the vivid interest taken by the pupils in the _theory_ of color. You
have never before observed in any classroom so intimate a concern
about rainbows, prisms, spectra, and the scientific sources of
aesthetic effects. Your mind runs back to your college days and returns
almost alarmed to this unacademic display of genuine, spontaneous,
unanimous enthusiasm. At last the reason for it works into your mind.
These girls are engaged in the _practice_ of color every afternoon,
over hats, ribbons, waists, gloves, costumes. When you begin once to
_study_ a subject which reaches practice in your life, you cannot stop
with practice. A law of your mind carries you on to the theory, the
philosophy, of it.
Just there you see the reason why trade training, broadly contrived,
broadens not only technique but soul, trains not only to _earn_ but to
_live_. "Refined selling" some of the girls call the salesmanship
which they learn in Mrs. Prince's class. They have perceived, to some
extent, the relation between the arts and sciences on the one hand and
their daily work on the other.
To a much greater extent has this relation been perceived by the young
woman who has taken the full four-year course in, say, "Secretarial
Studies" in Simmons and who, throughout her English, her German, her
French, her sociology, and her history, as well as throughout her
typewriting, her shorthand, and her commercial law, has necessarily
kept in view, irradiating every subject, the beacon-light of her
future working career.
"Ah! There, precisely, is the danger. Every Jack should have his Jill;
but if every Jill has her job, why, there again the wedding day goes
receding some more into the future. Let them stop all this foolishness
and get married, as their grandparents did!"
Poor Jack! Poor Jill! We lecture them, all the time, for postponing
their marriage. We ought not to stop there. We ought to go on to
lecture them for doing the thing which makes them postpone their
marriage. We ought to lecture them for postponing their _maturity_. We
ought to lecture them for prolonging their mental and financial
infancy.
The big, impersonal, unlectureable industrial reasons for the modern
prolongation of infancy were glanced at in chapter one of this book.
In the present chapter we shall glance at them again, more closely.
Just now, however, for a moment, we must revert to the Census, and we
must take one final look at the amount of marriage-postponement now
existing in this country.
It was in the United States as a whole that the census man found 275
out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period
unmarried. But the United States consists of developed and of
undeveloped regions. The cities are the high points of development.
Look at the cities:
In Chicago, out of every 1,000 women in the age-period from
twenty-five to twenty-nine, there were 314 who were unmarried. In
Denver there were 331. In Manhattan and the Bronx there were 356. In
Minneapolis there were 369. In Philadelphia there were 387.
Southern New England, however, is the most industrially developed part
of the United States, the part in which social conditions like those
of the older countries of the world are most nearly reached.
In Fall River, out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine
age-period, the unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In
Boston they were 452.
Therefore:
If, in educating girls, we educate them only for the probability of
ultimate marriage and not also for the probability of protracted
singleness, we are doing them a demonstrably grievous wrong.
But how is their singleness occupied?
We all know now that to a greater and greater degree it is getting
occupied with work, money-earning work.
The unmarried women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period
constitute more than one-fourth of the total number of women in that
age-period in the United States. In the large cities they constitute
usually more than one-third of the total number of women in that
period. Wouldn't it have been remarkable if their families had been
able to support them all at home? Wouldn't it have been remarkable if
the human race had been able to carry so large a part of itself on its
back?
We now admit the world's need of the labor-power of women. If women
aren't laboring at home (at cooking, laundering, nursing, mothering,
_something_), they will be (or ought to be) laboring elsewhere.
In the smaller cities and country districts of America home-life is
still (by comparison) quite ample in the opportunities it offers the
unmarried daughter for participation in hard labor. Nevertheless the
Census finds that the percentage of women "breadwinners" in the
"smaller cities and country districts" is as follows:
Age-Periods Breadwinners
From 16 to 20 years of age 27 women out of every 100
From 21 to 24 years of age 26 women out of every 100
From 25 to 34 years of age 17 women out of every 100
"Smaller cities," to the Census, means cities having fewer than 50,000
inhabitants. In the larger cities, in the cities which have _more_
than 50,000 inhabitants, in the urban environment in which home-life
tends most to contract to an all-modern-conveniences size, in the
urban environment in which the domestic usefulness of unmarried
daughters tends most to contract to the dimensions of "sympathy" and
"companionship," the Census finds that the percentage of women
breadwinners is as follows:
Age-Periods Breadwinners
From 16 to 20 years of age 52 women out of every 100
From 21 to 24 years of age 45 women out of every 100
From 25 to 34 years of age 27 women out of every 100
Therefore:
If, in educating girls, we do not educate them for the _possibility_
of money-earning work, we are exposing them to the possibility of
having to do that work without being schooled to it; we are exposing
them to the possibility of having to take the first job they see, of
having to do _almost anything_ for _almost nothing_; we are doing them
a wrong so demonstrable and so grievous that it cannot continue.
The schools which give a direct preparation for industrial life are
growing fast.
In the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in New York City, many
hundreds of young girls are, in each year, enrolled. These girls
have completed the first five public-school grades. They are
learning now to be workers in paste and glue for such occupations
as sample-mounting and candle-shade-making, to be workers with
brush and pencil for such occupations as photograph-retouching and
costume-sketching, to be milliners, to be dressmakers, to be
operators of electric-power sewing-machines.
"Nothing to it," says an irritated manufacturer. "Nothing to it at
all. I can't get any good help any more. Back to the old days! Those
early New Englanders who made the business of this country what it is,
they didn't have all this technical business. They didn't study in
trade schools."
My dear sir, those early New Englanders not only studied in trade
schools, but worked and played and slept in trade schools. They spent
their whole lives in trade schools, from the moment when they began to
crawl on the floor among their mothers' looms and spinning-wheels.
There were few homes in early New England that didn't offer large
numbers of technical courses in which the father and the mother were
always teaching by doing and the sons and the daughters were always
learning by imitating.
The facts about this are so simple and so familiar that we don't stop
to think of their meaning.
When in the spring the wood ashes from the winter fires were poured
into the lye barrel, and water was poured in with them, and the lye
began to trickle out from the bottom of the barrel, and the winter's
savings of grease were brought out, and the grease and the lye were
boiled together in the big kettle, and mother had finished making the
family's supply of soap for another year, the children had taken not
only a little lesson in industriousness, by helping to make the soap,
but a little lesson in industry, too, by observing the technique and
organization of the soap business from start to finish. A boy from
that family, even if he never learned to read or write the word
"soap," might some day have some _ideas_ about soap.
The curriculum of an old New England home, so far as presided over by
the wife, may be incompletely suggested as follows:
(N. B. The reader will note the inappropriateness of congratulating
the daughters of that home on their not wanting a job. They had it.
And the reader will also note that the education of the early New
England girl, rich or poor, began with the education of her _hand_.)
VEGETABLES DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Gardening.
"In March and in April, from morning to night,
In sowing and setting good housewives delight."
2. A course in Medicinal Herbs. Borage, fennel, wild tansy, wormwood,
etc. Methods of distillation. Aqua composita, barberry conserve,
electuaries, salves, and ointments. A most important course for every
housewife.
"A speedy and a sovereign remedy,
The bitter wormwood, sage and marigold."
--Fletcher: _The Faithful Shepherdess_.
3. A course in Pickling.
In this course pretty nearly everything will be pickled, down to
nasturtium buds and radish pods.
PACKING-HOUSE DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Salting Meat in the "powdering" tub.
2. A course in Smoking Hams and Bacons.
3. A course in Pickling Pig's Feet and Ears.
4. A course in Headcheese and Sausages.
LIQUOR DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Beer. The making of wort out of barley. The making of
barm out of hops. The fermenting of the two together in barrels.
(This course is not so much given now in New England, but it is an
immemorial heritage of the female sex. Gervayse Markham, in his
standard book, "Instructions to a Good Housewife," says about beer:
"It is the work and care of woman, for it is a housework. The man
ought only to bring in the grain.")
2. A course in Light Drinks, such as Elderberry Wine.
CREAMERY DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Making Butter.
2. A course in Making Cheese; curdling, breaking curds in basket,
shaping in cheese-press, turning and rubbing cheese on cheese-ladder.
CLEANING DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Soap-Making.
2. A course in Making Brooms out of Guinea-wheat Straw.
3. A course in Starch-Making.
4. A course in Cleaning.
(This last course is very simple. Having manufactured the things to
wash and sweep with, the mere washing and sweeping won't take long.)
FRUIT DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Preserving. In this course everything will be preserved
unless it already has been pickled.
BREAKFAST-FOOD DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Mush and forty kinds of Bread--Rhineinjun (sometimes
called Rye and Indian), bun, bannock, jannock, rusk, etc., etc.
LIGHTING DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Dips. The melting of tallow or bayberries. The twisting
of wicks. The attaching of wicks to rods. The dipping of them into
the melted mass in the kettle. Patience in keeping on dipping them.
(Pupils taking this course are required to report each morning at five
o'clock.)
2. A course in Wax Candles. The use of molds.
These departments might give a girl a pretty fair education of
the hand and a pretty fair acquaintance with the technique and
organization of the working world; but we haven't yet mentioned
the biggest and hardest department of all.
Before mentioning it, let us take a look at the picture reproduced in
this chapter from a book published in the year 1493. This book was a
French translation of Boccaccio's collection of stories called "Noble
Women." The picture shows a woolen mill being operated in the grounds
of a palace by a queen and her ladies-in-waiting. It summons back the
days when even the daughters of kings and nobles could not help
acquiring a knowledge of the working world, because they were in it.
One of the ladies-in-waiting is straightening out the tangled strands
of wool with carding combs. The other has taken the combed and
straightened strands and is spinning them into yarn. The queen, being
the owner of the plant, has the best job. She is weaving the yarn into
cloth on a loom.
[Illustration: THIS SKETCH OF A WOOLEN MILL OPERATED IN THE GROUNDS OF A
PALACE BY A QUEEN AND HER LADIES-IN-WAITING IS TAKEN FROM A VERY OLD
FRENCH TRANSLATION OF BOCCACCIO'S BOOK ON "NOBLE WOMEN." IN THOSE DAYS
EVERY HOME WAS A FACTORY AND A TRADE SCHOOL.
_Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago._]
The daughters of the Emperor Charlemagne, who, besides being an
emperor, was a very rich man, learned how to card and spin and weave.
Noble women had to direct all that kind of work on their estates. They
lived in the very midst of industry, of business.
So it was with those early New England women. And therefore,
whether well-to-do or indigent, they passed on to their sons as
well as to their daughters a steady daily lesson in the world's work.
The most intelligent mother in the United States to-day, let her be
kindergartner and psychologist and child-study specialist as much
as she pleases, cannot give her children that broad early view of
the organization of life. The only place where her children can get
it now is the school.
On the first of January of the year 1910 Ella Flagg Young, superintendent
of schools in Chicago, took algebra out of the eighth grade of the
elementary schools, and, in its place, inserted a course on Chicago.
Large parts of what was once the home are now spread out through the
community. The new course will teach the life of the community, its
activities and opportunities, civic, aesthetic, industrial. Such a
course is nothing but home training for the enlarged home.
But we must go back for a moment to that biggest and hardest
department of all in the old homes of New England.
"Deceit, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindly that they may live,"
said Chaucer in a teasing mood.
But spinning was a very small part of the Department of Textiles. We
forbear to dilate on the courses of instruction which that department
offered. We confine ourselves to observing that:
First. In the Subdepartment of Flax, after heckling the flax with
combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay pretty
straight, after spinning it into yarn on her spinning wheel, after
reeling the yarn off into skeins, after "bucking" the skeins in hot
lye through many changes of water, and after using shuttle and loom to
weave the stuff into cloth, the home woman of those days had to
accomplish some twenty subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing,
possing, drying, and bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.
Second. In the Subdepartment of Wool, in addition to being carders,
spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color
resources of the times, boiling pokeberries in alum to get a crimson,
using sassafras for a yellow or an orange, and producing a black by
boiling the fabric with field sorrel and then boiling it again with
logwood and copperas.
We pass over, as trivial, the making of flax and wool stuffs into
articles of actual use. We say nothing about the transformation of
cloth into clothes, table-covers, napkins; nothing about the weaving
of yarn on little lap looms into narrow fabrics used for hair laces,
glove ties, belts, garters, and hatbands; nothing about the incessant
knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings. Those details were for
idle moments.
Sweet domestic days, when girls stayed at home and helped their
mothers and let father support the family!
It seems as if even Rip Van Winkle, in his most shiftless mood, ought
to have been able to support a large number of daughters under such
conditions.
Does it astonish you that they matured young? There, all about them,
from babyhood, were the basic processes by which the world was
sheltered, clothed, and fed. Those processes were numerous but simple.
Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through eyes, through
finger-tips, during all those early years when eyes and finger-tips
are the nourishing points of the intellect. Does it astonish you that
they were soon ready for the duties of adult life?
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was
married at seventeen. His parents were not only willing, but aiding
and abetting. They considered him a man.
Mercy Otis, the wife of the patriot, James Warren, and Abigail Smith,
the wife of the future president, John Adams, both married before
twenty. A study of their lives will show that at that age they were
not only _thought_ to be grown up but _were_ so.
To-day, in Boston, a woman of twenty is considered so immature that
many of the hospitals will not admit her even to her preliminary
training for the trade of nurse till she has added at least three
years more to her mental development.
Who has thus prolonged infancy? Who has thus postponed maturity?
Science has done part of it.
By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution of
the compact industries of the home out and into the scattered,
innumerable business enterprises of the community, Science has given
us, in place of a simple and near world, a complicated and distant
one. It takes us longer to learn it.
Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press,
the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production
as well as the dissemination of knowledge), Science has brought forth,
in every field of human interest and of human value, a mass of facts
and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our
predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full
physical development long before we have caught up with the previous
mental experience of the race. This is true first with regard to what
is commonly called General Culture and next with regard to what is
commonly called Specialization. Growth into General Culture takes
longer and longer. And then so does the specialized mastery of a
specialized technique. The high-school teacher must not only go to
college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes
college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an
assistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture
rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist
of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending
before him.
A complicated and distant world instead of a simple and near one, a
large mass of human experience to assimilate instead of a small one, a
long technique to master instead of a short one,--for all this part of
the extension of immaturity we may thank Science. For the remaining
part of it we may thank System.
The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions
(and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at
some small subdivided job in a large organization of people. The
work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate
responsibility--and remuneration--toward the top. In time, from job to
job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows
bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor
duties for minimum pay.
Thus the _mental_ immaturity resulting from Science is supplemented by
the _financial_ immaturity resulting from System.
Both kinds of immaturity last longest among the boys and girls who
come from that large section of society which is neither rich nor
poor.
This is not to say that rich and poor escape unaffected. Shall we ever
again, from the most favored of homes, see a William Pitt, Chancellor
of the Exchequer, by merit, at 23? And, in the mass of the people,
shall we ever again see that quickness of development toward adulthood
which gave us the old common-law rule validating the marriage of a
male at 14 and of a female at 12? The retardation of adulthood is
observable in all social groups. But it comes to its climax in what is
commonly called the "middle" group. For it is in that group that the
passion for education is strongest, or, at any rate, most effective.
It is from the families of average farmers, of average business men
and of average professional men that we get our big supply of pupils
for the most prolonged technical training of our schools and
universities.
In this matter, as in many other matters, the historian of the
nineteenth century may possibly find that while public attention was
being given principally to the misery of the poor and to the luxury of
the rich it was in the "middle" part of society that the really
revolutionary changes in family life were happening.
It is with the financial reason for prolonged immaturity just as it is
with the mental. The rich boy may be supported into marriage by his
family. The son of the laborer soon reaches the wage-earning level of
his environment. But the son of the average man of moderate means,
after his years of scholastic preparation, must spend yet other years
in a slow climb out of the ranks into a position of commercial or
professional promise of "success" before he acquires what is regarded
in _his_ environment as a marrying income.
They say that college girls marry late. It's true enough. But it's not
well put.
The girls in the social group from which most college girls are drawn
marry late.
Late marriage was not started by college. It would be safer to say
that college was started by late marriage.
Out of the prolongation of infancy, out of the postponement of
marriage, came the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of
the world.
We can learn something about the nature of education by following the
history of that conquest.
When the old New England homestead furnished adequate employment to
all its daughters, and when those daughters passed directly from
girlhood to wifehood and were still most adequately employed, there
was really little reason why they should attend the schools in which
their brothers were being taught the knowledges of the outside world.
The girls did not belong to the outside world. Nor did the outside
world have anything to teach them about their work in the household.
In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that in 1684 the New
Haven Grammar School should have ordered that "all girls be excluded
as improper and inconsistent with such a grammar school as the law
enjoins."
In proportion, however, as the work of the household was shifted out
into the outside world, and in proportion as women began to follow
that work out into the outside world, the knowledges of the outside
world became appropriate and necessary for them. Hence, a hundred
years later, in 1790, it was as much a changing industrial condition
as a changing psychological one which caused the school authorities of
Gloucester, Mass., to resolve that "two hours (in each school-day) be
devoted to the instruction of females, as they are a tender and
interesting branch of the community."
But grammar-school education, even high-school education, was not long
enough for the women in the families in which the prolongation of
infancy, and the consequent postponement of marriage, was greatest.
While their future husbands were going through the long process of
education in school and college and university and then through the
long process of commercial and professional apprenticeship, these
girls were passing through the grammar-school age, through the
high-school age, and then on into what in those days looked like
old-maidhood. Their social environment did not lead them into factory
work. Yet their families were not rich. How were they to be occupied?
The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a
stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick
at her and say: "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps
indoors."
Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went into a job.
The "middle class" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and
housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.
Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's
college.
There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid,
blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day dazzles
us with the nobility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They
made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the
thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of
the needs, of the women of the times.