THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
437
likely she would be sent out late or to the police court if there were a man available who could be relied upon to do the work equally well, therefore the assignment is in the nature of a compliment. But for whatever motive sent she should go, and the old adage about women carrying chips on their shoulders is applicable here.
It would be a good deal more humiliating to the aspiring woman to be kept in the office cutting out fashion pictures for the woman’s page than to be given a man’s assignment. Human prejudice nowhere counts for more than in journalism, and there are editors still to be found, who, other things being equal, will give a journalistic commission to a man rather than to a woman. That good friend to all deserving woman, Mr. W. T. Stead, of the “ Review of Reviews,” is the only editor I have ever heard plead guilty to the opposite prejudice. He declares it his policy to never employ a man when he can employ a woman to do the work as well.
The most successful writer is the one who is never caught napping concerning any topic of immediate public interest. As women in journalism we must not be behind the times in current matters of art, religion and politics unless we would be ranked veritable stupids, and though we have all the great authors and poets at our pen’s end, such culture will not insure success in journalism. Likewise the natural gifts of sympathy, tact and originality of expression, while they all tend to stamp the writer with characteristics peculiarly her own and add to the charm of her work, yet natural gifts alone will not make a good journalist.
Knowledge precise and sound may be said to be the grand fundamental principle of journalistic work. First to know something to write, and then to know how to write it, is the never-failing advice from editors. We are enjoined to be original, and this according to Carlyle meant simply to be sincere.
The most cruel, as it seemed to me then in my “ salad days,” the most senseless advice I ever received from an editor was this: “ After you have finished your copy take a blue pencil and go over it from beginning to end, killing off every adverb and adjective and quotation there is in it. Read it over twice without them and you will probably never put them in again.”
I wondered then why he should have recommended a blue pencil in preference to any other for the killing off process. Alas! I have since learned that of all weapons used in journalistic warfare, the blue pencil is the most deadly. And I have learned the method in the madness of killing off adjectives and adverbs was to break up all tendency to the “ composition style of writing, which we unconsciously bring from school with us and which is such “ bad form” in journalism.
But after all cut-and-dried rules and regulations have been observed, still will the manuscript sometimes be returned, as often without thanks as with, or, w r orse yet, basketed. But this need discourage no one. It may mean anything rather than that the writer can not write. It may only mean that the subject was a week too late or too early for the paper to which it was sent. It may be just in time for some other paper. What one editor refuses another will accept. This return of manuscript as unavailable is one of the trials of women in journalism, and if the truth be told, only one of many.
But in the end, those who have weathered the discouragements readily declare the game to be. well worth the candle. The newspaper is the educator of the public, and men and women who write in newspapers have the best ooportunities for creating public opinion. Earnest workers among women journalists realize they are always on trial before the public, and that they have the honor of their sex, which means the regulation of one half the human race, more in their keeping than any other women of equal numbers. They have asked the public to take them at their own higher appraisement, and to judge of their work as work, and not merely as the work of women. They know their colleagues of the other sex watch them with an attention naturally critical, but not always sympathetic; therefore, for the sake of all they hold dear, they are endeavoring to give the enemy no occasion to blaspheme by pointing to either their work or their behavior as conclusive reasons why there should be no women in journalism.