WOMEN AND WAR.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 32, 8 February 1939, Page 14

WOMEN AND WAR.

Reactions During Crisis Period. Mr. Harold Nicolson told a large audience composed mainly of women, at the public session which concluded the meeting of women in London for the annual meeting of the National Council of Women, that during the recent crisis English women showed fear, not courage; that women had still to show whether they were brave or not, says a writer in an English paper. In no previous time of international difficulty had they felt themselves and their homes to be endangered, it was suggested, and on this first occasion of realising the proximity of danger while men 'had been resolute women had only been afraid.

There was an outcry of denials. Women had not, the speaker was expected to understand, been overwhelmed by fear. But why should we deny a natural reaction to sudden awareness of imminent danger? Of course we wore afraid. Men in the trenches know fear, and ours, when all at once our familiar shelter was apprehended as a vulnerable front line trench, was greater or less than theirs according to the effect Oil our minds of horrors that as yet most of us could only imagine or know by hearsay. Sometimes the view is taken that in women's fear lies the beat hope of ending war; but it can also *eeni that that fear is empty and unprofitable as a national emotion. One can feel a new fear that the cause of pacifism may even have been endangered by general insistence that fear of war ia women's prerogative and that naturally to them the fate of peoples is of lees importance than the immediate preservation of family ekins. It has been assumed that though men can be afraid and active, women must always be paralysed by fear—the old "women must weep" idea. A great body of women rendered nationally immobile by fear without resolution must be regarded ae a deadweight, a restrictive influence, on national policy. With a majority population clamouring for peace at any price what, we may wonder, can any Government do but clinch a bad bargain and snatch a peace that is momentarily presentable, but as poisonous behind ite exterior ae Snow White's apple?

"A Rebel Passion." A pitiful regard for women is apt to confirm them in their usual preoccupation with purely personal affairs and withhold their attention from larger issues. Thera is a great difference between the self-pity of women before and after a war, but that their emotional summary of a national situation may misdirect actjon is not a new suspicion. In the introductory note to his translation of "The Trojan Women," Gilbert Murray wrote of Euripedes, "Pity is a rebel passion. Its hand is against the strong, against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted gods. It

is the kingdom of heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of coste and the balancing of sacrifices, and even, in the last resort, of ruthleesness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It brings not peace, but a eword." The crisis that is past is not, however, to be regarded as a test of women's courage or of the degree of their fear. If war had come, in their first facing of it women would have had to learn and play new parts in a fearful instead of in a secure environment; their adjustment would have been only a matter of time and organisation. But the weeks that have followed the crisis have offered disturbing indications of either the unwillingness or the inability (or both) of women to analyse unpleasant facts with a determination to do more than give way to circumstances.

Volunteers. During the daye ■when war eeeme<l upon us many surprised women rushed to offer their cervices and were appalled by their own lack of useful training and

experience. When the war-cloud receded, so did the volunteers, and many who (had enrolled for courses of training heaved a sigh of relief and stayed away from the second and subsequent lectures. It is easily possible to pereeive in many a company of women that thoee who, a short time ago, were desperately afraid for their husbands and sons, and for themselves have by now almost forgotten their panic and have emerged from it with no heightened sense of responsibility to <be prepared to meet any future emergency. Should one rejoice that women can so quickly recover their balance and, hav-

ing become blind to the shadows outside their present circle of light, devote themeelvee again to the trivialities of domestic and social life? Or is it perhaps not reprehensible to decide that if women with at leaet leisure to enable them to lessen their ignorance of international issues can be content to know no more than that business and pleasure can be continued as usual for the time being, we shall only be taking our due place if we are degraded in the hierarchy of nations? If the real but selfish fear of more than half of the [K>pulation ie succeeded only by a lapse into a former state of uninterest in public affairs, ie any but a defeatist policy possible? • . On the other hand, there are faint signs that many women have been startled into discovering a new perspective; many, for instance, have said: 'Since the crisis I haven't worried nearly so much about my house. At the time," I thought that if it was to be blown up a bit of dust would be neither here nor there," or "When I took in three children from a danger zone for % week, I realised that things couldn't possibly 'be kept the same —and since they went I'm afraid I haven't got back my spick-and-span attitude. Somehow so' many ordinary things eeem lees im-

portant."' Such a change of heart or -mind is a basis for the establishment of the better sense of proportion that women need to acquire before they can acknowledge, as well ae a proper fear in the face of family danger, their readiness to anticipate future danger and to offer themselves, while there js yet time, as regiments of women for A.E.P. This and ->ther services will be best manned by Komen honest enough to relate fear to ts deepest causes rather than to its possible objects, and to admit that some if these causes may ultimately have >ther results at least as fearful as war. \ Government that could count on women's informed interest as -well as on women's fear would have new resources of moral armaments.