The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-01-29
DOROTHY DIX ON >S

OV0OVA fOxA VM .N
 WOMEN JOURNALISTS.
 Mrs. Elizabeth Gilmer Dorothy Dix)' Is spending a short time in New Orleans, her old home. and lectured there few days since on Woman With the Quill" Among many high and clever remarks made on this interesting subject (to
 newspaper women) were the following:
 "In reality it should cause no surprise that women have taken to journalism
 like a duck to water. In a charch fair and progressive euchre kind of a way
 our sex has always been training for the
 career, since newspaper is merely the
 aggregate gossip of the world. The first
 the most important, the one indispensa-
 ble requisite of a journalist is a nose
 fol. news and a talent for scenting out
 story under the baldest happenings.
 With men the ability to collect and
 disseminate news is the triumph of educa-
 ton over nature. With women it is in- tuitive faculty.
 Tt is only within the last three or four
 years, however, that woman has been re-
 moved from the side show of journalistic
 freaks and let in on the main floor of le- gitimate newspaper work. She Is no longer advertised as strange creature
 of well-nigh human intelligence who can
 write almost like a man. She works side
 by side with her brother and stands or
 falls on her own merit.
 "Women still go up in balloons and down in diving suits and travel around the world, but if their work is featured it is because the story is worth it. not
 because 1t wears petticoats.
 Give her a clew to story and she
 will follow it up hill and down hill. Send her to report a lecture. and she will sit like Patience on a monument while dry as-dust savants talk of protoplasms in terms that only a technical dictionary can understand
 Fond of talking as a woman is, she would choke on her own news before she would give a story away that promised a scoop. Whether her paper be the met ropolitan daily or the Crossroads Gazette. she believes 1t to be the greatest paper, with the biggest circulation on earth. What it advocates is her religion, and she would esteem it nothing short of sacrilege to differ with it in politics. "To a wonderful degree she sinks her | individuality in it. and seldom uses it to avenge her wrongs or further her inter- ests. Just how many deserving charities she booms, just how many good causes owe their success to her. nobody ever stops to consider. Her name never ap- pears in the cards of thanks that the lady patronesses and directors publish. but none the less she has been the nimble little tug that has lowed many a stately philanthropfc ship into harbor.
 "Nor even when judged by the prac- tical standards of results need the news- paper women be ashamed of her stew ardship. She has stood for truth purity and gentleness and the virtues that do most adorn her sex. She has been the champion of the home. Publicity is the breath of life to women's clubs and phil anthrppies, and she has stood behind the scene and worked the bellows until she pumped life back sE~ain into many mori- bund literary circle and good cause She has been the female Moses who has led | thousands and tens of thousands of wo-
 men readers gradually and step by step from the wilderness of the crochet tidy | and recipes for making an empire box | chair out of cheese box that used to constitute the woman's page, up into the | mountain heights where they may at least look over into the promised land"