s: thus she plans, organizes, conquers, and governs. People
speak of her existence as that of a doll or a toy, when she is the most
untiring of campaigners. Grant that her aim is, after all, unworthy, and
that you pity the worn face which has to force so many smiles. No matter:
the smiles are there, and so is the success. I often wish that the
reformers would do their work as thoroughly as the women of society do
theirs.

No, there is no constitutional want of thoroughness in women. The trouble
is that into the new work upon which they are just entering they have not
yet brought their thoroughness to bear. They suffer and are defrauded and
are reproached, simply because they have not yet nerved themselves to do
well the things which they have asserted their right to do. A distinguished
woman, who earns one of the largest incomes ever honestly earned by any one
of her sex, off the stage, told me the other day that she left all her
business affairs to the management of others, and did not even know how to
draw a check on a bank. What a melancholy self-exhibition was that of a
clever American woman, whom I knew, the author of half a dozen successful
books, refusing to look her own accounts in the face until they had got
into such a tangle that not even her own referees could disentangle them to
suit her! These things show, not that women are constitutionally wanting in
thoroughness, but that it is hard to make them carry this quality into new
fields.

I wish I could possibly convey to the young women who write for advice on
literary projects something of the meaning of this word "thorough" as
applied to literary work. Scarcely any of them seem to have a conception of
it. Dash, cleverness, recklessness, impatience of revision or of patient
investigation, these are the common traits. To a person of experience,
no stupidity is so discouraging as a brilliancy that has no roots. It
brings nothing to pass; whereas a slow stupidity, if it takes time enough,
may conquer the world. Consider that for more than twenty years the path of
literature has been quite as fully open for women as for men, in America,--
the payment the same, the honor the same, the obstacles no greater.
Collegiate education has until quite recently been denied them, but how
many men succeed as writers without that advantage! Yet how little, how
very little, of permanent literary work has yet been done by American
women! Young girls appear one after another: ea