WOMEN AND WAR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9125, 26 June 1908, Page 4

WOMEN AND WAR.

It is a common argument against the granting of votes to women thai; war is the ultima ratio, and that because it can never be applied by women in her struggle with man, ehe must always be man's subdtdinatc politically. It has been Uh'e.i by statesmen and lawyers, by "The Tim.\s" (London) and by the "Spectator" (London), and supported by carresponcents as "not only the strongest but the one unanswerable argument." Now Lady Agnes Grove declares in the "Fortnightly" that this is all nonsense. Women, she tays, could be made into good soldiers. She ridicules the "indisputable axiom" that Nature has deprived women of the

right to use the argument of force. Civilisation may have done this, but Nature has had nothing to do with it. In the Middle Ages it was not unusual for women to take part in war and politics, and even now Nature would no*: prevent women from facing an enemy. If, as a rej suit of a political disagreement in England, a sex war broke out, women would teach the men how to shoot straight. Judging by the disinclination of the average man to lift a linger in defence of his country, that would not be difficult. "Let us imagine," says Lady Grove, "all the available inhabitants of Britain drawn up in battle array opposite each other; men on one side and women on the other. Given to women a few generations of training such as soldiers have had in discipline and gunnery, and all the paraphernalia of war, given the same means of acquiring arms, given the generalship of a Joan of Arc, given the numerical preponderance of ablebodied women, given all these circumstances, I am not at all "sure that Nature would guarantee all the men invulnerability from the female bullets."