POOLING BRAINS

“Employ them.” This was the advice given to a large conference of women met to discuss business opportunities for their sex. The advice was vouchsafed by a young lawyer after the problem of opening wider fields to women in the legal profession had been looked at from every angle, only to end in the question, “What can we do to increase their practice?” She spoke with animation, as if she had found the key to the situation, “Employ them.” Perhaps more self-accusation than determination to mend their ways was roused by the short and pointed remark.

The advice has wider application. Taking thirty names of women at random, I learned in response to an inquiry that only four had women physicians, two had women lawyers, and only one, a woman dentist. Twenty-five women of large real estate holdings had never even for the most unimportant work secured the services of an architect of their own sex. Further inquiry brought out the fact that of a long list of women’s clubs and associations which have built or altered property for their purposes, only one had engaged a woman architect.

Perhaps it is indicative of a lack of nothing more serious than a sense of humor, that we women unite and, apparently without embarrassment, demand that masculine presidents, governors, mayors and legislatures shall appoint women to office. This unabashed faith in the good will of men seems not misplaced, for not only do public men show some confidence in the official capacity of women, but to my inquiry as to whom was due their opportunities to “get on,” business women invariably replied, “To men.”

However, the loyalty of women to women is increasing, and their solidarity on sound lines of service is a thing of steady growth. Thoughtful women, for instance, do not wish a woman put in a position of responsibility simply because she is a woman, but they are even more opposed to having a candidate of peculiar fitness overlooked merely because she is not a man. While the conscientious and poised women are not willing to urge any and every woman for a given office, they do tenaciously hold that there are positions which cry aloud for women and for which the right women should he found. In conquering a fair field, women will have to pool their brains even more effectively than they have in the past.

Our efforts at combination are a mere mushroom growth compared with the generations of training our big brothers have had in pooling brains. War and the chase gave them their first lessons in cooperation, nor has war been a bad teacher for women.

Just as the Crimean War and our Civil War put Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton and the trained nurse on the map, this war is bringing the medical woman to the fore. Women surgeons and doctors, unlike many other groups, offer themselves fully trained for service. They know they have something to give, and they know the soldiers’ need.

According to an official statement, the emergency call of the army for men physicians and surgeons fell two thousand short of being answered. The necessity of the soldier and the skill of the women will no doubt in the end be brought effectively together; for although the government of the United States, like Great Britain in the early days of the war, has left to ever farseeing France the honor of extending hospitality to American women doctors, their strong national organization, with a membership of four thousand, will in time, no doubt, persuade Uncle Sam to take his plucky women doctors over the top under the Stars and Stripes! Organization crystallized about an unselfish desire and skilled ability to serve is irresistible.

The pooling of the brains of women that has been going on on a country-wide scale for more than a half-century bears analyzing. These associations have almost invariably centered about a service to be rendered. Even the first petition for political enfranchisement urged it as the “duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the elective franchise.” Unselfishness draws numbers as a magnet draws steel filings. The spirit of service lying at the heart of the great national organizations made possible quick response to new duties immediately upon our entrance into the war. The suffragists said, We wish to serve and we are ready for service. The government used their wide-spread net of local centers for purposes of registrations and war appeals.

Naturally there were many efforts more foolish than effective in the universal rush to help. America was not peculiar in this, nor for the matter of that, were women. War! it does make the blood course through the veins. Every generous citizen cries aloud, “What can I do?” Perhaps men are a little more voluble than women, their emotions not finding such immediate and approved vent along clicking needles and tangled skeins of wool. On the whole, the initiative and organizing ability of women has stood out supremely.

Of the two departments of the Red Cross which are still left in the command of women, the Bureau of Nursing, with Miss Delano at its head, mobilized immediately three thousand of the fourteen thousand nurses enrolled. The first Red Cross Medical Unit with its full quota of sixty-five nurses completely equipped stood on European soil before an American soldier was there. Of the forty-nine units ready for service, twelve, with from sixty-five to one hundred nurses each, are now in France. Two of the five units organized for the navy, each with its forty active nurses and twenty reserves, are established abroad, and two hundred and thirty nurses are already in active naval service here. Miss Delano holds constantly in reserve fifteen hundred nurses as emergency detachments, a reservoir from which some eight hundred have been drawn for cantonment hospitals. An inflow of nearly one thousand nurses each month keeps the reservoir ready to meet the drain.

The Chapter work-rooms sprang up at a call in the night. No one can help admiring their well-ordered functioning. There may be criticism, grumbling, but the work-room is moving irresistibly, like a well-oiled machine. And women are the motive power from start to finish. The Chapters, with their five million members joined in three thousand units over the United States, are so many monuments to the ability of women for detail. Once mobilized, the women have thus far been able to serve two thousand war hospitals with surgical dressings, and to send abroad thirteen million separate articles packed carefully, boxed, labelled and accounted for on their books.

Not only does this directing of manual work stand to the credit of the Chapters, but they have given courses of lectures in home nursing and dietetics to thirty-four thousand women, and in first aid; ten thousand classes have been held and seventy-five thousand certificates issued to the proficient. Certainly one object of the Red Cross, “to stimulate the volunteer work of women,” has been accomplished.

It is difficult to understand why, with such examples of women’s efficiency before it, the Red Cross, founded by Clara Barton, places merely two bureaus in the hands of a woman, has chosen no woman as an officer, has put but one woman on its central and executive committee, and not a single woman on its present controlling body, the War Council. It may be that the protest against the centralization of all volunteer effort in the Red Cross, in spite of President Wilson’s appeal, was due to the fact that women feared that their energies, running to other lines than nursing and surgical dressings, would be entirely sidetracked.

The honor of the splendid war work of the Young Women’s Christian Association belongs to women. The War Work Council of the National Board of Young Women’s Christian Associations shows an example of how immediately efficient an established organization can be in an emergency. As one sees its great War Fund roll up, one exclaims, “What money raisers women are!” The immediate demands upon the fund are for Hostess Houses at cantonments where soldiers can meet their women visitors, dormitories providing emergency housing for women employees at certain army centers, the strengthening of club work among the younger girls of the nation, profoundly affected by war conditions, and the sending of experienced organizers to cooeperate with the women leaders of France and Russia and to install nurses’ huts at the base hospitals of France. It makes one’s heart beat high to think of women spending millions splendidly, they who have always been told to save pennies frugally! Well, those hard days were times of training; women learned not to waste.

A very worthy pooling of brains, because springing up with no tradition behind it, was the National League for Woman’s Service. In six months it drew to itself two hundred thousand members and built organizations in thirty-nine States, established classes to train women for the new work opening to them, opened recreation centers and canteens at which were entertained on a single Sunday, at one center, eighteen hundred soldiers and sailors. So excellent was its Bureau of Registration and Information for women workers that the United States Department of Labor took over not only the files and methods of the Woman’s League for Service, but the entire staff with Miss Obenauer at its head. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, what shall we say of complete adoption of work and workers, with an honorable “by your leave” and outspoken praise! And nothing could show a finer spirit of service than this yielding up of work initiated by a civil society and the willing passing of it into government hands.

Not only the Labor Department has established a special women’s division with a woman at its head, but the Ordnance Office of the War Department has opened in its Industrial Service Section a woman’s division, putting Miss Mary Van Kleeck in charge.

But still our government lags behind our Allies in mobilizing woman’s power of initiative and her organizing faculty. The Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, appointed soon after the outbreak of war, still has no administrative power. As one member of the Committee says, “We are not allowed to do anything without the consent of the Council of National Defense. There is no appropriation for the Woman’s Committee. We are furnished with headquarters, stationery, some printing and two stenographers, but nothing more. It is essential that we raise money to carry on the other expenses. The great trouble is that now, as always, men want women to do the work while they do the overseeing.”

Perhaps holding the helm has become second nature to men simply because they have held the helm so long, but I am inclined to think they have a very definite desire to have women help steer the ship. Surely the readiness with which they are sharing their political power with women, would seem to indicate their wish for cooperation on a plan of perfect equality.

In any case, it is not necessary to hang on the skirts of government. America has always shown evidence of greater gift in private enterprise than state action. Perhaps women will demonstrate the national characteristic. It was farsightedness and enterprise that led the Intercollegiate Bureaus of Occupations, societies run for women by women, to strike out in this crisis and open up new callings for their clients, and still better, to persuade colleges and schools to modify curricula to meet the changed demands.

Women are often passed over because they are not prepared.

The Bureaus have found the demand for women in industrial chemistry and physics, for instance, to be greater than the supply because the graduates of women’s colleges have not been carried far enough in mathematics, and in chemistry have been kept too much to theoretical text-book work. For example, the head of a certain industry was willing to give the position of chemist at his works to a woman. He needed some one to suggest changes in process from time to time, and to watch waste. He set down eight simple problems such as might arise any day in his factory for the candidates to answer. Some of the women, all college graduates, who had specialized in chemistry, could not answer a single problem, and none showed that grip of the science which would enable them to give other than rule of thumb solutions. He engaged a man.

In answering the questionnaire which the New York Bureau of Occupations sent to one hundred and twenty-five industrial plants, the manager in almost every case replied, in regard to the possibility of employing women in such positions as research or control chemists, that applicants were “badly prepared.” As hand workers, too, women are handicapped by lack of knowledge of machinery. In this tool age, high school girls are cut off from technical education, although they are destined to carry on in large measure our skilled trades. I am told that in Germany many factories had to close because only women were available as managers, and they had not been fitted by business and technical schools for the task.

If women individually are looking for a soft place, if they are afraid, as one manager expressed it, “to put on overalls and go into a vat,” even when their country is so in need of their service, it is futile for them to ask collectively for equal opportunity and equal pay; if they individually fail to prepare as for a life work, regarding themselves as but temporarily in business or a profession, their collective demand upon the world for a fair field and no favor will be as ineffective as illogical.

The doors stand wide open. It rests with women themselves as to whether they shall enter in.

To the steady appeals of the employment bureaus, backed by the stern facts of life, the colleges are yielding. On examination I found that curricula are already being modified. None but the sorriest pessimist could doubt the nature of the final outcome, on realizing the pooling of brains which is going on in such associations as the Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations and the League for Business Opportunities. They work to the end of having young women not only soundly prepared for the new openings, but sensitive to the demands of a world set towards stern duty.

Not only is there call for a pooling of brains to look after the timid and unready, but there is need of combination to open the gates for the prepared and brave. Few who cheered the Red Cross nurses as they made their stirring march on Fifth Avenue, knew that those devoted women would, on entering the Military Nurse Corps, find themselves the only nurses among the Allies without a position of honor. The humiliation to our nurses in placing them below the orderlies in the hospitals is not only a blow to their esprit de corps, but a definite handicap to their efficiency. A nurse who was at the head of the nursing staff in a state hospital wrote from the front: “There is one thing the Nursing Committee needs to work for, and work hard, too, and that is, to make for nurses the rank of lieutenant. The Canadians have it, why not the Americans? You will find that it will make a tremendous difference. You see, there are no officers in our nursing personnel. One of our staff says we are the hired extras! It is really a great mistake.” Uncle Sam may merely be waiting for a concentrated drive of public opinion against his tardy representatives.

And why should it be necessary to urge that while scores of young men are dashing to death in endeavors to learn to fly, there are women unmobilized who know how to soar aloft in safety? They have never, it is true, been submitted to laboratory tests in twirlings and twistings, but they reach the zenith. Two carried off the records in long distance flights, but both have been refused admission to the Flying Corps. Will it need a campaign to secure for our army this efficient service? Must women pool their brains to have Ruth Law spread her protecting wings over our boys in France?

To any one who realizes the significance of the military situation as it stands, and who is cognizant of the contrast between Germany’s use of her entire people in her national effort, and the slow mobilization of woman-power among the Allies and entire lack of anything worthy the name of mobilization of the labor-power of women in the United States, there will come a determination to bury every jealousy between woman and woman, all prejudice in men, to cut red tape in government, with the one object of combining all resources.

The full power of our men must be thrown into military effort. And, then, if as a nation we have brains to pool, we will not stand niggling, but will throw women doctors in to render their service, grant to the nurse corps what it needs to ensure efficiency, throw open the technical schools to girls as well as to boys, modify the college course to meet the facts of life. Each woman unprepared is a national handicap, each prejudice blocking the use of woman-power is treachery to our cause.

As to the final outcome of united thought and group action among women, no one can doubt. Contacts will rub off angles, capable service will break down sex prejudice and overcome government opposition. But there is not time to wait for the slow development of “final outcomes.”

Women must pool their brains against their own shortcomings, and in favor of their own ability to back up their country now and here.