From the start the committee worked—Dr. Anna saw to that. She and Mrs. Catt settled down in Washington. For myself I canceled two book contracts, determined to do what I could, indefinite as the task seemed. We met regularly; we kept office hours; we were keen to make something of our job. The committee took it for granted that we were to handle the food problem already looming so large. By midsummer we had our organizations everywhere, planting and hoeing. On top of this came dehydration, and we had many hot discussions about the best method. I remember a morning when the committee gave itself over to reminiscences of helping grandmother string apples for drying, of the way mother dried corn and berries. Then came canning—the larder was to be full. We were pretty well under way and rather proud of ourselves, thinking this was a special job, when Herbert Hoover came back from feeding Europe and was put at the head of the American Food Administration in a building of his own, practically a dictator of the food of America. Obviously Mr. Hoover was the one man in the world who could properly manage the huge and many-sided job; but it caused considerable heartburning in the Woman’s Committee that gardening and canning and drying should not be left entirely to us. Were we not already in the field? Had we not an organization which was rapidly extending to the last woman in the country? Were they not digging and planting and canning and saving? But in spite of Dr. Anna’s bristling opposition we were soon put in our place, made an auxiliary. It fell to me to act as liaison officer, which amounted to nothing more than finding out at food headquarters what they wanted from women and passing it on. What we soon had contrived to become, thanks largely to Dr. Anna and Mrs. Catt, was a free channel through which we could pour speedily and uninterruptedly any request which came to us from any department of the war machine. We developed a disciplined army with other things to do than knitting and bandage making, gardening and canning, essential and important as these were. Our most useful service, as I see it, was a growing activity in preventing the machinery of daily life from rusting in the storm of war. Take the women going in droves into industry. For the most part they were as untrained as the boys drafted into the Army, as willing as these to take it, throw themselves away. Jane Addams had said to me at the beginning of the War: “Everything that we have gained in the way of social legislation will be destroyed. It will throw us back where we were twenty-five years ago.”