"Hysterical, clamorous creatures, with wild demands for women's advancement ... are blind to real advancements that are going on quietly and naturally around them all the time. While the unbalanced ones are shrieking violently for redress, the fit women have adapted themselves unostentatiously to a genuine want. Evolution and a gradual natural development bring about innovations that would have been howled down if demanded and shrieked for.

"Florence Nightingale did not fight for a hearing about the rights of nurses; she supplied a need when Britain's wounded soldiers suffered in the Crimea. Joan of Arc did not agitate for petticoat soldiering. She led the legions of France when there seemed no one else to do it.

"So now, at this time of calamity, when vocations are left vacant by men doing their country's work at the front, women have in several cases filled their places. Almost every walk of life is being filled by plucky women in England and France ... and now comes news of the latest departure - the woman chaplain!

"This appointment was made in a French military hospital, and it was learned that the wives of pastors at the front have also been conducting services in their husbands' places. Clergymen are referred to as being of the 'third sex', so why shouldn't an intellectual, capable woman undertake the duties in a time of stress?"