Women At Work

(See Cover) Only a fraction of British man power--less than 1,000,000 men--is in uniform.

Full-time "war work" for British women therefore means little more than that if one cares to volunteer one can play at more or less romantic war activities in a jaunty uniform.

In France it has been a different story.

Five million Frenchmen are now in uniform. Although Germany has some 6,000,000 men under arms, the Reich is almost twice as populous as France, has nothing like the same man power shortage on the home front. Thus there has been for millions of Frenchwomen no question of seeking war work. It has been inescapably bequeathed them by their men.

The women of France have sweated before to save la Patrie. During War I Marshal Joffre declared he would be defeated "if all the women now at work in France were to stop for even 20 minutes.'' They are sweating again at three kinds of jobs: 1) in agriculture; 2) in industry, chiefly armaments; 3) with considerably less actual perspiration but with plenty of fatigue, in the social services that make life a little more worth living at home and at the front.

On the Farm. The French farm woman, with her tucked up black skirts, her sabots and her head cloth, has always worked hard at home and in her husband's fields. With husbands, sons, uncles, brothers called up. she now works ever harder. Paradoxically, the measure of her ardor has been the extent of her failure.

To get in the harvest last autumn uncounted thousands of women, children and old men marched into French fields. They worked as never before, but an early frost made speed imperative and lack of experienced man power was acutely felt. In many cases, partially gathered crops froze before they could be binned and much of the vintage was completely lost. Piles of rotted beets still lie along the roads of France. In Paris last week the cry "Man power on the farms in February and March for the spring sowing is as important as man power on the Maginot Line!" was raised by Parliamentary bigwigs including Senator Maurice Dormann, who demanded immediate granting of leaves to peasant soldiers "in order that they may save the French agricultural situation and our agricultural class."

In the Factory. Unlike the streets of London, the streets of Paris are not filled with women in war-workers' uniforms. Even the more chic French women's organizations wear no distinctive dress. But, unseen on the streets, thousands of Frenchwomen are in uniform.

There are those in navy blue with cowls on their heads. They hurry about in the dim blue light of great factories filled with the sickly smell of chemicals. They carry yard after yard of what looks like pastry. On the walls are signs: ONE MISTAKE CAN BRING DISASTER. The pastry is gunpowder in the making and if the women did not wear their cowls they would go home at night with inflammable hair. "I like the work," says one. "My husband is mobilized. I must do some thing to keep the family going. Oh no, we never think about the danger of it. I feel just as much at home here as in my own kitchen."

There are those in clean white coats with brightly stained nails and perfect manicures. These are the midinettes of Paris, whose nimble fingers no longer stitch gowns but assemble, in the largest plant of its kind on earth, the delicate wiring of radio sets for airplanes and ships.

There are the white jumpers of the airplane workers and the hodgepodge aprons of the fuse makers, who put together the intricate detonators of bombs and shells. "Of course there is eyestrain and fatigue," says one. "But after all, sitting here at work is not like being up at the Maginot Line in the snow."

There is le cafard, too, the blues that lonely, tired women get the world over after a long day's work. But the jobs begin again the next morning. How many women are engaged in the French armament industry is a military secret. In the last war there were 400,000. Twenty years of complication and perfection of the sinews of mechanical war cannot have reduced the number.

Spokeswoman. A helpful coordinator of this immense war effort by the women of France, and the official spokesman for all French women in War II, was not in France last week. She was dined and bedded by Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House at Washington, D. C. Thence Eve Curie would start her two-month lecture tour of the U. S. -- from Kalamazoo to Palo Alto, from Denver to Savannah -- on French Women and the War.

The Nobel Prize has gone thrice to the Curies. Once to fragile, indomitable Mother Marie and her husband Pierre, the late great discoverers of radium. Once to Mother Marie alone. Once to her spitting image and scientific successor Daughter Irene, the violently athletic co-discoverer (with Husband Jean Frederic Joliot) of synthetic radioactivity (see cut, p. 29). But never to elegant Daughter Eve whose brilliant biography Madame Curie was a smash seller all over the U. S. (TIME, Dec. 13, 1937). Eve is no more a scientific titan than Mrs. Roosevelt. She is, however, just about as articulate, effective, and well-acquainted all over the world as her White House hostess and considerably better dressed. On the day after break of war, that smart novelist & playwright Jean Giraudoux, now French Information Minister, with sure instinct chose smart Eve Curie to head the feminine section of his Commissariat of Information. To White House correspondents Miss Curie emphasized the point that French women are out to bring this war to a decisive finish. "Peace will not come soon," she said, "and it will not come at all while the Hitler regime remains in Germany -- because the French are determined that when this war ends there will be no more fighting in Europe for a long time."

Highspots of her first week's pronouncements:

>"The French people do not expect you Americans to send troops to help us. The people feel that we have too many troops in the lines now!"

> "All the men and women of genius are with us."

> "This is an economic war as well as a military war. The country that works most will win! French women no longer feel that the ideal of life is not to work, because the ideal now is to work--that is the way to win the war."

> "We produce a billion francs worth ($22,500,000) of silk exports alone every year, four hundred millions in perfumes, four hundred and fifty millions in jewelry, and six hundred millions in exports of dresses and hats. Luxury trades are not luxuries but necessities in French commercial life. To eliminate our so-called luxury trades would be not only a temporary loss for France but a loss forever and for everyone [probably to the U. S.]."

An able displayer of luxury goods, in Paris, as she was planning her U. S. tour recently, Eve scandalized Designer Schiaparelli by assembling no special wardrobe. "It would be ridiculous for you to appear in pre-War costumes!" she was told. So publicity-wise Schiaparelli created for her, among other things, a black oilskin coat lined with fluffy lamb's wool and equipped with huge pockets--just the thing for a Paris air raid or Kalamazoo.

Names. "France is not a country where personal effort is advertised in bright colors or shouted from the housetops," Spokeswoman Curie pointed out last week. "Just as one does not mention the name of an individual soldier, an individual bombing pilot in wartime, so in women's work the individual function is not to be publicized: there is publicity for the whole." Nevertheless, the unanimity with which the whole of French womanhood has joined up in War II is not best demonstrated by the anonymous millions of sweaters in industry and agriculture. It is best shown by the vast and varied array of non-sweating Big Names--including Curie--that, sharing or shunning the spotlight, are engaged in social war service.

Last week Mme Albert Lebrun, wife of the President of the Republic, refused--answering her own telephone, as she keeps no secretary--to give the press any details of her multifarious war work. But it includes nominal presidency of nearly every big French war charity, plus much personal effort in others such as Les Dejeuners des Lettres et de la Musique (TIME, Dec. 11), a group serving cheap meals to artistic folk made jobless by the war.

Mme Ynes de Bourgoing Lyautey, 70. indomitable widow of the great French empire-building Marshal, completed with no publicity an arduous tour around North Africa in the interest of war charities and colonial morale. Back in Paris she rested only a few hours, pegged off to more war work in Bordeaux.

In Lyon, centre of the French silk trade, Mme Edouard Herriot, obscure, lean wife of the enormous and much publicized of Deputies Speaker Edouard Herriot, Mayor of Lyon, meanwhile continued quiet supervision of her 15 ouvroirs for 2,055 war-impoverished seamstresses. Most of these women have been so desperate that they even pawned their sewing machines. These Mme Herriot got out of hock with charitable funds, kept the women from drifting into Lyon sweat shops, set them to making soldiers' uni forms and clothes for evacues. They earn what is considered good pay in Lyon, about 50 francs ($1.13) per day.

In Paris famed Mme Cecile Brunschvieg, No. 1 French feminist, only Jewess ever in the Cabinet (TIME, June 15, 1936) and Editor of La Franc,aise ("The French woman"), was keeping all her irons in the fire while nursing a sick child at home between intervals of work. She bounces out of bed early, attends to liaison between the Ministries of Health and Education, supervises social work among Paris slum children, edits her newspaper on busses or wherever she can open up her bulging portfolio, snorts cheerfully, "I have so much work to do there is no time to talk about it!"

Fashionably educated, airminded Jeanne Reynaud, wife of Finance Minister Reynaud, last week flew (see cut, p. 24) to North Africa for another womanly chore --to deliver a series of propaganda lectures.

Sparkling Jose Comtesse de Chambrun, daughter of onetime Premier Pierre Laval, was still more typical of the average French wartime wives, thousands of whom have taken over their husbands' businesses as well as their farms. She had taken over her husband's work of running the Paris Information Centre. Young Count Rene de Chambrun is a lieutenant on the Maginot Line. Like most wealthy Parisiennes. the Comtesse has also enrolled to drive her own sleek Hispano in emergency evacuation, succor wounded in case Paris is bombed.

Cafe Society & Couturieres. Ladies of cafe society in France, as elsewhere, are gayly extravert in war work. Thus the Hon. Mrs. Reginald ("Daisy") Fellowes, daughter of a French duke, onetime Princesse de Broglie and friend of the Duchess of Windsor, announced herself the marraine or "godmother" not of one French soldier -- the usual thing -- but of an entire battalion of Chasseurs Alpins (Blue Devils), traditionally agile and gallant French fighters: She sends them English blankets and every other sort of costly trench luxury, keeps her daughters madly knitting. Recently when "Daisy" visited her delighted chasseurs they did everything they could think of to show their gratitude, including a dash up among snow-crested crags to shoot chamois for her lunch. "The war has affected me in every way," gushed the Hon. Mrs. Fellowes last week. "I'm a European!"

Marraine to 200 French aviators is Mme Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel, who now patriotically wears nothing but the French national colors -- red, white & blue -- but less patriotically has closed her famed Paris style shop. "I don't believe in sending just anything to my aviators!" cried Coco last week, explaining that she sends them only the finest English pullovers, stockings and gloves, each .neatly stamped in the corner "Chanel." Exactly opposite in type to Coco is that dignified great lady of the haute couture, Mme Jeanne Lanvin, first woman of her calling ever made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, famed creator in rich fabrics of the simple robes de style. Mme Lanvin says briefly, "Women should stick to what they do best." She was open for business last week, turning out mostly day dresses for women and special uniforms for French officers of the higher ranks.

Sweethearts. Everybody's marraine in this war as in the last is venerable, foghorn-voiced Mistinguett, 64, triumphant sexy grandma of the Folies Bergere and Casino de Paris. Her famed extremities are still as shapely as they were generations ago (see cut, p. 25). Nobody looks at her now-withered face, and since "Mees" no longer has the strength to do her Apache dances under her own power she is swung and flung about the stage by two virile youths. "Mees" last week came tottering from Bordeaux where she had been helping the Duchess of Windsor raise money for Finnish ambulances. "I may go to Holland and Belgium on tour," she croaked, "and I may go to America--there I think I might help!"

One class of extraverts as busy as ever in World War II are female French journalistic trained seals. Typical Titayna (Elisabeth Sauvy ), self-styled "Sweetheart of Danger" and a Floyd Gibbons in skirts, boasts that she has "covered eight wars" in hottest danger spots, with stopoffs at spots like Tahiti (see cut, p. 25). Last week Danger's Sweetheart was more safely employed reading German newspapers and preparing radio scripts refuting them to be broadcast by Paris Mondial.

Mistresses & Spinsters. Why in every part of the world is the French woman generally rated high, whatever at times be the world's rating of French men? She comes elegant and plain, extravagant and thrifty, faithless and devoted, wanton and maternal--yet so do women in plenty of other lands. A good reason for her rating is that the French woman is unique in her talent for creating, either as love-object or as mistress of the home, enduring human relations of exceptional harmony and interest. In the main she contrives to satisfy--her lover, her husband, her children, her parents, herself.

This is often made possible in France because there it is traditional to regard marriage and sexual love as either fusable or separate things. This does not mean that every French husband or bachelor has a mistress. What it does mean is that the French woman does not have to be enigmatic, isolated or incomprehensible. Like her husband she is gregarious, and hence wants a family more than she wants the vote. Like him, she is economical, often in the less advantaged classes to the point of unsanitation. A beaten rug loses part of its life, and no scraps of food of the slightest usefulness are to be thrown away.

The French girl of the middle classes and up is on no Nordic romantic pedestal but serene in her father's provision of a suitable marriage portion practically guaranteed to attract an acceptable fiance. Or if there is no money for a dot then she rationally faces the alternatives of spinsterhood in its more or less appetizing forms. These in France can be either. The French spinster escapes certain laws which her smugly married sisters take as a matter of course, laws which definitely make the French husband master in his home. For example, a wife cannot go on the stage, open a bank account or obtain a French passport without her husband's explicit consent.

Not unnaturally many brilliant French spinsters like 35-year-old Eve Curie are in no hurry to tie themselves down. She has had fun these many years globetrotting, has partied with Playwright Henri Bernstein, Conde Nast, Lucius Beebe, French Ambassador Comte de Saint-Quentin, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt.

"She Has Everything!" Shelved recently in Hollywood was a scenario completed by Aldous Huxley to put Greta Garbo in the role of Marie Sklodovska, the sweetly wooden-looking Polish lass who saved the rubles she earned as a governess in Imperial Russia, came to Paris an eager student and married her distinguished Physics Professor Pierre Curie.

Daughter Irene was born in 1897. Next year her parents announced the discovery of radium and Mme Curie recorded that Irene was saying "Gogli, gogli, go." Daughter Eve came in 1904 and for her happiness at home that was several years too late. By the time Eve was a romping youngster who could and would bolt a whole box of chocolates at a sitting, Irene was already the brilliant but mechanical and efficient student who, when given chocolates, put the box away in a drawer, extracted and ate one piece a day, generally forgot chocolates altogether before the box was half empty.

It has been no wonder that the late Professor and Mme Curie, Daughter Irene and her scientist husband Professor Jean Frederic Joliot, thought Eve something of a flibbertigibbet. Eve took to music and Bohemia. She became a concert pianist, escaped straightway into a Paris that her scientist family will never know. "I don't hate Science, it just terrifies me!" says Eve.

Terrified of trading on the family name, because unkind people always say that is what she does, Miss Curie got into writing music criticism for various Paris papers under a pen name. From this she drifted into adapting Broadway plays for the Paris stage. Spread Eagle she did over into a successful French production staged as 145 Wall Street in Paris in 1932.

Marie Curie died two years later and after a decent interval U. S. publishers began badgering her daughter to do a biography. Eve was willing, but both terrified and lazy. She had to be constantly jogged by her publishers, but finally turned out a smooth, satisfying and deeply human work which Vincent Sheean ably translated. Others of her writer friends like Louis Bromfield promptly boosted Miss Curie to the skies in U. S. Sunday supplements. Since then she has been a best-seller in her own right.

"When I think of her, she is somehow associated with softly falling snow, not because she is cold," wrote Louis of Eve in the conservative New York Herald Tribune. "It is something that has to do with the freshness and beauty and soft glittering quality of snow. . . . She is like Diana. ... I realize that what I have written may sound rhapsodical, yet I only feel that my effort has been inadequate. She is a woman -- in the common vivid speech of our times -- who has every thing."

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