The Pittsburgh Press (September 26, 1941)
ORDEAL
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Soldier boys have the spotlight. But if you have praise to spare, save a little for the soldier girls in all the lands of earth, many of whom face a more fiery ordeal than giving up life for country.
That sacrifice is reserved for brave, fighting men, but for women, spared from bombs, there is heartbreak and loneliness, and the years dragging out their weary length in suffering more bitter than death.
How jauntily that pretty girl walks to her job this morning, unaware, perhaps, that this very moment Mars snatches from life the one who was to have been her lover and husband. Everywhere beyond the Seven Seas live young women who will never become old wives, because when wars end, there is a new scarcity of men and sometimes those who remain are helpless, weak or ill.
By destroying wealth and manpower, war is hard on economic systems. But it reserves its last cruelest reprisals for women by removing from earth potential husbands and fathers, thus leaving countless girls to face an existence bereft of profoundest joys. The sacrifices asked of us are actually far more terrible than those demanded of men – whatever their lot may be.
Every girl widowed before she is wed gives up those “ancient beautiful things” dear to feminine hearts and necessary to feminine happiness. What to us are fame, honors, medals, career, or national glory, when those old, lovely, commonplace experiences, without which life is always empty and meaningless for women, are no longer ours.
No need to tell you what they are. They are so unordinary, yet so universal, that they go unnoticed until beyond our reach –
A man’s football on the steps at evening; the sound of whistling in the bathroom; a baseball and a doll on the living room floor; a rumpled pillow beside your own; eyes across the table, kisses in the dark; a sleepy baby’s head upon your shoulder.