The Business of Being a WomanTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
General
The Business of Being a Woman
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Women -- Social and moral questions
But it takes more than a college course to make an efficient,
flexible, and trustworthy organ from a mind, masculine or feminine.
It must be applied to productive labor in competition with other
trained minds, before you can decide what it is worth. Set the
man-trained woman's mind at what is called man's business, let it be
what you will--keeping a shop, practicing medicine or law, editing,
running a factory--let her do it in what she considers to be a man's
way, and with fidelity to her original theory that his way is more
desirable than hers; that is, let her succeed in the task of making a
man of herself--what about her?--what kind of a man does she become?
Here again there is ample experience to go on. For seventy years we
have had them with us--the stern disciples of the militant program.
Greater fidelity to a task than they show it would be impossible to
find--a fidelity so unwavering that it is often painful. Their care
for detail, for order, for exactness, is endless. Dignity, respect for
their undertaking, devotion to professional etiquette they may be
counted on to show in the highest degree. These are admirable
qualities. They have led hundreds of women into independence and good
service. Almost never, however, have they led one to the top. In free
fields such as merchandising, editing, and manufacturing we have yet
to produce a woman of the first caliber; that is, daring,
experimenting, free from prejudice, with a vision of the future great
enough to lead her to embody something of the future in her task.
In every profession we have scores of successful women--almost never a
_great_ woman, and yet the world is full of great women! That is, of
women who understand, are familiar with the big sacrifices,
appreciative of the fine things, far-seeing, prophetic. Why does this
greatness so rarely find expression in their professional
undertakings?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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