We had more than one strike. Two women
would go round to every woman and girl in the shop and tell them: 'We
have asked for twenty or thirty pfennings more. To-morrow we are going
on strike. She who does not come out will have the thrashing of her
life.' We were all frightened and stayed away, for they really meant
it."
Herr Koettgen continues: "Novel circumstances are reawakening in the
meek German hausfrau some of that combative spirit which characterized
the Teuton women in the time of Tacitus, when they often fought
alongside of their men in the wagon camp.... German women will show
their men the way to freedom. Doing more than their share of the
nation's work, they insist upon being heard, and their growing influence
is one of the greatest dangers to German autocracy in its present
predicament. As politicians German women have the advantage of not
having gone through the soul-destroying, brutalizing school of Prussian
militarism, and of not being burdened with the rigmarole of theory which
formed the content of German politics before the war. They can be
trusted to make a bee-line for the real obstacle to peace and
liberty--to eradicate the autocratic militaristic regime which enslaved
the German people in order to enslave the world."
Now that the way has been cleared by two men of affairs who have never
condescended to write fiction, I will give my own reasons for belief in
the German women, and also for the general plan of _The White Morning_.
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