That Woman’s true profession is marriage is a fact commonly blinked in these times when, owing to their greater numbers, it is become inevitable that many women must go through life as spinsters. Not every woman may become the mistress of a home in these days when the proportion of females to males is growing larger and more evident year by year: not all the women and girls can attain to that ideal of marriage which they so ardently desire, now that women outnumber the men in Great Britain and Ireland alone by nearly a million; and so, to cover their failure in life, the unmarried have started the heresy that woman’s mission is domination rather than submission; that woman’s sphere of action and influence is not properly confined to the home, but is rightly universal, and that marriage is an evil which destroys their individuality. These failures, rightly to call those who cannot achieve legalised coverture, are, of course, of all classes, but chiefly and equally of course, they belong to the wage-earning class, and must seek employment wherewith to support their existence in an undesired spinsterhood. The growing competition of women with one another in feminine employments, the higher education of modern girls, the increasing tendency of men to defer marriage, or to remain bachelors altogether—all these causes have led to woman’s turning from the long-since overstocked markets for woman’s work to the more highly-paid functions fulfilled by men. Then, also, the new employments and professions evolved from the increasingly complex civilisation of this dying nineteenth century, have been almost exclusively feminised by the femmes soles who are occupied nowadays as clerks, shorthand writers, journalists, type-writers—vulgo ‘typists’—doctors, dentists, telephonists, telegraphists, decorators, photographers, florists, and librarians. A lower social stratum takes to such employments as match-box making, printers’ folding and bookbinding, and a hundred other crafts. Where deftness of manipulation comes into request these wage-earning women have proved their right to their new places; but in the occupations of clerks, cashiers, telephonists, telegraphists, and shorthand writers they have sufficiently demonstrated their unfitness, and only retain their situations by reason of the lower wages they are prepared to accept, in competition with men, and through the sexual sentimentality which would rather have a pretty woman to flirt with in the intervals of typewriting than a merely useful and unornamental man. It may be inevitable, and in accordance with the inexorable law of self-preservation, that women will continue to elbow men from their stools; but woman cannot reasonably expect, if she competes with man in the open market, to receive the old-time deference and chivalric treatment—real or assumed—that was hers when woman remained at home, and when the title of spinster was not an empty form. She must be content to forego much of the kindly usage that was hers before she became man’s competitor; and if she fails in market overt, where chivalry has no place, why, she has no just cause of complaint. If the time is past when women were regarded as a cross between an angel and an idiot it is quite by her own doing, and if she no longer receives the deference that is the due of an angel, nor the compassionate consideration usually accorded an idiot, no one is to blame but herself.

If she would be content to earn her wages in those manly employments she has poached, and to refrain from the cry of triumph she cannot forbear, she would be a much more gracious figure, and, indeed, entitled to some sympathy; but foolish women are clamorously greedy of self-glorification, and still instant, in and out of season, in reviling the strength and mental agility of men which surpass their own and forbid for ever the possibility of female domination. And yet women, one might reasonably suppose, have no just cause of complaint in the matter of their mental and physical inferiority. The feminine quality of cunning has ever stood them in good stead, and by its aid they have grasped advantages that could not have been theirs by right of their muscles or their reason. Cunning has taught them to use their shortcomings as claims for consideration, and to urge courtesy as their due in order to handicap men in the race. In the same manner Mr. Gladstone was wont, when all reasonable arguments had failed him, to urge his age as a claim to attention and a compliance with his policy; and, whenever a cricket match is played between an eleven of gentlemen and a corresponding number of ladies, the men must fain tie one hand behind their backs and fend as best they may with the other, and use a stump in place of a bat. Again, when gloves are wagered on a race, who ever heard of pretty Fanny paying when her wager was lost? You shall see an instance of feminine unreasonableness in competition with man in this tale of a race:—Mrs. Thornton, the wife of a Colonel Thornton, rode on horseback, in 1804, a match with a Mr. Frost, on the York racecourse. The course was four miles, and the stakes were 500 guineas, even. The race was run before an immense concourse, and eventually the lady lost! She could not, of course, considering her sex, contain herself for indignation, and her letter to the York Herald which followed made complaint against Mr. Frost for having been lacking in courtesy in ‘distancing her as much as he could.’ She challenged that discourteous sportsman to another match, but he very rightly considered that sport is masculine, and did not accept.

Many thousands of girls and unmarried women live nowadays upon their earnings in a solitary existence. They are of all grades and classes; they have entered the professions, and even invention is numbered among their occupations, although the inability of women to originate is notorious. According to a statement in the Times of December, 1888, ‘out of 2500 patents issued to women by the Government of the United States, none reveal a new principle.’

We have not many women inventors in these islands. Women have not had sufficient courage or rashness for dabbling in applied science, or meddling with mechanics. They owe even the sewing-machine, and all the improvements upon its crude beginnings, to man, and would have been content to wield the needle in slow and painful stitches for all time but for his intervention.

It was left for the Government to bring the employment of women forward, and successive Postmasters-General have sanctioned their introduction to post-offices; but as post-office clerks they have failed to give satisfaction. They readily assume official insolence, and carry it to an extent unknown even to Foreign Office male clerks, who were, before the introduction of women into the Civil Service, supposed to have attained the utmost heights of ‘side’ and official offensiveness. Many have been the bitter letters addressed to the Times—that first resort of the aggrieved—upon the neglect and contumely heaped upon the public by the Postmaster-General’s young ladies. But this neglect and studied insolence has, it must be owned, been chiefly shown by these Jacquettas in office to their own sex; and ladies have been observed to wait, with rage and vexation, for the tardy pleasure of female post-office clerks in condescending to notice their presence.

At one time the business of post-offices became served almost entirely by women. This was due not to any Governmental delusions upon the score of their merits, but was owing entirely to a cheeseparing economy which employed inferior wits at a lower wage than would have been acceptable to men. Even such extremely busy offices as those of Ludgate Circus and Lombard Street were filled with women, who elbowed men from their stools, and became so ‘flurried’ in the press of business that they frequently gave either too much change or too little over the counter, or committed such vagaries as giving ten shillings’ worth of stamps for half-a-crown; or were incapable of weighing letters and parcels properly, so that the Post-office revenues were increased by packages being more than sufficiently stamped, or else were augmented by the fines levied upon addressees in cases where their inherent inability to juggle with figures had caused inadequate prepayment. Indeed, the woman who can reason from cause to effect, or can employ the multiplication-table accurately (except under circumstances in which time is no object) is as much a ‘sport’—as Professor Huxley might say—as a white raven or a cat born with six legs.

The storm of indignation was so great over these unbusinesslike doings, that even that elephantine creature—the Postmaster-General—was moved,4 and the chiefest of the City post-offices are served now by men.

But the pert miss of the suburban post-office, and the establishments just beyond the City, is still very much in evidence. It is she who, with a crass stupidity almost beyond belief, misreads the telegrams handed in, and despatches the most extraordinary and extravagant messages that bear no sort of resemblance to their original draughts, and it is her sister at the other end of the wire who cannot interpret the dot and dash of the Morse system aright, and so further complicates affairs. The marvels and conveniency of telegraphy have been praised, and not beyond their due, but the other side of the medal has to be shown in the extraordinary and disquieting ‘blunders,’ perpetrated chiefly by female telegraphists, which spread dismay and consternation through such vital substitutions as ‘father is dead,’ for the original message of ‘father is bad’; ‘all going well: a little fire at 7 o’clock this morning,’ in which ‘fire’ is transmitted instead of ‘girl’; and the appalling error ‘Come at once: mother much diseased,’ in which the word ‘diseased’ usurps the place of ‘distressed.’

The absurd way in which people have been summoned by telegraph to meet friends at places that not only did those friends not contemplate, but which either do not exist at all, or, at least, not in the situations some of these erring telegrams assign them, is within the experience of almost every one who is in the way of frequently receiving these pink missives at the post-office. ‘Meet me 5 o’clock Saint Mary Abbots Church, Kensington,’ has been rendered, ‘Meet me 5 o’clock Saint Mark Abchurch, Kennington.’ The substitution of ‘Piccadilly’ for ‘Pevensey’; the omission of the second word in the address of ‘Manchester Square,’ and similar vagaries are common.

Of course this is not to say that they are only the women telegraph clerks who fall into these errors, but the greater percentage originates with them. The woman-clerk who receives a message through the wire cannot follow the telegraphic instrument with the attention that makes all the difference between accuracy and some dreadful blunder. Thus it is that in the domain of the electric telegraph the ineradicable tendency of her sex to argue from false premises, and her capacity for jumping to erroneous conclusions are admirably well shown; and the system by which telegrams are sent lends itself in the most complete and remarkable way to her errors of anticipation. The telegraphic alphabet now universally in use—known as the Morse system—consists of a series of dots and dashes; and a message is spelled out by a laborious ticking of the magnetic needle at the office in receipt of the telegram. The message is read, tick by tick, from the needle’s rapid oscillations:—‘Your sister di——’ ‘Oh,’ says the female telegraphist to herself, disregarding the next few movements of the needle, ‘died, of course,’ and so finishes the word. The needle continues ticking and the next words are spelled out, ‘with us last night, undertake——’ The telegraphist adds an ‘r’ to that word to make it fit her first guess, and reads off the remainder of the message, ‘to bring her up to-morrow,’ and so despatches an alarming telegram, which should have read harmlessly enough, ‘Your sister dined with us last night. Undertake to bring her up to-morrow.’

These things are sufficiently dreadful, and leave little room for exaggeration; but one must scan more than doubtfully that tale of a telegram which when handed in read, ‘I tea with Mr. Smith in Dover Street. Stay for me,’ but which was changed into ‘I flee with Mrs. Smith to Dover straight. Pray for me.’

As for journalism, women have invaded the newspaper offices to some purpose, and it is owing to them that the modern newspaper is usually an undistinguished farrago of wild and whirling words, ungrammatical at best, and at its worst a jumble of more or less malicious gossip, without sequence or thread of reason. The ‘lady journalist’ is no respecter of persons or institutions, and an easy impudence is natural to her contributions, whether her subject be peer or peasant. Proportion is in no sense her gift or acquirement: the death of a member of the ‘submerged tenth’ in a court off Fleet Street is more thrilling to her senses than the fall of a statesman from office; the cut of a dress or the shade of a ribbon wears an importance in her eyes that the rise and progress of trades can never win; and the babble of Social Science Congresses, or the lecturing of University Extensionists transcends the Parliamentary debater in her mind. ‘Actuality’ is her shibboleth and gush her output; and the heart actuates her pen rather than the head.

The journalist of years bygone was a very different being. His—for the old-time journalist was always masculine—his knowledge of frocks and flounces was nil; his habitat was generally a pothouse, and his speech was as often as not thick and husky with potations; but however confused his talk, and however objectionable his personality, his utterances in the press were apt and luminous and he took no bribes. In this last respect the name and trade of a ‘lady journalist’ are somewhat stale and blown upon of late, and she has been revealed as the debaucher of newspaper morality, who, in league with the advertisement department, praises the shoddy goods of the advertising tradesman, while he who relies not upon rÉclame but on excellence of workmanship is dismissed with faint praise, or mentioned not at all. Worse than this unscrupulous fending for her employer—editor or advertising manager—she stoops to gifts in coin and kind from eager shopkeepers, panting to gain the ear and open the purse of the public, and when she has a fancy for any ‘particular’ article, she begs it with an assurance born of the knowledge that her wishes will not be refused by the tradesman who has that article in his gift. He dare not do so, for his puff would be missing from the ‘organ’ that would otherwise have proclaimed the excellence of his wares to a gulled and gullible world.

Certainly, in all the man’s employments she has invaded, in no other is woman so powerful for ill as in journalism.

FINIS.

LONDON:

Printed by Strangeways & Sons, Tower Street, Cambridge Circus, W.C.