If the boy of the working classes is badly off for industrial
training, his sister is in far worse case. Some provision is already
made for the boy, and more is coming his way presently, but of
training for the girl, which shall be adequate to fit her for
self-support, we hear hardly anything. We have noted that women are
already in most of the trades followed by men, and that the number of
this army of working, wage-earning women is legion; that they are
not trained at all, and are so badly paid that as underbidders they
perpetually cut the wages of men. Nay, the young working-girl is even
"her own worst competitor--the competitor against her own future home,
and as wife and mother she may have to live on the wage she herself
has cheapened."
And to face a situation like this are we making any adequate
preparation? With how little we are satisfied, let me illustrate.
In the address of Mrs. Raymond Robins as president of the National
Women's Trade Union League of America before their Fourth Biennial
Convention in St. Louis, in June, 1913, she told how "in a curriculum
of industrial education we find that under the heading 'Science' boys
study elementary physics, mechanics and electricity, and girls the
action of alkalies, and the removal of stains. While under 'Drawing'
we read, 'For boys the drawing will consist of the practical
application of mechanical and free-hand work to parts of machinery,
house plans, and so forth. Emphasis will be placed upon the reading of
drawings, making sketches of machine parts quickly and accurately. For
the girls the drawing will attempt to apply the simple principles
of design and color to the work. The girls will design and stencil
curtains for the dining-and sewing-rooms and will make designs for
doilies for the table. They will plan attractive spacing for tucks,
ruffles and embroidery for underwear.' Women have entered nearly three
hundred different occupations and trades in America within the past
quarter of a century, three hundred trades and occupations, and they
are to qualify for these by learning to space tucks attractively."
In the very valuable Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Commissioner of
Labor, published in 1910, which is devoted to industrial education,
there is but one chapter dealing with girls' industrial schools,
in itself a commentary upon the backwardness of the movement for
industrial education where girls are affected. It is true that the
schools included under this heading do not account for all the school
trade-training given to girls in this country, for the classification
of industrial schools, where there is no general system, is
very difficult, and under no plan of tabulation can there be an
all-inclusive heading for any one type. For instance a school for
colored girls might be classified either as a school for Negroes or as
a school for girls, as a public school, a philanthropic school, or an
evening school, and a school giving trade-training to boys might also
include girls. The writer of this most exhaustive report, however,
states definitely that "trade schools for girls are rare, and even
schools offering them industrial courses as a part of their work are
not common."
It is impossible to consider vocational training without bearing in
mind the example of Germany. Germany has been the pioneer in this work
and has laid down for the rest of us certain broad principles, even if
there are in the German systems some elements which are unsuitable to
this country. These general principles are most clearly exemplified
in the schools of the city of Munich. Indeed, when people talk of the
German plan, they nearly always mean the Munich plan. What it aims at
is:
1. To deal in a more satisfactory way with the eighty or ninety per
cent. of children who leave school for work at fourteen, and to bridge
over with profit alike to the child, the employer and the community
the gap between fourteen and sixteen which is the unsolved riddle of
educators everywhere today.
2. To retain the best elements of the old apprenticeship system,
though in form so unlike it. The boy (for it mainly touches boys) is
learning his trade and he is also working at his trade, and he has
cultural as well as industrial training, and this teaching he receives
during his working hours and in his employer's time.
3. To provide teachers who combine ability to teach, with technical
skill.
4. To insure, through joint boards on which both employers and workmen
are represented, even if these boards are generally advisory, only an
interlocking of the technical class and the factory, without which any
system of vocational instruction must fall down.[A]
[Footnote A: As to how far this is the case, there is a difference
of opinion among authorities. Professor F.W. Roman, who has made so
exhaustive a comparative study of vocational training in the United
States and Germany, writes: "In Germany, there is very little local
control of schools, or anything else. The authority in all lines is
highly centralized." (The Industrial and Commercial Schools of the
United States and Germany, 1915, p. 324.) Dr. Kerchensteiner is quoted
by the Commercial Club of Chicago as saying, in a letter to Mr. Edwin
G. Cooley, that the separate administrative school-boards of Munich
form an essential part of the city's school-system.]
5. To maintain a system which shall reach that vast bulk of the
population, who, because they need technical training most urgently,
are usually the last to receive it.
Many of the most advanced educators in this country join issue with
the usual German practice on some most important points. These
consider that it is not sufficient that there be a close interlocking
of the technical school and class and the factory. It is equally
essential that vocational education, supported by public funds, shall
be an integral part of the public-school system, of which it is indeed
but a normal development, and therefore that we must have a unit and
not a dual system. Only thus can we insure that vocational education
will remain education at all and not just provide a training-school
for docile labor as an annex and a convenient entrance hall to the
factory system. Only thus can we insure democracy in the control of
this new branch of public activity. Only thus can the primary schools
be kept in touch with the advanced classes, so that the teacher, from
the very kindergarten up, may feel that she is a part of a complete
whole. Then indeed will all teachers begin to echo the cry of one whom
I heard say: "You ask us to fit the children for the industries. Let
us see if the industries are fit for the children."
Another point in which we must somewhat modify any European model is
in the limited training provided for girls. A country which is
frankly coeducational in its public schools, state universities and
professional colleges, must continue to be so when installing a new
educational department to meet the changed and changing conditions of
our time.
The parliament of organized labor in the United States has taken a
liberal view and laid down an advanced program on the subject of
vocational training. In 1908 the American Federation of Labor
appointed a committee on industrial education consisting of nineteen
members, of whom two were women, Agnes Nestor, International Secretary
of the Glove Workers' Union, and Mrs. Raymond Robins, President of the
National Women's Trade Union League of America. Its very first report,
made in 1909, recommended that the Federation should request the
United States Department of Commerce and Labor to investigate the
subject of industrial education in this country and abroad.
The report of the American Federation of Labor itself, includes
a digest of the United States Bureau of Labor's report, and was
published as Senate Document No. 936. It is called "The Report of the
Committee on Industrial Education of the American Federation of Labor,
compiled and edited by Charles H. Winslow."
Whatever narrowness and inconsistency individual trade unionists may
be charged with regarding industrial education, the leaders of the
labor movement give it their endorsement in the clearest terms. For
instance, this very report, comments those international unions which
have already established supplemental trade courses, such as the
Typographical Union, the Printing Pressmen's Union, and the Photo
Engravers' Union, and other local efforts, such as the School for
Carpenters and Bricklayers in Chicago and the School for Carriage,
Wagon, and Automobile Workers of New York City. All trade unions which
have not adopted a scheme of technical education are advised to take
the matter up.
On the question of public-school training, the American Federation of
Labor is no less explicit and emphatic, favoring the establishment of
schools in connection with the public-school system in which pupils
between fourteen and sixteen may be taught the principles of the
trades, with local advisory boards, on which both employers and
organized labor should have seats. But by far the most fundamental
proposal is the following. After outlining the general instruction on
accepted lines, they proceed as follows:
"The shop instruction for particular trades, and for each trade
represented, the drawing, mathematics, mechanics, physical and
biological science applicable to the trade, the history of that
trade, and a sound system of economics, including and emphasizing the
philosophy of collective bargaining."
The general introduction of such a plan of training would mean that
the young worker would start out on his wage-earning career with an
intelligent understanding of the modern world, and of his relations to
his employer and to his fellow-laborers, instead of, as at present,
setting forth with no knowledge of the world he is entering, and
moreover, with his mind clogged with a number of utterly out-of-date
ideas, as to his individual power of control over wages and working
conditions.[A]
[Footnote A: History, as it is usually taught, is not considered from
the industrial viewpoint, nor in the giving of a history lesson
are there inferences drawn from it that would throw light upon the
practical problems that are with us today, or that are fast advancing
to meet us. When a teacher gives a lesson on the history of the United
States, there is great stress laid upon the part played by individual
effort. All through personal achievements are emphasized. The
instructor ends here, on the high note that personal exertion is the
supreme factor of success in life, failing unfortunately to point out
how circumstances have changed, and that even personal effort may have
to take other directions. Of the boys and girls in the schools of the
United States today between nine and fourteen years of age, over eight
millions in 1910, how many will leave school knowing the important
facts that land is no longer free, and that the tools of industry
are no more, as they once were, at the disposal of the most
willing-worker? And that therefore (Oh, most important therefore!) the
workers must work in coöperation if they are to retain the rights
of the human being, and the status signified by that proud name, an
American citizen.]
If we wish to know the special demands of working-women there is no
way so certain as to consult the organized women. They alone are at
liberty to express their views, while the education they have had
in their unions in handling questions vital to their interests as
wage-earners, and as leaders of other women gives clearness and
definiteness to the expression of those views.
If organized women can best represent the wage-earners of their sex,
we can gain the best collective statement of their wishes through
them. At the last convention of the National Women's Trade Union
League in June, 1913, the subject of industrial education received
very close attention. The importance of continuation schools after
wage-earning days have commenced was not overlooked. An abstract of
the discussion and the chief resolutions can be found in the issue of
_Life and Labor_ for August, 1913.
After endorsing the position taken up by the American Federation of
Labor, the women went on to urge educational authorities to arm the
children, while yet at school, with a knowledge of the state and
federal laws enacted for their protection, and asked also "that such
a course shall be of a nature to equip the boy and girl with a full
sense of his or her responsibility for seeing that the laws are
enforced," the reason being that the yearly influx of young boys and
girls into the industrial world in entire ignorance of their own state
laws is one of the most menacing facts we have to face, as their
ignorance and inexperience make exploitation easy, and weaken the
force of such protective legislation as we have.
Yet another suggestion was that "no working certificates be issued to
a boy or girl unless he or she has passed a satisfactory examination
in the laws which have been enacted by the state for their
protection."
In making these claims, organized working-women are keeping themselves
well in line with the splendid statement of principles enunciated by
that great educator, John Dewey:
The ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must
be interpreted in the broadest and freest spirit; it is equivalent
to that training of the child which will give him such possession
of himself that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt
himself to the changes that are going on, but have power to shape
and direct them.
When we ask for coeducation on vocational lines, the question is sure
to come up: For how long is a girl likely to use her training in a
wage-earning occupation? It is continually asserted and assumed she
will on the average remain in industry but a few years. The mature
woman as a wage-earner, say the woman over twenty-five, we have been
pleased to term and to treat as an exception which may be ignored in
great general plans. Especially has this been so in laying out schemes
for vocational training, and we find the girl being ignored, not only
on the usual ground that she is a girl, but for the additional,
and not-to-be-questioned reason that it will not pay to give her
instruction in any variety of skilled trades, because she will be
but a short time in any occupation of the sort. Hence this serves to
increase the already undue emphasis placed upon domestic training as
all that a girl needs, and all that her parents or the community ought
to expect her to have. This is only one of the many cases when we try
to solve our new problems by reasoning based upon conditions that have
passed or that are passing away.
In this connection some startling facts have been brought forward by
Dr. Leonard P. Ayres in the investigations conducted by him for the
Russell Sage Foundation. He tried to find the ages of all the women
who are following seven selected occupations in cities of the United
States of over 50,000 population. The occupations chosen were those in
which the number of women workers exceeds one for every thousand of
the population. The number of women covered was 857,743, and is just
half of all the women engaged in gainful employment in those cities.
The seven occupations listed are housekeeper, nursemaid, laundress,
saleswoman, teacher, dressmaker and servant. No less than forty-four
per cent. of the housekeepers are between twenty-five and forty-four.
Of dressmakers there are fifty-one per cent. between these two ages;
of teachers fifty-eight per cent.; of laundresses forty-nine per
cent., while the one occupation of which a little more than half are
under twenty-five years is that of saleswoman, and even here there are
barely sixty-one per cent., leaving the still considerable proportion
of thirty-nine per cent. of saleswomen over the age of twenty-five.
It is pretty certain that these mature women have given more than the
favorite seven years to their trade. It is to be regretted that the
investigation was not made on lines which would have included some of
the factory occupations. It is difficult to see why it did not. Under
any broad classification there must be more garment-workers, for
instance, in New York or Chicago, than there are teachers. However, we
have reason to be grateful for the fine piece of work which Dr. Ayres
has done here.
The _Survey_, in an editorial, also quotes in refutation of the
seven-year theory, the findings of the commission which inquired
into the pay of teachers in New York. The commissioners found that
forty-four per cent. of the women teachers in the public schools had
been in the service for ten years or more, and that only twenty-five
per cent. of the men teachers had served as long a term.
It can hardly be doubted that the tendency is towards the lengthening
of the wage-earning life of the working-woman. A number of factors
affect the situation, about most of which we have as yet little
definite information. There is first, the gradual passing of the
household industries out of the home. Those women, for whom the
opportunity to be thus employed no longer is open, tend to take up or
to remain longer in wage-earning occupations.
The changing status of the married woman, her increasing economic
independence and its bearing upon her economic responsibility, are all
facts having an influence upon woman as a wage-earning member of the
community, but how, and in what degree, they affect her length of
service, is still quite uncertain. It is probable too, that they
affect the employment or non-employment of women very differently in
different occupations, but how, and in what degree they do so is mere
guess-work at present.
Much pains has been expended in arguing that any system of vocational
training should locally be co-related with the industries of the
district. Vain effort! For it appears that the workers of all ages are
on the move all the time. Out of 22,027 thirteen-year-old boys in the
public schools of seventy-eight American cities, only 12,699, or a
little more than half, were living in the places of their birth. And
considering the _wanderlust_ of the young in any case, is anything
more probable than that the very first thing a big proportion of this
advancing body of "vocationally trained" young men and women will want
to do will be to try out their training in some other city? And why
should they not?
If there has ever been voiced a tenderer plea for a universal
education that shall pass by no child, boy or girl, than that of Stitt
Wilson, former Socialist Mayor of Berkeley, I do not know it. If there
has ever been outlined a finer ideal of an education fitting the
child, every child, to take his place and fill his place in the new
world opening before him, I have not heard of it. He asks that we
should submit ourselves to the leadership of the child--his needs, his
capacities, his ideal hungers--and in so doing we shall answer many
of the most disturbing and difficult problems that perplex our
twentieth-century civilization. Even in those states which make the
best attempt at educating their children, from three-fourths to
nine-tenths, according to the locality, leave the schools at the age
of thirteen or fourteen, and the present quality of the education
given from the age of twelve to sixteen is neither an enrichment in
culture, nor a training for life and livelihood. It is too brief for
culture, and is not intended for vocation.
Mr. Wilson makes no compromise with existing conditions; concedes not
one point to the second-rate standards that we supinely accept; faces
the question of cost, that basic difficulty which most theoretical
educators waive aside, and which the public never dreams of trying to
meet and overcome. Here are some of his proposals.
The New Education [he writes] will include training and experience
in domestic science, cookery and home-making; agriculture and
horticulture; pure and applied science, and mechanical and
commercial activities with actual production, distribution and
exchange of commodities. Such training for three to six millions
of both sexes from the age of twelve to twenty-one years will
require land, tools, buildings of various types, machinery,
factory sites by rail and water, timber, water and power sources.
As all civilization is built upon the back of labor, and as
all culture and leisure rests upon labor, and is not possible
otherwise, so all cultural and liberal education, as generally
understood, shall be sequent to the productive and vocational. The
higher intellectual education should grow out of and be earned by
productive vocational training.
Hence our schools should be surrounded by lands of the best
quality obtainable, plots of 10, 50, 100 and more acres. These
lands should be the scene of labor that would be actually
productive and not mere play.... In such a school the moral
elements of labor should be primary, viz.: joy to the producer,
through industry and art; perfect honesty in quality of material
and character of workmanship; social coöperation, mutualism, and
fellowship among the workers or students; and last, but not least,
justice--that is, the full product of labor being secured to the
producer.
He plans to make the schools largely self-supporting, partly through
land endowments easier to obtain under the system of taxation of land
values that is possibly near at hand in the Golden State, for which
primarily the writer is planning. The other source of income would be
from the well-directed labor of the students themselves, particularly
the older ones. He quotes Professor Frank Lawrence Glynn, of the
Vocational School at Albany, New York, as having found that the
average youth can, not by working outside of school hours, but in the
actual process of getting his own education, earn two dollars a week
and upward. Elsewhere, Mr. Wilson shows that the beginnings of such
schools are to be found in operation today, in some of the best reform
institutions of the country.
For all who desire university training, this would open the door. They
would literally "work their way" through college. One university'
president argues for some such means of helping students: "We need
not so much an increase of beneficiary funds as an increase of the
opportunities for students to earn their living." This is partly
to enable them to pay; for their courses and thereby acquire an
education, but chiefly because through supporting themselves they gain
self-confidence and therefore the power of initiative.[A]
[Footnote A: "The social and educational need for vocational training
is equally urgent. Widespread vocational training will democratize
the education of the country: (1) by recognizing different tastes and
abilities, and by giving an equal opportunity to all to prepare for
their lifework; (2) by extending education through part-time and
evening instruction to those who are at work in the shop or on
the farm." Report of the Commission on National Aid to Vocational
Instruction, 1914, page 12.]
XI
THE WORKING WOMAN AND MARRIAGE
It is a lamentable fact that the wholesome and normal tendency towards
organization which is now increasingly noticeable among working-women
has so far remained unrelated to that equally normal and far more
deeply rooted and universal tendency towards marriage.
As long as the control of trade unionism among women remained with
men, no link between the two was likely to be forged; the problem
is so entirely apart from any that men unionists ever have to face
themselves. It is true that with a man the question of adhering to
a union alike in times of prosperity or times of stress may be
complicated by a wife having a "say-so," through her enthusiasm or her
indifference when it means keeping up dues or attending meetings; yet
more, when belonging to a union may mean being thrown out of work or
ordered on strike, just when there has been a long spell of sickness
or a death with all the attendant expenses, or when perhaps a new
baby is expected or when the hard winter months are at hand and the
children are lacking shoes and clothes. Still, roughly speaking, a man
worker is a unionist or a non-unionist just the same, be he single or
married.