In France the new design is accepted slowly. The girl conductor who swings at the open door of the Paris Metro with a whistle at her lips, wears the men employé's cap but she still clings to her own "tablier."
That July London procession organised by the suffragists, led in fact by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, in response to labour's call, "Women wanted," is the last suffrage procession of which the world has heard. And it is the most important feminist parade that has ever appeared in any city of the world. For it was a procession marching straight for the goal of economic independence. It was the vanguard of the moving procession of women that in every country is still continuously passing into industry. Germany in the first year of war had a half million women in one occupation alone, that of making munitions. France has 400,000 "munitionettes." Great Britain in 1916 had a million women who had enlisted for the places of men since the war began. In every one of Europe's warring countries and now in America, women are being rushed as rapidly as possible into commerce and industry to release men. In Germany nearly all the bank clerks are women. The Bank of France alone in Paris has 700 women clerks. In England women clerks number over 100,000. And the British Government is steadily advertising: Wanted, 30,000 women a week to replace men for the armies.
"Who works, fights," Lloyd George has said, in the English Parliament. English women enlisting
