MOBILIZING WOMEN IN FRANCE

Compared with the friction in the mobilization of woman-power in Great Britain, the readjustment in the lives of women in France was like the opening out of some harmonious pageant in full accord with popular sympathy. But who has not said, “France is different!”

It is different, and in nothing more so than in its attitude toward its women. Without discussion with organizations of men, without hindrance from the government, women filled the gaps in the industrial army. It was obvious that the new workers, being unskilled, would need training; the government threw open the technical schools to them. A spirit of hospitality, of helpfulness, of common sense, reigned.

And it was not only in industry that France showed herself wise. I found that the government had cooeperated unreservedly with all the philanthropic work of women and had given them a wide sphere in which they could rise above amateurish effort and carry out plans calling for administrative ability.

When the Conseil National des Femmes Francaises inaugurated its work to bring together the scattered families of Belgium and northern France, and when the Association pour l’Aide Fraternelle aux Evacues Alsaciens-Lorrains began its work for the dispersed peoples of the provinces, an order was issued by the government to every prefect to furnish lists of all refugees in his district to the headquarters of the women’s societies in Paris. It was through this good will on the part of the central government that these societies were able to bring together forty thousand Belgian families, and to clothe and place in school, or at work, the entire dispersed population of the reconquered districts of Alsace-Lorraine.

Nor did these societies cease work with the completion of their initial effort. They turned themselves into employment bureaus and with the aid and sanction of the government found work for the thousands of women who were thrown out of employment. They had the machinery to accomplish their object, the Council being an old established society organized throughout the country, and the Association to Aid the Refugees from Alsace-Lorraine (a nonpartisan name adopted, by the way, at the request of the Minister of the Interior to cover for the moment the patriotic work of the leading suffrage society) had active units in every prefecture.

One of the admirable private philanthropies was the canteen at the St. Lazarre station in Paris. I am tempted to single it out because its organizer, Countess de Berkaim, told me that in all the months she had been running it and it was open twenty-four hours of the day not a single volunteer had been five minutes late. The canteen was opened in February, 1915, with a reading and rest room. Six hundred soldiers a day have been fed. The two big rooms donated by the railway for the work were charming with their blue and white checked curtains, dividing kitchen from restaurant and rest room from reading room. The work is no small monument to the reliability and organizing faculty of French women.

It was in France, too, that I found the group of women who realized that the permanent change which the war was making in the relation of women to society needed fundamental handling. Mlle. Valentine Thomson, founder of La Vie Feminine, held that not only was the war an economic struggle and not only must the financial power of the combatants rest on the labor of women, but the future of the nations will largely depend upon the attitude which women take toward their new obligations. Realizing that business education would be a determining factor in that attitude, Mlle. Thomson persuaded her father, who was then Minister of Commerce, to send out an official recommendation to the Chambers of Commerce to open the commercial schools to girls. The advice was very generally followed, but as Paris refused, a group of women, backed by the Ministry, founded a school in which were given courses of instruction in the usual business subjects, and lectures on finance, commercial law and international trade.

Mlle. Thomson herself turned her business gifts to good use in a successful effort to build up for the immediate benefit of artists and workers the doll trade of which France was once supreme mistress. Exhibitions of the art, old and new, were held in many cities in the United States, in South America and in England. The dolls went to the hearts of lovers of beauty, and what promised surer financial return, to the hearts of the children.

To do something for France that stood first in the minds of the initiators of this commercial project. They knew her people must be employed. And next, the desire to bring back charm to an old art prompted their effort. Mlle. Thomson fully realizes just what “Made in Germany” signifies. The peoples of the world have had their taste corrupted by floods of the cheap and tawdry. Germany has been steadily educating us to demand quantity, quantity mountains high. There is promise that the doll at least will be rescued by France and made worth the child’s devotion.

In industry, as well as in all else, one feels that in France there has not been so much a revolution as an orderly development. Women were in munition factories even before the war, the number has merely swelled. The women of the upper and lower bourgeois class always knew their husband’s business, the one could manage the shop, the other could bargain with the best of them as to contracts and output. Women were trained as bookkeepers and clerks under Napoleon I; he wanted men as soldiers, and so decreed women should go into business. And the woman of the aristocratic class has merely slipped out of her seclusion as if putting aside an old-fashioned garment, and now carries on her philanthropies in more serious and cooerdinated manner. We know the practical business experience possessed by French women, and so are prepared to learn that many a big commercial enterprise, the owner having gone to the front, is now directed by his capable wife. That is but a development, too, is it not? For we had all heard long ago of Mme. Duval, even if we had not eaten at her restaurants, and though we had never bought a ribbon or a carpet at the Bon Marche, we had heard of the woman who helped break through old merchant habits and gave the world the department store.

But nothing has been more significant in its growth during the war than the small enterprises in which the husband and wife in the domestic munition shop, laboring side by side with a little group of assistants, have been turning out marvels of skill. The man is now in the trenches fighting for France, and the woman takes command and leads the industrial battalion to victory. She knows she fights for France.

A word more about her business, for she is playing an economic part that brings us up at attention. She may be solving the problem of adjustment of home and work so puzzling to women. There are just such domestic shops dotted all over the map of France; in the Paris district alone there are over eighteen hundred of them. The conditions are so excellent and the ruling wages so high, that the minimum wage law passed in 1915 applied only to the sweated home workers in the clothing trade, and not to the domestic munition shops.

A commission which included in its membership a trade unionist, sent by the British government in the darkest days to find why it was that France could produce so much more ammunition than England, found these tiny workshops, with their primitive equipment, performing miracles. The output was huge and of the best. The woman, when at the head, seemed to turn out more than the man, she worked with such undying energy. The commission said it was the “spirit of France” that drove the workers forward and renewed the flagging energies. But even the trade unionist referred to the absence of all opposition to women on the part of organizations of men. Perhaps the spirit of France is undying because in it is a spirit of unity and harmony.

It seemed to me there was one very practical explanation of the unmistakable energy of the French worker, both man and woman. The whole nation has the wise custom of taking meal time with due seriousness. The break at noon in the great manufactories, as well as in the family workshop, is long, averaging one hour and a half, and reaching often to two hours. The French never gobble. Because food is necessary to animal life, they do not on that account take a puritanical view of it. They dare enjoy it, in spite of its physiological bearing. They sit down to it, dwell upon it, get its flavor, and after the meal they sit still and as a nation permit themselves unabashed to enjoy the sensation of hunger appeased. That’s the common sense spirit of France.

Of course the worker is renewed, hurls herself on the work again with ardor, and losing no time through fatigue, throws off an enormous output.

Wages perform their material share in spurring the worker. Louis Barthou says that the woman’s average is eight francs a day. Long ago it seems long ago she could earn at best five francs in the Paris district. She works on piece work now, getting the same rate as men. And think of it! this must indeed be because of the spirit of France this woman does better than men on the light munition work, and equals, yes, equals her menfolk on the heavy shells. I do not say this, a commission of men says it, a commission with a trade union member to boot. The coming of the woman-worker with the spirit of win-the-war in her heart is the same in France as elsewhere, only here her coming is more gracious. Twelve hundred easily take up work on the Paris subway. They are the wives of mobilized employees. The offices of the Post, the Telegraph and Telephone bristle with women, of course, for eleven thousand have taken the places of men. Some seven thousand fill up the empty positions on the railways, serving even as conductors on through trains. Their number has swollen to a half million in munitions, and to over half that number in powder mills and marine workshops; in civil establishments over three hundred thousand render service; and even the conservative banking world welcomes the help of some three thousand women.

Out on the land the tally is greatest of all. Every woman from the village bends over the bosom of France, urging fertility. The government called them in the first hours of the conflict. Viviani spoke the word:

“The departure for the army of all those who can carry arms, leaves the work in the fields undone; the harvest is not yet gathered in; the vintage season is near. In the name of the entire nation united behind it, I make an appeal to your courage, and to that of your children, whose age alone and not their valour, keeps them from the war.

“I ask you to keep on the work in the fields, to finish gathering in the year’s harvest, to prepare that of the coming year. You cannot render your country a greater service.

“It is not for you, but for her, that I appeal to your hearts.

“You must safeguard your own living, the feeding of the urban populations and especially the feeding of those who are defending the frontier, as well as the independence of the country, civilization and justice.

“Up, then, French women, young children, daughters and sons of the country! Replace on the field of work those who are on the field of battle. Strive to show them to-morrow the cultivated soil, the harvests all gathered in, the fields sown.

“In hours of stress like the present, there is no ignoble work. Everything that helps the country is great. Up! Act! To work! To-morrow there will be glory for everyone.

“Long live the Republic! Long live France!”

Women instantly responded to the proclamation. Only the old men were left to help, only decrepit horses, rejected by the military requisition. More than once I journeyed far into the country, but I never saw an able-bodied man. What a gap to be filled! but the French peasant woman filled it. She harvested that first year, she has sowed and garnered season by season ever since. Men, horses, machinery were lacking, the debit yawned, but she piled up a credit to meet it by unflagging toil.

With equal devotion and with initiative and power of organization the woman of leisure has “carried on.” The three great societies corresponding with our Red Cross, the Societe de Secours aux Blesses, the Union des Femmes de France, and the Association des Dames Francaises, have established fifteen hundred hospitals with one hundred and fifteen thousand beds, and put forty-three thousand nurses in active service. Efficiency has kept pace with this superb effort, as is testified to by many a war cross, many a medal, and the cross of the Legion of Honor.

Up to the level of her means France sets examples in works of human salvage worthy the imitation of all nations. The mairie in each arrondissement has become no less than a community center. The XIV arrondissement in Paris is but the pattern for many. Here the wife of the mayor, Mme. Brunot, has made the stiff old building a human place. The card catalogue carrying information about every soldier from the district, gives its overwhelming news each day gently to wife or mother, through the lips of Mme. Brunot or her women assistants. The work of Les Amis des Orphelins de Guerre centers here, the “adopted” child receiving from the good maire the gifts in money and presents sent by the Americans who are generously filling the rôle of parent. The widows of the soldiers gather here for comfort and advice.

And the mairie holds a spirit of experiment. It houses not only courage and sympathy, but progress. The “XIV” has ventured on a Cuisine Populaire under Mme. Brunot’s wholesome guidance. And so many other arrondissements have followed suit that Paris may be regarded as making a great experiment in the municipal feeding of her people. It is not charity, the food is paid for. In the “XIV” fifteen hundred persons eat a meal or two at the mairie each day. The charge is seventy-five centimes fifteen cents, and one gets a soup, meat and a vegetable, and fruit.

The world seems to be counselling us that if we wish to be well and cheaply fed we must go where there are experts to cook, where buying is done in quantity, and where the manager knows about nutritive values.

If a word of praise is extended to the maire of the XIV arrondissement for his very splendid work, an example to all France, he quickly urges, “Ah, but Mme. Brunot!” And so it is always, if you exclaim, “Oh, the spirit of the men of France!” and a Frenchman’s ears catch your words, he will correct, “Ah, but the women!”

And the women do stand above all other women, they have had such opportunity for heroism. Whose heart does not beat the faster when the names Soisson and Mme. Macherez are spoken! The mayor and the council gone, she assumes the office and keeps order while German shells fall thick on the town. And then the enemy enters, and asks for the mayor, and she replies, “Le maire, c’est moi.” And then do we women not like to think of Mlle. Deletete staying at her post in the telegraph office in Houplines in spite of German bombardments, and calmly facing tormentors, when they smashed her instruments and threatened her with death. One-tenth of France in the enemy’s hands, and in each village and town some woman staying behind to nurse the sick and wounded, to calm the population when panic threatens, to stand invincible between the people and their conquerors!

It is very splendid! the French man holding steady at the front, the French woman an unyielding second line of defense. But what of France? Words of praise must not swallow our sense of obligation. Let us with our hundred millions of people face the figures. The death rate in France, not counting the military loss, is twenty per thousand, with a birth rate of eight per thousand. In Paris for the year ending August, 1914, there were forty-eight thousand nine hundred and seventeen births; in the year ending in the same month, 1916, the births dropped to twenty-six thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. The total deaths for that year in all France were one million, one hundred thousand, and the births three hundred and twelve thousand.

France is profoundly, infinitely sad. She has cause. I shall never forget looking into the very depths of her sorrow when I was at Creil. A great drive was in progress, the wounded were being brought down from the front, troops hurried forward. Four different regiments passed as I sat at dejeuner. The restaurant, full of its noonday patrons, was a typical French cafe giving on the street. We could have reached out and touched the soldiers. They marched without music, without song or word, marched in silence. Some of the men were from this very town; their little sons, with set faces, too, walked beside them and had brought them bunches of flowers. The people in the restaurant never spoke above a whisper, and when the troops passed were as silent as death. There was no cheer, but just a long, wistful gaze, the soldiers looking into their eyes, they into the soldiers’.

But France can bear her burden, can solve her problem if we lift our full share from her bent shoulders. Her women can save the children if the older men, relieved by our young soldiers, come back from the trenches, setting women free for the work of child saving. France can rebuild her villages if her supreme architects, her skilled workers are replaced in the trenches by our armies. France can renew her spirit and save her body if her experts in science, if her poets and artists are sent back to her, and our less great bare their breasts to the Huns.