YE GODS, YE GIRLS!

Obsevations on the Feminization of British Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness

CAMPBELL LEE.

A NEW Girl Peril is casting its sylphlike shadow across the British Isles. After selfishly hugging to its masculine breast the joy of franchise and the excitement of hanging, England is suddenly helplessly, heavily leaning on the ladies. You cannot take a train, get in your hay, cash a cheque, buy a drink, move your furniture, dine with Jones at the club, fill Smith's order for horseblankets, ship cartridges, dye stockings, turn out monoplanes, or indulge in a penny busride—you cannot do any of these things, or a million or so others, without brushing the strong arm of the Weaker Sex.

Everyday brings its girls. In which lies the beauty and the danger of it! As the Poet Laureate so nobly expressed it in The Times: "They're driving vans and running trams (and quite without the usual damns). Ah! Not again to prams and jams will they return—these peerless Ma'ams!" We quote from memory, but accuracy is less important than the point brought home, which is that here is the end of the beginning, so far as feminism goes. Does any person suppose that, having once tasted the bliss of throwing inebriated gentlemen off a bus, helping the police keep down crime in Hyde Park and loading luggage on the all-night trains, does any person dream that after this rich, free life women are going to be satisfied with the tepid blandishments of babies, lovers, silk stockings, cross-stitching, or animal crackers?

DOES anybody fancy that, having acquired miraculous self-control by making shells on a ten-hour stretch without conversation, harvesting without paying the slightest attention to the moon, and crossing Piccadilly Circus on a wet-wet day in topboots and a topcoat without picking up the skirt of said garment, is anyone wild enough to expect women to waste this accomplishment on amiability to tired business husbands at dinner, or on refraining from murder and larceny when refused money for the twenty-ninth hat?

No sober individual thinks anything of the kind. No wonder that on a recent occasion when the Women's Police Corps marched through London, cold beads of perspiration are said to have started from the bronze brows of the statues of Hercules, John Knox, Byron, Julius Caesar, Peter Pan and Henry the Eighth. No wonder when a company of Lady Harvesters, Working Smithesses, and Female Press Feeders proposed dropping in at Downing

Feminism Old Style left. These are the pretty, delightfully empty-headed young girls, who still buy more clothes than they need and wear considerably less, who still waste their time looking in shop windows, and who refuse to do any War work other than holding the hand of convalescent soldiers, or escorting timid young naval officers to supper at the Savoy, or getting up very small and stealthy, quiet home dances for lords on leave. Lady Gassem states that there are more of these slackeresses at large than the War Office has any idea of.

Street, recently, to have a little chat with the Prime Minister about THAT VOTE, no wonder Mr. Asquith discovered that he was bookedup for the duration of the war, and was not a bit sure of having any time free even afterward. It's the real British offensive—let no one forget it—this tap-tap of women's boot heels through the London streets, where once, as the mid-Victorian poets loved to sing, murmured the gentle swish of Delia's skirts.

ON top of the feminine phenomena witnessed daily, and just as though the public was not already sufficiently shaken, other bombs fall. The Morning Alarm, a bulwark of British conservative journalism, appears with a flamboyant advertisement for "Gangs of Strong Women to Fell Timber." And on the next page, the very next, where there used to be the sweetest patterns for dressing sacques and such, good recipes for henna shampoo and making your own cold cream, there was a stern appeal by Lady Gassem to all women to join her in an Anti-Vanity campaign and proceed against the only real examples of

HER present plan is to corral and convert all of them and to set them either to casting shells among themselves or to running underground lifts, punching railway tickets, or assisting into taxis perfectly able-bodied officers arriving or departing. Under this scheme the able-bodied officers will be the only men visible to the naked eye at Waterloo, London Bridge, Victoria and Charing Cross, frail-formed young girls having for some time gathered in all the tips for carrying heavy Gladstones and hoisting boxes. These transportation posts, however, are apt to be oversubscribed. The costume demanded by them consists of topboots and a topcoat, which gives an irresistible opportunity to show trim ankles and practice thrift in dress expenditure, two simultaneous and graceful gestes which do not fail to please the Government.

BUT there are, as has been said, two sides to every question. (Except the one— Who started the War?) A certain number of people think that the frivolous reactionary rosebuds are doing just as much good in their own silky, smiling, squandering way as the ladies who find it necessary to put a strap under the chin and cut off their hair in order to serve their country. The Champions of Chiffon say that whenever they see these charming damsels flitting in and out of Bond Street, with the dear old spendthrift look on their fresh faces and the latest frocks from Paris on their sweet little flat backs, they feel optimistic at once. They cease to fear for Verdun, they know that the British Battle Front is all right, and there is no need to worry about Ireland, either. But, of course, no person pays any attention to this weakly, selfindulgent viewpoint—none except an occasional few thousand hungry-eyed men in khaki. The girl invasion of all the professions, trades and bluffs, including those of butlers, vergers and scoutmasters, goes merrily on. Soon the whole of Great Britain will be in the possession of these Spartan Sirens. And to think that this is the same Gentle Sex that produced Salome, Delilah, Jezebel, Medea, Semiramis, Messalina, Agrippina, Livilla, Lady Macbeth, Joan of Naples, Lucretia Borgia and the Lear girls! ....

THE future is pleasantly complicated by the wave of new recruits reported daily. The birth notices are simply one Gladys Ermyntrude and Matilda Arabella after another! Which shows that girls are the goods. Nobody has forgotten an erudite book, written in Boche and of the most sensational scientific value, which demonstrates how Nature may be so instructed that, one may decide on pink or blue bassinette trimmings with perfect calm. If girls are gaining, it is because their King and country need them. Nor should the current crisis startle anyone familiar with the leaping imagination of the Sometime Tender Sex, their fertile invention, their uncanny but admirable power of resistance. It is undeniable that men, since Adam of Eden, have never had the wit to think of but one excuse for all occasions — inevitably they must see a man about a Pomeranian! Pit against this paucity of fancy the thousand and one fairy tales of Fatima, the artifices of Penelope, the glibly multiple reasons a woman can produce for being an hour late for an appointment.

MOREOVER, cannot one lone woman, weighing perhaps not more than ninetyfive pounds, make a single wire hairpin serve more purposes than any man, even with an Edison brain and a Rothschild cheque book! And if a woman knows that her frock is becoming and perceives that her boots are having a succes, she is capable of enduring hours of physical fatigue under circumstances that would break down the constitution of the toughest soldier on a route march.

Thus does war make heroes of us all. The net result is going to be, of course, that thousands and thousands of our best, and cleverest, and pluckiest Englishwomen are going to ornament trades, professions or avocations because—while they first went into them from necessity, they will continue in them because of the satisfaction in, and innate liking of— a JOB.

IT'S all very well for the doctors and scientists to go on swearing that women are congenitally inhibited from tackling any serious work whatever; that cruel biological restrictions force them to labor under great disadvantages when compared to the noble, handsome and puffed-up males in our land; but how are they going to explain the quite obvious fact that the women over the water—in America—are doing all the best interior decorating, department store buying, novel writing, editing, newspaper work, shopkeeping, play writing, and performing a dozen or more miracles of a similar nature?

We are told here in England that nothing in America during the past ten years or so has been so remarkable—in a sex-evolution sort of way—as the manner in which women have taken hold of the job of earning their own living. There are ten women in New York—we are credibly informed—who earn from fifty to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year; while there are hundreds who earn ten thousand a year—a mere bagatelle for a really clever woman.

Well, in America, the women have done all this because they were energetic, vitalized, full of the fine fury and frenzy of ambition, but in England the women were literally driven to it by the exigencies of war. Ladies who were apparently destined by nature to be embroiderers, soft pillow stuffers, lambrequin architects, all of a sudden found themselves apprentices at some rude and unladylike trade, like bricklaying or blacksmithing.