WOMAN’S PART IN SAVING CIVILIZATION

Men have played all honor to them the major part in the actual conflict of the war. Women will mobilize for the major part of binding up the wounds and conserving civilization.

The spirit of the world might almost be supposed to have been looking forward to this day and clearly seeing its needs, so well are women being prepared to receive and carry steadily the burden which will be laid on their shoulders. For three-quarters of a century schools and colleges have given to women what they had to confer in the way of discipline. Gainful pursuits were opened up to them, adding training in ordered occupation and self-support. Lastly has come the Great War, with its drill in sacrifice and economy, its larger opportunities to function and achieve, its ideals of democracy which have directly and quickly led to the political enfranchisement of women in countries widely separated.

Fate has prepared women to share fully in the saving of civilization.

Whether victory be ours in the immediate future, or whether the dangers rising so clearly on the horizon develop into fresh alignments leading to years of war, civilization stands in jeopardy. Political ideals and ultimate social aims may remain intact, but the immediate, practical maintenance of those standards of life which are necessary to ensure strong and fruitful reactions are in danger of being swept away.

We have been destroying the life, the wealth and beauty of the world. The nobility of our aim in the war must not blind us to the awfulness and the magnitude of the destruction. In the fighting forces there are at least thirty-eight million men involved in international or civil conflict. Over four million men have fallen, and three million have been maimed for life. Disease has taken its toll of fighting strength and economic power. In addition to all this human depletion, we have the loss of life and the destruction of health and initiative in harried peoples madly flying across their borders from invading armies.

Starvation has swept across wide areas, and steady underfeeding rules in every country in Europe and in the cities of America, letting loose malnutrition, that hidden enemy whose ambushes are more serious than the attacks of an open foe. The world is sick.

And the world is poor. The nations have spent over a hundred billions on the war, and that is but part of the wealth which has gone down in the catastrophe. Thousands of square miles are plowed so deep with shot and shell and trench that the fertile soil lies buried beneath unyielding clay. Orchards and forests are gone. Villages are wiped out, cities are but skeletons of themselves. In the face of all the need of reconstruction we must admit, however much we would wish to cover the fact, the world is poor.

And still, as in no other war, the will to guard human welfare has remained dominant. The country rose to a woman in most spirited fashion to combat the plan to lower the standards of labor conditions in the supposed interest of war needs. With but few exceptions the States have strengthened their labor laws. In its summary the American Association for Labor Legislation says:

“Eleven States strengthened their child labor laws, by raising age limits, extending restrictions to new employments, or shortening hours. Texas passed a new general statute setting a fifteen-year minimum age for factories and Vermont provided for regulations in conformity with those of the Federal Child Labor Act. Kansas and New Hampshire legislated on factory safeguards, Texas on fire escapes, New Jersey on scaffolds, Montana on electrical apparatus, Delaware on sanitary equipment, and West Virginia on mines. New Jersey forbade the manufacture of articles of food or children’s wear in tenements.

“Workmen’s compensation laws were enacted in Delaware, Idaho, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Utah, making forty States and Territories which now have such laws, in addition to the Federal Government’s compensation law, for its own half-million civilian employees. In more than twenty additional States existing acts were amended, the changes being marked by a tendency to extend the scope, shorten the working period, and increase provision for medical care.”

The Great War, far from checking the movement for social welfare, has quickened the public sense of responsibility. That fact opens the widest field to women for work in which they are best prepared by nature and training.

Many keen thinkers are concerned over the question of population. One of our most distinguished professors has thrown out a hint of a possibility that considering the greater proportion of women to men some form of plurality of wives may become necessary. The disturbed balance of the sexes is a thing that will right itself in one generation. Need of population will be best answered by efforts to salvage the race. The United States loses each year five hundred thousand babies under twelve months of age from preventable causes. An effort to save them would seem more reasonable than a demand for more children to neglect. Life will be so full of drive and interest, that the woman who has given no hostages to fortune will find ample scope for her powers outside of motherhood. The “old maid” of tomorrow will have a mission more honored and important than was hers in the past.

But whatever the conclusions as to the wisest method of building up population, there is no doubt that government and individuals will make strict valuation of the essentials and non-essentials in national life. In our poverty we will test all things in the light of their benefit to the race and hold fast that which is good.

The opinions of women will weigh in this national accounting. There will be no money to squander, and women to a unit will stand behind those men who think a recreation field is of more value than a race track. It will be the woman’s view, there being but one choice, that it is better to encourage fleetness and skill in boys and girls than in horses. If we have just so much money to spend and the question arises as to whether there shall be corner saloons or municipal kitchens, public sentiment, made in good measure by women, will eschew the saloon.

The things that lend themselves to the husbanding of the race will draw as a magnet those who have borne the race. The tired world will need for its rejuvenation a broadened and deepened medical science. Women are too wise to permit sanitation and research to fall to a low level. On the contrary, they will wish them to be more thorough. There will be economy along the less essential lines to meet the cost.

The flagging spirit needs the inspiration of art and music. To secure them in the future, state and municipal effort will be demanded. Women are born economizers. They have been trained to pinch each penny. With their advent into political life, roads and public buildings will cost less. Through careful saving, funds will be made available for the things of the spirit.

One of the men conductors on the New York street railways somewhat reproachfully remarked to me, “No one ever came to look at the recreation room and restaurant at the car barns until women were taken on. Men don’t seem to count.” Is the reproach deserved? Have women been narrow in sympathy? Perhaps we have assumed that men can look out for themselves. They could, but in private life they never do. Women have to do the mothering. A trade-unionist is ready enough to regulate wages and hours, but he gives not a thought to surroundings in factory and workshop.

An act of protection generally starts with solicitude about a woman or child. Factory legislation took root in their needs. There was no mercy for the man worker. His only chance of getting better conditions was when women entered his occupation, and the regulation meant for her benefit indirectly served his interest.

“Men suffer more than women in certain dangerous trades, but I did not suppose you were generous enough to care anything about them,” came in answer to an inquiry at a labor conference at the end of a most admirable paper on women in dangerous trades, given by one of the doctors in the New York City Department of Health. He was speaking to an audience of working women. I doubt if his hearers had given a thought to men workers.

Perhaps this is natural, since there has been going on at the same time with the development of factory legislation in America a strong propaganda directed especially at political freedom for women. We have been laying stress on the wrongs of woman and demanding very persistently and convincingly her rights. The industrial needs and rights of the man have been overlooked.

With increasing numbers of women entering the industrial world, with ever widening extension of the vote to women, and the consequent quickening of public responsibility, together with the recent experience of Europe demonstrating the importance of care for all workers, both men and women, there is ground for hope that even the United States, where protective legislation is so retarded in development, will enter upon wide and fundamental plans for conservation of all our human resources.

Protection of the worker, housing conditions, the feeding of factory employees and school children, play grounds and recreation centers, will challenge the world for first consideration. These are the social processes which command most surely the hearts and minds of women. The churning which the war has given humanity has roused in women a realization that upon them rests at least half the burden of saving civilization from wreck. Here is the world, with such and such needs for food, clothing, shelter, with such and such needs for sanitation, hospitals, and above all, for education, for science, for the arts, if it is not to fall back into the conditions of the Middle Ages. How can women aid in making secure the national position? Certainly not by idleness, inefficiency, an easy policy of laissez faire. They must labor, economize, and pool their brains.

Women can save civilization only by the broadest cooeperative action, by daring to think, by daring to be themselves. The world is entering an heroic age calling for heroic women.