World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, American
For this the Red Cross has been responsible to a certain degree.
Thousands of young women who never in their lives before saw a man
except in the presence of their mothers now work in station canteens at
all hours of the day and night, cooking, serving, feeding soldiers and
refugees, waiting on the sick and weary with tireless devotion.
I have spoken of the dearth of conductors on the French trains. There
is one train attendant who never fails, and that is the young woman
who collects funds for the Red Cross. Every time a train stops it is
boarded by girls and women in white uniforms, who go through all the
carriages shaking tin money receptacles. These are about the size
and shape of a quart milk bottle, and the girl who holds it neglects
nobody. “_Pour la Croix Rouge! Pour les blessés!_” she cries, and
everybody drops small change into the milk bottle’s insatiable maw. In
the course of a long journey one contributes rather heavily. But then,
one should.
The educated women of France have gone in for hospital nursing as never
before. No part of unpreparedness in France was more serious than the
neglect of the nursing profession. Formerly almost all nursing was
done by the religious orders, and to tell the truth, it was not very
scientific nursing. If a sister happened to be a born nurse, so much
the better. But even the best of them were untrained in the modern
sense.
When the religious orders were broken up in France little or nothing
was publicly done to replace the nurses. I visited a house in Paris, a
sort of a nurses’ settlement, where for some years a highly educated
and philanthropic woman has maintained a small training school of her
own.
This woman, whose name, unfortunately, has slipped my memory, lives
and works in a crowded quarter of the city where there is much
tuberculosis. She established her nurses’ training school in connection
with her tuberculosis work, which is extensive. She induced a number
of educated girls to take up nursing, and many of them in 1914 went
into war work. But they were a drop in the bucket. They were dozens
where thousands were needed. So the women had to leave their homes, as
our leisured women will have to, if this war outlasts 1918, and made
themselves capable and devoted trained nurses.
These are the new women of France, and it would be extraordinary if,
after finding freedom from the old restrictions and conventions, they
should ever go back to the old ways. I met several women who were as
emancipated as any young American feminist, and who seemed very happy
in their new independence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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