The Spirit of a New Age

She’ll change the world

She’ll change the world. Her imagination has been caught up in the headlong momentum of this new age of endless innovations, of motorcars and racing cars and countless uses for electricity. She believes there’s nothing she can’t accomplish. Opportunity is presenting itself everywhere for women who are determined to overcome the prejudices they’ve suffered since the days before history was first written. With an excellent education and parents eager to see her attain whatever goals she sets for herself, she’s eying the aeroplane in the sky above her as she recalls the three women she met in London who are now studying to become surgeons. And the one who just sailed to Egypt to take photographs and file reports for “Le Figaro” in Paris.

There she stands, beside her new motorcar, free of the confining fetters of an age that she’s happy has died. And good riddance. Good riddance to the corsets that have tormented her mother and grandmothers. To the gloves and hats that were mostly worn because “society” demanded them of ladies of good family.  She doesn’t care that she’s expected to behave like a “lady”, to be no more than a wife, a mother and a good hostess. She cares only that she may live up to her own standards, that she’ll succeed at something worthwhile, something that’ll make her proud of her life. She’s impatient to begin. New technologies are rushing at her, shouting to her to take up their challenge, to make her mark. Of course she can be a good wife and mother. There’s just so much more – out there.

 The aeroplane is now “looping-the-loop”. Suddenly, she wants to meet its pilot. Maybe he’ll take her up. What would the world look like from – how many hundreds ‒ thousands ‒ of meters? She smiles, then becomes impatient with herself when she notices how easily she assumed the pilot to be a man.

In less than two hours she will indeed meet that pilot and, in only two years, he’ll become a celebrated “ace” of the French Armée de l’Air. After the armistice, together, they’ll devote their lives to medical research that will relieve the suffering of French, German and British casualties of the war that’s now rushing toward this young woman on the magnificent evening of the 28th of June 1914.