World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, American
At Aix-les-Bains, where our soldiers went for their first vacation
leaves, there was a young girl who was an almost startling example. She
was about twenty years old and very pretty, in a delicate, patrician
way. Before the war this girl would never have gone out of the house
unattended. She had been educated in a private school with girls of her
own social class, and but for the war would have been married by this
time to a man chosen for her in the family council.
Now she was driving her own little Ford ambulance for the benefit of
the American soldiers. She had joined the American Y. M. C. A., wore
its becoming gray and blue uniform, with a boy’s soft hat pulled down
over her bobbed black hair, and she was as busy as a maternal little
wren.
I don’t know where she and the little car had operated before, but when
the boys began to arrive at Aix she drove down from Paris, entirely
alone except for a girl chum, an English girl, I believe, and a dozen
times a day she sat at the wheel speeding between Aix and Chambéry,
four miles away, carting supplies from one Y. M. C. A. headquarters to
the other, and taking soldiers back and forth as well.
Mademoiselle Marcelle spoke English quaintly but fluently, but she
was not a very conversational young person. She was grave and very
dignified, and she loved all American soldiers too well to favor any
one very much. They treated her like a princess and were ready any
minute to clean the car, or oil it, or spend half a day doing things to
its insides.
She was a charming little creature, Mademoiselle Marcelle. My son
confided in me one evening that he didn’t think he would have to look
farther for his life’s ideal, but then, so did at least a dozen other
doughboys, so I considered his chances rather slim.
Even before the war the position of the French girl showed signs of
change. The quality of her education had immensely improved, and in
fact was practically the same as that of boys. Coeducation was unknown
in the schools and in higher institutions, but in the Sorbonne, the
oldest of all French universities, men and women attended the same
lectures.
There have been individual parents who desired the fullest freedom
for their daughters, and who educated them for the professions. There
are not many women doctors in France, but the woman lawyer is highly
respected and even encouraged.
One daughter of such modern parents is at present rendering good
service to her country in the French foreign office. Mademoiselle
St. René Taillandier is a member of the press section of the foreign
office, and because of her fluent English is of the greatest assistance
to English and American correspondents, especially women correspondents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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