It was a non-official body, the National Union of Women's Suffrage
Societies, which opened before the war was two weeks old the Women's
Service Bureau, and soon placed forty thousand women as paid and
volunteer workers. It was this bureau that furnished the government with
its supervisors for the arsenals. The Women's Farm and Garden Union was
the fore-runner of the official Land Army, and to it still is left the
important work of enrolling those women who, while willing to undertake
agricultural work, are disinclined to sign up for service "for the
duration of the war."
Not only have unnumbered voluntary associations achieved miracles in
necessary work, but many of them have gained untold discipline in the
ridicule they have had to endure from a doubting public. I remember
hunting in vain all about Oxford Circus for the tucked-away office of
the Women's Signalling Corps. My inquiries only made the London bobbies
grin. Everyone laughed at the idea of women signalling, but to-day the
members are recognized officially, one holding an important appointment
in the college of wireless telegraphy.
How Scotland Yard smiled, at first, at Miss Damer Dawson and her Women
Police Service! But now the metropolitan police are calling for the help
of her splendidly trained and reliable force.
And the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps--I climbed and climbed to an
attic to visit their headquarters! There was the commandant in her
khaki, very gracious, but very upstanding, and maintaining the strictest
discipline. No member of the corps entered or left her office without
clapping heels together and saluting. The ambulance about which the
corps revolved, I often met in the streets--empty. But those women had
vision. They saw that England would need them some day. They had faith
in their ability to serve. So on and on they went, training themselves
to higher efficiency in body and mind. And to-day--well, theirs is
always the first ambulance on the spot to care for the injured in the
air-raids. The scoffers have remained to pray.
If Britain has a lesson for us it is an all-hail to non-official
societies, an encouragement to every idea, a blessing on every effort
which has behind it honesty of purpose. Great Britain's activities are
as refreshingly diversified as her talents. They are not all under
one hat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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