New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1917-05-20

Long before the war the women had proved
their case, but the door remained bolted. 1t
was the war that broke down the door and
let rush of women through into industries
and professions In few months they
altered the consciousness of England and
won their spiritual freedom. The vote, in
dustrial quality and control of their life will
inevitably follow. There five hundred
thousand of them making shells. An entire
military hospital has been placed in their
control and under their exclusive manage
ment-doctors, surgeons, orderlies, messen-
gers and superintendent. That was done by
the War Office, which has never been rash
or radical innovator in England The War
Office is now issuing requests for women doc
tors. 1t finds them as steady in emergency,
as delicate in nice manipulation, as their
brothers. The old cant about physiological
barriers has been broken down by the press
ure of million casualties. Women are driv
ing heavy trucks, running elevators and
trans, even managing places of business, in
GLIDING bank.
y SCN ETtSuOu Noh
As yet it is in large part the same millions
of women who were earning wages before
the war that have taken possession Of the
new activities. Probably not more than five
hundred thousand women have stepped over
from idleness into the days work. But half
a million is large increase, and that half
million are only the vanguard of the army
81 - poIop1ir mod of
every adult for increased production. The
significance of the change does not lie as yet
in the number of previously unemployed
women who have entered wage-earning occu-
pations. The Significance lies IN the new
professions and the process Of industry which
they have taken over 1t lies in the work
once closed to them, which is now opened for
all time. A measure of freedom has been
won that never existed before. Their right
to play a part in the industrial and profess
sional world had been challenged. Their
presence in the modern economic world had
been resented Inside of two years woman
has ceased to be a question and has become
an accepted fact.
II is a mistake to think that the hundreds
of thousands of women who are helping TO
carry on industry while the young men fight
were organized and engineered by newcom-
ers, that a spontaneous uprising took place.
The women who led the new movement into
hospitals, munitions, the tramcars and the
police were the seasoned executive women
who had long been successful wage-earning
workers in nursing and school teaching,
women who had long fought for social re-
form in labor conditions, housing and the
care Of children. The amazing alteration in
the economic position of women in England
is not the work of amateurs. 1t is the sud
den ripening OF an immensely laboriOus,
painfully slow growth.
Opponents of the woman's movement have
watched with a keen eye for disintegration
Of the home resulting from the entrance of
numbers of "home" women into muntion
factories Neglected children, shoddily
dressed and poorly fed, were what they
feared to find The showing has been all the
other way. The reports from Woolwich, for
instance, show that the school children are
better nourished and better clothed than in
the days when the mother was hack in the
home over washtub. A wage to mother
of 81 los has not wrecked the British lower
class household, but has improved IL.
Radicals have played the same part in the
woman's movement that they have played in
the labor movement. IL is not that the mass
agrees with them or likes them or follows
them. but they have clarified and given a
Conference to vague subconscious desires of
an inartieulate community. They have pre-