The Pittsburgh Press (March 23, 1943)
Ferguson: Advice to Mr. Stowe
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Leland Stowe, the war correspondent, is now on an interurban jaunt beating his breast before lecture audiences about the willpower shortage in America. He doesn’t exactly spare the men, but when he compares his own countrywomen with those of Russia, he suffers mental anguish because the women of the USA are so far behind the women of the USSR in their patriotic efforts.
“We’ve been mollycoddled for 50 years and now look at us!” cries Mr. Stowe. The men have spoiled us until we are no good at winning a global war.
Piffle and both! Mr. Stowe should leave the mink-coat set and get off the pavements for a change. He’d make an agreeable discovery, for there he would find hundreds of thousands of women getting up before day to milk cows, plant gardens, tend chickens, put out the week’s wash, and take a turn at corn planting and picking as the season demands.
Also, he would see city women, millions of them, putting in from 12 to 14 hours a day at some sort of hard work. If my facts are straight, the coddled portion of our sex is always a mere handful compared to the laboring groups.
What’s got into these Soviet-admirers? They seem to be bowled over by the sight of Russian women doing men’s work. As if that hadn’t been going on among the peasant classes since the time of Ivan the Terrible. Their remarks leave us befuddled on another point. Most of them talk as if we would have been infinitely better off to remain in a state of savagery – which, you remember, is that state in which man always shoves off the hard manual labor onto his womenfolks.
My suggestion for a partial relief from the manpower shortage and the food problem is to set some of our war correspondents to doing field instead of platform work during their brief visits back to their homeland.
