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Updated: June 19, 2025
On the Monday after mobilization the banks of France announced that they would buy no bonds. These poor bewildered women would have starved if the women of the more fortunate classes had not immediately begun to organize relief stations and ouvroirs.
In countless other ouvroirs they were cutting and making uniforms with the same facility that men had long since acquired, or running sleeping bags through sewing-machines at the rate of thousands a day. M. Herriot "mobilized" Lyons early in the war, and its contribution to the needs of the Front has been enormous.
After her ouvroirs the most important organization of which she is president is the Comité International de Pansements Chirurgicaux des Etats Unis in other words, surgical dressings started by Mrs. Willard, and run actively in Paris by Mrs. Austin, the vice-president. When I visited it they were serving about seven hundred hospitals, and no doubt by this time are supplying twice that number.
The next step in aiding this army of helpless women was to open ouvroirs, or workrooms. As the vast majority of the peasant farmers and petite bourgeoisie had been used to sleeping in airtight rooms they suffered bitterly during that first long winter and spring in the open.
The most difficult women to employ were those who had been accustomed to make embroidery and lace, as well as many who had led pampered lives in a small way and did not know how to sew at all. But one-franc-fifty stood between them and starvation and they learned. To-day nearly all of the younger women assisted by those first ouvroirs are more profitably employed.
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