c. March-April 1904 — Annual luncheon, Cornell alumnae, Murray Hill Hotel, New York City

Nearly all women who escape matrimony and the schoolroom try for journalism. I have been rubbing up against journalism myself, and I have a profound respect for the woman who succeeds in it. if she can endure the first six months of brutalizing experiences, she is apt to succeed. There is no other sphere in life where the fact that you are a woman counts for nothing. There is not a good and wholesome woman in the world who does not want consideration because she is a woman.

When a woman enters the office of a great daily she is painfully conscious that she is a woman — just a woman. She cannot at first grasp the idea that the great daily is a wonderful and almost perfect machine that makes what she terms cruel demands.

That daily paper is a wonderful creation, and all who serve it become a part of the machinery, and not individuals. It takes a woman some time to realize this.

She goes into the office, receives her first assignment, does her best on it and next morning finds that not a word of it is used. She takes her next assignment, and perhaps two of the ten inches she wrote is used. Finally, she goes to the busy man with the glasses at the night desk and asks why. She is coldly informed that her first articles were “rot.” She thinks it is brutal and hard and does not understand why the men ignore the fact that she is a woman.

Then she wants to quit. In lots of cases she does quit. Women, newspaper women, have to get over that habit of quitting — it’s fatal. And she mustn’t cry — if she belong[s] to that class she will probably be asked to quit. Tears may be a forceful weapon in matrimony, but never in an editorial room.

Women never become high class reporters. Women never get the big assignments. But women have a great chance in sensations.

Source: New York Sun

Also: The Daily Republican (Monongahela PA), June 17, 1904.