d States Government, learning from the weaknesses and
the mistakes of the governments across the sea, immediately after
declaring war on Germany knew that it was wise to mobilize not
only the man power of the nation but the woman power. It took
Great Britain a long time to learn that--more than a year--and it
was not until 50,000 women paraded the streets of London with
banners saying, "Put us to work," that it dawned upon the British
government that women could be mobilized and made serviceable in
the war. And what is the result? It has been discovered that men
and women alike have within them great reserve power, great
forces which are called out by emergencies and the demands of a
time like this.

Dr. Shaw described the forming of the Woman's Committee of the Council
of National Defense by the Government and her selection as its
chairman. She said she had no idea what the committee was expected to
do, so she went to the Secretary of the Navy to find out, and
continued: "I learned that the Woman's Committee was to be the channel
through which the orders of the various departments of the Government
concerning women's war work were to reach the womanhood of the
country; that it was to conserve and coordinate all the women's
societies in the United States which were doing war work in order to
prevent duplication and useless effort. This was very necessary, not
because our women are not patriotic but because they are so patriotic
that every blessed woman in the country was writing Washington, or her
organization was writing for her, asking the Government what she could
do for the war and of course the Government did not know; it has not
yet the least idea of what women can do."

An amusing picture was given of men supervising a department of the
Red Cross where women were knitting, making comfort bags, etc. She
showed how for the past forty years women in their clubs and societies
had been going through the necessary evolution, "until today," she
said, "they are a mobilized army ready to serve the country in
whatever capacity they are needed. So when the Council of National
Defense laid upon the Woman's Committee the responsibility of calling
them together to mobilize women's war work, we knew exactly how to do
it.... It is not a question of whether we will act or not, the
Government has said we _must_ act; it is an order as much as it is an
order that men shall go