A LARGE audience, made up of typical representatives of the young womanhood of London, assembled in the Central Hall, Westminster, on Thursday evening, December 9, when a mass meeting was held in connexion with the White Crusade.
The idea of the crusade originated with the G.F.S. [Girls’ Friendly Society], and this particular meeting was the culminating point of Crusade Week in the dioceses of London and Southwark. Brigadier-General N. F. Jenkins, C.M.G., C.B.E., who presided, said that the object of the crusade was the promotion of the purity and honour of England — as anything that affected the Motherland must inevitably affect the whole Empire — the promotion of the purity and honour of the Empire. In the new world, on the threshold of which they stood, woman would play a prominent part, for she had now taken her place side by side with man in every activity of life. Was the new civilization to grow into something clean and beautiful, or was it to be sickly and doomed to perish at birth? The answer depended very largely on the women and girls of the Empire. The ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome owed their downfall, to a very great extent, to their imperfect ideals of womanhood, and the new civilization upon which they were just entering would perish also unless a high ideal of womanhood was maintained. . .
The Church Times digital archive is available free to subscribers