Mobilizing Woman-Power.
[Labor]. Blatch, Harriot Stanton. Mobilizing Woman-Power. With a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt. With illustrations. New York: The Womans Press, 1918.
8vo.; contemporary ownership signature on front endpaper; frontispiece illustration, “Jeanne d’Arc—the spirit of the women of the Allies” and other illustrations throughout printed on coated paper; caramel cloth, stamped in blue; light wear to extremities.
First edition; dedicated to “The Able and Devoted Women of Great Britain and France who have stood behind the armies of the Allies through the years of the Great War as an unanswering second line of defense against an onslaught upon the liberty and civilization of the world.” With a foreword by Teddy Roosevelt, in which he commends Blatch for her call-to-arms for women to do their part to protect freedom and liberty by offering their labor during World War I:
In this new world women are to stand on an equal footing with men, in ways and to an extent never hitherto dreamed of. In this country they are on the eve of securing, and in much of the country have already secured, their full political rights. It is imperative that they should understand, exactly as it is imperative that men should understand, that such rights are of worse than no avail, unless the will for the performance of duty goes hand in hand with the acquirement of the privilege. (p. 7)
Blatch, Roosevelt writes, is right to assert that women’s labor must be used to “back up both the labor and the fighting work of the men, for the fighting men leave gaps in the labor world which must be filled by the work of women” (p. 8), and that since “man power must give itself unreservedly at the front…woman power must show not only eagerness but fitness to substitute for man power” (p. 9).
Throughout, Blatch draws upon the examples of women in England and France who have joined the workforce (and includes an appendix of war-related women’s employment documents from France and Great Britain), in the hope that American women will be inspired to show the same initiative. She points out how the utilization of German women has been not only advantageous but instrumental in Germany’s rise to power. However, though lower class and bourgeois women in Europe have been working in certain industries for years, American men, for some reason, seem especially apprehensive of women workers. Blatch proposes several reasons for this male anxiety, but emphatically states that men in the U.S. must acclimate to the times and accept that the labor of women is necessary if the Allied Powers are to be victorious.
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