THE AMERICAN BACHELOR GIRL’S CODE OF ETIQUETTE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XX, Issue XIV, 2 April 1898, Page 408

THE AMERICAN BACHELOR GIRL’S CODE OF ETIQUETTE.

A young woman and a young man entered a street car together the other afternon in New York, and were talking sociably when the conductor came for fares. In a flash the young woman handed him a coin. ‘Two,’ she said. The conductor seemed amused as he fished for change. The young man looked very eloquent. ‘l’ll get even with you yet,’ he was heard to say. ‘Get even all you want,’ said the girl, snapping her purse together; ‘it’s the doing more than that, that’s against the creed. If you rode home from business with a man friend you wouldn’t always pay his fare anymore than he would pay yours. You’d share and share between you, and no fuss would be made about it. A girl in business should insist on being treated purely as an individual and not as a woman.’ ‘The girl was right,’ said a woman bachelor in speaking of the incident. ‘These very little courtesies and deferences that men habitually pay to woman are a elog to her business advancement. Even- the lifting of a man's hat to his typewriter, and his standing aside to let her pass. are. stumbling blocks in her business career. Explain it? Why, this way. There are girls working now for $l2 a week where if they were men of the same capacity and intelligence, they would command $lB. As long as women in business go on letting men treat them as though they were on a different plane, observing usages and customs

that obtain in social life, they will be set apart in the matter of standing and wages also. When the business woman stops expecting, and accepting, courtesies which had their source in an entirely different order of things, when there were no women wage-earners to consider at all, men will consent to acknowledge her worth on its own merits, and pay her the same for her services as a man is paid. When a man clerk has a sweetheart he is so much out, so far as expense is considered, but when a woman clerkhas a sweetheart, he is a source of income to her, from a money point of view. He gets her theatre tickets, pays her car fare, supplies her with flowers, jewellery, candy, perfumery, gloves, what not. Business men and business women can’t stand on an evenly adjusted plane as long as that sort of thing holds. That is the outcome of etiquette observance established when there were no women wage-earners. It is -precisely because more is expected of a man, because there are more demands on his purse, that the business firms pay him more and pay their women workers less. When the new era dawns and no more is expected of a man, in a monetary way than of a woman, then either the man’s wages will be lowered to the woman’s standard, or her salary will be raised to his. Both will fare alike. Busmess women are outside the pale of ordinary social observance. They are an anomaly. The dictums and regulations that hold good for women of leisure were made to fit an entirely different order of living. For instance, in the matter of acquaintances. In social life a girl’s men acquaintances are only those men whom her father, brother, or other relatives elect to introduce to her. The girl in business is in a different atmosphere. Her business absorbs her time and cuts her off from chances for making purely social acquaintances. She meets men in a business way, but she has to judge for herself as to their fitness or unfitness for her friendship. If she accepts attentions from these informal acquaintances she runs counter to the code which would discountenance such a departure, and the. simplest way out of the dilemma is for her to receive these attentions just as a comrade, insisting upon reciprocating them, and so avoid embarrassment.’ ‘You mean that if a man asks a business woman to take luncheon with him, or to go to a play, the courtesy should be returned if sheaccepts?’ this adovcate of a new code was asked. ‘Certainly, if she met him in a business way, and she likes him well enough on further acquaintance. Ofcourse, the woman who had some social experience, before she launched out in business, and was brought up with the old stereotyped notions, will never be able to rid herself of her prejudices, but there’s no reason why girls who step directly from the school room into business should be hampered with a lot of regulations that never in any case apply to them, or to anything in their world. The young business woman should have acquaintances even if made informally. It i:» not natural that she should have no genial influences in her life at all, and her business occupies nearly all her days. If, therefore, she accepts attentions from acquaintances made in a business way, just as if she were a man, then she must return them, just as a man does. ‘At present, with the average man getting higher wages than the average woman, the man must take the initiative because he has more income. The code of social relation, as it exists now, is responsible for this state of things, but the bicycle, and the twentieth century girl’s common sense together is an entering wedge for a new code in the every-day work-a-day world, and even so small a matter as car fare shows which way the wind blows.’