Chapter III: Barred From the Professions

Taking professional careers as a speculation, i.e., carefully counting the outlay and what it is likely to bring in, can we deny what a University woman once said: “With training at one British and at two foreign universities, and all our degrees, as well as dancing, singing, music, painting, riding and other accomplishments, should we not have been, so far as actual monetary gain is concerned, better off had we learnt to stick labels on jam-pots?”

Look what a barrister’s education costs, and yet “briefless barristers” amongst men are the rule, not the exception. Hear what young barristers have to do and put up with until they can get their chance. Remember that some have to leave the thorny road without securing even a chance. For men, the Bar is a great career fraught with passionate interest, but bristling with disappointments. The prizes are few and far between. What then has taken woman along that most difficult of difficult ways? Is it a real love of the profession? Or is it a vain desire to be amongst the first interesting few? Has she any real chance of success at the Bar?

Some people are inclined to think women ought to be able to plead for their own sex better than men—but can they? Have they the sound logic of the man barrister? Is not his fox-craftiness, cynicism, and self-possession more necessary than the fund of emotion which is her trump card? Perhaps the very qualities she is relying on to win her case will lose it. It must be a long while before women can make a name for themselves at the Bar, for only _super_ women will ever get briefs. “We trust women doctors with our lives,” it is said. “Yes, but you trust the woman lawyer with your purse!”

From the first, Mlle. Miropolsky, the brilliant Polish-French barrister, herself a woman of unusual intelligence, very wisely placed a rich barrister husband between herself and the financial side of life. In any case, both have exceptional personalities, and are leaders in their profession.

But would anyone in their senses consider the Bar as a suitable _provision_ for the average woman?

In Medicine, though physically hard on women, and despite the cost of the long years of training, there is more chance of success. To begin with, the East can utilize a great many women doctors, and in the medical mission field they have proved their unique worth. Yet in spite of the war, sex-prejudice has not vanished, and only women of exceptional personality can keep a practice together. And despite all that has been said or written to the contrary, it will be long before this prejudice disappears. Her sex is against women here as in so many other fields of endeavour. When one recognises how much personality and capacity public opinion demands from a woman doctor, and how all her little slips are multiplied a thousandfold, one sees that medicine can only be a stop-gap, and that the experiment is indeed costly.

In the early days, suffragettes quoted the father who said: “Had my girl been a boy, I would have risked the money and put him in practice; but, with my limited income, that would be too much to ask me for a girl.”

As an investment, medicine for women is very risky. When the career is completed, a practice has to be bought. How is her health to stand the strain? Has she enough courage and personality to keep up her practice? Surely most fathers would do better if they used the money to purchase an annuity instead of spending it on training.

Another great drawback to the woman doctor is the refusal of other women to trust her judgment. As a confessor, where above all one would have prophesied her success,—and every doctor is to a certain extent a confessor—she often fails. Is it lack of heart and of understanding, or simply of _savoir-faire_? The fact remains, however, that a large number of women, seeking the mental help that a doctor so often gives, would unburden themselves more readily to a man.

When a man and a woman, both doctors, work together, the partnership is generally a success, and not only among married couples. The friendship of mutual interests, _where no love comes in_, often raises both to great heights of purpose, and achieves much that is conspicuously worth while. If one, or both, are married, so much the better.

The solitary, spinster-practitioner can have no secretary in her work. In partnership the strain is diminished for both, and the patients feel much greater confidence with a man in the background.

The two professions for which, at any rate in the past, no special training was required, are journalism and the stage. In these professions competition is fiercest. It is not always the best written work which pays; it is not the most talented actress who wins public applause. There are hundreds, however, who love the excitement of trying to find even a tiny corner of their own in these streets of adventure, and they are ready to go through fire to secure it.

The University of Columbia, U.S.A., has now a Chair for “Journalism,” which shows the value of training in this profession. Paris has a Conservatoire where all their artists are trained, free of charge, after admission by open competition. The preliminary work thus entailed, however, does not in the least diminish the keen competition that we must expect in professions which hold the chance of such big possibilities. Yet once more, for both, good health is absolutely indispensable. The harassing strain of uncertainty plays havoc with the finest constitution, and the public, out for amusement and interest, has no time for waning or fallen stars.

The fact is that women are only fitted constitutionally for certain kinds of journalism. The office night-work is too exhausting, and the path of the War Correspondent is one no woman should seek to tread. There are insurmountable difficulties all the way, and, speaking from personal experience, I am convinced that she can only pull through at all by throwing herself on the chivalry of men. In the French army, officers were seriously punished for uselessly exposing men’s lives; yet in order to furnish the sensational head-line of “A Woman in the Trenches,” fathers of families had to risk their lives to protect her, to my certain knowledge, over and over again. It ought not to be allowed.

In the early Victorian era, teaching and nursing used to be the two professions for women. They were both badly paid, and if the school teacher had little or no prestige, the governess had none at all. Nursing was and is still done in hospitals for a pittance; private work is better paid, but the women who do it tell me they dislike the profession.

Both teaching and nursing are, however, vocations, and girls who only take them for want of something better, do not, of course, give their best. Yet no work requires women of more solid character. They have at their mercy, to make or to mar, the young and the sick, yet candidates for these professions cannot be chosen. Neither nursing nor teaching, taken seriously, is a sinecure, and again robust health is required for both.

In the arts, _i.e._, music, painting and literature, training is not enough, and since men have not only to be put on their feet but “seen through,” women must also be “seen through.” Genius, generally speaking, will find its public, but the arts too frequently mean that lessons are given for bread and butter. From both the artistic and financial aspect, however, one wonders whether such poor results are really worth while. Things have naturally been much worse since the War.

The hand-to-mouth, Quartier Latin or Chelsea Studio existence is all very well as a stop-gap, for a change or even a picnic; but what of the future? When is the woman paid enough at this work to save for her old age. It simply cannot be done. There is Florence Barclay, it is true, who made more than enough for a life-time with one book—and there are other exceptions. But these are rare enough to be called miraculous.

In the Middle Ages, teaching and nursing were done by nuns. They gave their lives to the community; and the community cared for them—in sickness, unto death. Nowadays, if women still give their lives to the community, a lay community, the community (or the State) must see that they never want.

Considering the strain of teaching, the terrible risks of nursing, and the uncertainty of women being strong enough to pursue their work after middle age, they ought not to be left dependent upon any profession that does not carry with it the security of a pension; unless, indeed, they are well insured, and, for greater safety, insured by the State.

A profession cannot be abandoned and then picked up again for rainy days. A woman will come back, as men have, to find herself out of date, out of the running. She is not wanted; her place is taken by younger women.

In every profession—the Bar, Medicine, Teaching, Nursing, or Journalism, woman is hindered by her physique. It is idle to contend with the statistics which prove how many women between forty and fifty break down seriously, and never get fit again. Even in partnership with men, where all the risks are obviously diminished, they must be sure of provision in case of sickness. Most professions are good ladders but bad crutches. Under the present conditions of destructive competition, they too often prove no more than an expensive hobby.