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
When the great call, “Women wanted,” first commenced in all lands,
there were those who stood with reluctant feet at the threshold simply
because they did not know how to step out into the new wide world
of opportunity stretching before them. In this crisis it was to the
suffragists that every government turned. Who else should organise?
These women, like My Suffragette, had devoted their lives to assembling
cohorts for a cause! The Assoziazione per la Donna in Italy, as the
Conseil National des Femmes Françaises in France, promptly responded by
offering their office machinery as registration bureaus through which
women could be drafted into service. It was the suffrage association at
Budapest, Hungary, that filled the order from the city government for
five hundred women street sweepers. The Vaterlandischer Frauenverein
assembled 25,000 women in Berlin alone to take the course of training
arranged for _helferinnen_, assistants in all phases of relief work.
But it was in England where the woman movement of yesterday had
reached its highest point in organisation that the woman movement for
to-day was best equipped to start. Britain counted among the nation’s
resources no less than fifty separate suffrage organisations, one of
which alone, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was able
to send out its instructions to over 500 branches! And the mobilisation
of the woman power of a nation was under way on a scale that could have
been witnessed in no other era of the world.
The woman who has been enlisted in largest numbers in England as
in other lands is the woman who at her country’s call hung up the
housewife’s kitchen apron in plain little cottages to put on a new
uniform with a distinctive feature that has been hitherto conspicuously
missing from women’s clothes. It has a pocket for a pay envelope.
“See,” I say to My Suffragette, “you would not know her at all, now,
would you?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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