Women of the War
9781465683922
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I have read this volume with an interest which I feel confident will be widely shared by the English speaking public. Its simple and unexaggerated account of the varied fields of work which have enlisted, during the last three years, the energies and efforts of women of our race, forms a unique chapter in the annals of war. Looked at as a whole, these narratives are as good evidence as could be found of the depth and universality of the appeal which the war has made to our women, not only for sympathy but for service. For the first time it has taught us as a nation to realise how large and how decisive is the part that can be played in a world wide contest by those who are prevented from taking a place in the actual fighting line. There is no question here of any form of compulsion. The services and sacrifices which are described in these pages were given and suffered spontaneously by volunteers. That they should have been on such a scale, covering such wide and diverse activities, and shared in by women of every class and of so many types of special or general capacity, is a speaking tribute, not only to the quickened sense of national duty, but to the commanding and irresistible authority of a great cause. Hardly less remarkable is the testimony which this book affords to the versatility, one might say the inventiveness, displayed in the share which women have contributed to the general stock of patriotic effort. They have done and are doing things which, before the war, most of us would have said were both foreign to their nature and beyond their physical capacity. It would be invidious to discriminate, but anyone turning over these pages will find abundant illustrations. Nor can it be doubted that these experiences and achievements will, when the war is over, have a permanent effect upon both the statesman’s and the economist’s conception of the powers and functions of women in the reconstructed world. But I must leave the book to speak for itself and teach its own lessons. It does not profess to be an exhaustive account of women’s work in the war. It is content with the more modest task of selecting and describing some typical cases. I know the scrupulous care with which it has been prepared, and I heartily commend it, not only as a trustworthy and uncoloured delineation of actual fact, but as a message of stimulus and inspiration to us all.
