MONEY-MAKING WOMEN.
THOSE who deny the mental equality of women and men might add a line to the four in which Ebenezer Elliott, himself a believer in the other sex, registered the more con- spicuous of their failures :-
" She hath no Raphael, Painting saith ; No Newton, Learning cries ; Show us her steamship, her Macbeth, Her thought-won victories."
Nor hath she a Rothschild, business moans ; and really the failure is an odd one, almost as inexplicable as the inability of women who have delighted in music for ages, and have been more trained than men to practise it, to produce a com- poser even of the second class. If in creative power they are the equals, or as their advocates sometimes say, the superiors, of men, why do they not produce a Mendelssohn or a Wagner ? There seems to be absolutely no reason why no great maker of fortunes should be recorded among women. They are distinctly successful ae mathematicians, they have never been debarred by law from trading, and they have frequently in modern times had possession of sufficient capital, the want of which, indeed, would be no excuse, as fortunes have constantly been made by men who came to the Metropolis with the proverbial half-crown. No physical requirement except health promotes success in business, no education beyond a knowledge of ciphering can be proved to be neces- sary, and the prejudice against women trading has always been of the faintest kind ; indeed, in some branches of busi- nese it cannot be said ever to have existed. There seems, in fact, to be positively no reason why a woman should not have set up a great bank, or have founded a great insurance office, or have built up a distributing business until it became as great as that of the late Mr. Stewart, of New York, who left nearly twenty millions. They ought, in particular, to have been the jewellers of the world. Women desire money as much as men ; they are often extremely economical, not to say avaricious ; and they frequently display a power of clinging to property such as no men, however tenacious of their pos- sessions could possibly surpass. The failure is the more remarkable because women often make admirable managers, conduct complicated businesses like hotel-keeping with greater skill than men, and have been trusted for ages with the con- trol of household finance. The bank clerks of the Continent, the cashiers of shops, and the collectors of accounts are half of them women, and there, at least, they are believed to show in those departments of life more skill, more assiduity, and, curiously enough, more honesty than the majority of men. No one who has ever watched them carefully believes that women are more extravagant than men, they are at least as persevering, and we find no reason to believe that they have the smallest repugnance to any business in which money can be made by the kind of brain-work which goes to the building up of a successful commercial concern. They do not, as a matter of fact, go bankrupt in anything like the same pro- portion as men, still less incur the penalties of the law for either forgery, embezzlement, or fraud. Why, then, do they fail to grow rich, like men, through business, and why do men when drawing their wills so constantly doubt whether it is quite safe to leave them in the position of executors or trustees, and hesitate to trust wives whom they have con- sulted all their lives with the unchecked disposition of funds which, nevertheless, they know will be honestly administered exactly according to their wishes? The mass of legal arrange- ments made in England to prevent women from wasting in- heritances, dowers, and acquisitions generally, is positively stupendous, while lawyers, who of all men ought to know, and who can have no special prejudice against the sex, pro- claim with one voice that, allowing always for rare indi- vidual exceptions, no property is safe which is intrusted to the unchecked control of a woman. They cannot, say the solicitors, understand business any more than priests.
It is all, say the advanced women, a defect of training.
Women are never " taught " business, and therefore never understand it, while the general and gross neglect to give them broad education prevents them from making up by
general culture for the want of special instruction in business matters. Look, they say, at the "Girton girls," their
splendid economy, and their success in managing their affairs. If women were but trained like men, they would rival them in business as they do already in mathematics, in
classical learning, and in at least one department of litera- ture. We cannot honestly say we quite believe the excuse, for, after all, many of the successful business men of the world were not originally " trained " to business, while general education does so little for them that in all Stock Exchanges and places where men buy and sell there is an immovable opinion, sure to have some foundation in experi- ence, that men of broad, and still more of deep, culture become in some way unfitted for money-making, and when they succeed, do so either by virtue of some special gift of enter- prise, which is, of coarse, independent of the gifts which incline a man to learning, or of some power of picking agents and assistants well, a power which might belong to a Newton as well as to the smallest and most ignorant speculator in bonds. The reason of women's comparative failure in busi- ness must lie deeper than that, and is probably to be sought ultimately among unalterable sex differences, the disposition of women to trust to intuition rather than reason, their incurable readiness to believe that those whom they like will not cheat them, and their want of courage in run- ning business risks, a want of necessity fatal to any great successes. A woman believes in a speculation because she believes in it, and for no reason, good or bad; she is certain that the people she likes will not defraud her solely because she likes them, and she will shrink back in the hour of fortune because she has a presentiment against going on, that is, in reality, because her mind has turned away to some- thing else than money-making. "Never trust feminine finance," said Sidonia, and that is the experience of all professionally charged with investing for them. Bess of Hardwick, the greatest feminine money-maker of English history, made it not for herself or for itself, but out of love for the Cavendishes, and would have been ruined in a year if that family had been spendthrift ; while the women who stop when on the road to fortune are almost as numerous as the women, never much of a multitude, who get their feet fairly planted on that, to men, over-alluring path.
Nevertheless, we entirely agree with the advanced women, that the sex generally is neglected in the matter of business training, and that the evil ought to be remedied in ordinary education. Every one of them ought to listen to, and if possible imbibe thoroughly, lectures like those which Mr. Bertrand Stewart recently delivered before the students of the Home Education Society, in which he endeavoured, in a rather dry way, we fear, to make his audience understand mysteries like the nature of Console, which men unravel almost unconsciously while transacting the daily business of life. It is a little too absurd that girls who will be heiresses should, while their fathers live, never understand what a bank- ing account means, should regard investments as attractive in proportion to the interest they are promised to yield, should look upon insurance as a hopeless mathematical mystery, and should be profoundly ignorant of the extent of the powers they are giving to their relatives, lawyers, lovers, or other trusted advisers. The young heiress who, when warned by her bankers that her account was overdrawn, sent them by return of post a large cheque on their own bank, must have been something of a goose; but every one has known among female acquaintances instances of ignorance nearly as gross. It is a fact, we believe, for instance, proved on oath in Court, that an East Anglian lady of intelligence and means gave a solicitor, who afterwards absconded, an absolute power of attorney to sell her properties under the impression that she was giving him authority to act as her solicitor in a suit. The commonest rules of will-making—the fact, for instance, that a legatee must not be a witness—are unknown to half the intelligent women of England, while their ignorance about their liabilities under a lease is positively complete. The majority of them do not even know the common law of master and servant, though the servants usually do know it, while their cardinal notion as to the law of libel is that if they are told anything, legal responsibility for repeating it rests only with the teller. We entirely agree in the suggestion that a business class would be a most useful addition to every high school in the country ; but whether it will make all girls women of business is another matter. What seems to be required for that is rather mental training, the creation of a habit of mind rather than technical knowledge of any kind. You may teach all girls what Consols are, as Mr. Stewart wants to do, and be as lucid about it as he is, and when you have done, one half of them will still believe that 5 per cent. is the natural interest of money, and fail to see that the man who promises a certainty of 50 per cent. from a speculation would, if he were certain, keep his 50 per cent. for himself and his friends. The "brutal" question, Why should a Pennsyl- vanian offer Londoners 1,500 per cent. for their money—the offer is actually in circulation—when Philadelphia is over- flowing with capital P seems somehow or other never to rise to a woman's lips, and if the promoter who offers it is personally known to her it keeps away even from her thought. Still, a little more early instruction in " the elementary facts " of business would make thousands of women's lives much happier, and they ought to have it, even though at the end of the curriculum they believe in endless entails and their con- sequent claim to the manor sold half a century before under a decree of Court.
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