And once more, Cecile Bornozi somewhere in Europe is passing the sugar. In pursuit of food conservation, hotel waiters have a way of removing the sugar bowl to the dining-room sideboard and thoughtfully forgetting to offer it a second time. And the pretty young woman in the chic hat, who sat opposite me at breakfast that morning, was near enough to reach it and daring enough to commandeer the sugar bowl for our common use. There is nothing, I believe, like a lump of sugar that so quickly makes war-time travellers kin. That is the way I came to know Cecile Bornozi, new woman in commerce.
She is a type distinct from her predecessors in that old world of ours that is going up in battle smoke. Her brown hair is done in as coquettish a curl on her forehead, her eyes are as sparkling blue, her lips are as curving red as any girl’s who used to have nothing to do but to dance the tango and pour afternoon tea. But her horizon has widened beyond the drawing-room. Nor is she the business woman whom we have had with us for a generation. Why, the stenographer who takes my dictation is a business woman. But from her hand bag as another woman might produce a shopping list, Cecile Bornozi has just drawn forth a $50,000 bill of sale to her for a freight steamer.
She has just purchased it because of the increasing scarcity of tonnage in which to transport the fire brick that she is buying for the reconstruction of factory furnaces in the devastated districts of France. Yesterday she shipped 90 cwt. of oil boxes and bearings and 6 railway coal wagons. In the past few months she has sent over some 2000 railway wagons. Like this, during the past year, she has expended a million dollars for railway rolling stock that she rents to the French Government. She is specially commissioned by France for this undertaking, as her Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement spread in front of my breakfast roll shows to me and all of the Allies. A shipper has to have a license like this in these days. It is what secures for her her export permit from the London Board of Trade. Now she sets down her coffee cup and folds her newspaper and is off for India House in Kingsway where fore-gather other merchants who have confidential appointments with the War Office and the English Government. Upon her decisions to-day will depend so much more than the selection of a ribbon to match the blue of her eyes or the choice of the card to win at an afternoon bridge whist party. Her care and her forethought, her planning and her enterprise must outwit even the German submarines and get the goods across the English Channel to keep the transportation lines of a nation open for communication with the front. And there will be no superior at her elbow to tell her how.
“I like big ventures. I like to do things myself. I’d sell flowers on the curb before I’d consent to be any one’s else employé,” the new woman in commerce flashed back at me as she buttoned her coat collar and started out in a ten o’clock morning fog.
RISING TO THE NEW OCCASION
You see, it’s like that. The big venture is the fascinating field that lies beyond humdrum directed routine. We have by now forgotten the stir that was created when perhaps thirty years ago the first woman walked into a business house to take her place at a typewriter desk. Let us not lose sight of the innovation of our own day that is about to command attention: the woman at the typewriter is rising. I think we shall see her take the chair before the mahogany desk in the president’s office.
The Woman’s Association of Commerce of America was recently organised at Chicago in a convention of business women gathered from cities from New York to Chicago. For the first time adequate training to fit a woman for real commercial responsibilities is beginning to be as freely offered as to men. Cecile Bornozi, widely known as the only railway woman in France, came by her commercial knowledge largely through instinct and inheritance. She gave up literature at the Sorbonne for it, because as the daughter of Philip Bornozi, from Constantinople, who supplied rolling stock to the railways of the Orient, France, and Belgium, the call to commerce was in her blood. But except for the few specially placed women like that, the way up in commerce before the year 1914 was not plain and easy. Now all over the world there are floating in on the morning mail invitations like the one that has just come to me from the New York University.
How much it means, I suppose no man can quite understand. Suppose you, sir, were going to attempt to talk glibly in terms of chiffon and voile and chambray and all the rest of those mystifying terms that tangle the tongue of a novice sent down the aisle of a department store with a sample in his lower left hand vest pocket to be properly matched—you’d feel, wouldn’t you, that a course in this positively unknown tongue would be helpful in making yourself and your errand rightly understood. Just so. Now all unknown language is a handicap as is this one to you, which is quite familiar to every woman, for we learn to lisp in terms of our clothes. But on the other hand, there are commercial terms which you as a boy imbibed as naturally from your environment, which are to your sister a foreign tongue. We need the schools to teach it. And I am not sure but it is the schools now being set up by the women who have learned through their own experience that offer the surest interpretation of the way in these new paths in which women’s feet are set to-day.
Just off from Central Park West in New York City, the Financial Centre for Women has been established in direct response to the war demand. Wall Street asked for it. Already 60 young women instructed in practical banking, investments, accountancy, and managerial duties have been sent out to fill responsible positions in the National Bank of Commerce, Morgan’s, the Federal Reserve and over half a dozen other of the leading banks of New York City. These young women have been given an intimate working knowledge of such mysteries as stop payments and certified checks, gold imports, cumulative and preferred shares and all the intricacies of the market and the terms in which “the street” talks. In the room with the green cloth covered table, about which sit these future financiers and captains of industry in training, there is a blackboard. See the chalk marked diagram. By the routes mapped out in those white lines, they have brought furs from Russia, wheat from Canada, sugar from Hawaii. And all the money transactions involved have been properly put through. Thoroughly familiarised like this with international operations, there is more to learn for the making of a financier. I doubt if any but a woman would think to teach it. Miss Elizabeth Rachel Wylie, who directs the Financial Centre, recalls her classes from the wide world of affairs through which they circle the globe, for personal instruction. They have now the groundwork of the knowledge with which a business man is familiar. And Miss Wylie adds earnestly, impressively the last lesson: “Don’t darn.”
You see, captains of industry don’t. Even so much as an office boy who aspires to become a captain of industry doesn’t. And the woman in the office who spends her evenings mending her stockings and washing her handkerchiefs, misses, say, the moving pictures where the man in the office is adding to his stock of general information. This tendency to revert to type has been the fatal handicap of the past. By the faint beginnings of an intention to discard it, you differentiate the new woman in commerce from her predecessor the business woman. By way of discipline that girl there at the green cloth covered table, whose bag of war knitting hangs on the back of her chair the while she’s shipping furs from Russia, will leave it at home to-morrow. Cecile Bornozi wouldn’t have done a million dollars’ worth of business with the French Government the past year if she had stopped to knit. And if her thoughts had been on her stockings, she might have missed important details in railway rolling stock. In her room at the Hotel Savoy in London, I never saw a needle or thimble or spool of thread. But on her table I noticed System, the magazine of business.