Calling Women

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 189, 5 February 1943, Page 3

Calling Women

NE of the features of total war is that it very soon runs short of men. A world war is heavy on men, a world total war so heavy that men alone are not sufficient to keep it going. So the call that is being made this week for more women for the radio-location ‘services is not merely a tribute to the patience and skill of women in this particuJar field. It is that primarily. But it is also a reminder of the fact that this is a war in which all must serve as well as suffer. No one has ever been foolish enough to suppose that if only men serve only men know what war means in misery. Women are more sensitive than men. They worry more. They suffer’ more vicariously. Necessarily therefore they endure more in a long and bitter war than all but the limited number of men whose nerves make violence a long agony. Yet it is almost incredible that in a war so long, so wide-spread, so universal, and so deliberately ruthless as this one we are only now beginning to understand in how many ways women can and should serve. Radio-location is a special case because it involves patience as well as precision, and is almost uncannily important. A woman accepted for service in this branch knows that she is not merely relieving men but guarding them, and their wives and their children, with a weapon that gives each watcher the strength of ten. It is radio-location, and a few other _ mysteries associated with it, that enable us all to go to bed with the confidence of soldiers who trust their sentries. We feel safer behind this scientific screen than .behind battleships and forts — provided of course that the guns are there if they are required; and it is women working with men who are keeping us safe. So the moral of course is that those women specially adapted for this work, because they have delicate fingers and sensitive and disciplined minds, must neither hold back nor be selfishly withheld from it by other interests. f