Mobilizing Woman-Power | Page 2

women, when thoroughly aroused, and when the right
appeal is made to them, will offer our surest means of resisting this
unhealthy softening.
No man who is not blind can fail to see that we have entered a new day
in the great epic march of the ages. For good or for evil the old days
have passed; and it rests with us, the men and women now alive, to
decide whether in the new days the world is to be a better or a worse
place to live in, for our descendants.
In this new world women are to stand on an equal footing with men, in
ways and to an extent never hitherto dreamed of. In this country they
are on the eve of securing, and in much of the country have already
secured, their full political rights. It is imperative that they should
understand, exactly as it is imperative that men should understand, that
such rights are of worse than no avail, unless the will for the
performance of duty goes hand in hand with the acquirement of the
privilege.
If the women in this country reinforce the elements that tend to a
softening of the moral fibre, to a weakening of the will, and
unwillingness to look ahead or to face hardship and labor and danger
for a high ideal--then all of us alike, men and women, will suffer. But if
they show, under the new conditions, the will to develop strength, and
the high idealism and the iron resolution which under less favorable
circumstances were shown by the women of the Revolution and of the
Civil War, then our nation has before it a career of greatness never
hitherto equaled. This book is fundamentally an appeal, not that woman
shall enjoy any privilege unearned, but that hers shall be the right to do
more than she has ever yet done, and to do it on terms of self-respecting
partnership with men. Equality of right does not mean identity of

function; but it does necessarily imply identity of purpose in the
performance of duty.
Mrs. Blatch shows why every woman who inherits the womanly virtues
of the past, and who has grasped the ideal of the added womanly
virtues of the present and the future, should support this war with all
her strength and soul. She testifies from personal knowledge to the
hideous brutalities shown toward women and children by the Germany
of to-day; and she adds the fine sentence: "Women fight for a place in
the sun for those who hold right above might."
She shows why women must unstintedly give their labor in order to
win this war; and why the labor of the women must be used to back up
both the labor and the fighting work of the men, for the fighting men
leave gaps in the labor world which must be filled by the work of
women. She says in another sentence worth remembering, "The man
behind the counter should of course be moved to a muscular
employment; but we must not interpret his dalliance with tapes and
ribbons as a proof of a superfluity of men."
Particularly valuable is her description of the mobilization of women in
Great Britain and France. From these facts she draws the conclusion as
to America's needs along this very line. She paints as vividly as I have
ever known painted, the truth as to why it is a merit that women should
be forced to work, a merit that every one should be forced to work! It is
just as good for women as for men that they should have to use body
and mind, that they should not be idlers. As she puts it, "Active mothers
insure a virile race. The peaceful nation, if its women fall victims to the
luxury which rapidly increasing wealth brings, will decay." "Man
power must give itself unreservedly at the front. Woman power must
show not only eagerness but fitness to substitute for man power."
I commend especially the chapter containing the sentence, "This war
may prove to us the wisdom and economy of devoting public funds to
mothers rather than to crèches and juvenile asylums;" and also the
chapter in which the author tells women that if they are merely looking
for a soft place in life their collective demand for a fair field and no
favor will be wholly ineffective. The doors for service now stand open,

and it rests with the women themselves to say whether they will enter
in!
The last chapter is itself an unconscious justification of woman's right
to a share in the great governmental decisions which to-day are vital.
No statesman or publicist could set forth more clearly than Mrs. Blatch
the need of winning this war, in order to prevent either