Part 48

The determination not only to protect woman in her new capacity but educate her, thrust her ahead, was strong. Representatives of organized women met in Kansas City in June demanding new standards for war contracts. The upshot was that Florence Kelley was made a member of the Board of Control of Labor standards for Army Clothing. Things went rapidly after that. A woman’s division was created in January in the United States Employment Service with Mrs. H. M. Richard at its head. About the same time Mary Van Kleeck was made head of a woman’s branch in the Ordnance Service and our Agnes Nestor, who had by this time become generally recognized for her intelligence and steadiness, was appointed on the newly formed advisory council to the Secretary of Labor in war labor legislation.

Agnes Nestor and Mary Anderson, the present head of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, demonstrated as I had never seen it the education to be had in a labor organization which seeks by arbitration and more arbitration and still more arbitration to improve its situation without weakening the industry by which it lives, one that appeals to force only as a last resort, never as a mere threat.

What all this amounts to is that through the activities of women in and out of industry there was a steady clarification and strengthening of our position.

The chief service of the Woman’s Committee in the matter was seeing that full information of what was going on was sent broadcast. Miss Nestor’s reports reached women in quarters where labor standards had probably never been heard of. In our bulletins we kept up a constant stream of news items of what women were doing in industry not only in this country but in others. To make our vast horde conscious of the needs of sisters at the machine, eager to support what the Government had decided was right and just for her protection, was our aim. We did our part in proving that even in war determined women can not only prevent backward movements but even move forward.

Similar to what we did for the woman in industry was the help we were able to give to the Children’s Bureau. Julia Lathrop, its head, told us how its work was falling behind: playgrounds in many places given up, maternity work shut down. Could we help to stem this backward flow? We turned our machinery at once to the support of the bureau. Women in districts where its work had never been known were aroused to establish nursing centers, look after maternity cases, interest themselves afresh in what was happening to children. It was a work of education as well as of renewal.

Julia Lathrop told me one day just before the committee went out of existence that the work of her bureau had been extended more in the few months that we had been promoting it than it could have been with their machinery in as many years.

As the effectiveness of our national channel began to be understood, naturally enough all sorts of requests came to help out in putting over this or that scheme, to grant favors for this or that friend. While the majority of such efforts were entirely legitimate, there were some of dubious character.

I recall an amusing illustration of the latter. Just after war began to take its toll the Gold Star Mothers were organized, and our committee was asked to prepare an official arm band with a gold star or stars. The idea had not been noised about before a gentleman high in the counsels of the nation came to us with the request that we make the badge not of black as decided but purple—purple velvet. His reason was that a friend of his, a manufacturer of velvet, had on hand some thousands of yards of purple velvet which he would like to dispose of. We did not see our way to change our choice of color and material.

A request which led to a peck of trouble for me came from the two persons in the country I least expected to look to us for help—Loie Fuller and Sam Hill, friends of Queen Marie of Rumania. If I remember correctly they wanted us to bring her over in the interest of the Allied cause. We compromised by promising to send her a message of sympathy. I was commissioned to see that it was properly illuminated, and through my affiliation with the Pen and Brush Club of New York, a group of women writers and artists, a really beautiful parchment roll was turned out. We were so pleased with it that we had one made for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium.

But how were we going to get them to the Queens? Mr. Gifford of the Council was unsympathetic. No one would have dared suggest to Mr. Lansing that the State Department interest itself. The War Department could not be expected to carry them. Those messages lay about the Woman’s Committee for weeks a burden and finally a joke, a burden and a joke which was thrown on my shoulders when in January of 1919 I went to Paris for observation for the Red Cross Magazine. Surely in Paris there would be some way of delivering them. It was Robert Bliss of our Embassy who came to my help in the case of Queen Marie, and much to my relief passed the roll on—to a representative of the Rumanian Government, I understood, although I never had any diplomatic assurance that it really landed on the desk of the Queen.

As to the message to Queen Elisabeth, Mrs. Vernon Kellogg, who was persona grata with the Queen, was in Paris and, knowing that she was going back to Brussels, I hastened to her with my roll, told her my predicament, begged her to take it off my hands, which she kindly did. And that was the last I heard of the messages to the Queens.

By the end of our first year I was persuaded that the making of a permanent Federal agency lay in the Woman’s Committee. I took my notion to the Secretary of the Interior, Franklin Lane, who had proved a helpful friend of the committee in moments of strain.

“Why,” I asked, “could not the present Woman’s Committee be continued after the War in the Department of the Interior? Why could it not be put under a woman assistant secretary and used as a channel to carry to women in the last outposts of the country knowledge of what the various departments of the Government are doing for the improvement of the life of the people? You know how limited is the reach of many of the findings of the bureaus of research, of their planning for health and education and training? Why not do for peace what we are doing for war?”

Secretary Lane was interested, but in the committee itself there was little response. Dr. Anna pooh-poohed it. It was too limited a recognition. What she wanted was a representative in the Cabinet, and she was unwilling to take anything else.

It is possible that Dr. Anna did not want to encourage ideas concerning women from a woman as lukewarm as I had always been in the matter of suffrage. She wanted a committee as actively interested in pushing ahead the cause of votes for women as it was in defense work, in protecting women and children. From her point of view the cause was as vital as protecting women in industries, indeed essential to that problem.

There was only one other woman on the committee as lukewarm as I in the matter of suffrage, and that was one of our most valuable and distinguished members—Mrs. Joseph Lamar of Atlanta, the widow of Justice Lamar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mrs. Lamar and I saw eye to eye as a rule in the work of the committee, and we both felt it should keep out of suffrage work. Not so easy for old-time national leaders like Dr. Anna and Mrs. Catt, with militant suffragists picketing the White House, begging for arrest; but they showed admirable restraint. Indeed, I believe that restraint to have been in the long run the soundest politics. It certainly helped in bringing both Houses of the Congress to accept the Nineteenth Amendment in the early summer of 1919, giving nation-wide suffrage to women.

Dr. Anna’s attitude towards me was quite understandable. She was familiar with and resented, as she told me quite frankly, certain activities of mine which had conflicted with both her convictions and her arguments—activities which had been a surprise and a regret to many of those whose opinions I valued highly.

I had always resented the pains that militant suffragists took to belittle the work that woman had done in the past in the world, picturing her as a meek and prostrate “doormat.” They refused, I felt, to pay proper credit to the fine social and economic work that women had done in the building of America. And in 1909, after we took over the American Magazine, I burst out with a series of studies of leading American women from the Revolution to the Civil War, including such stalwarts as Mercy Warren, Abigail Adams, Esther Reed, Mary Lyon, Catharine Beecher, the fighting antislavery leaders—not omitting two for whom I had warm admiration, if I was not in entire agreement with them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

I thought I made a pretty good showing, but I found it was not welcome. And on top of that I settled my position in the minds of Dr. Anna and many of her friends by a series of little essays which I finally brought together under the title of “The Business of Being a Woman.” That title was like a red rag to many of my militant friends. The idea that woman had a business assigned by nature and society which was of more importance than public life disturbed them; even if it was so, they did not want it emphasized.

Feeling as I did, I could not fight for suffrage, although I did not fight against it. Moreover, I believed that it would come because in the minds of most people democracy is a piece of machinery, its motive power the ballot. The majority of the advocates for women’s suffrage saw regeneration, a new world through laws and systems; but I saw democracy as a spiritual faith. I did not deny that it must be interpreted in laws and systems, but their work deepens, broadens, only as the spirit grows. What I feared in women was that they would substitute the letter for the spirit, weaken the strategic place Nature and society had given them for keeping the spirit alive in the democracy, elevating it to the head of the procession of life, training youth for its place. But what chance had such ideas beside the practical program of the suffragist?

My arguments again had no emotional stuff in them. They carried no promise of speedily remaking the hard life most women were living, had always lived. The suffragists pictured a society renewed, regenerated, stripped of corruption and injustice, all done by a single stroke—giving votes to women. They would never betray the trust—the old fiction to which they held so tenaciously that women are by nature “better” than men and need only the chance in politics to clear society of its corruption. I could not agree.

It is not to be wondered that Dr. Anna suspected me, had a certain resentment at my being a member of her committee. In spite of all this, as the months went on she and I became better and better friends. She was so able, so zealous, so utterly given to her cause that I had always had genuine admiration for her. Now I found her a most warm-hearted and human person, as well as delightfully salty in her bristling against men and their ways.

An event in the history of our committee was a grand evening gathering in one of Washington’s theaters. We all sat in state on the platform, and in the boxes were several members of the Cabinet with President Wilson himself, for a part of the evening at least. Dr. Anna made a capital speech, little antimasculine chips flying off her shoulder every now and then, to the particular delight of the President.

“Dr. Anna,” I told her the next day, “you are one of the most provocative women I have ever known, an out-and-out flirt.” But we were good enough friends by this time for her to laugh. I am not sure but she was a bit flattered.

When the work of the committee was over and she was sending out her final report, thanking each of us officially for our part in what I always think of as her achievement, she included in mine a hand-written personal letter which I shall always treasure as a proof of the bigness and the beauty of the nature of this splendid woman.

Evidently she remembered how she had sputtered at me sometimes. “You talk too much, Miss Tarbell.” True—I always do if I have a listening audience. “I hate a lukewarm person,” she declared when I persisted in balancing arguments. She did; she had never known for a moment in her life the frustration, the perplexities of lukewarmness.

But now she wrote thanking me for what she called “my consideration and kindness” toward what she called her “blunders and mistakes.” Just what she meant, I do not know. It was enough for me that she should end with “sincere and affectionate regard”—enough because I knew she understood what I had never put into words, that for her I had never had anything but a sincere regard—a regard which our associations had turned to real affection.

The only professional work I did in this period was a few weeks of lecturing, a contract which I had made before we went into the War.