the great compensations for the
waste of our heritage, spiritual and material, through the War. _The
voluntary socialization of previously individualistic democracy will be
the next great forward movement of the human spirit_.

XIII

THE WAR AND FEMINISM

Of all consequences of the War, perhaps none is more significant than
its effect upon the position of women. Militarism and feminism are
counter currents in the tide of history. All recrudescence of brute
force carries the subjugation of women. In the degree to which
professional militarism prevails in any society, women are forced into
hard industrial activities, despised because fulfilled by women. On the
other hand, a group of carefully protected women is held apart as a fine
adornment of life. Both ways militarism accentuates the property idea in
reference to women: the one type, useful, the other, adorning, property.
The one shows in marriage by purchase, the other in the dowry system.
It is hard to say which is more dishonoring to women. It would,
perhaps, seem preferable and less offensive to be bought as useful,
rather than accepted with a money payment, as an adorning but expensive
possession, where, as with the automobile, "it is the upkeep that
counts." Surely, however, either attitude is degrading enough.

The accentuation, in the present War, of the notion of women as
property, is evident in more brutal form in the horrors of rape, in the
deliberate and organized use of women as breeders, with the same
efficiency with which Germany breeds her swine.

Nevertheless, here, too, strong counter currents are at work. As this
is a war of nations, not of armies, it is the whole people that, in each
instance, has had to be mobilized and organized. In all the democracies
women have voluntarily risen to this need, just as citizens have
voluntarily become soldiers. Thus women, by the legion, are working in
munition factories, on the farms, in productive plants of every kind, in
public service and commerce organizations. The noble way in which women
have accepted the double burden has created a wave of reverent
admiration throughout the world. Thus where professional militarism
tends to despise the industrial activities into which it forces women,
war for defense and justice causes reverence for the same socially
necessary activities and for the women who so courageously undertake
them for the sake of all.

Moreover, the increased freedom of