HOW WOMEN HAVE COME INTO THEIR OWN.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume II, Issue 593, 4 January 1916, Page 4

HOW WOMEN HAVE COME INTO THEIR OWN.

SUSTAINING THE SPIRIT OF THE NATION. Yes, it's a truism to say ho, for it. is universally acknowledged; but I wonder if they realise it themselves. I think not (writes Lady Troubridge in the "Daily Chronicle"). They have not had time to think of it at all. They are too busy doing their duty; and how they do it; short of fighting side by side with the men in the trenches, there is nothing they do not do. Can you imagine a war charity without them? It would be like the play of "Hamlet" without Hamlet. Imagine our soldiers, our sailors, our prisoners, our sick, without them, and the thing becomes ridiculous; but they are more than the willing servants of the State, the earnest volunteers of the country. They are at this moment sustaining the whole spirit of the nation. This is a great deal to say, but it is psychologically true. They are the unseen audience to whom the great game of war is played. Behind the footlighcs of that mighty stage they sit in serried, silent ranks—watching, watching, always watching, yet working and praying, too. The sense of their gaze is on

the men; they would not deny it. The traces of their work are round them. The incense of their prayers rises like, a cloud to heaven. In spirit they are on the battlefield like the legendary angels of Mons, the hearts of the heroes hold them as the Holy Grail holds the wine of heaven. Ail this we know. It is the result we are considering, and the result is stujjendous. Gone are the claims of suffrage as we knew them. Do not start, dear sisters —I say only as we knew them; for it may be that it is a, ghost that will not be lightly laid, ami from its shallow bed is rising something incredible in its greatness, only to be apprehended as yet; yet certain facts are emerging distinctly that will alter the new relations of men and women, while consecrating the old. Sex animosity is dead —and what that means only the future can estimate, it was rampant before the war, ami nothing else could have killed it, and from this death there will be no resurrection. The Greatest Bar. Think what that means. The greatest bar to women's progress—l speak of it in its widest, most uncontroversial sense—was the fact that man, with all his love for woman, all his willingness to make certain sacrifices for her, all his pity for the worst in her, all his respect for the best in her, had but a poor opinion of woman if he spoke the uttermost truth. He granted her certain qualities —she was indispensable in the home, and to certain aspects and phases of life, but not to Life itself in its broad, all-embracing sense. Now she is. Gently, unobtrusively, she has become the keystone of the arch, and the greatest thing Edith Cavell did for her country was to reveal how many Edith Cavells there are. We thank God not only for such a woman, but. because in the heart of many women burns that, sacred flame. It may be that God, knowing their weaknesses, and their high hopes, graciously permitted this supreme manifestation of womanhood to help the entire race, because He knew that men did not know yet what she could become. It may be that when all else about the great war is forgotten in the dust of centuries, when generals and field-marshals are dust and their names recalled with difficulty, save by the student—as the names < of countless Crimean heroes escape the memory today of the man in the street, while Florence Nightingale's is still a household word —that, the name of Edith Cavell, the poor solitary nurse singing the hymn of her childhood with hei only friend steeling her fainting heart with the knowledge that she died for England, may be the name that survives this bloody conflict as the greatest and rests like a crown upon the arch of Peace. She watered the soil of woman's future with her blood, and the flower that springs from it may be a wonder blossom that will make the woman question but a fragrant memory from which the bitterness has passed for ever more because the answer to it has been found.