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There are those in clean white coats with brightly stained nails and perfect manicures. These are the midinettes of Paris, whose nimble fingers no longer stitch gowns but assemble, in the largest plant of its kind on earth, the delicate wiring of radio sets for airplanes and ships.
There are the white jumpers of the airplane workers and the hodgepodge aprons of the fuse makers, who put together the intricate detonators of bombs and shells. "Of course there is eyestrain and fatigue," says one. "But after all, sitting here at work is not like being up at the Maginot Line in the snow."
There is le cafard, too, the blues that lonely, tired women get the world over after a long day's work. But the jobs begin again the next morning. How many women are engaged in the French armament industry is a military secret. In the last war there were 400,000. Twenty years of complication and perfection of the sinews of mechanical war cannot have reduced the number.
Spokeswoman. A helpful coordinator of this immense war effort by the women of France, and the official spokesman for all French women in War II, was not in France last week. She was dined and bedded by Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House at Washington, D. C. Thence Eve Curie would start her two-month lecture tour of the U. S. — from Kalamazoo to Palo Alto, from Denver to Savannah — on French Women and the War.
The Nobel Prize has gone thrice to the Curies. Once to fragile, indomitable Mother Marie and her husband Pierre, the late great discoverers of radium. Once to Mother Marie alone. Once to her spitting image and scientific successor Daughter Irène, the violently athletic co-discoverer (with Husband Jean Frédèric Joliot) of synthetic radioactivity (see cut, p. 29). But never to elegant Daughter Eve whose brilliant biography Madame Curie was a smash seller all over the U. S. (TIME, Dec. 13, 1937). Eve is no more a scientific titan than Mrs. Roosevelt. She is, however, just about as articulate, effective, and well-acquainted all over the world as her White House hostess and considerably better dressed. On the day after break of war, that smart novelist & playwright Jean Giraudoux, now French Information Minister, with sure instinct chose smart Eve Curie to head the feminine section of his Commissariat of Information. To White House correspondents Miss Curie emphasized the point that French women are out to bring this war to a decisive finish. "Peace will not come soon," she said, "and it will not come at all while the Hitler regime remains in Germany — because the French are determined that when this war ends there will be no more fighting in Europe for a long time."
Highspots of her first week's pronouncements:
>"The French people do not expect you Americans to send troops to help us. The people feel that we have too many troops in the lines now!"
> "All the men and women of genius are with us."
> "This is an economic war as well as a military war. The country that works most will win! French women no longer feel that the ideal of life is not to work, because the ideal now is to work—that is the way to win the war."