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The Woman's World
Marion Phillips Defends The Business Woman
WOMAN THE IDEAL SECRETARY
Can Keep Secrets Better Than Men
Dr. Marion Phillips, the Australian woman member of Parliament in
the House of Commons, has taken up the cudgels in the English press
in defence of the business woman.
Men, she complains, are always writing, lecturing, and broadcasting
on why woman can't do this or that, but it is admitted that they make
better secretaries than men.
"Yet to be a good secretary," says Dr.
Marion, "demands the very qualities which
are most often denied to women by her
critics.
NOT YET IN THEIR STRIDE
"A good secretary must be secret, dis-
creet, patient, conscientious, and, above all,
ready to sink her own personality and in-
terests in those of her employer; whereas
women are constantly being told that they
are egotists, capricious, forgetful and im-
pulsive, and especially that no one can trust
them to keep silence.
"The trouble is that
women have only re-
cently begun to write
or talk in public about
anything at all. They
have not yet got into
their stride, and but
just begun to write of
women, so we still
learn of women from
what men have written
and said about them.
"I am convinced,"
she says, "that it is
woman's maternal in-
stinct that makes her such a success as a sec-
retary. So readily does she play second-fiddle
to her principal, with all her energy pro-
viding the background against which he may
stand out triumphant, just as a mother who
presses back while her child says his piece.
"So, again, with quiet and discreet com-
forting, she makes good any weakening after
he has blundered, so that she may send him
out once more warm in self-confidence.
"SAFETY VALVE"
"There is no more admirable safety valve
than the skilled secretary, whose mothering
instinct is proof against irritability, failure
or mediocrity. She falls very easily into the
harmonies of second fiddle, ready even where
the initiative is hers to let the world think
otherwise.
"As to her discretion! It is strange to
think how many of the secrets of the world
are in her hands.
"In 20 years of political life I can remem-
ber a great many 'leakages' of informa-
tion. In no single instance that I can re-
call has a woman been either suspected or
proved to be the guilty person.
"The woman spies of history and fiction
are comparatively few; those that there are
have never been secretaries; always they
have gained their knowledge by the well-
worn paths of the affections and not through
stenography.
THE MAN TALKED
"I once knew of a secret which was to
be kept for two months. It was known to
15 women and two men. It remained a secret
until one of the men was overheard telling
it to a chance-met friend in a cafe.
"I always felt inclined to utter a cry of
warning to women, concerning their success
as secretaries. Fo they may make a vice
out of a virtue; they may become second
fiddle too easily and let their own powers
rust from disuse.
THE SUPER-SECRETARY
"The kind of secretary—the very devil of
a Mussolini—who lives by driving com-
mittees, conferences, and eventually Cabinets
and League of Nations Councils, is a very
different being. Florence Nightingale had
this quality—this compulsion to develop her
own initiative. She belonged to the race of
super-secretaries, who itch to organise others'
lives, and, maybe, it is a super-maternal in-
stinct which drives them into activity.
"To join their ranks, even as a trumpeter,
is to say good-bye to peace, but it is never-
theless better to be among those who com-
pose the melody."
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Dr. Marion
Phillips
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