If this little book reads more like a memoir than a systematic study
of conditions, my excuse is that I remained too long in France and was
too much with the people whose work most interested me, to be capable,
for a long while, at any rate, of writing a detached statistical
account of their remarkable work.

In the first place, although it was my friend Owen Johnson who
suggested this visit to France and personal investigation of the work
of her women, I went with a certain enthusiasm, and the longer I
remained the more enthusiastic I became. My idea in going was not to
gratify my curiosity but to do what I could for the cause of France as
well as for my own country by studying specifically the war-time work
of its women and to make them better known to the women of America.

The average American woman who never has traveled in Europe, or only
as a flitting tourist, is firm in the belief that all Frenchwomen are
permanently occupied with fashions or intrigue. If it is impossible to
eradicate this impression, at least the new impression I hope to
create by a recital at first hand of what a number of Frenchwomen (who
are merely carefully selected types) are doing for their country in
its present ordeal, should be all the deeper.

American women were not in the least astonished at the daily accounts
which reached them through the medium of press and magazine of the
magnificent war services of the British women. That was no more than
was to have been expected. Were they not, then, Anglo-Saxons, of our
own blood, still closer to the fountain-source of a nation that has,
with whatever reluctance, risen to every crisis in her fate with a