The Pittsburgh Press (October 31, 1940)
WOMEN AND WAR
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
It may be possible, as many sincere people believe, to defend democracy with battleships and guns, but assuredly he old notion that man can thus protect his women and children will have to be discarded.
At last we are face-to-face with the results of male inventive genius. A new kind of martial struggle goes on, whose main objective is to terrorize, maim and wipe out civilian populations. Any future historian who can ascribe glory to the enterprise of modern warfare will be endowed with a macabre imagination.
Britain at bay is a magnificent sight. But this time it is not the soldiers alone who meet death for country with dauntless valor. Women and children live amid falling bombs and see their friends killed, a spectacle heretofore reserved for battlefields.
After the present catastrophe is ended, it will never again be possible to tell ourselves that women are the weaker sex. In the horrible world that has been made for them, they are asked to bear babies and watch them be blown to bits. They must keep the home fires burning while they suffer sleepless night s and fearful days. They endure the new anguish and all the old agonies of suspense about the fate of their men and the future of their children.
Yet in this world women have really no voice in the making of peace treaties or war policies. They are mute while men go empire-grabbing in the name of protection for their wives and babies. In our own land they pay taxes and obey the laws, submit to marital discipline and help in every patriotic aim, but are not represented on draft boards and have no voice in war policies.
When will intelligent men protect their women and children in the only way protection can be rendered – by working for peace between wars, as hard as they work for wars between truces? And when will women demand such protection from their men? Until we do, we are traitors to our children.