The Ladies!

The chief responsibility for the tumult in the Office of Civilian Defense has been blamed on its head, round-bottomed Fiorello Henry LaGuardia, but Eleanor Roosevelt, flitting hither & yon, distributing White House roses among her colleagues' desks, has not notably succeeded in straightening things out. Last fortnight, deciding that OCD workers in Washington did not get enough recreation, she got hold of a portable phonograph, at lunch hours led 40 or 50 workers up to the roof to dance Virginia Reels. "Her intentions," said one admirer, "were swell." The First Lady typified the earnestness and confusion with which U.S. women have stampeded to defense work since Dec. 7. By last week hundreds of thousands of them were madly sewing, knitting, cooking, dancing, driving automobiles, thundering in airplanes, jumping into fire nets.

Many were just as bewildered as an elderly lady in Los Angeles who bustled into the Defense Council insisting that she wanted to make bullets. Eager lady volunteers turned up in all kinds of unlikely spots. In Boston, militant women practiced firefighting, had firemen worried over the possibility of their turning up at a fire, to get tangled in hoses. Members of the Women's Ambulance & Defense Corps of Los Angeles, in khaki suits with Sam Browne belts, appeared at the sheriff's office on the night of Dec. 7, saluted smartly, announced to the startled sheriff that they were reporting for duty. (The sheriff sent them home.)

In Chicago, Mrs. John Alden Carpenter, wife of the composer, sat gazing into space. Her job as head of the Women's Division of the Defense Savings Department awed her. Said she: "We are in the process of organizing and we are simply going to sell millions of bonds when we get started. I'm sure you realize that even the upper classes cannot do all of the work. A streetcar conductor's wife is sometimes as smart as a woman of my position. . . . Everybody will have a part in helping me with this tremendous job."

Of all the volunteer groups, the one that made the most noise was the American Women's Voluntary Services, founded by Mrs. Alice Throckmorton McLean, daughter of the late Phelps Dodge partner. James T. McLean. She had modeled A.W.V.S. on the British Women's Voluntary Services.

Mrs. McLean nailed her colors to the mast on the day New York had its first air-raid alarm. The alarm was false, but Mrs. McLean, already at her "post," declared: "We shall remain on duty for 24 hours. Our Motor Corps and emergency kitchen will be drawn up outside the door ready to rush to any spot where there is a disaster. I have sent women downtown to hunt for tin helmets, and others are sewing armbands on their uniforms. I shall stay here all night."

Eight official A.W.V.S. uniforms included breeches and boots for the cycle corps, ski-troop suits for workers in the far North (couriers, spotters, dogsled teamsters in Saranac, N.Y., Alaska, etc.). For A.W.V.S. fingernails, light polish was prescribed; hairdo: simple, preferably short, up off the neck.

In a huge, disheveled loft in Manhattan, short-haired A.W.V.S. women in slate-blue uniforms received applicants. Volunteers had numerous wartime careers to choose from: navigation, aerial photography, truck driving, etc. The work of the A.W.V.S. sometimes overlapped the work of the Red Cross, sometimes duplicated the work of the OCD.

Cookies & The New Life. Other organizations had already been busy for some time. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union's Soldiers & Sailors Department, led by Mrs. Ella P. Christner, rushed forward with a cookie-jar crusade. In four months 34,515 cookies were given away outside Fort Dix.

Said the American Legion Auxiliary: "We see this emergency a little more clearly than the others. . . . We stand ready."

The Liberty Belles, of San Antonio, Tex., were not content just to stand. They "danced for their country" at soldiers' balls and Army post parties; senior hostesses gave an average of four evenings a week for "the morale of the Army." Not content to stand and wait either were thousands of Junior Leaguers and the Women Flyers of America.

Uniforms blossomed on all sides. Vogue ecstatically proclaimed: "This is our new life. This is what we have to do. . . . And whatever our duties are, one of the symbols of our new double-duty lives is the uniform. The uniform stands for our new spine of purpose, our initiative in getting women working, splayed out into hundreds of different jobs, to find talents which have been mossed over. It means that we know that it is time to stop all the useless little gestures, to stop being the Little Woman and be women."

Despite examples of futility, many women managed to do worthwhile jobs without noise, and even without uniforms. Buried away in secret offices in cities along the seacoasts were the women of the Information & Filter Centers, listening to telephoned reports of aircraft, marking every plane's flight on maps. Their hours were long, their jobs dull, but some day they might be vital to air-raid defense. Some of them were Junior Leaguers, but the majority were stenographers, teachers, young housewives. Boss of these unpaid workers, who slaved without uniforms or froufrou, was the Army.

Calm through all the clamor, aloof to cracks from the A.W.V.S., noncommittal on the subject of Mrs. Roosevelt reeling on a roof, was the American Red Cross. Since war's beginning, some 2,500,000 women had signed up for its 14 definite, well-established volunteer programs. Many of its executives were men, but head of the Volunteer Special Services was small, white-haired Mrs. Dwight F. Davis (wife of the onetime Secretary of War). Its hard-working ranks were filled for the most part by women.

The Red Cross also had its Motor Corps. More important were thousands of ladies in production centers who whipped up hospital garments, diapers, children's clothing, made millions of surgical dressings for the armed forces. Nurse's Aide Corps taught women to take over the routine jobs of nursing, to free trained nurses for other jobs. A blood donor's service filled blood banks for transfusions. With few delusions about women's greatest talents, officials stressed three prosaic training courses for housewives who wanted to help: First Aid, Home Nursing, Nutrition.

Said President Roosevelt: "The American Red Cross occupies a unique place. . . ."

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