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
This new woman will look back into the dear eyes that search hers. In
her level glance there will flash an understanding of life that never
was in woman’s eyes before in all the ages of sorrow since the angel
fixed up the flaming swords that shut her out of Eden. For in the white
silence where she has found her soul, she has heard even the closest
whisper of God. If man before missed it, why, maternity was naturally
the matter that he could not know and could not understand. This is
the new revelation, _that maternity shall be made more divine_! There
has been a halo about it in song and picture and story. But we want to
put a halo on in London’s east end and New York’s east side. Creation
itself is to be corrected.
Doesn’t it need to be? See how many men, it is being discovered
to-day, are not well enough made for soldiers. England is obliged to
reject 25% of her men as physically unfit. America is reported to have
rejected 29%. The other nations cannot show any better figures. If in
the great arsenals that are manufacturing munitions of war, one shell
in four turned out was spoiled, the industry would have to be at once
investigated and put on a more efficient basis than that. Quite likely
the mistake might be discovered to be “speeding up.” There had been an
effort to turn out too many shells. If fewer shells are made, they can
be better made. And you will get just as many in the end. For by the
present process, all these shells that fail, you see, do not count in
the real output.
It’s just like this about people. We’ve been trying to have too many.
When Mrs. Smith in London or in New York or Frau Schmidt in Berlin,
has six or eight or more children in, say, two rooms, some of them are
going to have rickets and some of them are going to have tuberculosis
and some of them are going into penal institutions. So that when
you come to want them for the army, you find that one in four has
failed. Why, even chickens would. A poultry fancier does not presume
to try to raise a brood of chickens in quarters too crowded for their
development. He measures his poultry house and determines how many
chickens he can accommodate with enough air and space—and how many he
can afford to feed. He limits the flock accordingly. Mrs. Smith in
London or New York and Frau Schmidt in Berlin, can too!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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