Remarks to Members of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services.

IT IS a very great pleasure to meet all of you this morning. I want to express my appreciation for the time and effort you are putting in, to help us with the defense program. And it needs your help. There never was a time in the history of the country when the good women of the country could make a greater contribution than they can at this time.

We need you. We also want you as a committee to make it perfectly plain to the people of this country just exactly what we are up against. I don't think a large number of the people really appreciate that we are in the midst of one of the greatest crises we have ever faced, and that we must meet it, and that we must not, under any circumstances, let down. Because this great country of ours is the hope of the free world, and we must make good on that hope.

In the history of our country the women have always been a help in its settlement, in civilizing it, and in keeping it a republic. If you remember, in Puritan times, in Virginia, when the first settlers came in, the women manned the forts just as the men did. In the late 1840's and early 1850's, my grandmothers were first settlers in western Missouri, and they had trouble with Indians at that time. My grandfathers were in the trading business across the plains, and my red-haired grandmother, on one occasion, routed a whole band of Indians by herself and two great big shepherd dogs, and they didn't come back and bother her any more. But she maintained the home and did it just as my grandfather would have done, had he been there.

The women of this day and age have that same spirit, and I want you to arouse them and see if you can't get them to come help us.

It has been a privilege to see you.