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Show MOVEMENT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND GREAT . WAR Economist Thinks Feminism Has Quietly Reached Its Aims; Gentle Sex Takes Place in Great Struggle. By MAX NORDAU. CHAPTER ONE. f-EW persons are at present inclined j to inquire after the fate of the! ideas w,hich used to exercise the j minds before the outbreak of the world's catastrophe. Those that have preserved sufficient equanimity for such: pursuits note, mostly not without some ! jeering, that the war has hilled the woman's rights movement in Europe. The fact is one scanioly hears anything any-thing about it now. Its periodical congresses con-gresses are interrupted. Its noisy open-air open-air or closed-hall meetings do not take place. Jlost of its press organs have ceased to appear. Its controversial controver-sial literature is at rest. Its loaders are silent. The English1 suffragettes have inwrapt their .banner. Their leader, Mrs. Pankhurst, no longer sends forth her partisans to smash shop window panes with a hammer, to cut pictures in public galleries, to disturb royal receptions, re-ceptions, to annoy cabinet ministers in their own homes, and to set sports pavilions on fire. She has taken the field with part of her mobilized troops to aid as a sister of charity the defenders defend-ers of her country, while another portion por-tion of them renders sterling service in the ammunition factories. So feminism femi-nism is really for the time being ousted from public discussion. Only, this is not because it is dead; it is because it no longer needs to get excited, to force its voice, and to gesticulate. To speak of its death would be just as exact as to talk of the death of the caterpillar from which the butterfly has goue forth. Quietly Reaches Aim. Feminism has quietly readied its aim. Nobody opposes it any longer. While the men fight., the women have occupied the foremost place in the life of the community com-munity behind the fighting line, and H Is unanimously admitted that it is due to them. They bear courageously and resolutely reso-lutely -their share in the burden of the I war. Not as , combatants . in arms, it is true. Penthesilean characters have happily hap-pily become scarce. This time we hear Utile of Amazons yho disguise themselves as men to take, part in the campaign, in the capacity of soldiers. To rejoice In bloodshed is not the craving of woman. She execrates war, not only because she trembles for the life of her dear ones, but ouL of her fundamental female in-sLinct in-sLinct which tends to creation, to building, to roaring, to gathering, . to preserving, and to which all wanton and wicked destruction de-struction Is odious and intolerable. The species of the Walkyries is extinct. It lias left no offspring. Nowadays woman feels it as her calling not to fan the war flame, but to extinguish it. There were women, in neutral countries, it is true, who exerted themselves last year to bring about a peace congress in Denmark, J Tolland Tol-land or Switzerland, and it was not their fault that the endeavor failed. It was a woman, the Hungarian Miss Rosa Sehwimmer. who Inspired the well-intentioned, if somewhat -bland American millionaire, mil-lionaire, Mr. Ford, with the idea of his not-very-happy peace crusade to Kurope. Presently there is circulated among tiie women of Km nee an appeal asking In deeply moving terms that a stop should be put to the bloodshed. The document has already received thousands of signatures signa-tures from those French women whose anient patriotism and moral valor have ever been rightly considered as exemplary. exem-plary. Women Help Earnestly. Women of every category co-operate 1 willingly and successfully in the corporate task of the community. In the working and earning classes, woman toils as she was accustomed in peace time, only more i zealously, longer, harder. She bears new responsibilities and discharges functions func-tions which she was spared in the ordi- , narv course. She governs her domestic affairs, fulfills the duties of the family- ; head, bestows her care on the spiritual I and bodily well-being of the children, keeps up, according lo her traditional task, the sacred hearth-fire of her home. But, at the same time, she manages also the business, the workshop, the mill, perhaps per-haps the hanking establishment of her absent ab-sent husband, a thing to which she formerly for-merly had scarcelv been trained anywhere . outside of France, and she secures t he I regular mar h of the entire economic apparatus ap-paratus of the nation. She tills the soil, she tends tiie cattle, she harvests the 1 grain, scantily aided by the old men, by the half-grown boys and here and there by war prisoners. In the post and tele- i graph administration, in the urban- corn- j munlcatkm service, she takes the room of j nearly all the male officials who have been 'mobilized. She peoples the arms and ammunition factories, which but for her ! would have ceased working. Irately she I has done in French barracks, with re- i mark able success, alt the clerical and household labor which formerly was less : cleverly accomplished by soldiers turned : away from their proper tasks. I All Classes Sincere. I Nor does woman of the well-to-do I classes lag behind her less favored sister, j She quenches her thirst for pleasure, re- , nounces her frivolities and obeys t he call of duty. .She scarcely remembers any longer that there was a time when she went crazy over the tango, she thinks neither of tennis nor of winter sports, she gets out of practice In dancing and bridge playing and loses even her partiality for 5 o'clock teas. Fashion, It is true, she cannot wholly abjure. However, even in her dress she makes concessions to the austerity of the time. She chooses unostentatious un-ostentatious colors, and the cut of her robe vaguely recalls a military uniform. She follows the road shown her by her nature and devotes herself in the first place to the Samaritan service In the hospitals, hos-pitals, nurses the wounded and the sick, guides the first uncertain, tottering steps of the blinded, writes the letters for the paralyzed and crippled. Other ladies protect pro-tect "the war fugitives, adopt motherless children, befriend the lonely and assuage as kind-hearted godmothers the, hardships of the fighting men in the firing line. The rare ladies that are engaged in none of these charities make themselves useful use-ful in the improvised working clubs that have sprung up everywhere, knitting stockings for soldiers and otherwise filling fill-ing uo the gaps of official purveyance. (To be concluded next. Sunday.) |