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
She came marching through the streets of London on July 17, 1915, in
one of the most significant detachments mustered for the new woman
movement, 40,000 women carrying banners with the new device: “For
men must fight and women must work.” And industry, in which she was
enlisting, presented her with a new costume. The Ministry of Munitions
in London got out the pattern. Employers of labour throughout the world
are now copying it. There isn’t anything in the chorus more attractive
than the woman who’s walked into the centre of the stage in shop and
factory wearing overall trousers, tunic and cap. Some English factories
have the entire woman force thus uniformed and others have adopted only
the tunic. Here are girl window cleaners with pail and ladder coming
down the Strand wearing the khaki trousers. The girl conductor of the
omnibus that’s just passed has a very short skirt that just meets at
the knees her high leather leggings. The girl lift operators at the
stores in Oxford Street are in smart peg-top trousers. In Germany the
innovation is of course being done by imperial decree, a government
order having put all the railway women in dark grey, wide trousers. In
France the new design is accepted slowly. The girl conductor who swings
at the open door of the Paris Metro with a whistle at her lips, wears
the men employé’s cap but she still clings to her own “_tablier_.”
That July London procession organised by the suffragists, led in
fact by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, in response to labour’s call, “Women
wanted,” is the last suffrage procession of which the world has heard.
And it is the most important feminist parade that has ever appeared in
any city of the world. For it was a procession marching straight for
the goal of economic independence. It was the vanguard of the moving
procession of women that in every country is still continuously passing
into industry. Germany in the first year of war had a half million
women in one occupation alone, that of making munitions. France has
400,000 “munitionettes.” Great Britain in 1916 had a million women who
had enlisted for the places of men since the war began. In every one of
Europe’s warring countries and now in America, women are being rushed
as rapidly as possible into commerce and industry to release men. In
Germany nearly all the bank clerks are women. The Bank of France alone
in Paris has 700 women clerks. In England women clerks number over
100,000. And the British Government is steadily advertising: Wanted,
30,000 women a week to replace men for the armies.
“Who works, fights,” Lloyd George has said, in the English Parliament.
English women enlisting for agriculture have been given a government
certificate attesting: “Every woman who helps in agriculture during the
war is as truly serving her country as is the man who is fighting in
trenches or on the sea.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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