"Say," he said, "we didn't get any stuff set last night. Power was off. Better come out and pick out the plate you want to fill with."
What he meant by the power being off I could understand, and perforce I went out to select the plate. He handed me long slabs of plate matter to read. Later I learned that printed copies of the plate are sent for selection, but in my ignorance I took up the slabs and tried to read the type. To my astonishment it was all backward, and I found myself wondering if it were a Chinese feature story. Finally I threw myself on his mercy and told him to select what he chose. As I left the composing-room I heard him say to one of the printers: "That's what comes of the boss hiring a hen editor."
Shortly after noon a linotype operator came to me with his hands full of copy.
"If you want any of this dope in the paper," he said, "you'll have to grab off a paragraph here and there. My machine's got a bad squirt, and it'll take an hour or more to fix it."
Greek, all Greek! A squirt! I was too busy "grabbing off" paragraphs to investigate; but then and there I resolved to penetrate all these mysteries. I found the linotype operator eager to show me how his machine works, and the foreman was glad to take me around and instruct me in his department and also in the pressroom. I have had trouble with printers since; but in the end they had to admit that the "hen editor" knew what she was talking about.
There is a great cry now for woman's advancement. If the women are hunting equality as their goal let them not seek out the crowded, hostile cities, but remain in the smaller places where their work can stand out distinctly. A trite phrase expresses it that a newspaper is the "voice of the people." What better than that a woman should set the tune for that voice?
Equality with men! I sit at my desk looking out over the familiar home scene. A smell of fresh ink comes to me, and a paper just off the press is slapped down on my desk.
"Look!" says the foreman. "We got out some paper today, didn't we?"
"We!" How's that for equality? He has been twenty years at his trade and I only ten, yet he includes me.
When I am tempted to feel that my field is limited, my tools crude, and my work unhonored and unsung, I recall a quotation I read many years ago, and I will place it here at the end of the "hen editor's" uneventful story.