Page:Women Wanted.djvu/118

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108
WOMEN WANTED

for agriculture have been given a government certificate attesting: "Every woman who helps in agriculture during the war is as truly serving her country as is the man who is fighting in trenches or on the sea."

"But," protests the bewildered woman from only the other day, "they told us that women didn't know enough to do man's work, that she wasn't strong enough for much of anything beyond light domestic duty like washing and scrubbing and cooking and raising a family of six or eight or ten children."

"Nothing that anybody ever said about women before August, 1914," I answer, "goes to-day. All the discoveries the scientists thought they had made about her, all the reports the sociologists solemnly filed over her, all the limitations the educators laid on her and all the jokes the punsters wrote about her—everything has gone to the scrap heap as repudiated as the one-time theory that the earth was square instead of round. Everything they said she wasn't and she couldn't and she didn't, she now is and she can and she does."

IT IS UNIVERSAL SERVICE

Even women who do not need to work for pay are working without it and adding to the demonstration of what women can do. See the colonel's lady taking the place of Julie O'Grady at the lathe for week-end work in the munition factories to release the regular worker for one day's rest in seven. Lady