report for 1910 shows the great difficulties that enumerators and
statisticians experience in getting at exact facts, wherever the
situation is both complex and confused. The census officials admit
their inability to do so in the present instance, although they have
revised the figures with extreme care. With all possible allowance for
error, women still appear in all but a minority of employments. The
classification of occupations is on a different basis, and the number
of divisions much larger; yet even now out of four hundred and
twenty-nine separately listed, women are returned as engaged in all
but forty-two. On the other hand there is only one trade which does
not embrace men, that of the (untrained) midwife.]
Textile mill operatives 330,766
Saleswomen 250,438
Tobacco-workers and cigar-makers 71,334
Boot- and shoe-makers and repairers 61,084
Printers, lithographers and pressmen 27,845
Book-binders 22,012
Just here we can see a rock ahead. In the very prospects that we
rejoice over, of the early introduction of public industrial
training, we can detect an added risk for the girl. If such technical
instruction is established in one state after another, but planned
primarily to suit the needs of boys only, and the only teaching
afforded to girls is in the domestic arts, and in the use of the
needle and the pastebrush for wage-earning, where will our girls be
when a few years hence the skilled trades are full of her only too
well-trained industrial rivals? In a greater degree than even today,
the girl will find herself everywhere at a disadvantage for lack of
the early training the state has denied to her, while bestowing
it upon her brother, and the few industrial occupations for which
instruction is provided will be overcrowded with applicants.
That women should take such an inferior position in the trades they
are in today is regrettable enough. But far more important is it to
make sure that they obtain their fair share of whatever improved
facilities are provided for "the generation knocking at the door"
of life. Working-women or women intimately acquainted with
working-women's needs, should have seats on all commissions, boards
and committees, so that when schemes of state industrial training are
being planned, when schools are built, courses outlined, the interests
of girls may be remembered, and especially so that they be borne in
mind, when budgets are made up and appropriations asked for.
If not, it will only be one other instance of an added advantage to
the man proving a positive disadvantage to the woman. You cannot
benefit one class and leave another just as it was. Every boon given
to the bettered class increases the disproportion and actually helps
to push yet further down the one left out.
Among the many influences that make or mar the total content of life
for any class, be that class a nation, a race, an industrial or
economic group, there is one, the importance of which has been all
too little realized. That influence we may call expectance. It is
impossible for anyone to say how far a low standard of industrial
or professional attainment held out before the girl at her most
impressionable age, a standard that to some degree, therefore,
develops within her, as it exists without her, ends in producing the
very inefficiency it begins by assuming. But psychology has shown us
that suggestion or expectance forms one element in the developing of
faculty, and this whether it be manual dexterity, quickness of memory
or exercise of judgment and initiative.
In all probability, too, this element of expectance has indirect as
well as direct effects, and the indirect are not the least fruitful in
results. To illustrate: it is certain that if we start out by
assuming that girls are poor at accounts, that they cannot understand
machinery, that they are so generally inefficient as to be worth less
wages than boys, any such widespread assumption will go a long way
to produce the ignorant and incompetent and inefficient creatures it
presupposes girls to be. But it will do more than this. Such poor
standards alike of performance and of wages will not end with the
unfortunate girls themselves. They will react upon parents, teachers,
and the community which so largely consists of the parents and which
employs the teachers. Those preëssentials and antecedents of the
competent worker, training, trainers, and the means and instruments
of training, will not be forthcoming. What is the use of providing
at great expense industrial training for girls, when the same money,
spent upon boys, would produce more efficient workers? What is the
use of giving girls such training, when they are presumably by nature
unfitted to benefit by it?
X
WOMEN AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING
The United States started its national existence with an out-of-doors
people. Until comparatively recent years, the cities were small, and
the great bulk of the inhabitants lived from the natural resources of
the country, that is to say, from the raw products of the mines and
the forests, and the crops grown upon the plains by a most primitive
and wasteful system of agriculture. But the days have forever gone
when a living can be snatched, so to speak, from the land in any of
these ways. The easily gotten stores of the mines and forests are
exhausted; the soil over many millions of acres has been robbed of its
fertility. The nation is now engaged in reckoning up what is left in
the treasury of its natural resources, estimating how best to conserve
and make profitable use of what is left.
The nation might have done this sooner, but there was in the West
always fresh land to open up and in the East, after a time, a new
source of income in the factory industries, that were more and more
profitably absorbing capital and labor. So that although pioneer
conditions gradually passed away, and it became less easy to wrest a
living from plain or mountain or mine, the idea of finding out what
was wrong, improving methods of agriculture, conserving the forest
wealth by continual replanting or working the less rich mines at a
profit through new processes, or the utilization of by-products, did
not at first suggest itself.
When, on the other hand, we turn to the manufacturing occupations,
we find that they have followed an analogous, though not precisely
similar, course of evolution. Certainly from the first the
manufacturers showed themselves far ahead of their fellows in the
economical management of the raw material, in the adoption of every
kind of labor and time-saving device and in the disposal of refuse.
But in their way they have been just as short-sighted. They carried
with them into the new occupations the very same careless habits of
national extravagance. They, too, went ahead in a similar hustling
fashion. This time the resources that were used up so recklessly were
human resources, the strength and vitality of the mature man, the
flesh and blood of little children, their stores of energy and
youthful joy and hope. By overwork or accident, the father was cut
off in his strong manhood, the boy was early worn out, and the young
girl's prospects of happy motherhood were forever quenched.
There are now signs of a blessed reaction setting in here, too, and it
is largely owing to the efforts of organized labor. The principles of
conservation and of a wise economy, which are re-creating the plains
of the West and which will once more clothe with forests the slopes of
the mountains, are at work in the realm of industry. Not a year passes
but that some state or another does not limit anew the hours during
which children may work, or insist upon shorter hours for women, or
the better protection from dangerous machinery, or the safeguarding
of the worker in unhealthy occupations. Organized labor, ever
running ahead of legislation in its standards of hours and sanitary
conditions, provides a school of education and experiment for the
whole community, by procuring for trade unionists working conditions
which afterwards serve as the model for enlightened employers, and as
a standard that the community in the end must exact for the whole body
of workers.
But more must be done than merely keeping our people alive, by
insisting they shall not be killed in the earning of their bread.
Leaders of thought and many captains of industry have at last grasped
the fact that the worker, uneducated and not trained in any true
sense, is at once a poor tool and a most costly one. Other countries
add their quota of experience, to back up public opinion and
legislative action. Hence the demand heard from one end of the land
to the other for industrial training. The public everywhere after a
century of modern factory industry are at length beginning to have
some definite ideas regarding industrial training for boys who are to
supply the human element in the factory scheme. (Regarding girls, they
still grope in outer darkness.)
For many years economists were accustomed to express nothing but
satisfaction over the ever-advancing specialization of industry. They
saw only the cheapening of the product, the vast increase in the total
amount produced, and the piling up of profits, and they beheld in all
three results nothing but social advantage. Verily both manufacturer
and consumer were benefited. When the more thoughtful turned their
attention to the actual makers through whose labors the cloth and
the shoes and the pins of specialized industry were produced, they
satisfied themselves that the worker must also be a sharer in the
benefits of the new system; for, said they, everyone who is a worker
is also a consumer. Even though the worker who is making shoes has
to turn out twenty times as much work for the same wages, still as
a consumer he shares in the all-round cheapening of manufactured
articles, and is able to buy clothes and shoes and pins so much the
cheaper. That the cost of living on the whole might be greater, that
the wage of the worker might be too low to permit of his purchasing
the very articles into the making of which his own labor had gone, did
not occur to these _à priori_ reasoners. It has taken a whole century
of incredibly swift mechanical advance, associated at the same time
with the most blind, cruel, and brutal waste of child life and adult
life, to arrive at the beginning of an adjustment between the demands
of machine-driven industry and the needs and the just claims of the
human workers. We have only just recovered from the dazed sense of
wonderment and pride of achievement into which modern discoveries
and inventions, with the resultant enormous increase of commerce
and material wealth, plunged the whole civilized world. We are but
beginning to realize, what we had well-nigh totally overlooked, that
even machine-driven industry with all that it connotes, enormously
increased production of manufactured goods, and the spread of physical
comfort to a degree unknown before among great numbers, is not the
whole of national well-being; that by itself, unbalanced by justice to
the workers, it is not even an unmixed boon.
I have tried to follow up the evolution of our present industrial
society on several parallel lines: how industry itself has developed,
how immigration affects the labor problem as regards the woman worker,
and the relation of women to the vocations in the modern world. Let us
now glance at our educational systems and see how they fit in to the
needs of the workers, especially of the working-women. For our present
purpose I will not touch on education as we find it in our most
backward states, but rather as it is in the most advanced, since it
is from improvement in these that we may expect to produce the best
results for the whole nation.
Free and compulsory public education was established to supply
literary and cultural training at a time when children still enjoyed
opportunities of learning in the home, and later in small shops
something of the trades they were to practice when grown-up. I know
of a master plumber, who twenty years ago, as a child of eleven, made
friends with the blacksmith and the tinsmith in the little village
where he lived, and taught himself the elements of his trade at the
blacksmith's anvil and with the tinsmith's tools. At fourteen that boy
knew practically a great deal about the properties of metals, could
handle simple tools deftly, and was well prepared to learn his trade
readily when the time came.
As the most intelligent city parents cannot as individuals furnish
their children with similar chances today, we must look to the public
schools, which all citizens alike support, to take up the matter, and
supply methodically and deliberately, that training of the eye and
hand, and later that instruction in wage-earning occupations which in
former days, as in the case quoted, the child obtained incidentally,
as it were, in the mere course of growing up.
On the literary side, it is true, schools are improving all the time.
History is now taught by lantern slides, showing the people's lives,
instead of by a list of dates in a catechism. Geography is illustrated
in the garden plot of the school playground. But in responding to the
new claims which a new age and a changed world are making upon them,
schools and teachers are only beginning to wake up. The manual
training gradually being introduced is a hopeful beginning, but
nothing more. The most valuable and important work of this kind is
reserved for the upper grades of the grammar schools and for certain
high schools, and the children who are able to make use of it are for
the most part the offspring of comfortably off parents, enjoying all
sorts of educational privileges already. Education, publicly provided,
free and compulsory, therefore presumably universal, was established
primarily for the benefit of the workers' children, yet of all
children it is they who are at this moment receiving the least benefit
from it. Many circumstances combine to produce this unfortunate
result. The chief direct cause is poverty in the home. So many
families have to live on such poor wages--five and six hundred dollars
a year--that the children have neither the health to profit by the
schooling nor the books nor the chance to read books at home when the
home is one or perhaps two rooms. The curse of homework in cities ties
the children down to willowing feathers or picking nuts or sewing on
buttons, or carrying parcels to and from the shop that gives out the
work, deprives them of both sleep and play, makes their attendance at
school irregular, and dulls their brains during the hours they are
with the teacher. In the country the frequently short period of school
attendance during the year and the daily out-of-school work forced
from young children by poverty-harassed parents has similar disastrous
results.
Even in those states which have compulsory attendance up to fourteen,
many children who are quite normal are yet very backward at that age.
The child of a foreign-speaking parent, for instance, who never hears
English spoken at home, needs a longer time to reach the eighth grade
than the child of English-speaking parents.
Chicago is fairly typical of a large industrial city, and there the
City Club found after investigation that forty-three per cent. of
the pupils who enter the first grade do not reach the eighth grade;
forty-nine per cent. do not go through the eighth grade; eleven per
cent. do not reach the sixth grade, and sixteen per cent. more do not
go through the sixth grade.
A child who goes through the eighth grade has some sort of an
equipment (on the literary side at least) with which to set out in
life. He has learned how to read a book or a newspaper intelligently,
and how to express himself in writing. If he is an average child he
has acquired a good deal of useful information. He will remember much
of what he has learned, and can turn what knowledge he has to some
account. But the child who leaves school in the fifth or sixth grade,
or, perhaps, even earlier, is apt to have no hold on what he has been
taught, and it all too soon passes from his memory, especially if he
has in his home surroundings no stimulus to mental activity. Poor
little thing! What a mockery to call this education, so little as
it has fitted him to understand life and its problems! What he has
learned out of school, meanwhile, as often as not, is harmful rather
than beneficial.
The school door closes and the factory gate stands open wide. The
children get their working papers, and slip out of the one, and
through the other. At once, as we arrange matters, begins the fatal
effect of handing over children, body and soul, into the control of
industry. After a few days or weeks of wrapping candy, or carrying
bundles or drawing out bastings, the work, whatever it is, becomes but
a mere mechanical repetition. A few of the muscles only, and none of
the higher faculties of observation, inquiry and judgment come
into play at all, until, at the end of two years the brightest
school-children have perceptibly lost ground in all these directions.
Two of the most precious years of life are gone. The little workers
are not promoted from performing one process to another more
difficult. They are as far as ever from any prospect of learning a
trade in any intelligent fashion. The slack season comes on. The
little fingers, the quick feet are not required any longer. Once more
there is a scurrying round to look for a job, less cheerfully this
time, the same haphazard applying at another factory for some other
job, that like the first needs no training, like the first, leads
nowhere, but also like the first, brings in three or four dollars
a week, perhaps less. A teacher at a public-school social center
inquired of a group of fifty girls, cracker-packers, garment-workers
and bindery girls, how long each had been in her present situation.
Only one had held hers eighteen months. No other had reached a year in
the same place. The average appeared to be about three or four months.
Worse still is another class of blind-alley occupation. These are the
street trades. The newsboy, the messenger and the telegraph boy often
make good money to begin with. Girls, too, are being employed by some
of the messenger companies. These are all trades, that apart from the
many dangers inseparable from their pursuit, spell dismissal after two
or three years at most, or as soon as the boy reaches the awkward age.
The experience gained is of no use in any other employment, and the
unusual freedom makes the messenger who has outgrown his calling
averse to the discipline of more regular occupations.
What a normal vocational education can be, and a normal development of
occupation, is seen in the professions, such as law and medicine. The
lawyer and the doctor are, it is true, confining themselves more and
more to particular branches of their respective callings, and more
and more are they becoming experts in the branch of law or medicine
selected. The lawyer specializes in criminal cases or in damage suits,
in commercial or constitutional law; he is a pleader or a consultant.
The doctor may decide to be a surgeon, or an oculist, an anesthetist
or a laboratory worker. And the public reap the benefit in more expert
advice and treatment. But the likeness between such professional
specialization and the dehumanizing and brain-deadening industrial
specialization, which is the outgrowth of the factory system, is one
in name only as was admirably put by Samuel Gompers, when presiding
over the Convention of the American Federation of Labor at Toronto in
1909.
"It must be recognized that specialists in industry are vastly
different from specialists in the professions. In the professions,
specialists develop from all the elements of the science of the
profession. Specialists in industry are those who know but one part
of a trade, and absolutely nothing of any other part of it. In the
professions specialists are possessed of all the learning of their
art; in industry they are denied the opportunity of learning the
commonest elementary rudiments of industry other than the same
infinitesimal part performed by them perhaps thousands of times over
each day."
When the speaker emphasized these points of unlikeness, he was at the
same time, and in the same breath, pointing out the direction in which
industry must be transformed. Training in the whole occupation
must precede the exercise of the specialty. Furthermore, as all
professional training has its cultural side, as well as its strictly
professional side, so the cultural training of the worker must ever
keep step with his vocational training.
The motto of the school should be, "We are for all," for it is what
teachers and the community are forever forgetting. Think of the
innumerable foundations in the countries of the old world, intended
for poor boys, which have been gradually appropriated by the rich. Of
others again, supposed to be for both boys and girls, from which the
girls have long been excluded. The splendid technical schools of this
country, nominally open to all boys, at least, are by their very terms
closed to the poor boy, however gifted. To give to him that hath
is the tendency against which we must ever guard in planning and
administering systems of public education. With many, perhaps most,
educational institutions, as they grow older, more and more do they
incline to improve the standards of their work, technically speaking,
but to bestow their benefits upon comparatively fewer and fewer
recipients.
I would not be understood to deprecate original research, or the
training of expert professional workers in any field, still less as
undervaluing thoroughness in any department of teaching. But I plead
for a sense of proportion, that as long as the world is either so poor
or its wealth and opportunities so unequally distributed, a certain
minimum of vocational training shall be insured to all.
We recognize the need for thorough training in the case of the coming
original investigator, and the expert professional, and they form the
minority. We do not recognize the at least equally pressing need for
the thorough training of the whole working population, and these make
up the vast majority. In so far as the pre-vocational work in primary
schools, the manual work and technical training in high schools,
the short courses, the extension lectures and the correspondence
instruction of universities are meeting this urgent popular need, just
so far are they raising all work to a professional standard, just so
far are they bringing down to the whole nation the gifts of culture
and expert training that have hitherto been the privilege of the few.
I have often noticed college professors, in turning over the leaves of
a university calendar or syllabus of lectures, pass lightly over the
pages recounting the provision made for short courses, summer schools,
extension or correspondence work, and linger lovingly over the
fuller and more satisfactory program outlined for the teacher or
the professional worker. The latter is only apparently the more
interesting. Take Wisconsin's College of Agriculture, for example. It
sends forth yearly teachers and original investigators, but quite as
great and important a product are the hundreds of farmers and farmers'
sons who come fresh from field and dairy to take their six weeks'
training in the management of cattle or of crops, and to field and
dairy return, carrying away with them the garnered experience of
others, as well as increased intelligence and self-reliance in
handling the problems of their daily toil.
Anna Garlin Spencer, in her "Woman and Social Culture," points out
how our much-lauded schools of domestic economy fail to benefit the
schoolgirl, through this very overthoroughness and expensiveness how
they are narrowed down to the turning out of teachers of domestic
economy and dietitians and other institutional workers. Domestic
economy as a wage-earning vocation cannot be taught too thoroughly,
but what every girl is entitled to have from the public school during
her school years is a "short course" in the simple elements of
domestic economy, with opportunity for practice. It is nothing so very
elaborate that girls need, but that little they need so badly. Such a
course has in view the girl as a homemaker, and is quite apart from
her training as a wage-earner.