Woman's Place in the Business World?

N

MRS. FRANK LESLIE,

Proprietor and Manager Frank Leslie Publishing House, New York.

OT many years ago had this question been propounded to a circle of business men, the answer would have been unanimous in the negative. Within our memory woman had no place in the business world, and, indeed, seemed, in the opinion of multitudes, to have no sphere of usefulness outside of the kitchen, nursery, and society.

A woman's judgment upon financial matters began and ended with her power of getting her money's worth out of the drygoods merchant, the market man, and the grocer; also, in a good many cases, it was proved in her skill of abstracting money on various sly pretexts from her husband's unwilling pockets.

The husband, adopting the creed of his father, treated his wife just as he did his children, supplying her wants liberally if they seemed to him rational, and denying her wishes with more or less good nature if they seemed to his superior wisdom exaggerated.

After all, the principle is a sound one, that the money getter should be the money keeper and dispenser; it is in the line of justice, and that is the best law of the world in all matters purely worldly, like money earning and money spending.

Perhaps a consciousness of this "eternal fitness" in the matter has been one of the great incentives to woman's wonderful progress in these lines. Her wants have increased tenfold since the days of our meek, domestic grandmothers, and have far outrun any increased facility on the part of our natural pro

tectors, and providers for meeting them. Women saw more and more clearly that to live as they wished and expend as they liked they must have money of their own, and not depend upon the caprice or the capacity of some man's pocketbook.

Besides those who had the choice, there arose more and more prominently into view that great class of women unattached to any man; or, if attached in the sentimental sense of the word, unable to reap any practical or monetary advantages from that attachment; these, too, must live, for even blighted affections do not suffice in lieu of bread and butter.

"Men must work, and women must weep," sings the poet, but unfortunately for woman, her need of weeping does not preclude her need for work, and more and more does that necessity become obvious and pressing.

Woman's first advance into the business world was timid and tentative; she begged humbly to be allowed to do a man's work for half a man's wages, and she received uncomplainingly reproofs and sneers, and criticisms and impositions, that few men would have offered to a fellow man, and few men would have borne or remained under.

But public opinion, that most powerful of "governors" in the great engine that runs our world in this country, began first to murmur, and then to speak aloud, and at last to shout, that this style of things was both ridiculous and unjust, and therefore untenable. Public opinion announced that work should be paid for, not by the sex of employee, but by the value to the employer. If a woman puts on male attire, goes to a counting-room and does the work of a man satisfactorily and steadily, why as soon as her sex is discovered and she puts on feminine garb is she to be cut down a third or a half from her former wages? But an inborn prejudice is very hard to kill, especially in the minds of those who profit by the perpetuity of that prejudice, and all classes of employers, although not all employers in any class, still persist in the mean discrimination of sex in their payments for work equally well done by male and female employees.

A friend of my own, a woman of singularly fine and logical intellect, wrote several articles for a magazine. The correspondence was at first carried on under her initials, and the publishers, supposing her to be a man, made liberal payment for the two papers, at the same time requesting more. Another paper of equal merit in every way was sent with the mention that the writer was a woman. Payment was made in due course, but of just two-thirds the amount paid for each of the previous papers.

But woman's courage and perseverance already have conquered many obstacles to her success, and will in the end conquer all. She has "come to stay" in the business world as surely as in the world of home and of society, where her place has always been conceded.

More than this, the timid employee, underpaid and slighted, although the pioneer of the advancing army, no longer stands alone or unsupported. Women of capital, of position, and of a sublime faith in themselves and their ability, have come to the front, and taken up their position as leaders and commanders. The old sneer and smile have died off the lips of even conservative men, and few will now deny that woman is a power to be considered not only in the world at large, but in the world of business especially. And why not? Most women have keener insight, quicker perceptions, readier resource, and more fertile brains than most men. Women of the class likely to undertake the lead in business are, as a rule, braver than men, that is to say have more faith in themselves, and are less liable to panic.

"Pretty bad times just now, but we shall come out all right in the end," said a business woman to me the other day, and, before the hour was out, a man gloomily remarked, "I see nothing but ruin ahead, and, if it were not for the disgrace, I would end it all to-night."

Perhaps at present this optimistic faculty in woman may make her a little rash, a little headstrong in business. enterprises, but this is a fault which will mend itself with

experience. Woman is quick to learn, and not too proud to abandon a mistaken course as soon as she perceives her mistake; she is at once more daring and more cautious than man, and hence one of her most important positions in the business. world, especially of the future; she can and she will open paths on which men would never have ventured, but will stanchly follow so soon as he is convinced of their safety.

A heavy fieldpiece is very effective when securely planted, but the light cavalry are the guides who will test the ground before the artillery ventures upon the possible morass.

Woman's place in business, do you ask? It is at man's side, as in every other relation in life. Her mission is to bring her delicate perceptions, her quick intuitions, her inherent conscientiousness, into the arena where they have been sadly needed and often wanting. She can lead and she can follow with equal facility; she will set herself and her sex upon a vantage ground they have never yet occupied in this world's history, and she will at once elevate and diversify the monotonous levels and unhealthy swamps of business ways and walks.

Her place is like the place of the air-everywhere, and of vital need to everybody, diffusive, penetrative, universal; never obtrusive, except when unjustly opposed, and then a power which, although soft and intangible to the grasp, can overturn the steam engine, which has always seemed to me a very type of masculinity.

Literary and Professional Women.

MRS. MARY A. LIVERMORE, Melrose, Mass.

F the women of the early century, in America, could have looked down the years with prophetic vision, their lonely and unsatisfied souls would have been amazed at the quantity and quality of the literary work of the women of to-day. For American women have attained a phenomenal prominence in literature at the present time, and many of them stand in the front rank as writers of ability. One of the most successful magazine managers declares that "of the fifteen most successful books published in the last two years, eleven were written by women."

Miss Hannah Adams, born in Massachusetts, in 1755, was the precursor and the pioneer of the literary woman of to-day. From her "Autobiography," published in 1832, when she was seventy-seven years old, we are made acquainted with the difficulties that hedged up her path to authorship, which were even more serious than those surmounted by Harriet Martineau, the foremost literary Englishwoman of the last century. In addition to these, she believed so completely in the mental inferiority of women, as announced by men at that time, that she was almost broken down by an abject depreciation of her Her "History of New England," written in the stiff and formal style of the day, is in many of the older libraries-a book which nearly cost her her eyesight, but which yielded her very little in the way of pecuniary compensation.

sex.

After Miss Adams, and near the close of the eighteenth century, came Miss Catharine Sedgwick, and Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney. The former wrote mild novels, illustrative of New England