Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War — Themes and Context

From Chamois Bag to Typewriter

The opening chapter, “Glimpsing the Great World War,” establishes a pattern of personal anecdote leading to broader argument. Daggett recalls the weight of her chamois bag, then notes its absence: “to-day my tailored skirt drapes smoothly there.” That small, bodily detail—a woman no longer carrying identification papers—becomes a metaphor for the war’s erasure of old restrictions. She immediately pivots to the woman at the typewriter, whom she predicts will “take the chair before the mahogany desk in the president’s office.” The typewriter is not just a tool but a symbol of rising status. Throughout the excerpts, Daggett anchors her claims in such concrete images: the blackboard diagram of international trade, the sample of chiffon in a novice’s pocket, the instruction “Don’t darn.” These are not abstract arguments; they are scenes from a world being remade.

Training for a New Economic Order

Daggett devotes considerable attention to the institutions springing up to train women for commercial roles. She cites the Financial Centre for Women in New York, established “in direct response to the war demand,” which had already placed sixty young women in banks like the National Bank of Commerce and Morgan’s. The curriculum included “stop payments and certified checks, gold imports, cumulative and preferred shares”—terms Daggett lists with evident relish. She also mentions the Woman’s Association of Commerce of America, organized in Chicago, and the Paris School of Commerce for Women led by Mlle. Sanua. These are not generic references; Daggett names specific people and places. Cecile Bornozi, “the only railway woman in France,” is presented as an exception whose commercial knowledge came “through instinct and inheritance,” contrasting with the systematic training now available. The message is clear: the war has cracked open doors that were previously locked.

The Language of Commerce and Cloth

One of Daggett’s most striking rhetorical moves is her comparison of commercial and domestic vocabularies. She addresses an imagined male reader: “Suppose you, sir, were going to attempt to talk glibly in terms of chiffon and voile and chambray.” The point is that women have long mastered a specialized language of textiles, while men have absorbed the language of business from boyhood. Now, she argues, women need schools to teach them “commercial terms which you as a boy imbibed as naturally from your environment.” This is not a complaint but a practical observation. Daggett herself moves easily between both worlds, describing the “mystifying terms” of department stores and the “intricacies of the market” with equal fluency. The Financial Centre’s blackboard, with its chalk lines mapping furs from Russia, wheat from Canada, and sugar from Hawaii, becomes a visual representation of this new, global literacy.

Daggett’s book is best read as a contemporary dispatch, not a retrospective analysis. She writes in the midst of the war, and her evidence is drawn from what she has seen and heard: the parade of forty thousand women led by Mrs. Pankhurst, the training rooms in New York, the offices of Paris. Readers should attend to the specific names and institutions she records—they are the primary sources. The book’s value lies not in its predictions but in its documentation of a moment when the typewriter was rising and the chamois bag was put away.

I remember reading about those women's hands—how war gave them tools they'd never held before. It made me think of my grandfather's old copy of Lee and Longstreet at High Tide: Gettysburg in the Light of the Official Records — Edition Insights, where every map felt like a held breath. Both books whisper the same thing: history's biggest shift happens in the smallest, quietest movements.