The Iron Ration Part 27

These women and children struggled to keep food production close to normal, but failed.]

The fact that women were employed in foundries and steel-works, in the manner stated above, is chiefly remarkable for the evidence furnished that woman is able to do much of the work for which in the past she has been thought unsuited, especially if her deficiency in bodily strength is discounted by the use of machinery. At the Weiss works I was told that the women doing heavy work with the aid of mechanical energy were in every respect the equal of the men who had done the same thing before the war.

The war, then, has demonstrated in Central Europe that the woman is far less the inferior of man than was held formerly. To that extent the status of women has been bettered. When a man has seen members of the frail s.e.x fashion steel into sh.e.l.ls he is thereafter less inclined to look upon that s.e.x as a plaything which an indulgent Scheme provided for him. Over his mind may then flash the thought that woman is, after all, the other half of humanity--not only the mother of men, but their equal, not a mere complement of the human race, but a full-fledged member of it.

A little later I was the guest of Halideh Edib Hannym Effendi at her private school in the Awret Basar quarter of Stamboul, Constantinople.

The Turkish feminist and promoter of education had asked me to take a look at the establishment in which she was training Turkish girls and boys along the lines adhered to in the Occident. She had arrived at the conclusion that the _medressi_--Koran school system--was all wrong, for the reason that it sacrificed the essential to the non-essential. Though her influence with the Young Turk government and the Sheik-ul-Islam was great, she had not asked that her experiments with Western education be undertaken at the expense of the public. Her father is wealthy.

Several teachers had been invited to the tea. Like Halideh Hannym they were "Young Turk" women, despite the fact that most of them still preferred the non-transparent veil--_yashmak_--to the transparent silk _burundshuk_.

I commented upon this fact.

"The _yashmak_ does indeed typify the Old Turkey," said Halideh Hannym.

"But is it necessary to discard it because one takes an interest in the things identified as progress? To the _yashmak_ are attached some of the best traditions of our race; it comes from a period when the Turk was really great, when he was still the master of a goodly share of Europe--when he ruled, instead of being ruled."

All of which was true enough.

I pointed out that the _burundshuk_, however, was the promise that the Turkish woman would soon be able to look into the world--that seclusion would before long be an unpleasant memory. To that my hostess and her other guests agreed.

"The war has been a good thing for the Turkish woman," I ventured to remark.

"It has been," admitted Halideh Hannym. "As an example, the university has been opened to women. Three years ago n.o.body would have thought that possible. To-day it is _un fait accompli_. The world does move--even here."

Halideh Hannym did not mention that she was largely responsible for the opening of the Constantinople University to women. Modesty is one of her jewels. Nor would she admit that her novels and her trenchant articles in the _Tanin_ had much to do with the progress made in the emanc.i.p.ation of the Turkish woman.

"If Turkey is to be regenerated, her women must do it," said Halideh Hannym, when we had come to speak of the necessity of better government in the Ottoman Empire.

That one sentence comprises at once the field of endeavor and the motive of the woman. She believes that there is much good in her race, but that its old-time position of conqueror and ruler over subject races had been fraught with all the dangers of ease and idleness.

"We must work--work--work," she said. "The race that lies fallow for too long a time gives the weeds too much chance. Our weaknesses and shortcomings are deep-rooted now. But I believe that the plowing which the race had during the present war will again make it a fertile field for the seeds of progress."

Not long before that Sultan Mahmed Rechad Khan V. had told me the same thing.

"We of the Orient are known to you Westerners as fatalists," remarked the old monarch in the course of the audience. "The fatalist is accepted to be a person who lets things drift along. This means that any fatalist may be no more than a lazy and shiftless individual. In our case that is not true. Our belief in the Fates--Kismet and Kadar--is to blame for what backwardness there is in the Ottoman Empire. But it will be different in the future. It is all very well to trust in G.o.d, but we must work."

I told Halideh Hannym that probably his Majesty had read some of her writings. My reason for doing this was largely the fact that as yet this gospel of work was little known in Turkey.

"That is not impossible," thought the woman. "At any rate, we must work, and it is the women of Turkey who must set the example. When the Turks have more generally embraced the idea that all there is worth while in life is labor, they will come to understand their non-Osmanli fellow-citizens better. I look upon that as the solution of the Ottoman race problems. Labor is the one platform upon which all men can meet. My objective is to have the races in the empire meet upon it. Turk, Greek, Armenian, and Arab will get along together only when they come to heed that old and beautiful saying of the Persians, 'How pleasantly dwell together those who do not want the ox at the same time.' That means that each of us must have his own ox--work ourselves, in other words."

And Halideh Hannym applies this to herself. There is no reason why she should write novels and articles to make money--she does not need it, so far as I know, if town houses and a country seat on the island of Prinkipo mean anything at all. Halideh Hannym works for the satisfaction there is in knowing that duty is done and done to the limit of one's ability, and within that limit lies the seizing of one's opportunity.

Hers came with the war, and while others stood by and lamented she set to work and wrung from ungenerous man that which under the pressure of the times he thought unimportant. Halideh Hannym and her friends and co-workers gathered these crumbs, one by one, and then made a loaf of them, and that loaf is not small. Some future historian may say that the emanc.i.p.ation of the Turkish woman was due to the Great War. I hope that he will not overlook Halideh Edib Hannym Effendi.

The women of Central Europe have always worked hard, but at best they have been kept at drudgery. They have done what man would not do, as deeming it below his masculine dignity, or what he could not do. The result of this has not been a happy one for the women. The "lord of the household" has in the course of time come to look upon his wife as a sort of inferior creature, fit indeed to be the first servant in the house, but unfit to be elevated above that sphere. The rights of equality which he takes from his mate he generally bestows upon his daughters, and later he is inconsistent enough to have them enter the servitude of his wife. Thus it came that the majority of all women in Central Europe thought of nothing but the stomach of the lord and master, and when this was attended to they would put in their spare moments knitting socks.

The picture of the German _Hausfrau_ may appeal to many. It does not to me. Nothing can be so disheartening as to spend an evening with a family whose women will talk to the accompaniment of the clicking of the knitting-needles. The making of socks should be left to machinery, even if they are intended to warm the "Trilbys" of the lord and master.

I am glad to report that a large creva.s.se was torn into this _Hausfrau_ notion by the war. With millions of men at the front, the women had to stand on their feet, as it were. The clinging ivy became a tree. Though the ubiquitous knitting-needle was not entirely dispensed with, it came to be used for the sake of economy, not as the symbol of immolation on the altar of the _Herr im Hause_.

The woman who has fought for bread in the food-line is not likely to ever again look upon the breadwinner of the family with that awe which once swayed her when she thought of "his" magnanimity in giving her good-naturedly what she had earned by unceasing effort and unswerving devotion.

Thus has come in Central Europe a change that is no less great and sweeping than what has taken place in Turkey. All concerned should be truly thankful. The nation that does not give its women the opportunity to do their best in the socio-economic sphere which nature has a.s.signed them handicaps itself badly. Not to do that results in woman being little more than the plaything of man, or at best his drudge, and, since man is the son of woman, no good can come of this. The cowed woman cannot but have servile offspring, and to this we must look for the explanation why the European in general is still ruled by cla.s.ses that look upon their subjects as chattels. A social aggregate in which the families are ruled by autocratic husbands and fathers could have no other than an autocratic government. I believe that a pine forest is composed of pines, despite the fact that here and there some other trees may live in it.

The war has upset that scheme in Central Europe. While the labor of woman was valuable to the state, through its contributions to the economic and military resources of the nation, it also fostered in the woman that self-reliance which is the first step toward independence.

Of this the plow-woman and the women in the steel-works are the factors and Halideh Hannym the sum. While the plow-woman and steel-workers were unconsciously active for that purpose, the Turkish feminist had already made it the objective of a spreading social policy.

What poor pets those women in the steel-mill would make!

XVIII

WAR AND Ma.s.s PSYCHOLOGY

Hara.s.sed by the shortage in everything needed to sustain life, plagued by the length of the war and the great sacrifices in life and limb that had to be made, and stunned by the realization that Germany had not a friend, anywhere, aside from her allies and certain weak neutrals, the German people began to take stock of their household and its management.

It seemed to many that, after all, something was wrong.

I ran into this quite often in 1916.

During the Somme offensive in August of that year I was talking to a German general--his name won't matter. The man could not understand why almost the entire world should be the enemy of Germany. I had just returned to Central Europe from a trip that took me through Holland, Denmark, and parts of Norway; I had read the English, French, and American newspapers, with those of Latin Europe and Latin America thrown in, and I was not in a position to paint for the soldier the picture he may have been looking for. I told him that the outlook was bad--the worst possible.

He wanted to know why this should be so. I gave him my opinion.

Not far from us was going on a drumfire which at times reached an unprecedented intensity. The general looked reflectively across the sh.e.l.l-raked, fume-ridden terrain. He seemed to be as blue as indigo.

"Tell me, Mr. Schreiner, are we really as bad as they make us out to be?" he said, after a while.

The question was frankly put. It deserved a frank reply.

"No," I said, "you are not. Slander has been an incident to all wars. It is that now. The fact is that your government has made too many mistakes. War is the proof that might is right. Your government has been too brutally frank in admitting that and suiting its action accordingly.

Belgium was a mistake and the sinking of the _Lusitania_ was a mistake.

You are now reaping the harvest you sowed then."

My questioner wished to know if _sans_ Belgium, _sans Lusitania_ the position of Germany would be better.

That question was highly hypothetical. I replied that an opinion in that direction would not be worth much in view of the fact that it could not cover the actual causes of the war and its present aspects, of which the case of Belgium and the work of the submarine were but mere incidents.

"Seen objectively, I should say that the invasion of Belgium and the use of the submarine against merchantmen has merely intensified the world's dislike of much that is German. I doubt that much would have been different without Belgium and without the _Lusitania_," was my reply.

"This war started as a struggle between gluttons. One set of them wanted to keep what it had, and the other set wanted to take more than what it had already taken."

Not very long afterward General Falkenhayn, the former German chief of staff, then commander of the Ninth German Army against the Roumanians, asked a similar question at dinner in Kronstadt, Transylvania. He, too, failed to understand why the entire world should have turned down its thumb against the Germans. My reply to him was more or less the same.

A regular epidemic of introspective reasoning seemed to be on. At the Roumanian end of the Torzburger Pa.s.s I lunched a few days later with Gen. Elster von Elstermann. He also wanted to know why the Germans were so cordially hated. Gen. Krafft von Delmansingen, whose guest I was at Heltau, at the head of the Voros Torony gorge, showed the same interest.

"It seems that there is nothing we can do but make ourselves respected,"

he said, tersely. "I am one of those Germans who would like to be loved.

But that seems to be impossible. Very well! We will see! We will see what the sword can do. When a race has come to be so thoroughly detested as we seem to be, there is nothing left it but to make itself respected.

I fear that in the future that must be our policy."