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
Why man, you see you can’t do that sort of thing any more! Yesterday,
it is true, a woman physician was only a woman. To-day her title to her
place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven great London
hospitals that never before permitted so much as a woman on their
staff, now have women resident physicians in charge. Five of them are
entirely staffed by women. The British Medical Research Commission
is employing over a score of women for the highly scientific work of
pathology. When one of those Scottish Women’s Hospitals on its way to
Serbia was requisitioned for six weeks to assist the British army at
Malta where the wounded were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities
there, at length reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided that
the Malta military hospitals in the future could not do without the
woman doctor. They sent to London for sixty of her. And the War
Office reading their report asked for eighty more for other military
hospitals. By January, 1915, professional posts for women doctors were
being offered at the rate of four and five a day to the London School
of Medicine for Women, and they hadn’t graduates enough to meet the
demand!
Like that the nations have capitulated. The woman physician’s place
in Europe to-day is any place she may desire. Russia, which before
the war, would not permit a woman physician on the Petrograd Board
of Health because its duties were too onerous and too high salaried
for a woman, had by 1915 mobilised for war service even all of her
women medical students of the third and fourth years. France has Dr.
Marthe Francillon-Lobre, eminent gynecologist, commanding the military
hospital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue de Monceau,
Paris. In Lyons the _medecin-en-chef_ of the military hospital is Dr.
Thyss-Monod who was nursing a new baby when she assumed her military
responsibilities. Everywhere the woman doctor rejected of the War
Office of yesterday is now counted one of her country’s most valuable
assets. And so precious is she become to her own land, that she may not
be permitted to leave for any other. “Over there” the governments of
Europe have ceased to issue passports to their women doctors.
You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. Medical associations
will no longer bar you as in America until the seventies and in England
until the nineties. Salaried positions will not be denied you. Clinical
and hospital opportunities will not be closed to you. You of to-day
will no more be elbowed and jostled aside. You will not even be crowded
out from anywhere. For there is room everywhere. Oh, the horror and
the anguish of it, room everywhere. And every day of the frightful
world conflict they are making more of it. Great Britain alone has sent
10,000 medical men to the front. America, they say, is sending 35,000.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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