Page:Women Wanted.djvu/99

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HER COUNTRY'S CALL
91

And of course, I too remember when the world was barricaded against everywhere a woman wanted to go beyond the dishpan and the wash tub and the nursery. It all seems now such a long while ago.

"Dear old-fashioned girl," I reply, "women no longer have to smash a way anywhere. They'll even be sending after you if you don't come."

When the militants of England signed with their government the truce which abrogated for the period of the war the Cat and Mouse Act with which they had been pursued, it was the formal announcement to the world of the cessation of suffrage activities while the nations settled other issues. From Berlin to Paris and London, feminists acquiesced in the decision arrived at in Kingsway. It seemed indeed that the woman's cause was going to wait. But is it not written: "Whoso loseth his life," etc., "shall find it."

Women Wanted! Women Wanted! "Listen," I say to the Soul of a Suffragette, as we stand in the Strand. "You hear it? And it's like that in the Avenue de l'Opéra and in Unter den Linden and in Petrograd and now in Broadway. To every woman, it is her country's call to service."

I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the door of the Doll's House opened. She who stood at the threshold where the tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to lines of gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then the clock on her mantel ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries that only God himself