Page:Women Wanted.djvu/396

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
360
WOMEN WANTED

lost her own: by law when she married, she became of her husband's nationality. When the troops began to march in 1914, a wife like this suddenly found herself a woman without a country. Frightened English women married to Germans resident in London, panic-stricken German women married to Englishmen who happened to be resident in Berlin, knew not which way to turn for a haven from the terrors of war. Pronounced aliens in their home land, their position was even worse than that of the woman of actual enemy birth who was stranded in a foreign country when the war burst. She could at least go home. But where should a woman who was married to an enemy alien go?

Her own country turned on her coldly with the declaration, His people are your people. And nowhere in the world would she be so little welcome as among his people now at war with and bitterly hostile to hers. There are instances where these women have been obliged to find refuge in neutral countries. In some lands they have been permitted to remain in the place of their birth, but under police espionage. A man and his wife, you know, are one. And if he controls her absolutely, from her slippers to her principles, is it likely that she will dare to be a free agent in her war sympathies? As a matter of fact, this war has developed that she is always more or less under the cold suspicion even of relatives and neighbours, of having along with the loss of her own nationality lost also her patriotism. Who shall say