privilege.

If the women in this country reinforce the elements that tend to a
softening of the moral fibre, to a weakening of the will, and
unwillingness to look ahead or to face hardship and labor and danger for
a high ideal--then all of us alike, men and women, will suffer. But if
they show, under the new conditions, the will to develop strength, and
the high idealism and the iron resolution which under less favorable
circumstances were shown by the women of the Revolution and of the Civil
War, then our nation has before it a career of greatness never hitherto
equaled. This book is fundamentally an appeal, not that woman shall
enjoy any privilege unearned, but that hers shall be the right to do
more than she has ever yet done, and to do it on terms of
self-respecting partnership with men. Equality of right does not mean
identity of function; but it does necessarily imply identity of purpose
in the performance of duty.

Mrs. Blatch shows why every woman who inherits the womanly virtues of
the past, and who has grasped the ideal of the added womanly virtues of
the present and the future, should support this war with all her
strength and soul. She testifies from personal knowledge to the hideous
brutalities shown toward women and children by the Germany of to-day;
and she adds the fine sentence: "Women fight for a place in the sun for
those who hold right above might."

She shows why women must unstintedly give their labor in order to win
this war; and why the labor of the women 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. She
says in another sentence worth remembering, "The man behind the counter