Page:Women Wanted.djvu/225

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THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE
207

captains of industry in training, there is a blackboard. See the chalk marked diagram. By the routes mapped out in those white lines, they have brought furs from Russia, wheat from Canada, sugar from Hawaii. And all the money transactions involved have been properly put through. Thoroughly familiarised like this with international operations, there is more to learn for the making of a financier. I doubt if any but a woman would think to teach it. Miss Elizabeth Rachel Wylie, who directs the Financial Centre, recalls her classes from the wide world of affairs through which they circle the globe, for personal instruction. They have now the groundwork of the knowledge with which a business man is familiar. And Miss Wylie adds earnestly, impressively the last lesson: "Don't darn."

You see, captains of industry don't. Even so much as an office boy who aspires to become a captain of industry doesn't. And the woman in the office who spends her evenings mending her stockings and washing her handkerchiefs, misses, say, the moving pictures where the man in the office is adding to his stock of general information. This tendency to revert to type has been the fatal handicap of the past. By the faint beginnings of an intention to discard it, you differentiate the new woman in commerce from her predecessor the business woman. By way of discipline that girl there at the green cloth covered table, whose bag of war knitting hangs on the back of her chair the while she's shipping furs from Russia, will leave it at home to-morrow. Cecile Bor-