Stated plainly, my first charge amounts to this: women-journalists are unreliable as a class. They are unreliable, not by sexual imperfection, or from any defect of loyalty or good faith, but because they have not yet understood the codes of conduct prevailing in the temples so recently opened to them. On the hearth, their respect for the exigencies of that mysterious business is unimpeachable; somehow, admittance to the shrine engenders a certain forgetfulness, Or perhaps it would be kinder and truer to say that the influences of domesticity are too strong to be lightly thrown off. For commercial or professional purposes these influences, in many cases, could not well be worse than they are. Regard, for a moment, the average household in the light of a business organisation for lodging and feeding a group of individuals; contrast its lapses, makeshifts, delays, irregularities, continual excuses, with the awful precisions of a city office. Is it a matter for surprise that the young woman who is accustomed gaily to remark, "Only five minutes late this morning, father," or "I quite forgot to order the coals, dear," confident that a frown or a hard word will end the affair, should carry into business (be it never so grave) the laxities so long permitted her in the home?
I would not charge the professional woman, as I know her, with any consistent lack of seriousness. On the contrary, she is in the main exquisitely serious. No one will deny that the average girl, when she adopts a profession, exhibits a seriousness, an energy, and a perseverance, of which the average man is apparently incapable. (It is strange that the less her aptitude, the more dogged her industry.) The seriousness of some women in Fleet Street and at the Slade School must be reckoned among the sights of London. It seems almost impossible that this priceless intensity of purpose should co-exist in the same individual with that annoying irresponsibility which I have endeavoured to account for. Yet such is the fact. Scores of instances of it might be furnished; let one, however, suffice. Once there was a woman-journalist in the North of England who wrote to a London paper for permission to act as its special correspondent during the visit of some royal personages to her town. The editor of the paper, knowing her for an industrious and conscientious worker and a good descriptive writer, gave the necessary authority, with explicit information as to the last moment for receiving copy. The moment came, but not the copy; and the editor, for the time being a raging misogynist (for he had in the meanwhile publicly announced his intention to print a special report), went to press without it. The next day, no explanation having arrived, he dispatched to his special correspondent a particularly scathing and scornful letter. Then came the excuse. It was long, but the root of it amounted to exactly this: "I was so knocked up and had such a headache after the ceremonies were over, that I really did not feel equal to the exertion of writing. I thought it would not matter." Comment would be inartistic. The curious thing is that the special correspondent was an editor's wife.
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Secondly, inattention to detail. Though this shortcoming discloses itself in many and various ways, it is to be observed chiefly in the matter of literary style. Women enjoy a reputation for slipshod style. They have earned it. A long and intimate familiarity with the manuscript of hundreds of women writers, renowned and otherwise, has convinced me that not ten per cent of them can be relied upon to satisfy even the most ordinary tests in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I do not hesitate to say that if twenty of the most honoured and popular women-writers were asked to sit for an examination in these simple branches of learning, the general result (granted that a few might emerge with credit) would not only startle themselves but would provide innocent amusement for the rest of mankind. Of course I make no reference here to the elegances and refinements of written language. My charge is that not the mere rudiments are understood. Even a lexicographer may nod, but it surely requires no intellectual power surpassing the achievement of women to refrain from regularly mis-spelling some of the commonest English words. The fact that there are niceties of syntax which have proved too much for great literary artists, does not make less culpable a wilful ignorance of the leading grammatical rules; yet the average woman will not undergo the brief drudgery of learning them. As for punctuation, though each man probably employs his own private system, women are for the most part content with one--the system of dispensing with a system.
These accusations, I am aware, have no novelty. They are time-worn. They have been insisted upon again and again; but never sufficiently. And now the accusing sub-editors and proof-readers seem to have grown weary of protest. They suffer in silence, correcting as little as they dare, while all around are appearing women's articles, which, had their authors been men, would either have met with curt refusal or been returned for thorough revision.
The root of the evil lies, as I think, in training. The female sex is prone to be inaccurate and careless of apparently trivial detail, because that is the general tendency of mankind. In men destined for a business or a profession, the proclivity is harshly discouraged at an early stage. In women, who usually are not destined for anything whatever, it enjoys a merry life, and often refuses to be improved out of existence when the sudden need arises. No one by taking thought, can deracinate the mental habits of, say, twenty years.
But some women are as accurate and as attentive to detail as the most impeccable man, while some men (such as have suffered in training) present in these respects all the characteristics usually termed feminine. Which shows that this question at any rate is not one to be airily dismissed with that over-worked quotation: "Male and female created he them."
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Thirdly, a lack of restraint. This, again, touches the matter of literary style. Many women-writers, though by no means all, have been cured of the habit of italicising, which was the outcome of a natural desire to atone for weakness by stridency. (Every writer, of whatever sex, must carry on a guerilla against this desire.) It is useless, however, to discipline a vicious instinct in one direction, if one panders to it in another. Women have given up italics; but they have set no watch against over-emphasis in more insidious forms. And so their writing is commonly marred by an undue insistence, a shrillness, a certain quality of multiloquence. With a few exceptions, the chief of whom are Jane Austen and Alice Meynell, the greatest of them suffer from this garrulous, gesticulating inefficacy. It runs abroad in Wuthering Heights and Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese. And George Eliot, for all her spurious masculinity, is as the rest. You may trace the disease in her most admired passages. For example:--
"It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after life, --the time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by a slight something--a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or an eyelid--that she is at least beginning to love him in return. The sign is so slight, it is scarcely perceptible to the ear or eye--he could describe it to no one--it is a mere feather-touch, yet it seems to have changed his whole being, to have merged an uneasy yearning into a delicious consciousness of everything but the present moment." (Adam Bede, p. 187.)
Observe here the eager iteration of the woman, making haste to say what she means, and, conscious of failure, falling back on insistence and loquacity. Exactly the same vehement spirit of pseudo-forcefulness characterises women's journalism to-day. And the worst is that these tactics inevitably induce formlessness and exaggeration; the one by reason of mere verbiage, the other as the result of a too feverish anxiety to be effective.
I submit that this lack of restraint shown by women writers as a class is due (like other defects) less to sex than to training. The value of restraint is seldom inculcated upon women. Indeed, its opposites--gush and a tendency to hysteria--are regarded, in many respectable quarters, as among the proper attributes of true womanliness; attributes to be artistically cultivated. When at length the principles on which women are brought up come to be altered, then this fault (and the others which I have mentioned) will disappear. In the meantime much can be done in individual cases by suitable moral and intellectual calisthenics.
Chapter III
The Roads towards