682 State Papers and Addresses

muting to one's work, will require many alterations before it is fitted to the
new requirements of life.

In other words, from now on, it will not be possible to visit and shop, and
to enjoy all the little luxuries of quick transportation that have made life in
America so convenient and enjoyable. It will take a lot of mental adjustment
for our people to accomodate themselves to these changing conditions. Women
will have to be a great factor in creating and sustaining a National spirit of
cooperation that will accept all these annoying regulations and, indeed, instead
of permitting them to be deterrents to patriotic action, make them rather a
stepping stone to greater heights of patriotic cooperation.

That women will meet the new responsibilities thus laid on them is un-
questioned. They have given ample evidence of their good will in the readiness
which they have responded to the calls of industrial employment in connection
with the war effort.

Through the school teachers of the Country, likewise, they have given
remarkable illustration of a readiness to go to great lengths to help accomplish
the things that must be done. In the registration of men under the Selective
Service and occupational classifications, and only recently in the registration of
our people for sugar rationing, women have made a contribution to the National
war effort whose value cannot properly be evaluated.

Indeed, the Country was most fortunate to have at hand a group so pa-
triotic, so willing, so capable, to which to entrust this all-important responsi-
bility. Few other groups could have tackled it so capably; none could have
done it more generously or more successfully.

In all the various phases of Civilian Defense, in our Air Raid Precaution
Service and in such necessary activities as the furthering of war bonds and
stamp sales, the women of America have rallied nobly to the calls made upon
them. It is necessary to emphasize, however, that what has been done is but
a prelude to possibly more stringent, more vital sacrifices in the interest of
all-out war effort.

Ruling at home, as the women of America do; charged with the very direct
responsibility of training and educating the great masses of our millions of
school children, the mothers and the school teachers of America can be, and I
know will be, the mainstays of our National morale, just as their sisters and
daughters in the airplane factories and all the other varied war industries
assume an increasing share of the war production load. How much greater that
share will become, time alone can tell. As an indication of the possibilities, let
it be noted that, while the American plane industry, for instance, has but five
or ten, or, at the most, 15% of its workers recruited from the ranks of women,
similar factories in Great Britain employ from 40% to 50% of women workers.

It is highly interesting, too, to note in this connection that industry now
recognizes that there are certain important fields of manufacture in which
women are admittedly more skilful than men. In the manufacture of precision
instruments, for instance. In radio, in the manufacture of such items as para-
chutes, clothing, and in a great variety of other production, the deft fingers