Page:Women Wanted.djvu/116

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WOMEN WANTED

at her country's call hung up the housewife's kitchen apron in plain little cottages to put on a new uniform with a distinctive feature that has been hitherto conspicuously missing from women's clothes. It has a pocket for a pay envelope. "See," I say to My Suffragette, "you would not know her at all, now, would you?"

She came marching through the streets of London on July 17, 1915, in one of the most significant detachments mustered for the new woman movement, 40,000 women carrying banners with the new device: "For men must fight and women must work." And industry, in which she was enlisting, presented her with a new costume. The Ministry of Munitions in London got out the pattern. Employers of labour throughout the world are now copying it. There isn't anything in the chorus more attractive than the woman who's walked into the centre of the stage in shop and factory wearing overall trousers, tunic and cap. Some English factories have the entire woman force thus uniformed and others have adopted only the tunic. Here are girl window cleaners with pail and ladder coming down the Strand wearing the khaki trousers. The girl conductor of the omnibus that's just passed has a very short skirt that just meets at the knees her high leather leggins. The girl lift operators at the stores in Oxford Street are in smart peg-top trousers. In Germany the innovation is of course being done by imperial decree, a government order having put all the railway women in dark grey, wide trousers.