Will Women End War?

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 25, 25 August 1911, Page 17

Will Women End War?

Olive- Sehreiner, the author of "The Story of an African Farm/, declares that war must and will end,, and that it is not the gentlemen of diplomatic circles and peace societies., but women, gaining a full half in the government of the. nations,, who will bring peace. In her new book, "Woman and Labour," Miss Schreiner makes a declaration of independence of all women, with J International Brotherhood as one of ! its clauses. Her attitude toward war is not mere- , ly theoretical, for Miss Schreiner went I through the whole Boer war. Much of this very book was rewritten while she was held prisoner in a fortified town. While she was writing, says she, "all day the pom-poms from the armoured trains could be heard at intervals, and at night there was the tramp of the watch with the endless, "Who goes there?" When a conflict was fought near by ihe dead and wounded were brought in. Under these conditions, I had to force my thoughts from the horror of the world around mc, to dwell on some abstract question, and it was under these circumstances that this book ("Woman and Labour") was written." . A good part of her time must have been spent, in thinking very incisively about war. She declares, to quoteWOMEN PAY THE COST OF WAR. "For to-day we take all labour for our province, and more, particularly in war do we intend to play our part- We havo a-l.vays borne tiie major part of the weight of war. "It is not that in primitive times we suffered from the destruction of the houses we built; it is not that later as domestic labourers we, in material loss and additional labour, paid as much as the male towards the cost of war; nor is it even because the spirit of resolution in its women and their willingness to endure, has, n all ages, largely determined the fate of a race that goes to war, that we demand our controlling right where war is concerned. Our relation to war is far more intimate, personal. "Men have made swords or guns with which to -, destroy each other; we have made the men who destroyed and Merc destroyed! "We have in: all ages produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war. There.- is no battlefield on earth, howsoever covered with slain, which it has not cost the women of the race wore in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply than it has cost the men who lie there. We pay the first cost on all human life. "In supplying the men for the earn- j age of a battlefield, women have not merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acu.£e anguish and weariness, in the long months of bearing and in the final agony of childbirth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it ; but, in the long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his longest march has more than eeualled; while, oven in the matter of death, in all civilised societies, the probability that j the average woman will die in child- i birth is immeasurably greater than the J

Olive Message.

probability that the average male will di© in battle! THE HORROR OF WAR. "There is, perhaps, no woman, who could look upon a battlefield but the thought would rise to her, 'So many mothers , sons! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; all this that men might lie with glazed eyeballs and swollen faces and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed —this that an acre of ground might bo manured with human flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener or redder ! "Women do not shrink from war because they lack courage. Nor will woman's influence militate against war because in the future women will not be able physically to bear her part in it. "The smaller size of her muscle, which might severely have disadvantaged her when Avar was conducted with a battleaxe or sword, would now little or not at all affect her. She might acquire the skill of guiding a Maxim or shooting down a foe with a Lee-Metford at four -thousand yards as ably as any male. 'It is not because of woman's cowardice, incapacity, nor her general superior virtue, that she will end war, when her voice is fully and clearly heard in the governance of States- —it is because on this one point of knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to, : that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; lie does not." -WHEN WOMEN RULE. How are women to stop war., however? At this question Miss Schreiner does not hesitate. The whole of "Woman and Labour'" , is an answer to it; for the contention of. the book is that woman must take, and arc taking, a full half in all the labour of the world, including government. Mrs. Schreiner declares, to continue the quotation • ' 'On that day when the woman takes her place beside the man in the governance of the affairs of her race, will also be that day that 1 eralds the death of war as a means of arranging. human differences. . "No tiusel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce women into the insanity of recklessly destroying life. "In a besieged city, it might well happen that men in the streets might seize upon statues and hurl them in to stop the breaches made in their ramparts by the enemy. "One nian, however, could not do this—the sculptor. He would seek to-, throw in even gold and silver before he sacrificed his works of art. "Men's bodies are our 'women's -works of art. Given to us power to control, we will never carelessly throw them in to. fill up the gaps in human relationships made by international greed. "Arbitration and compensation would as naturally occur to woman as cheaper and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in national relationships, as to the sculptor it would occur. to throw in anything rather than statuary"—(From "Woman and Laboiir," Stokes, 1911.)