Page:Theresa Serber Malkiel - Woman of Yesterday and To-day.djvu/13



The Suffragists were not alone in their work and devotion to their country. Women on both sides of the camp paid a toll to the bloody monster. This, of course, was not a new occurrence. Women always paid the highest price for all wars. Not only in excessive labor and privation, but in actual bloodshed, in the loss of life and limb.

During the Civil War women gave freely the flesh of their flesh, the blood of their blood by sending their sons to the front, while they, at home, were separated from kith and kin, and starved or froze to death. From the day the first shot was fired on Fort Sumpter to the hour when peace was declared they bravely manned all the industries, and branches of commerce, and education deserted by the men called to the battlefield. They produced, sold and bought the world’s goods, taught the young and nursed the wounded and feeble. With one stroke of the sword they were turned from a mere appendage of men to self-supporting beings, often supporting the other weaker members of their families. When peace was proclaimed there was fully a million of such women in this country.

Their presence was a great surprise to the hundreds of thousands of men returning from the battlefield. Instead of finding their plows and workbenches waiting for them, they found them used by a new army of workers. An army of women so vastly different from the creatures they left behind when they went at their country's call.

This, then, was the outcome of the Civil War; not so intended, to be sure, but such was the result. Fought: primarily to free the black man, it proved a great step to freedom for the struggling white woman.