Annie Laurie

The Western Sentinel/April 23, 1909

A well known and extremely clever woman made a speech at the Women’s Wage Earner’s Convention the other day, and in that speech she said not once but many times that the one thing important for working women to do was to range themselves together to fight the tyrant man.

What on earth are women who say things like that thinking about?

Women wage earners are paid salaries to do their work—not to be women.

The man who wants a competent stenographer doesn’t care whether that stenographer is black, white, green or yellow; old or young, man or woman. Half the time he really doesn’t know. All he knows is that his work is well done, in which case the stenographer gets a good salary and holds on to a good position.

Or that the work is ill done; in which case the stenographer gets a poor salary and will lose the position the very first time there’s chance to employ someone more competent.

The factory girl who gets fired for being late to work is fired not because she’s a girl, but because she’s late.

There is and should be no such thing as sex in business.
A business woman who wants to succeed never says anything about her headache or her backache or her home troubles to the man who pays her salary. She isn’t a woman to him, she’s an employee, and if she has any self-respect at all, that’s what she wants to be.

The fact is, men in business are not tyrannical enough to women in business.

The average man is so much kinder to his woman stenographer than he is to his male clerks that the idea of calling him a tyrant in his dealings with women is a joke.

Business men put up with enough silly incompetence from women to make them out a title clear to the name of martyr, and not to the name of tyrant.

It’s all wrong, the whole woman in business proposition; all wrong.

Women ought not to have to be in business at all. But as long as they do have to be in business then they must attend to business and expect to be treated like paid employees, and not like personal friends.

If women would “range themselves together” to do the work they are paid to do, and let it go at that, there would “conventions” and in their listening to speeches about the “tyrant man” who pays them the money that buys their bread and butter.