The Ocala evening star. [volume] (Ocala, Fla.) 1895-1943, 1914-12-01
Woman and War
by Olive schreiner)

IL IS not tnat IN primitive times Wet
suffered from the destruction of the
fields we titled and the houses we
built; it is not that in a comparatively
insignificant manner, as nurses of the
wounded in modern times, or now
and again as warrior chieftainesses,
and leaders in primitive and other So
cieties, we have borne our part; nor
is it even because the spirit of reso-
luton In its women, and their will |
again and again largely determined
the fate of race that goes to war,
that we demand our controlling right
where war is concerned. Our rela-l
ton to war is far more intimate, per-
sonal, and indissoluble than this. Men
have made boomerangs, bows, swords
or guns with which to destroy one an
other; we have made the men who de-
stroyed and were destroyed! We have
in all ages produced, at an enormous
cost, the primal munition Of war,
without which no other could exist.
There is no battlefield on earth, nor
ever has been, howsoever covered
with slain, which it has not cost the
women of the race more in actual
bloodshed and anguish to supply, than
it has cost the men who lie there.
We pay the first cost on all human
life
There is perhaps, no woman who
could look down upon battlefield COW
cred with slain but the thought would
rise in her, $50 many mothers sonsi
So many young bodies brought into
the world to lie there! So many
months. of WEAKNESS and pain while
bones and muscles were shaped with
I'M So many hours of anguish and
struggle that breath might be! SO
many baby mouths drawing life at
women's breasts-all this, that men
might lie with glazed eyeballs, and
swollen faces, and fixed, blue unclos-
ed mouths and great limbs tossedl"
cause this must not bel" No woman
who is woman says of human
body sit is nothing"
No tinsel of trumpets and flags
will ultimately seduce women into the
insanity of recklessly destroying life,
or gid the willfu1 taking of life with
any other name than that of murder,
whether it be the slaughter of the
million or of the one by one. And
this will be, not because with the
function of maternity necessarily
goes in the human creature a deeper
moral insight or loftier type Of So
cial instinct than that which accom-
panies the paternal. Men have in all
ages led nobly as women in many
paths of heroic virtue, and toward
the higher social sympathies; in GER
tain ages, being freer and more wide
ly cultured, they have led further
and better.
/ Nor will women shrink from war
because they lack courage. Earth's
women of every generation have fac
ed suffering and death with an equan-
unity that no soldier on battlefield
has ever surpassed and few have
/ preserve life, or land, or freedom
rather than for aggrandizement and
power, women have in all ages known
how to bear an active part and die.
/ Nor will woman's influence initiate
against war because in the future
woman will not be able physically tc
bear her part in it. The smaller size
of her muscle, which might severely
have disadvantage her when war was
conducted with a battle-ax or sword
and hand to hand, would now little OF
not at all affect her. If intent or
training for war, she might acquire
the skill for guiding a Maxim or fol
shooting down a foe with Lee-Met-
ford at four thousand yards as ably as
any male; and undoubtedly it has mo-
been only the peasant girl of France
who has carried latent and hid in hel
person the gifts that would make
the great general. IF our European
nations should continue in their pres
ent semi-civilized condition few gen
erations more it is highly probable
that as financiers, as managers o
commissariat departments, as in
), spectors of provisions and clothing
for the army, women may probabl.
play very leading part, and tina
the nation which is the first to EN-
ploy women may be placed at a vas
advantage over its fellows in time o
! war. 1t is not because of woman
cowardice, in capacity, nor, above al
because of her voice is fully and clear
! ly heard in the goverance of states
. it is because, on this one point, and o.
. this point alone, the knowledge o
! woman, simply as woman, is superio