Page:Women Wanted.djvu/98

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WOMEN WANTED

service of an unpopular ideal. Who wanted feminists free to find themselves? Even women themselves came haltingly as recruits. But this is a pageant, with Everywoman crowding for place at her country's call. And who would not adore to be a patriot? It is with flying colors, albeit to the solemn measures of a Dead March that the new columns are coming on.

It is the Woman Movement against which all the parliaments of men shall never again prevail. Majestically, with sure and rhythmic tread, it is moving, not under its own power of propaganda, but propelled by fearful cosmic forces. At the compulsion of a sublime destiny accelerated under the aegis of a war office press bureau, suffragists pro and anti alike are gathered in. Theirs no longer to reason why. For see, they are keeping step, always keeping step with the armies at the front!

There is a new offensive on the Somme. There is a defeat at the Yser, a victory at Verdun or Marne. The dead men lie deep in the trenches! The war office combs out new regiments to face the hell fire of shrapnel and the woman movement in all nations joins up new recruits to fill the vacant places from which the men, about to die, are steadily enlisted. See the sign of the times. I point it out to My Suffragette: "Women Wanted." With each year of war the demand becomes more insistent. Women Wanted! Women Wanted!

"But they didn't used to be," she gasps in amazement.