"Famous Pastor Suggests Fair Sex Might Make Better Generals Than Some Of Our Male Military Failures", Sydney's The Globe and Sunday Times War Pictorial boomed 100 years ago this week.
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In a long essay the Reverend R.J. Campbell looked at how the war had changed, forever, the role of women in our society.
"Quietly, irresistibly, amazingly, women are stepping into positions they had to fight hard for previous to July 1914 [war's commencement], or were barred from by conventional prejudice, or deemed totally unfit for.
"A revolution indeed, and one that has accomplished more within a few short harrowing months than by all the fierce propaganda of the militant suffragists and their sympathisers in the decade preceding.
"The cry of alarm is already being raised at the wholesale displacement of male by female labor; but it is no use opposing it, it is bound to go on. We must simply adjust ourselves to the new conditions.
WOMEN AS GENERALS
"Women can do everything but fight, and I am not sure that they could not do that as well as the men if they were put to it. Mere physical strength counts for little in warfare nowadays.
"A woman general might be an improvement on some of our military commanders.
"And there are precedents for it. Zenobia, Queen of the East, was a great general in her day ... as was our [Britain's] own Boadicea. She had the faculty of putting heart into her warriors."
