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{Added to Ferber collection 3/8/1988. Original is in Series 1706, Loyalty Legion Corresp. & Misc. Papers, box 2, folder labeled "Loyalty Legion, April 1918."}
Talk by Miss Edna Ferber.
Strand Theater.
April 12th, 1918.
I am full of asperin, and grippe germs, and English breakfast tea, and Liberty Loan conversation, and I don't know which is going to predominate, but I hope it is going to be the last. I got the grippe germs and asperin talking in Illinois but it was worth it. I have had a most beautiful ten days. I have learned things about Illinois, and incidentally about women that I never expected to know; and I am learning things about Milwaukee and Wisconsin tonight, and I thought that I knew things about Milwaukee. You know the little boy who said to a little friend, "I know all about you, but I like you anyway." Well, I don't know any one who could know more about a city than a newspaper reporter - unless it is an ex-newspaper reporter. I know all about Milwaukee, and I like it anyway.
In Monmouth, Illinois, just a few days ago I got up at six o'clock in the morning (new time), because boys from Monmouth, Ill. were going to war. Now, I have seen quite a number of boys go to war in the last few months. I have seen them march down Fifth Avenue, and it was a glorious sight; and I have seen them stepping down Michigan Avenue, and it was a thing to thrill you. But after I got through seeing those seven boys from Monmouth, Ill. go to war, I had to go back to my hotel and powder all over again. There was something so intimate; there was something so real; there was something so microscopic about those seven boys in their plaid mackinaws. With their suit cases, and their pasteboard boxes in their hands marching down the streets in Monmouth, Ill. at half past seven to go to the train, to go to training camps, to go to France - to win the war. I can't think of any better reason for them to leave Monmouth, Ill.
And there was a woman (evidently the mother of one of them) as the train pulled out, and the boys all stuck their heads
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out of the windows the way soldier boys do now. They were smiling and saying "good-bye girls" - and some of the girls were sixty years old. And this one woman stood there with her face wet with tears, and she was laughing, and it wasn't hysteria either. I knew then that that woman, and hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and millions of women like her in America today had something that I had always hoped they have. All my life I had the early Pilgrim mothers, and the Civil War mothers rammed down my throat. I thought they had something that my mother and your mother... just every day, three-meals-a-day, always there when you needed mother, did not have. Well, they have it. It seems to me today that the thing they had, we have and you have, only it is developed to the nth degree, and it is the 1918 brand.
I sat at dinner tonight with twenty or more women, and their conversation was a thing to marvel at. They knew more about Liberty Loans and about bread making than I ever expect to know, and that is a most wonderful combination of knowledge. They talked about both of them expertly. I am not an expert, but I know an expert when I see one.
It wasn't so very long ago, two or three years perhaps, when we saw a group of women close together. Their conversation would have run something like this: "My dear, did you hear about Ethel? They say she has gone to work, and with all their money! They say she always was a little queer, even in college. How awful for the family!" You see a group of women with their heads close together nowadays, and this is what you hear: "They say she isn't doing a thing, not a thing: and I hear that she sleeps until nine in the morning. Her poor mother!"
Every worth-while girl has gone and got a job. Some of them have two jobs - their own and Uncle Sam's; no Uncle Sam's and their own, and they are covering them both. I feel sorry for
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every woman who was born a hundred years ago, or is going to be born twenty-five years from now. They have missed a glorious epic.
But if there is one thing, if there is one respect in which women haven't changed, it is this: Every woman, every one of us, is part of that little animal which we call the squirrel. Some of us are 50%, some 25%, some 10%, and some of us a bare fraction of a per cent, of that thrifty, bright-eyed little animal whose motto is "one nut in the ground is worth two on the tree." Who but a woman would save those pieces of lace, and those bits of tinsel? Who but a woman would store away the faded rose that adorned last year's hat? It is the woman who saves the bits of ribbon, and dried bread crusts, and old corset steels, and baby's outgrown shoes, and lover's letters, and chicken bones. If it weren't for women, there would be no attics. Attics were built in requisition of women.
There is a superstition to the effect that women are wasteful. It is they who wear the jewels and the silks. It is for the women that the shop windows are made gorgeous. And it is true. But perhaps the world will never know how much of the gorgeousness of the shop window is due to the man who wants his woman to be a credit to him. But I am not here to try to prove to you that it is the man who says "I'll take that", without asking the price. I don't want to try to demonstrate the theories of the woman who turns a dime backwards, and frontwards, and sideways. I am here tonight to try to get the attention for ten or twelve, or twenty minutes of every squirrel woman in this audience, which means every woman - and I don't mind if the men listen too.
In the good old days long before the war when the butcher threw in a chunk of liver for the cat, and a chunk of roundsteak for the dog, and when a soupbone with greens cost 5¢, you didn't have
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to be an expert mathematician and civil engineer to make the housekeeping money last through the week. It was a pretty poor kind of a housekeeper who couldn't save enough out of her weekly allowance to procure for herself some of those little luxuries and adornments for which she did not feel justified in asking for a lump sum. Twenty-five cents here, fifty cents there, a dollar, two dollars, will at the end of a year probably help to pay for John's first year at college; for Mildred's music lessons; for a spray of paradise; for a pair of lace curtains; for the new dining room rug; or for a platinum setting for the diamond or sunburst that John gave her on her tenth anniversary.
I know a woman who, thirty years ago, raised a family of six on $10 a week, and well too, and at the end of a year had $75.00 left with which she bought herself a pair of longcoveted diamond eardrops. There's a squirrel for you! Even if you could get 3 dozens of eggs for a quarter, and porterhouse steak was 12¢ a pound. But in these days when the purchase of a porterhouse is an immoral act, when a pork chop is a luxury, and wheat bread a forbidden dainty, that the weekly allowance is spread so thin that it is likely to appear transparent in spots. But the squirrel instinct still survives. Somehow miraculously, the woman who used to save a bit here, and a bit there, is still doing it, and no man will ever be able to understand how she does it. Under the handkerchief box in the lefthand bureau drawer; on the shelf in the bed room, behind the spare blankets; in the little neighborhood bank around the corner - with that Indian patience and ingenuity, the squirrel woman still manages to put by her weekly nut - a nut buried in the ground against a wintry day.
The time is here for the squirrel woman to dig up that nut. The wintry day has come. No matter what the purpose is for
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