APPROACHING HIGH FINANCE IN FRANCE
Over on the banks of the Seine even as here on the banks of the Hudson, they are teaching women now the things that Cecile Bornozi knows. Not so long ago I stood in the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement Commercial pour les Jeunes Filles in Paris. This practical school of high commercial instruction for young girls is in the Rue Saint Martin in an old monastery, the Ancien Prieure de Saint Martin des Champs, where the Government has given them quarters. Here a high vaulted room of prayer has been turned into an amphitheatre. On rows of benches lifted tier after tier above the grey and white tiled floor, a hundred and twenty-five girls sat facing a new future. For the first time in history, la jeune fille who has always been more domestic minded than the young girl of any other nation except Germany, is being taught to be commercially minded. Curiously enough, “Thou shalt not darn” is a fundamental precept for success laid down by the director of the new school in France even as at the new school in America. Mlle. Sanua in Paris has to be perhaps even more insistent about it than Miss Wylie in New York. These are 125 girls of the bourgeoise families, any one of whom, if the great war had not come about, would be this morning going to market with her mother to learn the relative values of the different varieties of soup greens. And this afternoon she would be occupied, needle in hand, on a chemise or a robe de nuit for her trousseau. Now she has been called to a totally new environment. Here she sits on a wooden bench, the sofa pillow she has brought with her at her back, a fountain pen in hand, her note book on her knee, adjusting herself to a career which up to 1914 no one so much as dreamed of for her. She is hearing this morning a lecture on commercial law, delivered by Mme. Suzanne Grinberg, one of Paris’ famous lawyers. Le Professeur sits on a high stool before a great walnut table, her shapely hands in graceful gesture accentuating her legal phrases. Every little while you catch the “n’est ce pas?” with which she closes a period. And now and then she turns to the blackboard behind her to illustrate her meaning with a diagram.
Mlle. Sanua passes the school catalogue for my inspection and I notice a course of study that includes: industrial trade marks, designs, etc.; foreign commercial legislation; commercial documents, buying and selling, banking, etc.; bookkeeping, commercial and financial arithmetic; course in merchandising, including textiles, dyes, etc.; political economy, including the distribution of wealth, the monetary systems of the world, the consumption of wealth; pauperism, insurance, and charities; the state and its rôle in the economic order, taxes, socialism; economic geography and world markets; law, including public law, civil law and laws relating to women; foreign languages. This is the curriculum now being approached by the young girl who up to yesterday had nothing more serious in the world to occupy her leisure than to sit at the window with an embroidery frame in her lap watching and waiting for a husband.
But you see three years ago, four years ago, Pierre marched by the window in a poilu’s blue uniform and he may never come back. Marriage has hitherto been the fixed fact of every French girl’s life. Now numbers of women must inevitably, inexorably find another career. These girls here are many of them the daughters of professional men, doctors and lawyers. The girl in the third row back with the blue feather in her hat is the niece of President Poincaré. That one with the pretty soft brown eyes in the front row is married. The wife of a manufacturer who is serving his country as a lieutenant in the army, she is trying as best she may to take his place at the head of the great industrial enterprise he had to leave at a day’s notice when his call to the colours came. She found herself confronted with all sorts of difficult situations. Somehow she’s managed so far by sheer force of will and somewhat perhaps by intuition to come through some pretty narrow situations. For the future she’s not willing to take any more such chances. She has come to learn all that a school has to teach of the scientific principles and the established facts of commerce. Two girls here are the granddaughters of one of the leading merchants of the Havre. Their brother, who was to have succeeded to the management of the celebrated financial house, gave his life for his country instead at the Marne. And these girls, with the consent of the family, have dedicated their lives to taking their brother’s place in the economic up-building of France to which the financial world looks forward after the war.
You see like this the new woman in commerce all over the world is planning for a career that will never again rest with stenography and typewriting. Bringing furs from Russia and wheat from Canada is more interesting. There is nothing like preparedness. You are almost sure to do that for which you have specially made ready. And one glance at the programme of study for the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement Commercial shows clearly enough to any one who reads, that it is what Cecile Bornozi with her flashing glance calls the “big venture” which is the ultimate aim of this girl with the new note book on her knee. Meantime France can scarcely wait for her to complete her training. Mlle. Sanua has almost to stand at the door of the Ancien Prieure to turn away the employers who come to the Rue St. Martin to offer positions to her pupils. “Always they are asking,” she says, “have I any more graduates ready?”
Avocat Suzanne Grinberg’s soft musical voice goes on in the amphitheatre expounding commercial law. Outside in her adjoining office, the little stone walled room with the religious Gothic window, Mlle. Sanua tells me how it has come about, this new attitude on the part of her country to women who are going to find economic independence in the business world. In the cold little room in a war burdened land where coal is $80 a ton, we draw our chairs closer to the tiny grate. Mlle. Sanua leans forward and selects two fagots to be added to the fire that must be carefully conserved with rigid war-time economy.
As she begins to talk, I catch the look in her eyes, the glow of idealism that I have felt somewhere before. Where? Ah, yes. It was Frau Anna von Wunsch in whose eyes I have seen the gleam that flashed the same feminist message. Frau von Wunsch was before the war the presedient of Die Frauenbanck. This was for Germany a most revolutionary institution that hung out its gold lettered sign at 39 Motzstrasse, Berlin, a woman’s bank in a land where it was contrary to custom for a married woman to be permitted to do any banking at all. But “Women will never become a world power until they become a money power,” said Frau von Wunsch. And they put that motto in black letters on all of their letter heads and checks. The armies of the world are now entrenched between the Seine and the Rhine and since 1914 of course hardly any personal word at all has come through the censored lines from the feminists of Germany to the feminists of France. One does not even know what has become of Frau von Wunsch and her Frauenbanck over there in Mittel Europa. But the ideal that she lighted, flames now in every land.
Mlle. Sanua’s plan too is for a new woman in commerce who shall be a money power and a world power. And perhaps it may be France that is temperamentally fitted to lead all lands in achieving that ideal. The jeune fille, so carefully trained for domesticity only, has been known to develop wonderful business qualities after marriage. Invariably in the small shops of France it is Madame who presides at her husband’s cash drawer. A woman’s hand has led industries for which France is world famous: Mme. Pommerey whose champagne is chosen by the epicure in every land, Mme. Paquin whose house has dictated clothes for the women of all countries, and Mme. Duval whose restaurants are on nearly every street corner of Paris. The commercial instinct is really latent in every French woman. There is scarcely a French household in which a husband making an investment of any kind does not first consult with his wife. This birthright then, why not develop it by training and add scientific knowledge to intuition?
That was the proposition with which the French Minister of Commerce was approached at the beginning of the war. It was his own daughter who came to the Bureau of State over which he presided, with a new programme. Mlle. Valentine Thomson is the editor of La Vie Feminine, in whose columns she had already advocated wider business opportunities for women on the ground that France would have need of women in many new capacities. Now she came to ask that the High Schools of Commerce throughout the land should be opened to girls. Hitherto they had been exclusively for boys. The Minister of Commerce took the matter under consideration. The argument that girls should be prepared for responsibilities that every year of war would more surely bring to them sounded to him logical enough. Besides Mlle. Valentine Thomson is a daughter with a most pretty and persuading way, a way that is as helpful to a feminist as to any other woman. So it happened that the Minister of Commerce, in September, 1915, issued a circular recommending the opening of the national Schools of Commerce to women. The Ministry could only recommend. Each Chamber of Commerce could ultimately decide for its own city. And there were but three cities in which the final court of authority refused, Paris, Lyons and Marseilles.
Then in Paris Mlle. Sanua decided that women too must somehow have their chance. She had already organised her countrywomen in the Federation of French Toy Makers, for which she has far-flung ambitions. This new industry which she is putting on its feet in France, she has planned shall supplant the made-in-Germany toys in the markets of the world. But the women who are handling the industry must know how on more than a domestic scale. And Paris, the metropolis of France, offered them no commercial training. In the spring of 1916 Mlle. Sanua decided to go to the Department of State about the matter. There the Minister of Commerce, M. Thomson, furrowed his brow: “After all, Mademoiselle,” he said, “have women the mentality for business? The Ministry of War has opened employment in its offices to women. And these girls now whom the Government has admitted to clerkships here, some of them seem quite useless. Mademoiselle,” he added wearily, “is a woman’s brain really capable for commerce?”