Journalism for Women | Page 5

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 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, I would recommend you, unless you are assured of a genuine predisposition towards it, to find another and less exhausting, less disappointing occupation than journalism. For it will surely prove both exhausting and disappointing to those whose hearts are not set fast upon it.
But how are you, the woman who desires to be a journalist, to ascertain whether you have that