Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
You see like this the new woman in commerce all over the world is
planning for a career that will never again rest with stenography and
typewriting. Bringing furs from Russia and wheat from Canada is more
interesting. There is nothing like preparedness. You are almost sure
to do that for which you have specially made ready. And one glance at
the programme of study for the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement
Commercial shows clearly enough to any one who reads, that it is what
Cecile Bornozi with her flashing glance calls the “big venture” which
is the ultimate aim of this girl with the new note book on her knee.
Meantime France can scarcely wait for her to complete her training.
Mlle. Sanua has almost to stand at the door of the Ancien Prieure
to turn away the employers who come to the Rue St. Martin to offer
positions to her pupils. “Always they are asking,” she says, “have I
any more graduates ready?”
Avocat Suzanne Grinberg’s soft musical voice goes on in the
amphitheatre expounding commercial law. Outside in her adjoining
office, the little stone walled room with the religious Gothic
window, Mlle. Sanua tells me how it has come about, this new attitude
on the part of her country to women who are going to find economic
independence in the business world. In the cold little room in a war
burdened land where coal is $80 a ton, we draw our chairs closer to
the tiny grate. Mlle. Sanua leans forward and selects two fagots to be
added to the fire that must be carefully conserved with rigid war-time
economy.
As she begins to talk, I catch the look in her eyes, the glow of
idealism that I have felt somewhere before. Where? Ah, yes. It
was Frau Anna von Wunsch in whose eyes I have seen the gleam that
flashed the same feminist message. Frau von Wunsch was before the
war the presedient of Die Frauenbanck. This was for Germany a most
revolutionary institution that hung out its gold lettered sign at 39
Motzstrasse, Berlin, a woman’s bank in a land where it was contrary to
custom for a married woman to be permitted to do any banking at all.
But “Women will never become a world power until they become a money
power,” said Frau von Wunsch. And they put that motto in black letters
on all of their letter heads and checks. The armies of the world are
now entrenched between the Seine and the Rhine and since 1914 of course
hardly any personal word at all has come through the censored lines
from the feminists of Germany to the feminists of France. One does not
even know what has become of Frau von Wunsch and her Frauenbanck over
there in Mittel Europa. But the ideal that she lighted, flames now in
every land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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