, for the first time it has ever listened to women, has received a delegation who urge: "Half the population of the country is composed of women. Can you any longer ​afford to do without our point of view in your national deliberations?" The Grand Council of Switzerland is considering a bill which is before it, proposing to give women the franchise in communal affairs. Mexico is struggling toward national freedom with her women at the side of her men. It was not even considered necessary to incorporate in the new constitution the woman suffrage provision suggested by Hermila Galinda at the national convention. The new Mexican Federal constitution states explicitly that "Voters are those Mexicans who are 21 if unmarried and over 18 if married and possessed of an honest means of livelihood." And under this constitution, in the March, 1917, elections, Mexican women quietly voted as a matter of course along with the other citizens.
In all of Russia's turbulent revolutionary unrest, none of the divers parties struggling for supremacy there, denies the claim of half the race to the freedom which it is hoped ultimately to establish. The Provisional government's first announcement was for universal suffrage. But the Russian women weren't
DR. POLIKSENA SHISKINA YAVEIN
Who led 45,000 women to the duma in Petrograd to make their calling to citizenship sure.
Well, the answer came. It was an unconditional affirmative, received in turn from the men who came out from the government house to reply to the waiting women: M. V. Rodzianko, prescient of the Imperial Duma; N. S. Tchkeidze, president of the Council of Workingmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, and Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of Ministers. And when the preliminary parliament of the Russian Republic was opened at Petrograd in October, 1917, the chair was offered to Madame Breshkovsky, the celebrated "Little Grandmother" of the Russian Revolutionaries, as the senior member of the council.
In New York City on election night of November, 1917, the newsboys shrilled out a new cry, "The wimmin win!" "The wimmin win!" It was like a victory at Verdun or the Somme. The cables throbbed with the news that New York State, where the woman movement for all the world began ninety years before, had made its over three million women people. It is now only a question of time when all ​other American women will be. New York State carries with it almost as many electoral votes as all of the 17 previous States combined, which have conferred on women the Presidential franchise. The strongest fortress of the opposition is fallen. And President Wilson has already recommended women suffrage to the rest of the States as a war measure for immediate consideration.
It was from the hand of Susan B. Anthony that the torch of freedom was received by every leader of the woman movement now carrying it. On her grave at Rochester, N. Y., we have already laid the victory wreath. For Democracy, the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose authority they submit, is about to be established in the earth!
"One thing that emerges from this war, I feel absolutely convinced," (it is Mr. Lloyd George, Premier of England, who is speaking in a public address), "is the conviction that women must be admitted to a complete partnership in the government of nations. And when they are so admitted, I am more firmly rooted than ever in the confident hope that they will help to insure the peace of nations and to prevent the repetition of this terrible condition of things which we are now deploring. If women by their enfranchisement save the world one war, they will have justified their vote before God and man."
There is a story that the anti-suffragists started. But it's our best suffrage propaganda now. A farmer's wife in Maine, who had cooked the meals ​and swept the house, and washed the children and sent them to school, and hoed the garden and fed the chickens, and worked all the afternoon in the hayfield, and was now on her way to the barn to finish her day's work with the milking, was accosted by an earnest agitator, who asked her if she didn't want the vote. But the farmer's wife shook her head: "No," she answered, "if there's any one little thing the men can be trusted to do alone, for heaven's sake, let 'em!"
But is there? From the rose bowered cottage, the cottage red roofed and the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage, and the plain little white house somewhere off Main Street, there is a rising to the question.
Lest we forget, this war was made in the land where woman's place was in the kitchen!
And the mere housewifely mind asks, Could confusion be anywhere worse confounded than in the government houses of the world to-day?
Hark! You cannot fail to hear it! The cry of the nations is now sharp and clear. It is the cry of their distress: "Women wanted in the counsels of state."