Journalism for Women | Page 5

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."
* * * * *
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 Journalism

More women long and strive to be journalists than by natural gifts are
fitted for the profession. By itself, the wish is no evidence of latent
capacity. Such desire may be induced by the need to earn a livelihood;
or by the peremptory impulse to do something which drives forward so
many women to-day; or perhaps through conversing with an
enthusiastic journalist; or by printed statements as to the incomes and
influence of certain famous members of the craft; or by the mere
glamour which surrounds the newspaper life; or in forty other ways.
The practice of journalism does not demand intellectual power beyond
the endowment of the average clever brain. It is less difficult, I should
say, to succeed moderately in journalism than to succeed moderately in

dressmaking. Any woman of understanding and education, provided
she has good health and the necessary iron determination, can become a
competent journalist of sorts if she chooses to put herself into hard
training for a year or two--and this irrespective of natural bent. Yet
even so,