WOMEN AT WORK

Shannon News, 19 February 1929, Page 4

WOMEN AT WORK

Are They Too Self-Conscious?

One of' the criticisms persistently levelled by masculine critics is that women are too ludicrously self-conscious in their various wage-earning roles, particularly m those professions and branches of industry newly opened to feminine competition. It cannot be denied that such criticism may hold some element of truth. But it is a symptom that need not unduly alarm those gallant pioneers who have led the van-' guard of the fight for women’s political" anjjl industrial freedom and selfdetermination. Nor will it affright or surprise any shrewd, sane and really intelligent masculine observer. 'He knows that it will wear off, like the naive self-consciousness of the average man who dons a new suit for the first time. ,

Indeed, on this not-inapt analogy, women should, with their firmer tradition of novelty and change,as well as their keener sense of life’s spectacular theatricalism, more speedily emerge from the emphasised self-consciousncss stage than did man in his own pioneering days. One may quite logically in-, fer that, aw r ay back in the firstddarnw r n of mankind’s discovery of the world arena beyond his cave-man existence, he was not without his exaggerated self-consciousness, too. The first man to push his canoe across the perils of the flood must have been aware of acute personal uplift. He had, most probably, a nervous tingling as he felt the eyes of contemporary criticism fixed on his bold debut. Is it any marvel—still less any reproach—that the woman pioneers of to-day are a little self-conscious? It may be true that they are only doing what men did centuries ago. But remember that they are now doing it for the first time, and they are aware that their every action is being watched in not always toofriend'y a fashion.

One cannot imagine that the first, woman motor driver who took her place in a queue of vehicles all wfith masculine drivers was not self-con-scious. She would not be a woman, nor a* human being, but a cubist monster. And the members of the public themselves emphasise this selfconscious impression. The first woman - who wore breeches was mobbed. Might- she not be forgiven for feeling a trifle self-conscious, equally with the first man to display an < umbrella in the streets? The latter /poor soul, must have been frightfully self-con-scious, because they promptly stoned him. f

The way of the woman pioneer and those who follow her is made even more self-conscious by reason of the unjust generalisations about her fellow women that dog her every movement. Any mistake that she may make becomes a mistake made by “all women” who follow that particular profession. The same mistake if made by a man would be sheeted home to him personally; ‘all men” Would not be condemned.

Long ago Tennyson hinted in smooth iambics that women were too self-con-scious in their newly acquired academic learning. That they did not wear it gracefully ‘as a feather in the cap.’ Already we have got past that. ' Educated women are to-day so numerous that nobody gets excited about their learning, and they themselves take their degrees as the merest matter of course. It will be just the same in much shorter time than is generally contemplated, in all the other new ventures of modern womanhood.