Page:Women Wanted.djvu/115

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HER COUNTRY'S CALL
105

reluctant feet at the threshold simply because they did not know how to step out into the new wide world of opportunity stretching before them. In this crisis it was to the suffragists that every government turned. Who else should organise? These women, like My Suffragette, had devoted their lives to assembling cohorts for a cause! The Assoziazione per la Donna in Italy, as the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises in France, promptly responded by offering their office machinery as registration bureaus through which women could be drafted into service. It was the suffrage association at Budapest, Hungary, that filled the order from the city government for five hundred women street sweepers. The Vaterlandischer Frauenverein assembled 29,000 women in Berlin alone to take the course of training arranged for helferinnen, assistants in all phases of relief work. But it was in England where the woman movement of yesterday had reached its highest point in organisation that the woman movement for to-day was best equipped to start. Britain counted among the nation's resources no less than fifty separate suffrage organisations, one of which alone, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, was able to send out its instructions to over 500 branches! And the mobilisation of the woman power of a nation was under way on a scale that could have been witnessed in no other era of the world.

The woman who has been enlisted in largest numbers in England as in other lands is the woman who