Page:Women Wanted.djvu/275

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
IN THE PROFESSIONS
255

want to see. Surgeon in chief and the commanding officer in charge of this military hospital with 600 beds, she is the daughter of Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She is also the niece of Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. And she is to-day one of England's greatest surgeons, Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, with the rank of major in the English army.

Her place in this new woman movement is the more significant because of her prominent affiliation with that of yesterday. For the militancy in which she is now enlisted Dr. Anderson had her training in that other militancy that landed women in Holloway Jail. Her transfer to her present place of government service has come about in a way that makes her one of our most famous victory exhibits. "You have silenced all your critics" the War Office told her when they bestowed on her the honour of her present official rank as she and her Woman's Hospital Corps "took" Endel Street.

It was a stronghold that did not capitulate by any means at the first onslaught of the women's forces. There was, at least, as you might say, a preliminary skirmish. The Woman's Hospital Corps raised and financed by British medical women was at the beginning of the war offered to the British Government. But in the public eye these were only "physicians to women and children." Kitchener swore a great oath and said he'd have none of them for his soldiers. Practically the War Office told them to "run along."