# Women Wanted/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
Taking Title in the Professions
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. Women physicians hurry from the laboratories with the anesthetics that will be needed. Girl orderlies, lounging at leisure in the corridors, remove their hands from their pockets to seize the stretchers and rush to their line-up in the courtyard. The gate keeper turns a heavy iron key. From out the darkness beyond, the convoy of grey ambulances reaching in a continuous line from the railway station begins to roll in.
On and on they come in great waves of agony ​lashed up by the latest seething storm of horror and destruction out there on the front. 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.
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.
It is very plain. You cannot stand like this in a woman staffed hospital in the war zone without catching a vision of the great moving picture spectacle that here flashes through the smoke of battle. Hush! From man's extremity, it is, that the Great Director of all is himself staging woman's opportunity.
The heights toward which the woman movement of yesterday struggled in vain are taken at last. The battle has been won over there in Europe. ​tween the forces of the Allies and the Kaiser, it is, that another fortress of ancient prejudice has fallen to the waiting women's legions. It was entirely unexpected, entirely unplanned by any of the embattled belligerents. Woman had been summoned to industry. The proclamation that called her went up on the walls of the cities almost as soon as the call of the men to the colours. There were women porters at the railway stations of Europe, women running railroads, women driving motor vans, women unloading ships, women street cleaners, women navvies, women butchers, women coal heavers, women building aeroplanes, women doing danger duty in the T. N. T. factories of the arsenals, and in every land women engaged in those 96 trades and 1701 jobs in which the British War Office authoritatively announced: "They have shown themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex."
Let the lady plough. Teach her to milk. She can have the hired man's place on the farm. She can release the ten dollar a week clerk poring over a ledger. She can make munitions. Her country calls her. But the female constitution has not been reckoned strong enough to sit on the judge's bench. And Christian lands unanimously deem it indelicate for a woman to talk to God from a pulpit. From the arduous duties of the professions, the world would to the last professional man protect the weaker sex.
Then, hark! Hear the Dead March again! As ​inexorably as in the workshops and the offices, it began to echo through the seminaries and the colleges, through the laboratories and the law courts. Listen! The sound of marching feet. The new woman movement is here too at the doors. High on the walls of Leipzig and the Sorbonne, of Oxford and Cambridge and Moscow and Milan, on all of the old world institutions of learning, the long scrolls of the casualty lists commenced to go up. Whole cloisters and corridors began to be black with the names of men "dead on the field of honour." And civilisation faced the inexorable sequel. Women at last in the professions now are taking title on equal terms with men.
The doors of a very old established institution in Fifty-ninth Street, New York, swung open on a day last autumn. And a line of young women passed through. They went up the steps to take their place—for the first time that women had ever been there—in the class rooms of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. There is perhaps a little awkward moment of surprise, of curiosity. A professor nods in recognition to the new comers. The class of 1921 smiles good naturedly. An incident is closed.
And an epoch is begun. Outside on a high scaffolding there are masons and carpenters at work. See them up there against a golden Indian summer sky. They are putting the finishing touches on a new $80,000 building addition. And the ringing of their hammers and chisels, the scraping of their trowels is but significant of larger building ​operations on a stupendous scale not made by human hands.
A LOOK BACKWARD IN MEDICINE
This is the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, which after more than a hundred years of history has decided to enlarge its accommodations and add a paragraph to its catalog announcing the admission of women. To understand the significance of this departure from custom and precedent we should recall the ostracism which women have in the past been obliged to endure in the medical profession. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman of modern times in any land to achieve a medical education, knocked in vain at the doors of some twelve medical colleges of these United States before one reluctantly admitted her. She was graduated in 1849 at the Geneva Medical College now a part of Syracuse University. The entrance of this first woman into the medical profession created such a stir that Emily Blackwell the second woman to become a doctor, following in the footsteps of her sister, found even more obstacles in her path. The Geneva college having incurred the displeasure of the entire medical fraternity now closed its doors and refused to admit another woman. Emily Blackwell going from city to city was at last successful in an appeal to the medical college of Cleveland, Ohio, which graduated her in 1852. So great was the opposition now to women in the profession, that it was clear that they must create their ​own opportunities for medical education. In turn there were founded in 1850 the Philadelphia Medical College for Women with which the name of Ann Preston is associated as the first woman dean; in 1853 the New York Infirmary to which in 1865 was added the Woman's Medical College both institutions founded by the Drs. Blackwell; in 1863 the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women. "Females are ambitious to dabble in medicine as in other matters with a view to reorganising society," sarcastically commented the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Society as also the medical profession coldly averted its face from these pioneer women doctors.
"Good" women used to draw aside their skirts when they passed Elizabeth Blackwell in church. When she started in practice in New York City she had to buy a house because no respectable residence would rent her office room. Dr. Anna Manning Comfort had her sign torn down in New York. Druggists in Philadelphia refused to fill prescriptions for Dr. Hannah Longshore. Girl medical students were hissed and jeered at in hospital wards. Men physicians were forbidden by the profession to lecture in women's colleges or to consult with women doctors. Not until 1876 did the American Medical Association admit women to membership. How medical men felt about the innovation, which State after State was now compelled to accept, was voiced by the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 1879 which said: "We regret to be obliged to announce ​that, at a meeting of the councillors held Oct. 1, it was voted to admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society."
Syracuse University, recovering from the censure visited upon it for receiving Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first of the coeducational institutions to welcome women on equal terms with men to its medical college. Other coeducational colleges in the West later began to take them. In 1894 when Miss Mary Garrett endowed Johns Hopkins University with half a million dollars on condition that its facilities for the study of medicine be extended to women equally with men, a new attitude toward the woman physician began to be manifest. From that time on, she was going to be able with little opposition to get into the medical profession. Her difficulty would be to get up. Now no longer was a woman doctor refused office facilities in the most fashionable residential quarters in which she could pay the rent. Her problem however was just that—to pay the rent. A medical diploma doesn't do it. And to practise medicine successfully, therapeutically and financially, without a hospital training and experience is about as easy as to learn to swim without going near the water. The most desirable opportunities for this hospital experience were by the tacit gentleman's agreement in the profession quite generally closed to women.
Until very recently, internships in general hospitals were assigned almost exclusively to men. Dr. Emily Dunnung Barringer in 1903 swung herself ​aboard the padded seat in the rear of the Gouverneur Hospital ambulance, the first woman to receive an appointment as ambulance surgeon in New York City. Twice before in competitive examinations she had won such a place, but the commissioner of public charities had declined to appoint her because she was a woman. In 1908 another girl doctor, Dr. Mary W. Crawford in a surgeon's blue cap and coat with a red cross on her sleeve, answered her first emergency call as ambulance surgeon for Williamsburg Hospital, Brooklyn. It happened this way: the notification sent by the Williamsburg Hospital to Cornell Medical College that year by some oversight read that the examination for internship would be open to "any member of the graduating class."
When "M. W. Crawford" who had made application in writing, appeared with a perfectly good Cornell diploma in her hand, the authorities were amazed. But they did not turn her away. They undoubtedly thought as did one of the confident young men applicants who said: "She hasn't a chance of passing. Being a girl is a terrible handicap in the medical profession." When she had passed however at the head of the list of thirty-five young men, the trustees endeavoured to get Dr. Mary to withdraw. When she firmly declined to do so, though they said it violated all established precedent, they gave her the place. And a new era in medicine had been inaugurated.
Here and there throughout the country, other women now began to be admitted to examinations ​for internships. They exhibited an embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of them were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was for the hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution had "no accommodations for women doctors" which simply meant that all of the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on this ground that Philadelphia's Blockley Hospital, the first large city almshouse in the country to open to women the competitive examination for internship, again and again refused the appointment even to a woman who had passed at the head of the list. It was 1914 before Bellevue in New York City found a place for the woman intern: five women were admitted among the eighty-three men of the staff.
This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the indication of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in consequences. Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass bottle containing a kidney perserved in alcohol. In all the annals of the medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been another kidney just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for a layman to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it happens that a young woman physician discovered the patient with that kidney and diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed it successfully. Then a man physician came along and borrowed it and read a paper on it at a medical convention. He is now chronicled throughout the ​medical fraternity with the entire credit for the kidney.
"And it isn't his. It's our kidney," I heard the girl doctor say with flashing eyes. "You'll take it easier than that when you're a little older, my dear," answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer in the professional atmosphere that is so chilling to ambition.
It was against handicaps like this that the women in medicine were making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly's name, in New York, is at the top in the annals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a famous surgeon in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and Dr. Emma V. P. Culbertson are leading members of the medical profession in Boston. Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar was in 1917 appointed visiting surgeon on the staff of the Women's Hospital in New York, the first woman in New York City to receive such an appointment. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, who established in New York the first bureau of child hygiene in the world, is probably more written of than is any man in medicine. As chief of this department, she has under her direction 720 employés and is charged with the expenditure annually of over a million dollars of public money. She is a graduate of Dr. Blackwell's medical college in which social hygiene first began to be taught with the idea of making medicine a preventive as well as a curative art. It was the idea that Harvard University a few years incorporated in a course leading to the degree ​"Doctor of Public Health." And though a woman had thus practically invented "public health" and another woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and original doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was refused at Harvard the opportunity to take their course leading to such a title. The university did not admit women. But a little later the trustees of Bellevue Hospital Medical College, initiating the course and looking about for the greatest living authority to take this university chair, came hat in hand to Dr. Baker, even though their institution does not admit women to the class rooms. "Gentlemen," she answered, "I'll accept the chair you offer me with one stipulation, that I may take my own course of lectures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public Health elsewhere refused me because I am a woman." Like this the woman who has practically established the modern science of public health, in 1916 came into her title. It is probably the last difficulty and discrimination that the American woman in medicine will ever encounter.
The struggle of women for a foothold in the medical profession is the same story in all lands. It was the celebrated Sir William Jenner of England who pronounced women physically, mentally and morally unfit for the practice of medicine. Under his distinguished leadership the graduates of the Royal College of Physicians in London pledged themselves, "As a duty we owe it to the college and to the profession and to the public to offer the fullest ​resistance to the admission of women to the medical profession." Well, they have. The medical fraternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge.
A WORLD WIDE RECONSTRUCTION
But to-day see the builders at work at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Yale and Harvard have also announced the admission of women to their medical colleges. And it is not by chance now that these three most exclusive medical colleges in the United States have almost simultaneously removed their restrictions. They are doing it too at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of Moscow. The reverberation from the firing line on the front is shaking all institutions to their foundations. As surely as if shattered by a bomb, their barriers go down. Like that, the boards of trustees in all countries are capitulating to the Great Push of the new woman movement. All over the world to-day the hammers and chisels are ringing in reconstruction. It is the new place in the sun that is being made for woman. The little doors of Harvard and Yale and Columbia are creaking on their ancient hinges because the gates of the future are swinging wide. It is not a thin line that is passing through. The cohorts of the woman's cause are sweeping on to occupy the field for which their predecessors so desperately pioneered.
Forward march, the woman doctor! It is the clear call flung back from the battle fields. Hear them coming! See the shadowy figures that lead ​the living women! With 8000 American women doctors to-day marches the soul of Elizabeth Blackwell. Leading 3000 Russian women doctors there is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first medical woman of that land, who in 1865 was denied her professional appellation and limited to the title "scientific midwife." With the 1100 British women there keeps step the spirit of Sophia Jex Blake pelted with mud and denied a degree at Edinborough University, who in 1874 founded the London School of Medicine for Women.
And there is one grand old woman who lived to see the cause she led for a lifetime won at last. The turn of the tide to victory, as surely as for the Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the professional woman's cause when the British War Office unfurled the English flag over Endel Street Hospital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest significance on the vision of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The beautiful eyes of her youth were not yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all of their old star fire glowed again when the news of this great war hospital, entirely staffed by women, was brought to her at her home in Aldebourough, Suffolk, where she sat in her white cap, her active hands that had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly in her lap.
Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of ​modern times, the first in England. When as Elizabeth Garrett she came to London to be a doctor in 1860, there was no University in her land that would admit her. Physicians with whom she wished to study, were some of them scornful and some of them rude, and some were simply amazed. "Why not become a nurse?" one more tolerant than the rest suggested. The girl shook her head: "Because I mean to make an income of a thousand pounds a year instead of forty." The kindly old doctor who finally yielded to her importunities and admitted her to his office, also let her in to the lectures at the Middlesex Hospital with the specific arrangement that she should "dress like a nurse" and promise earnestly "not to look intelligent." Her degree she had to go to Paris for. Like that she got into the medical profession in 1871 a year before her marriage to the director of the Orient steamship line. Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women and founder of the New Hospital for Women, she came through the difficult days when it was only in "zenana" practice in India that English women doctors had a free field. Russia too dedicated her pioneer medical women to the heathen, modestly designing them for the Mussulman population and at length permitting them the designation "physician to women and children." That idea lingered long with civilisation. As late as 1910 a distinguished British surgeon in a public address allowed that there was this province for the woman physician, the treatment of women and children. But any medical ​woman "who professed to treat all comers," her he held to be an "abomination."
Then the world turned in its orbit and came to 1914. And Elizabeth Anderson's eyes looked on the glory of Endel Street. Do you happen to be of that woman movement which but yesterday moved upward toward the top in any of the professions so laboriously and so heavily handicapped? Then for you also, Endel Street is the shining citadel that today marks the final capitulation of the medical profession to the woman's cause, as surely as the New York Infirmary in Livingston Place still stands as the early outpost established by the brave pioneers. But the ordinary chance traveller who may search out the unique war hospital in the parish of St. Giles in High Holborn, I suppose may miss some of this spiritual significance to which a woman thrills. The buildings which have been converted from an ancient almshouse to the uses of a hospital are as dismal and as dingy as any can be in London. They are surrounded by a fifteen foot high brick wall covered with war placards, a red one "Air Raid Warning," a blue one "Join the Royal Marines," and a black one "Why More Men are Needed. This is going to be a long drawn out struggle. We shall not sheathe the sword until—" and the rest is torn off where it flapped loose in the winter wind.
In a corner of this wall is set Christ Church, beside which a porter opens a gate to admit you to the courtyard. Here where the ambulances come through in the dark, the bands play on visitors' day. ​It is a grey court yard with ornamental boxes of bright green privet. On the benches about wait the soldiers, legless soldiers, armless soldiers, some of them blind soldiers. On convalescent parade in blue cotton uniform with the gaiety of red neckties, every man of them at two o'clock on a Tuesday is eager, expectant, waiting—for his woman. Mothers, wives, sweethearts are arriving, the girls with flowers, the women with babies in their arms. And each grabs his own to his hungry heart. You go by the terrible pain and the terrible joy of it all that grips you so at the throat. Inside where each woman just sits by the bedside to hold her man's hand, it is more numb and more still. A girl orderly in khaki takes you through. Her blue shoulder straps are brass lettered "W. H. C," "Women's Hospital Corps." The only man about the place who is not a patient is the porter at the gate. The women in khaki with the epaulets in red, also brass lettered "W. H. C.," are the physicians and surgeons.
There is one of these you should not miss. You will know her by her mascot, the little fluffy white dog "Baby" that follows close at her heels. Her figure in its Norfolk belted jacket is slightly below the medium height. Her short swinging skirt reveals trim brown clad ankles and low brown shoes. She has abundant red brown hair that is plainly parted and rolled away on either side from a low smooth brow to fasten in a heavy knot at the back of her head. I set down all of these details as being of some interest concerning a woman you surely will ​want to see. Surgeon in chief and the commanding officer in charge of this military hospital with 600 beds, she is the daughter of Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She is also the niece of Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. And she is to-day one of England's greatest surgeons, Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, with the rank of major in the English army.
Her place in this new woman movement is the more significant because of her prominent affiliation with that of yesterday. For the militancy in which she is now enlisted Dr. Anderson had her training in that other militancy that landed women in Holloway Jail. Her transfer to her present place of government service has come about in a way that makes her one of our most famous victory exhibits. "You have silenced all your critics" the War Office told her when they bestowed on her the honour of her present official rank as she and her Woman's Hospital Corps "took" Endel Street.
It was a stronghold that did not capitulate by any means at the first onslaught of the women's forces. There was, at least, as you might say, a preliminary skirmish. The Woman's Hospital Corps raised and financed by British medical women was at the beginning of the war offered to the British Government. But in the public eye these were only "physicians to women and children." Kitchener swore a great oath and said he'd have none of them for his soldiers. Practically the War Office told them to "run along." ​Well, they did. They went over the Channel. "They are going now to advance the woman's cause by a hundred years. O, if only I were ten years younger," sighed Elizabeth Anderson wistfully as she waved them farewell at Southampton on the morning of Sept. 15, 1914.
France was in worse plight than England. Under the Femmes de France of the Croix Rouge, the Government there permitted the Women's Hospital Corps to establish themselves in what had been Claridge's Hotel in the Champs Elysées. In the course of time rumours reached the British War office of this soldiers' hospital in Paris run by English women. Oh, well, of course, women surgeons might do for French poilus. At length it was learned however that even the British Tommies were falling into their hands. And Sir Alfred Keogh, director of the General Medical Council, was hurried across to see about it.
"Miss Anderson," he addressed the surgeon in charge, "I should like to look over the institution."
"Certainly," she acquiesced. "But it's Dr. Anderson, if you please." Three times as they went through the wards, he repeated his mistake. And three times she suggested gravely, "Dr. Anderson, if you please."
They had finished the rounds. "This," he said, "is remarkable, 'er quite remarkable, don't you know. But may I talk with some of your patients privately?"
DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON
The first woman physician in England and after Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell of America the next woman of modern times to practise medicine.
"Extraordinary, most extraordinary," murmured Sir Alfred Keogh. And this report he carried back to the General Medical Council. "Incredible as it may seem, gentlemen," he announced gravely, "it seems to be so."
"It appears then," brusquely decided Kitchener, "that these women surgeons are too good to be wasted on France." And promptly their country and the War Office invited them to London. It was England's crack regiment after the great drive on the Somme that was tucked under the covers for repairs at Endel Street. The issue was no longer in doubt. "Major" Anderson and the Women's Hospital Corps held the fort for the professional woman's cause in England.
WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT
Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangan, fascinating little French feminist, meanwhile was executing a brilliant coup in demonstration to her government. France, it was true, had seen that British women could be military doctors and surgeons. But the French woman doctor, oh, every one was sure that the French ​woman doctor's place was the home. And if ever there was a woman whom God made just to be "protected," you'd say positively it was Nicole Gerard-Mangin.
She stood before me as she came from her operating room, curling tendrils of bright brown hair escaping from the surgeon's white cap set firmly on her pretty head, a surgeon's white apron tied closely back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness of line. She is soft and round and dainty and charming. She has small shapely hands, as exquisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I looked at her hands in the most amazement, the hands that have had men's lives in their keeping, little hands that by the sure swift skill of them have brought thousands of men back from death's door. You'd easily think of her as belonging in a pink satin boudoir or leading a cotillion with a King of France. And she's been at the war front instead. "Madame la petite Major" she is lovingly known to the soldiers of France. She too has that rank. You will notice on one of the sleeves of her uniform the gold stripe that denotes a wound and on her right pink cheek you will see the scar of it. On her other coat sleeve are the gold bars for three years of military service.
This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, Dr. Gerard-Mangin was in charge of the tuberculosis sanitarium, Hôpital Beaugou, in Paris. When the call came for volunteers for army doctors, she signed and sent in an application, carefully omitting ​however to write her first name. The War Office, hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin as any other man. One night at twelve o'clock her concierge stood before her door with a government command ordering the doctor to report at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case in one hand and a surgeon's kit in the other, she was on her way. The astonished military medecin-en-chef, before whom she arrived, threw up his hands: "A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be."
She held out her government order: "N'est ce pas?" He examined it more closely. "But yet," he insisted, "it must be a mistake."
"En ce moment," as they say in France, a thousand wounded soldiers were practically laid at the commander's feet—and he had only five doctors at hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy of a woman before him. After all there was an alertness, an independent defiance of her femininity that straightened at attention to duty now every curving line of the little figure. His glance swept the wounded men: "Take off your hat and stay a while," he said in desperation. "But," he added, "I shall have to report this to the War Office. There must be an investigation."
Three months later when the Inspector General of the French army arrived to make it, he learned that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had performed six hundred operations without losing a single patient. "You'll do even though you are not a man," he hazarded.
​A little later she was ordered to Verdun to organise a hastily improvised epidemic hospital. For the first week she had no doctors and no nurses. There was no equipment but a barracks and the beds. As fast as these could be set up, a patient was put in. There were no utensils of any kind but the tin cans which she picked up outside where they had been cast away by the commissary department when emptied of meat. There was no heat. There was no water in which to bathe her patients except that which she melted from the ice over an oil lamp. For six weeks she worked without once having her clothing off. One of her feet froze and she had to limp about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid arrived and she had a staff of twenty-five men under her direction. There were eight hundred beds. For seventeen months the hospital was under shell fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. Three hundred and twenty-nine panes of glass were shattered one day. A man next the little doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her but she had only time to staunch the flow of blood with her handkerchief. Outside the American ambulance men were coming on in their steady lines. They delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 18,000 wounded in four days, whom she in turn gave first aid and passed on to interior hospitals. Later when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back from the army infected with tuberculosis, the Government required its greatest expert for the diagnosis of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-Mangin in the fall ​of 1916 was recalled from the front to be made medecin-en-chef of the new Hôpital Militaire Edith Cavell in the Rue Desnouettes, Paris. It is a group of low white buildings with red roofs. The white walls inside are ornamented above the patients' beds with garlands of red and blue and yellow flowers. And the commanding officer's own gay little office has curtains of pink flowered calico. Grey haired French scientists in the laboratories here are taking their orders from Madame la petite Major. Soldiers in the corridors are giving her the military salute. One day there came a celebrated French general: "When I heard about you at Verdun," he said, "I could not believe it. I insisted, she cannot be a surgeon. She is only a nurse. I have made the journey all the way to Paris," he smiled in candour, "to find out if you are real."
The records of the War Office show how real. Dr. Gerard-Mangin did her two years' service at the front without a day off for illness and never so much as an hour's absence from her post of duty. She is the only surgeon with the French army who has such a record. Her right to a place in the profession in which no man has been able to equal, let alone surpass, her achievement, would seem to be assured beyond question. Let us write high on the waving banners carried by the cohorts of the woman's cause the name of Nicole Gerard-Mangin. It was not a simple or an easy thing that she has done. You would know if you heard her voice tremulous yet with the agony on which she has looked. "I shall ​nevair forget! I shall nevair forget!" she told me brokenly, in the gay little pink calico office. And the beautiful brown eyes of the little French major, successful army surgeon, were suddenly suffused with woman's tears.
WHAT SCOTTISH WOMEN DOCTORS DID
Like this the woman war doctor began. Before the first year of the great conflict was concluded, there was not a battle front on which she had not arrived. And the Scottish Women's Hospitals have appeared on five battle fronts. Organised by the Scottish Federation of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and supported by the entire body of constitutional suffragists under Mrs. Fawcett of London, they afford spectacular evidence of how completely the forces of the woman movement of yesterday have been marshalled into formation for the winning of the new woman movement of to-day. Dr. Elsie Inglis the intrepid leader of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, like a general disposing her troops to the best strategic advantage, has literally followed the armies of Europe, placing her now indispensable auxiliary aid where the world's distress at the moment seems greatest. There have been at one time as many as twelve of the Scottish hospitals in simultaneous operation. Sometimes they are forced to pick up their entire equipment and retreat with the Allies before the onslaught of the Hun hordes. Sometimes they have been captured by ​the enemy, only eventually to reach London and start out once more for new fields to conquer.
These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan trimmings and the sign of the thistle embroidered on their hats and their epaulets, have crossed the vision of the central armies with a frequency that has seemed, to the common soldier at least, to partake of the supernatural. Bulgarian prisoners brought into the Scottish Women's Hospital operating at Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up into the doctors' faces in amazement to inquire: "Who are you? We thought we had done for you. There you were in the south. Now here you are in north. Are you double?" Of this work in the north, in the Dobrudja from where they were obliged to retreat into Russia, the Prefect of Constanza said in admiration: "It is extraordinary how these women endure hardship. They refuse help and carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies."
At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish women left their first record of efficiency at Calais. Their hospital there in the Rue Archimede, operated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest percentage of mortality for the epidemic of enteric fever. In France the hospital at Troyes under Dr. Louise McElroy was so good that it received an official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika to be regularly attached to the French army, this being one of the very few instances on record where a voluntary hospital has been so honoured. The ​Scottish Hospital under Dr. Francis Ivins, established in the deserted old Cistercian abbey at Royaumont, is one of the show hospitals of France. When the doctors first took possession of the ancient abbey they had no heat, no light but candles stuck in bottles, no water but that supplied by a tap in the holy fountain, and they themselves slept on the floor. But eventually they had transformed the great vaulted religious corridors into the comfortable wards of Hôpital Auxiliarie 301. They might, the French Government had said, have the "petite blessé." They would be entrusted with operations on fingers and toes! And every week or so, some French general ran down from Paris to see if they were doing these right. But within two months the War Office itself had asked to have the capacity of the hospital increased from 100 to 400 beds. And the medical department of the army had been notified to send to Royaumont only the "grande blessés." At the end of the first week's drive on the Somme, all of the other hospitals were objecting that they could receive no more patients: their overworked staffs could not keep up with the operations already awaiting them in the crowded wards. "But," said the French Government, "see the Dames du Royaumont! Already they have evacuated their wounded and report to us for more."
MISS NANCY NETTLEFOLD
Leader in the campaign to admit women to the practise of law in England.
Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. Where, oh, where are all those earlier fabled ​disabilities of the female sex for the practice of the profession of medicine? A very celebrated English medical man, returning recently from the front, found a woman resident physician in charge of the London hospital of whose staff he was a particularly distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly tendered his resignation, only to be told by the Board of Directors practically to forget it. And he had to.
Why man, you see you can't do that sort of thing any more! Yesterday, it is true, a woman physician was only a woman. To-day her title to her place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven great London hospitals that never before permitted so much as a woman on their staff, now have women resident physicians in charge. Five of them are entirely staffed by women. The British Medical Research Commission is employing over a score of women for the highly scientific work of pathology. When one of those Scottish Women's Hospitals on its way to Serbia was requisitioned for six weeks to assist the British army at Malta where the wounded were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities there, at length reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided that the Malta military hospitals in the future could not do without the woman doctor. They sent to London for sixty of her. And the War Office reading their report asked for eighty more for other military hospitals. By January, 1915, professional posts for women doctors were being offered at the rate of four and five a day to the London School of ​Medicine for Women, and they hadn't graduates enough to meet the demand!
Like that the nations have capitulated. The woman physician's place in Europe to-day is any place she may desire. Russia, which before the war, would not permit a woman physician on the Petrograd Board of Health because its duties were too onerous and too high salaried for a woman, had by 1915 mobilised for war service even all of her women medical students of the third and fourth years. France has Dr. Marthe Francillon-Lobre, eminent gynecologist, commanding the military hospital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue de Monceau, Paris. In Lyons the medecin-en-chef of the military hospital is Dr. Thyss-Monod who was nursing a new baby when she assumed her military responsibilities. Everywhere the woman doctor rejected of the War Office of yesterday is now counted one of her country's most valuable assets. And so precious is she become to her own land, that she may not be permitted to leave for any other. "Over there" the governments of Europe have ceased to issue passports to their women doctors.
You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. Medical associations will no longer bar you as in America until the seventies and in England until the nineties. Salaried positions will not be denied you. Clinical and hospital opportunities will not be closed to you. You of to-day will no more be elbowed and jostled aside. You will not even be crowded out from anywhere. For there is room everywhere. Oh, ​the horror and the anguish of it, room everywhere. And every day of the frightful world conflict they are making more of it. Great Britain alone has sent 10,000 medical men to the front. America, they say, is sending 35,000.
Hurry, hurry, urges this the first profession in which the women's battalions have actually arrived as it hastily clears the way for you. The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, not to be outdone by any institution now bidding for women's favour, has rushed up an "emergency" plant, a new $200,000 building. The London School of Medicine has erected a thirty thousand pound addition and the public appeal for the funds was signed by Premier Asquith himself. The nations to-day are waiting for the women who shall come out from the colleges equipped for medical service.
A PLACE IN EVERY PROFESSION
And after the most arduous profession of all, how about the others? If a woman can be a doctor at a battle front, how long before she can be a doctor of divinity? At the City Temple in London on a Sunday in March, 1917, a slender black robed figure preceded an aged clergyman up the pulpit steps. With one hand resting on the cushioned Bible she stood silhouetted against the black hanging at the back of the pulpit, her face shining, illumined. By the time that the white surpliced choir had ceased chanting "We have done those things that we ought not to have done," the ushers were hanging in the ​entrance corridor the great red lettered signs "Full."
The house was packed to the last seat in the gallery to hear Miss Maude Royden, one of England's leading suffragists, "preach." This church is nearly 300 years old and only once before, when Mrs. Booth of the Salvation Army was granted the privilege, has a woman ever spoken from its pulpit. Some six months since, Maude Royden has now been appointed pulpit assistant at the City Temple, the first woman in England to hold such a position. Dr. Fort Newton, the pastor, in announcing the innovation, declared: "We want the woman point of view, the woman insight and the woman counsel." The City Temple is not an Episcopalian Church. But even the established church has recently heard an archbishop cautiously pronounce the opinion that "we may invite our church women to a much larger share in the Christian service than has been usual." You see there are 2000 English clergymen enrolled as chaplains at the front. Laywomen were last year permitted to make public addresses in the National Mission of Repentance. They thus ascended the chancel steps. A committee of bishops and scholars—and one woman—has now been appointed to see how much farther women may be permitted to go on the way to the pulpit itself. A few of the smaller churches in America have a woman minister in charge. But from the arduous duties of the highest ecclesiastical positions women in all lands are still "protected." High established places are of course the last to yield. Theology continues to ​be the most closed profession. But Maude Royden in the pulpit of the London City Temple, the highest ecclesiastical place to which a woman anywhere in the world has yet attained, has, we may say, captured an important trench.
In the field of science the opposing forces are even more steadily falling back before the advancing woman movement. One of the most conservative bodies, the Royal Astronomical Society of England, has added a clause to its charter permitting women to become fellows. The Royal Institute of British Architects has also decided to accept women as fellows and in 1917 the Architectural Association for the first time opened its doors to women students. Germany even has several women architects employed in military service, among them Princess Victoria of Bentheim. Russia, in 1916, admitted women to architecture and engineering.
Chemistry is distinctly calling women in all lands. Sheffield University, England, in 1916 announced for the first time courses in the metallurgical department for training girls as steel chemists to replace young men who have been "combed out" of Sheffield's large industrial works. Firms in Leeds, Bradford and South Wales are filling similar vacancies with women. Bedford College of London University had last year started a propaganda to induce young women to study chemistry. In 1916 there were some twelve graduates in the chemical department and the college received applications from the industrial world for no less than 100 women chemists. ​So insistent was the demand that even Woolwich Arsenal was willing to take a graduate without waiting for her to get her degree. Women are wanted too in physics and bacteriology. A London University woman has been appointed to a position at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and there were last year, at this one university, offers of twenty positions for women physicists that could not be filled. All over the world now, in trade journals are beginning to appear advertisements for women chemists and physicists.
Even in the teaching profession there is the record of new ground won. Women have of course been longest admitted to this the poorest paid profession, and in it they have been relegated to the poorest paid places. But now over in Europe, note that one-third of all the masters in the German upper high schools are enlisted in the army and with the consent of the Department of Education women are for the first time being appointed to these places, in some instances even at the same salaries as were received by the men whom they replace. Russia had in the first year of the war opened the highest teaching positions in that country to women, by a special act of the Duma providing that "their salaries shall equal those of men in the same position." Russia also in 1915 had her first woman college professor, Mme. Ostrovskaia, occupying the chair of Russian history at the University of Petrograd. In 1916 Mlle. Josephine Ioteyko, a celebrated Polish scientist, had been invited to lecture at the College de France in ​Paris. In 1917 Germany had its first woman professor of music, Fraulein Marie Bender, at the Royal High School of Music in Charlottenburg. And in the same year England had appointed its first woman to an open university chair, when Dr. Caroline Spurgeon was made professor of English literature at Bedford College.
MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG
Celebrated woman lawyer of Paris who pleads cases before the Conseil de la Guerre. The privilege thus accorded the French women lawyers marks an epoch in history. It is the first time in the world that women have conducted cases before a military tribunal.
But opportunities for professional advancement for women in law have been exceedingly limited. It is on the judge's bench, in every land, that their masculine colleagues have most stubbornly refused to move up and make room. So it is noteworthy that Georgiana P. Bullock was in 1916 made a Judge of the Woman's Court in Los Angeles, the first tribunal of its kind in the world. A few women have been allowed a place as judges in the children's courts. Catherine Waugh McCulloch of Chicago, who some years ago as justice of the peace was the first woman anywhere in the world to have arrived at any judicial office, scored another victory in December, 1917, when she was made a master in ​chancery, the first woman to receive such an appointment. Litta Belle Hibben, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles in 1915, and Annette Abbot Adams, assistant United States district attorney in San Francisco in the same year, were the first women to arrive at these appointments. Helen P. McCormick, in 1917 assistant district attorney in New York, is the first woman in the more conservative East to become a public prosecutor. There is a reason for this advance. Could a woman really be accepted as an expert in the interpretation of laws, so long as she was permitted no share in making them? With the pressure of the woman movement at the gates of government resulting in enfranchisement, that handicap of civic inferiority is being removed.
Like this even in the United States farthest from the war zone, the rear guard of the women's lines in the legal profession are moving. At the front "over there," every country reports distinct progress. Even a deputation of Austrian women have been to their department of state to demand admission to the legal profession. In October, 1917, on a petition from the German Association of Women Lawyers, the Prussian Ministry of Justice made the first appointment of women in the Central Berlin law courts, three women having legally qualified there as law clerks. In Russia directly after the revolution one of the first reforms secured by the Minister of Justice was the admission of women lawyers to the privilege of conducting cases in court on equal terms with the men of the profession. The Italian ​Parliament in 1917 passed a bill granting to women in that country the right to practise law.
Specially significant is the legal situation in England, the land where Chrystabel Pankhurst, denied the opportunity to practise law, became instead a smashing suffragette. Now, see the vacant places in the London law courts where day by day women clerks are appearing with all of the duties, though not yet the recognition, as solicitors. And the English Parliament at last is considering a bill which shall permit women to be admitted to this branch of the legal profession in England. This bill really should be known as Nancy Nettlefold's bill. The year that Nancy Nettlefold arrived at her twenty-first birthday and was presented at court, Cambridge University announced in June, 1912, that she had taken the law tripos, her place being between the first and second man in the first class honours list. And she at the time determined to make the winning of the legal profession her contribution to the woman's cause. With four other English women, who have also passed brilliant law examinations, she has financed and worked indefatigably in the campaign to that end. To-day they have that conservative organ of public opinion, the London Times, urging in favour of their case: "Many prejudices against women have been shattered in this war. And there is no stronger theoretical case against the woman lawyer as such than against the woman doctor." The bill permitting women to enter the Law Society has passed a second reading in the House of Lords, ​Lord Buckmaster, its sponsor, declaring: "The true sphere of a woman's work ought to be measured by the world's need for her services and by her capacity to perform that work."
And the world's need presses steadily, inexorably day by day. France had called 1500 men lawyers to the colours when the War Office sent a brief notice to the bar association of Paris: "On account of the absence of so many men at the front," read the summons, "women lawyers are wanted in the Ministry of War." Women have been in the legal profession in France since 1900. There are 52 women lawyers in Paris. But their practice has been limited largely to women clients. Madame Miropolsky has made a reputation as a divorce lawyer. Madame Maria Verone is the prominent barrister of the Children's Court. A year ago I heard Avocat Suzanne Grinberg plead a case before a tribunal which up to 1914 had never listened to a woman's voice.
DR. ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON OF NEW YORK
Who is organizing the American women physicians for war service.
Only the day before yesterday woman's capacity for the higher education to fit her for the professions was in grave doubt. Vassar College once stood as the farthest outpost of radical feminism, and Christian women were counselled by their clergymen not to send their daughters there. Even after the moral stigma of a college education had passed, the critics said that anyhow the female mind was not made to master science and Greek and mathematics. And it was only about twenty years ago that Phi Beta Kappa decided to risk the opening of its ranks to college women—of course provided that any of them should be able to attain the high scholarship that it required. The female mind, you know!
Well, at the last Phi Beta Kappa council meeting, the secretary reported to that distinguished body that ​in the elections of the past three years, women have captured in Phi Beta Kappa an aggregate of 1979 places to 2202 for men. What shall the oldest college fraternity do in the face of this feminine invasion? A letter on my desk says that the committee on fraternity policy has been commissioned to take under advisement this grave situation and report to the council meeting of 1919! So the present Phi Beta Kappa record seems to dispose forever of the old tradition of the mental inferiority of the always challenged sex.
Ladies, right this way for titles, please, one profession after another takes up the call to-day. New York University at its opening last fall registered 110 women in its law school, the largest number ever entered there. Already the American medical women are called and coming. New York City has recently appointed women doctors for nearly every municipal institution. The first mobile hospital unit of American women physicians with a hospital of 100 beds, to be known as the Women's Oversea Hospital Unit, is now in France. It is backed financially by the National Women's Suffrage Association. And it goes from that first original outpost of the professional woman's cause, Elizabeth Blackwell's New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Meanwhile the entire Medical Women's National Association is being organised for war service under the direction of Dr. Rosalie S. Morton, who has been made a member of the General Medical Board of the United States Government at ​Washington. The American Women's Hospitals are being formed for civilian relief at home and for service with Pershing's army. From the Surgeon General's headquarters in Washington the announcement is made: "There will be need for the war service of every woman physician in the United States."
And through the vast Salle de Pas-Perdus of the world, the professional women are passing. The Lost Footsteps! O, the Lost Footsteps! Forward the advancing columns. Hush, there are ways that are not our ways! On with the new woman movement, but with banners furled before the woe of a world! For all the pæans of our victory are drowned in the dirge of our grief.
* ↑ Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldebourough, Suffolk, England, Dec. 17, 1917.
* ↑ Died 1917.