So much has been written lately about women’s work in England that most of the obvious generalisations on the subject have been exhausted. Much has yet to be done before all the vexed questions raised by the increase of woman workers during the war are settled, but that is a matter for the trades themselves. The only principle of primary validity is that women have as much right as men to enter the labour market, but they must win their places legitimately by their performances and not at the price of being sweated. Women, of course, have always worked in England. A book recently published by a woman on woman workers in the seventeenth century has reminded us of this, if we have forgotten Hood’s Song of the Shirt. So that the entry of women into the more technical and highly organised employments, hitherto mainly reserved for men, is nothing more than an inevitable process of development. The one thing, in this connection, which strikes an ordinary observer is that women are still a long way from having acquired men’s capacity for self-organisation, and this is the road on which the Englishwoman who works must progress in the future. Women can learn esprit de corps, but they do not seem to imbibe it naturally. This, I think, is partly due to their more sequestered education, with fewer games in which combined effort is all important, and partly to their intensely personal outlook on the whole of life. To them life is a clash of individual atoms rather than of corporate bodies to whose progress the fate of individual members is of comparatively little interest. History for them, whether past or contemporary, is a drama in which living persons, not ideas and processes, are the protagonists. For the large majority of them the notion of solidarity begins and ends with the home, within which it is absolute, only to be nebulous outside it. Yet the talent is not absent, only dormant. When it awakes the results are striking and often put men to shame. Florence Nightingale teaches us this lesson, and we have learnt it again more recently from the women’s ambulances and the women’s organisations which have helped us to win the war.

The opportunities for corporate action on the part of women are unlimited, and it is a fact which women of all classes are coming to realise in a greater measure. It was made plain, even to the more gently born among them who worked in factories and offices during the war, that without corporate action it was almost impossible to get justice. The rightness of ideas, unfortunately, does not conquer by its own momentum, especially in England where both men and women are apt to await its embodiment in concrete facts. They saw that ameliorations and advantages, the justice of which was admitted as soon as it was urged by common action, did not come to those who did not press for them, and that such action on the part of isolated individuals was triumphantly met by the retort that nobody else had asked for any change, a sufficient proof that it was not necessary. With their gain of political franchise and the removal by law of sex-disqualifications women in this country have every incentive to put into practice lessons of this kind. There is no reason, moreover, why they should restrict their corporate action to their own sex. They work with men domestically, forming combinations of immense strength: there is no reason why they should not do so generally. In the middle classes this truth is at last recognised, but in the working classes it is still regarded with suspicion. The Trades Unions, whether they like it or no, will have to admit women of like trades to full membership.

Another thing, as I have already remarked, which women have learnt more fully during the war, is the healthiness of regular work for its own sake, apart from its merely material rewards. Few that have had this salutary experience will reconcile themselves to a return to an existence of semi-idleness, nor will they bring up their daughters to regard such an existence, even where it is economically possible, as a natural one. The doctrine that no citizen has a right to live unless he or she makes his contribution to the work of the community is no longer a musty relic of simpler ages, but is forcing itself more and more upon universal recognition as an undeniable principle. Some of its most fervent devotees, it is true, would restrict the meaning of “work” to manual labour, but this is a pure delusion which cannot last in any fully organised and orderly community. It is almost impossible to set the limits of utility, and men have often condemned as useless the very activities which were to be the means of abundant progress to future generations. Utility and selfishness, moreover, can easily go together, so that the eradication of the latter can only be accomplished at the price of restricting the former. The one certain negation of utility is self-indulgence, which can only be allowed in small doses when utility has earned its keep. Women have learnt the wider limits of utility: they will no longer, in the more leisured classes, limit their idea of it to domestic utility, and women of the future will be no worse prepared for this important sphere of it if they are trained to enter the world at the age of discretion able to render definite service to the community in a form which it considers valuable.

To the weary worker in shop or factory, to the overworked servant and the harassed mother of a family it may seem ridiculous, even impertinent, to say these things. But they will recognise that, so far as the words contained any reproach, it was not directed at them, and that the diversion of any superfluous feminine energy into regular channels of work is not a matter of trifling import. They themselves will benefit by any such development, for better organisation of women will improve the lot of women who already work at trades, and will win more general recognition for the fact that the domestic labours of the household, whether performed for wages or not, are really work and not merely an occupation. Every woman with a dwelling and a family, irrespective of any other possible employment, is one of the country’s workers, and one of the best kind of workers, since her work is not done for a material reward but to fulfil a duty and attain an ideal. This has been said often enough, but it cannot be said too often. In certain classes the standard of motherhood is low and so is the standard of housewifery. Education alone will not raise these standards to a worthy level: we want a higher conception of domestic work and of its importance in the productiveness of our country, the aim of all labour being production. It always appears strange to me that a man who, if given the amount of individual responsibility in a business which is entailed in the administration of a household, would consider himself a fully-occupied worker, will often look upon his wife’s activities—which keep him comfortable, his children healthy and his servants contented—as mere incidents in an otherwise ornamental life.

Mr. J. Swinburne, a very gifted engineer, in a sensational paper read not long ago before the Musical Association, poked a great deal of good-humoured fun at the claims of women to equal consideration with men. Though “Women in Music” was the title of his paper, he surveyed generally the performances of women in every kind of activity and came to an unfavourable conclusion. One of his criticisms was that women’s minds are almost wholly receptive and hardly at all productive. They were not, he urged, originators of ideas or systems, neither leaders of thought, inventors or captains of industry. In his view, the great impulses which really drive round the wheels of civilisation have always been and always will be virile. So far as the past is concerned, this is certainly true, but it is questionable whether it is necessarily true of the future. The truth is that women are some centuries behindhand in experience of public activity, and this deficiency cannot quickly be made up. But the good Englishwoman will hardly go forward into the future with any damaging assumptions on her back: she will rather dump them by the roadside and press on, acknowledging a somewhat light equipment for her journey, but trusting to capacities in her knapsack to the possibilities of which she will confess no limits.

Englishwomen are excellent employees: they are more docile than men and less lazy by nature. Men are far more critical of their employers and every man, no matter how well suited to him his employment may be, faces his daily task with a certain spirit of rebellion. Having greater activity of mind and body than a woman, he is always distracted by the idea that he might be spending his time more profitably, or at least more agreeably. On the other hand, men are more methodical, and less at the mercy of their emotions when at work. Mary the housemaid runs upstairs at such a pace that she is speechless by the time she reaches the top, and Eliza the cook, if she has had a “few words” or her young man has been faithless, will produce pastry that is uneatable. Men do not run upstairs, and they leave their hearts outside the office with their overcoats, transforming themselves with ease into part of an impersonal machine from which they completely detach themselves at night with the same nonchalance. Mr Swinburne asserts that women take their work too seriously, as if that were a fault: the real fault is that they are apt to brood over it in their leisure hours, thus robbing the mind of its relaxation. Englishwomen might learn of Englishmen a habit of greater attention to themselves as machines.

The Englishman sets great store on physical well-being, a trait which, in exaggeration, is not particularly pleasing. But physical well-being means efficiency, so that on the whole a certain selfishness in insisting on sufficient food and rest for body and mind is valuable to a worker. We men are wisely gross, but we might not like to see the women as gross as we are, nor are we likely to do so, but we have something to teach them in our respect for the body as an engine rather than as an object of admiration, and in the readiness with which we cast away preoccupation when our work is done. I have seen a general in the field sitting in his dugout writing letters home while his force was delivering an important attack. All his arrangements had been made, all his orders framed with care: there was nothing to do at the moment but to allow his subordinates to act and to await their reports. So, like a wise man, he diverted his mind. Few women could have shown as much self-control. Men, of course, are not proof against anxiety, but they do manage to harden themselves against small worries. Women, on the other hand, so often show no discrimination, and give them as much mental and emotional wear and tear over a molehill as over a mountain. To speak mechanically, women would do well to improve their oil-feeds. As it is, their engines knock too readily and frequently seize on small provocation.

And, speaking of oil, there is a precious oil called geniality which I should like to see more freely poured out by Englishwomen whose employment brings them into contact with the body of their fellow creatures. They are much behind their Latin sisters in this respect. A Frenchwoman serves a customer with an empressement which is not merely a professional affectation. She takes a personal interest in the transaction, and would prefer to carry it through with smiles and gaiety on both sides. She is warm in her opening and parting salutations, ready to seize a suggestion with a pleased alacrity and always on the look out for anything that she can do or say to increase the satisfaction of her client or customer. This spontaneous cheerfulness of address is only natural to the Irish among us, but I am bound to say that many Englishwomen who wait or serve push its opposite to an absurd extreme. We all know the awful chilly superiority of the being who takes our orders at a counter or at a tea-shop. She advances either with the air of Juno invoked by a presumptuous mortal or approaches with an irritable scuttle as if she were far too busy with other important affairs to pay much attention to our insignificant wants. At times she will condescend to a kind of Olympian affability, with mincing speech and an affected smirk, but never betray herself an ordinary English girl, cheerful, unaffected, anxious to please, eager to find a personal link of sympathy with all her customers: that would be unladylike and wanting in commercial deportment. Men are much more friendly. For kindly solicitude no Frenchman, Swiss, German or Italian ever beat the old-fashioned English waiter, even if his gastronomical imagination was more limited. Bartenders are comrades, but barmaids are usually Gorgons. I crack a joke with my tailor, even when I owe him money, but I have never seen anything so common pass between the silk-gowned divinity of the dressmaking department and one of her respectful but determined clients: a simper on one side and a sniff on the other are the more usual small change which passes between the feminine server and the feminine served. There seems to be no good reason for this stiffness of Englishwomen. In ordinary social life these same women are as good-humoured as the rest of their kind, and we are not a crabbed race, however reserved we may be. It is, I think, partly a convention which might well be allowed to die, and partly due to the woman’s intense desire to live up to any position in which she may be placed. Her self-consciousness overwhelms her natural humanity, which is a pity, since geniality added to other feminine graces is irresistible.

Women as employers or managers of others are not susceptible of generalisation: they can be very good and very bad. In this respect they have a less even level than men, whose administration, in general, is more exposed to pressure of public opinion and who, in all business relations, are less personal than women. A woman superior can inspire greater personal affection and more bitter personal antipathy in her subordinates, because she carries about with her wherever she goes all her good and bad qualities, while a man, if he is often too lazy to get the best out of his good ones, is equally slow to show the worst of his bad ones: where he at best will create a strong link of common endeavour among the whole of a personnel, a woman will forge chains of most intimate affection, but where he inspires fear and that dislike which is called “unpopularity,” she from sheer perversity can surround herself with an atmosphere of rebellious hatred. There is no doubt that the infinite capacity of Englishwomen at their best for tact and sympathy gives them an immense advantage over men in any kind of personal relation if they care to use it: a motherly employer can do infinitely more for the welfare and happiness of employees than the most fatherly, for men have a delicacy about intruding too far into individual circumstances, whereas there is nothing into which a sympathetic woman cannot inquire without embarrassment. Here, certainly, there is much progress before the Englishwoman. Outside the domestic sphere, she is still in her infancy as an employer, as an administrator or as an industrial organiser. She has so far failed to extend the happy touch with which she can conduct a household or a small personal business to the large concern or to the company, as though her grasp failed the moment she was out of immediate contact with concrete personalities in the more hazy realm of units, aggregations and impersonal figures. Where she calculates in days the man calculates in years, and, though she may know with surprising accuracy the idiosyncrasies and capabilities of a staff within the immediate survey of her own eyes, she leaves it to the man to devise the large schemes which will find useful employment for thousands.

Possibly this wider and more impersonal grasp will never come to women: if so, we shall have to learn more accurately the reason why, for the impossibility is now not obvious. With organisation and combination becoming more and more the rule in every department of human activity, it will be a great loss to the community if, through women’s failure to extend their administrative capacity over wider areas, the fostering care and sympathetic penetration peculiar to women are confined to narrow circles. In that sense they have great need to develop the productive mind and also the gift of leadership, which is the art of attaching energies rather than affections. The proof of clear aims and a keen vision, single-hearted devotion to a worthy end, judicious selection of means to attain it, quick recognition of capacity in others and confidence in it when recognised, care in preparation, incisiveness in action, these are the qualities which draw men after them in spite of personal incompatibilities, and harness a multitude of scattered energies, at their highest efficiency, into a single co-ordinated effort. Women, so far, have been wanting in these qualities, and yet what could they not do if they had them? Joan of Arc and Napoleon both led armies: one touched the hearts of men, the other their pride. A woman who to the moral force of Joan could add the executive genius of Napoleon might lead the world straight to the millennium.

So extreme a combination of unusual qualities is improbable: but it is by no means inconceivable that some Sylvia commended by all the swains should develop the practical powers of a Whiteley or a Burbidge, a phenomenon which might occur sooner than the emergence from among women of a really commanding master-intellect. It may happen in time that a woman starting from small beginnings may earn millions and leave them to her sons as any Carnegie or Pierpont Morgan of to-day. The fact that it now seems impossible is a proof of what women have yet to achieve rather than of their natural limitations. I should not like to lay odds against the success of women as great originators of commercial enterprise, but I would modestly back my opinion that such pioneers will as quickly arise within these islands as from any part of the world outside them.