The effect of this attitude of the two sexes towards each other—an attitude of inherent and essential superiority on the one side, of inherent and essential inferiority on the other—is nearly always apparent when men and women work together at the same trade. (Apparent, at least, to the women; the men, one concludes, do not really grasp the system by which they benefit.) What I refer to is the ordered, tacit, but usually quite conscious endeavour on the part of women who work side by side with men to defer to a superiority, real or supposed, on the part of their male colleagues. Thus a woman will not only decline to call attention to a blunder or oversight on the part of a male fellow-worker, but she will, if possible, cover up his mistake, even if she suffer by it, and, at any rate, will try to give him the impression that it has escaped her notice; and this under circumstances where no sort of injury to the blunderer would be involved, and which would not prevent her from calling prompt attention to a similar slip if made by a colleague of her own sex.
I have not the slightest doubt that this tendency on the part of the working or business woman to pass over in silence the errors or mistakes of the working or business man is attributed by the latter (if, indeed, he notices it at all) to some mysterious operation of the sexual instinct; while the lack of a similar palliative attitude towards the errors and mistakes of a comrade of her own sex is, I should imagine, attributed to the natural, inevitable, and incorrigible “cattiness” of one woman towards another—the belief in such a natural, inevitable, and incorrigible “cattiness” being a comfortable article of the masculine faith.
The practice, it seems to me, can be explained without having recourse to the all-pervading sexual instinct (usually understood to regulate every action performed by women, from the buttoning of boots to the swallowing of cough-drops). A similar practice, which can hardly have originated in the sexual instinct, obtains amongst male persons conscious of inferiority and desirous of standing well with their superiors. Junior clerks are in the habit of preserving a discreet silence with regard to errors of judgment traceable to employers, managers, and heads of firms; and the understrapper who wishes to get on in the world seldom makes a point of calling public attention to the shortcomings of foremen and others who are set in authority over him. On the contrary, he is usually—and wisely—tender towards their failings; and in the same way women are frequently tender towards the failings of those who, by virtue of sex and not of position, they believe to be set in authority over them. The attitude in this respect of working-woman to working-man is, as often as not, the attitude of a subordinate, and in itself an acknowledgment of inferiority; it has about it that tinge of servility which enjoins the turning of a blind eye to the faults of a superior.