The woman with the pay envelope may democratize thrift. She knows how
hard it is to earn money, and has learned to make her wages reach a long
way. Then, too, she has it brought home to her each pay day that health
is capital. She finds that it is economy to keep well, for lost time
brings a light pay envelope. Every woman who keeps herself in condition
is making a war saving. There has been no propaganda as yet appealing to
women to value dress according to durability and comfort rather than
according to its prettiness, to bow to no fashion which means the
lessening of power. To corset herself as fashion dictates, to prop
herself on high heels, means to a woman just so much lost efficiency,
and even the most thoughtless, if appealed to for national saving, might
learn to turn by preference in dress, in habits, in recreation, to the
simple things.
The Japanese, I am told, make a ceremony of going out from the city to
enjoy the beauties of a moonlight night. We go to a stuffy theatre and
applaud a night "set." Nature gives her children the one, and the
producer charges his patrons for the other. A propaganda of democratic
war economy would teach us to delight in the beauties of nature.
In making the change from business as usual to economy, Europe suffered
hardship, because although the retrenchments suggested were fairly
democratic it had not created channels into which savings might be
thrown with certainty of their flowing on to safe expenditures. Europe
was not ready with its great thrift schemes, nor had the adjustments
been made which would enable a shop to turn out a needed uniform, let us
say, in place of a useless dress.
Definite use of savings has been provided for in the United States. The
government needs goods of every kind to make our military effort
successful. Camps must be built for training the soldiers, uniforms,
guns and ammunition supplied. Transportation on land and sea is called
for. The government needs money to carry on the industries essential to
winning the war.
If a plucky girl who works in a button factory refuses to buy an
ornament which she at first thought of getting to decorate her belt, and
puts that twenty-five cents into a War Saving Stamp, all in the spirit
of backing up her man at the front, she will not find herself thrown
out of employment; instead, while demands for unnecessary ornamental
fastenings will gradually cease, she will be kept busy on
government orders.
Profiting by the errors of those nations who had to blaze out new paths,
the United States knit into law, a few months after the declaration of
war, not only the quick drafting of its man-power for military service,
but methods of absorbing the people's savings. If we neither waste nor
hoard, we will not suffer as did Europe from wide-spread unemployment.
There is more work to be done than our available labor-power can meet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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