WOMEN AND WAR.

White Ribbon, Volume 24, Issue 279, 18 September 1918, Page 10

WOMEN AND WAR.

LKCTURK BV MRS KIN ETON PARKKS. Mrs Parkes was Secretary of the Women’s Kmergency Corps She tells from first-hand e*|K*rien«e the story of how these women organised to meet every emergency that arose as the result of the war. As the story was unfolded by the lecturer, and apparently insurmountable difficulties were met and solved, one ceased to regard the waving of a fairy’s wand as something belonging only to the r*alm of fiction. These marvellous doings were sober facts. They happened yesterday, and were happening to clay. By the hundred thousand women ‘Mitering fresh avenues of employment. How was it done? The Women’s Kmergency Corps, following the lead of well-known actresses, began quietly enrolling women, and finding out what work needed doing, and just as men were recruited and diafted into th'* Army, so women were either drafted into various positions for which they were fitted, or support* cd while they were being made tit for xxork that supplied the social nerds hat arose continually out of th** war. Whether that work was the making of munitions, distributing bills, taking care of children, or meeting refugees unable to s|K*ak Knglish, there were the women numbered and classified, ready to do the work required. Reflecting on this xxonderful story, one realises what destitution, misery, and perhaps even degradation, wer** averted bx this timely help rendered bx the women to the women themselves an ! to the 1 nation at large, and when th** story is fully told it will be* a record of use fulness, heroism, and adventure as thrilling as many a story of the battlefield. Let us hope that from this the teaching of history, instead of being a record of w.irs and dynasties, xxill Iv* a record of what concerns the* lives and well-being of the peoples themselves. In concluding the lecture, Mrs Parkes said that women had borne a full share in the work, the dangers, the losses and sorrows, and even the honours incident to* the war, but in one* thing only thex declined to take a share, namely, the responsibility. Not in any one nation engaged in the xvar did women have any part in bringing it about. Women suffered too much in producing life to engage lightly in tak ing life, and, turning to

the M.P.’s on the platform, the lecturer made an earnest .qqieal to men to allow women io help them when this xxork of destrue *i«*ii xx.is over, in reconstructing the* world on a better basis.