Women in America

From the Illustrated London News, 1st December 1917.

LADIES' PAGE.

The chief difference that struck me on my two visits to the States was the way in which American women are allowed a free field and no favour—so different from here, where women are too often put in the background and kept from exercising the talents which they possess.  I could name a number of instances in this war in which the offered services of conspicuously competent women have been utterly rejected.  The women Army doctors are one illustration.  Their proffered services were blankly and curtly refused.  Not until the French Government, hard pushed for surgeons, and the poor Serbians, quite destitute of such help, had accepted and so displayed the value of our women's services, did our Government at length allow our own competent women doctors to treat wounded men.  In America, nearly forty years ago, a woman surgeon was called in to the assassinated President Garfield, and her signature appeared on the bulletins with those of eminent men colleagues.  Of the twenty or so fine and costly buildings that were put up by the different States at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, four had women architects; and a woman sculptor was given the commission by the State for the heroic statue of "Illinois Welcoming the Nations."  There are English women sculptors and architects, but there is no great statue or building that they have been allowed to undertake.  To snub women of high ability is an instinct with not a few Englishmen; American men arc almost free from it.  Consequently, they have not only a double reservoir of talent at call, but the liberated and encouraged energies of the women react upon their children, and help to produce the high level of capacity of American men.

This was pointed out to me by the extremely able lady, Miss Carey Thomas, LLD., who is Dean of Bryn Mawr, the great women's University near Philadelphia, at which President Wilson was at one time a Professor.  "In the United States," she said, "we have for the first time in history men who are the sons of several generations of parents educated on equal terms, and we see a marked result."  She ascribed the greater freedom of those men from prejudice against women's activities to universal primary co-education.  "When a boy has sat on the same bench with girls all the time he is at school, and knows very well that he has had to work his hardest to keep pace with the girls," Dr. Thomas said, "it is not possible for him as he grows up to be certain that his abilities are so wonderfully beyond those of his sister."  So American women are allowed to try what they can do; and in every direction they "make good."  It is rumoured that a corps of women is training to pilot the American war-airships.  I should deeply deplore women entering on the business of killing; and it would make no difference in the result, for if one nation accepted women as soldiers, the rest would necessarily follow suit.  But I am certain that if American girls have made up their minds to do this, they will be allowed to achieve it.  Meantime, a million women in America have already enrolled their names for war service of different kinds.