MLLE. SANUA
Who, at the Ancien Prieure in Paris, holds open the door of commerce for women in France.
Little peaches might not be worth more, it is true. The troubled French minister was probably right when he complained that some of his new office force were quite useless. But there is a Federation of University women in England with perfectly good University degrees attesting mathematical proficiency. They say, however, that they cannot live on less than a minimum wage of three pounds a week. Awhile ago in Italy a group of women accountants were asked by the Administration of Public Instruction to replace men called to the front. With exactly the same academic licenses as men, they were nevertheless offered but two-thirds men’s pay. And they declined the proffered positions. Nor is it only England or Italy or Russia or France that presents this ratio between the wages of men and those of women in the business offices. The first resolution adopted by the new Women’s Association of Commerce of America was one demanding equal pay for equal work. Eventually the Women’s Association of Commerce and the Financial Centre for Women and the École Pratique de Haut Enseignement Commercial may succeed in cultivating in the commercial world a taste for a higher type of employé than the little peaches of the past. But for the present it is the handicap that the business woman in routine office positions has to accept. And there is no Trade Union in commerce to care. Can you manage to give equal work on two-thirds man’s pay?
If you can, this is the hour of your opportunity. The women’s battalions are with every month of the war drawing nearer, moving onward toward the president’s office. The London and Southwestern Bank has advanced 200 of its women clerks to the cashier’s window. The London City and Midland Bank a year ago promoted a woman to the position of manager of one of its branches. It was the first time that a woman in England had held such a position. Newspaper reporters were hurriedly despatched to Sir Edward Holden, the president, to see about it. But he only smilingly affirmed the truth of the rumour that had spread like wildfire through the city. It was indeed so. And he had no less than thirty more women making ready for similar positions.
Over in France at Bordeaux and at Nancy in both cities the first class graduated from the High School of Commerce after the admission of women, had a woman leading in the examinations. In the same year, 1916, a girl had carried off the first honours in the historic Gilbart Banking Lectures in London. I suppose no other event could have more profoundly impressed financial circles. The Banker’s Magazine came out with Rose Esther Kingston’s portrait in a half page illustration and the announcement that a new era in banking had commenced. It was the first time that women had been admitted to the lectures. There were some sixty-two men candidates who presented themselves for examination at the termination of the two months’ course. Rose Kingston, who outstripped them all, had been for a year a stenographer in the correspondence department of the Southwestern Bank. Now she was invited to the cashier’s desk.
To correctly estimate the achievement, it should be remembered that the men with whom she competed, had years of commercial background and this girl had practically one year. There were so many technical terms with which they were as familiar as she is with all the varieties of voile. What was the meaning of “allonge”? she asked three of her fellow employés bending over their ledgers before she found one who was willing to make it clear that this was the term for the piece of paper attached to a bill of exchange. Fragment by fragment like this, she picked up her banking knowledge. Once the Gilbart lecturer mentioned the “Gordon Case,” with which every man among his hearers was quite familiar. She searched through three volumes to get an intelligent understanding of the reference. Meantime, I think she did “darn” nights. You see, her salary was thirty shillings a week.
THE NEW WOMAN AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
This is for the feminine mind the besetting temptation most difficult to avoid. Can we give up our “darning” and all of the habits of domesticity which the word connotes? It is the question which women face the world over to-day. Success beckons now along the broad highway of commerce. But the difficult details of living detain us on the way to fame or fortune. And we’ve got to cut the apron-strings that tie us to yesterday if we would go ahead. Which shall it be, new woman or old? Most of us either in business or the professions cannot be both. Dr. Ella Flagg Young, widely known as the first woman to so arrive at the top of her profession as Superintendent of Schools in the city of Chicago, received a salary of $10,000 a year. She had made it the inviolable rule of her life to live as comfortably as a man. She told me that she did not permit her mind to be distracted from her work for any of the affairs of less moment that she could hire some one else to attend to. She did not so much as buy her own gloves. Her housekeeper-companion attended to all of her shopping. And never, she said, even when she was a $10 a week school teacher, had she darned her own stockings!
There are a few women who have, it is true, managed to achieve success in spite of the handicap of domestic duties. But they must be women of exceptional physique to stand the strain. I know a business woman in New York who, at the head of a department of a great life insurance company, enjoys an income of $20,000 a year. Yet that woman still does up with her own hands all of the preserves that are used in her household. Her husband, who is a physician with a most lucrative practice, you will note doesn’t do preserves. He wouldn’t if the family never had them.
A woman who is a member of the New York law firm of which her husband is the other partner was with him spending last summer at their country place. She, during their “vacation,” put up a hundred cans of fruit. I think it was between strawberry time and blackberry time that she had to return to town to conduct a case in court. She had cautioned her husband that while she was gone, he be sure to “see about” the little green cucumbers. But, of course, he didn’t. What heed does a man—and he happens also to be a judge of one of the higher courts—give to little green cucumbers? Long after they should have been picked, they had grown to be large and yellow, which, as any woman knows, takes them way past their pickling prime. That was how the woman who cared about little green cucumbers found them, when she returned from the city. In despair she threw them all out on the ground. The next day, turning the pages of her cook book, she happened to discover another use for yellow cucumbers. Putting on a blue gingham sunbonnet, she went out to the field back of the orchard and laboriously gathered them all up again. And she could not rest until on the shelf in her farm house cellar stood three stone crocks filled with sweet cucumber pickle. She just couldn’t bear to see those cucumbers go to waste. It is the sense of thrift inculcated by generations of forbears whose occupation was the practice of housewifery.