Stretcher-Bearing for Women

By ELIZABETH ROBINS

Daily Mail

Wednesday, August 18, 1915 page 4

[Transcription by Joanne E. Gates for the Robins Web. Sue Thomas Bibliography lists this as item 192 within Miscellaneous Articles.

Note that Robins' Diary mentions many letters written to the paper in support of her proposition. She had volunteered for the library unit of the Endell Street Hospital, organized and staffed by women and led by Dr. Flora Murray. And she had recently interviewed at the war office Sir Alfred Keough, director-general of medical services. See Gates biography, pp. 223-225.]

Could not much of the R.A.M.O. service by in the hands of women, thereby releasing men ambulance-drivers and some of the stretcher-bearers for the firing line?

The issues involved are so grave that only two aspects of the matter ought to require consideration:

• Are women ready to undertake this work?
• Can they do it?

Not every able-bodied young woman is fitted to be a nurse. Yet, nursing being for many the only obvious way to serve the country, girls unfit by character and training for that vocation have gone into hospitals, little to the advantage of the scene of their ministrations. All honour, then, to those who, in spite of their eagerness to serve, see that the particular type of drudgery required in a hospital is, for them, not the way.

There have always been some women who could do and who have done exceptional work requiring physical strength, steady nerve, and endurance. Our point is that there are more women of this sort to-day than we have any ground for supposing the world ever saw before.

TRAINING FOR TWO GENERATIONS

Are such women ready for the service we have in mind? They have been making ready for at least two generations-- not only where girls have lived much in good air, on generous food; where they have played tennis, cricket, golf; hunted, rowed, climbed mountains. Many a girl, obliged to admit she has no gift for nursing, feels that she has little more, or indeed little less, to offer to her country than have the young man whom the posters implore her to coax and charm into going to the front. From the public appeals addressed in particular to her ("Is your best boy in khaki?") many a young woman turns with feelings which would surprise the persons who framed these appeals. From the point of view of recruiting no appeal yet made could so arouse men to a sense of their country's need as the knowledge that women are gladly taking a share of the hardships and the danger -- women no longer begging them to "Go!" but crying "Come!"

We know that in the hospitals, girls gently bred can bear the horrors of the operating theatre and make themselves as serviceable there as men.

But we are told all that is as nothing compared to the horrors of war. "These horrors are not for women." No-- nor for men -- who not infrequently go to pieces under the strain. These horrors are our common burden. Why should the specially qualified woman, who knows herself capable of bearing a share, not be allowed to? "Not woman's work? " Shade of Florence Nightingale, hold a little higher the light of your lamp!

SURPLUS WOMEN AFTER THE WAR. 

Are Women ready? The assistant matron of a suburban military hospital answered that question before it was asked. To the visitor impressed by the excellence of all she saw the under-matrons (thirty or so) said: "Hundreds could do this. Some of us here ought to be sent to the dressing stations. Danger? We should save lives." And at the iteration of danger—"There were more than enough of us before. After the war .  .  .  " And she left it. 

There are those others-- who already have lost the best of life. Why should such a woman be compelled to live on in weary safety instead of following the brave spirit by means of a dedication like his own, though otherwise expressed? Is sheready? Ask her.

Now, her fitness.

Some of the best informed have admitted that this whole subject was. Vitiated in the early days of the war by the inconvenient presence, too near the front of certain women, with no exceptional qualification except their possession of influence. They went out, so their critics say, for a sensation. Did no young men go for sensation?

The trouble with those women lay not so much in their spirited response to the German menace as in the fact that they were undisciplined and unorganized.

Of the objections to women serving near the seat of war, the more rational are met by the public-spirited proposal made by certain medical officers, that the work we have in mind should be done not by an isolated woman. Or two here and there, but by trained squads living and working together. The plan which, I understand, would with any encouragement be submitted, is that in the first place a small body of the most eligible should be selected and given a stiff preliminary training in a military hospital at home. 

The hospital is ready. The recruits are ready. The training is ready.

The countries need for the service?

A PROOF FROM BELGIUM. 

We should not perhaps expect the overburdened authorities to give much consideration to an opinion which a large percentage of returned soldiers bring home, that hundreds of valuable lives have been lost. That might have been saved. After listening for months to accounts of happenings in Flanders and in France, the ordinary person cannot but be impressed by the unanimity of unsolicited evidence as to the need of more stretcher-bearers and more quickly given first aid.

On one side, the cry of men for help.

On the other women ready, fit, to give that help. What stands between the two?

Those who would answer that grave question must face one outstanding fact, as new to some of us, as it will be to the general public. While we in England have been debating the readiness and fitness of women to share this work. The case has been proved. In a small way, (small of necessity since hampered by every conceivable discouragement and difficulty) women have been stretcher-bearing and first-aiding where the need was greatest--near the firing line in the midst of that desolation which was Belgium. These facts are now accessible and verifiable. But why waste time, which means wasting life? Why not let the work go forward under official orders?

If the idea of women sharing some degree of danger should still be so unnerving to the authorities, a preliminary step is suggested by a woman who has done service both in France and Belgium. "In any case," says this First-Aider who has grown accustomed to the sound of bursting shrapnel, "women should be substituted for the men now employed in base towns -- young men ambulance driving to-day in and near Havre, Boulogne, Calais, and Rouen, who are as fit for the trenches as any who are there."

Other men doing this work and who are "over age" show themselves less quick in eye and hand than young women, who moreover can work for longer shifts without collapse.

Many a woman who has subjected herself to severe bodily exercise has seen that at one period of her life she is able to stand the test without ill effect. War reminds us how precisely to the corresponding years is confined the physical fitness of the average man.

But again, why waste precious time in debating a proved point? Why, in short, should the foreigner everywhere be first to recognise the aid from medical service to munition-making that women can render to the Army?