something, self-respecting, self-supporting. The existence of those
needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's
colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once
issued a large supply of teachers.
This flow of teachers goes back to the very fountain-head of the
higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before
she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was
running her school in Middlebury, Conn., was training young women to
_teach_, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently
urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school
in the United States.
From that time to this most college women have taught school before
getting married. _The higher education of women has been, in economic
effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher._
But isn't it the purpose of the colleges to avoid training their
pupils for specific occupations? Isn't it their purpose to give their
pupils discipline and culture, pure and broad, unaffected by
commercial intention? Isn't that what colleges are, and ought to be,
for?
On the shore of this vast and violent controversy we discreetly pause.
We shall not enter it. We cannot refrain, however, from extending our
finger at three reefs of solid fact which unsubmergably jut out above
the surface of the raging waters.
First. The colleges instruct their pupils in the subjects which those
pupils subsequently teach.
Second. The pupils specialize in the subjects which they are going to
teach.
Third. The colleges, besides providing the future teachers with
subjects, almost always offer to provide them with instruction in the
principles of education, and frequently offer to provide them with
instruction in the very technique of class-room work.
Our verdict, therefore, which we hope will be satisfactory to counsel
on both sides, is that the college is by no means a trade school, but
that if the woman who is going to earn her living will choose the one
trade of teaching, she can almost always get a pretty fair trade
training by going to college.
Passing beyond even the suspicion of controversy, we may observe,
uncontradicted, that the amount of trade training which a teacher is
expected to take is increasing year by year. In teaching, as in other
trades, the period and scope of preliminary preparation continue to
expand.
In the last calendar of Bryn Mawr College, the Department of
Education, in announcing its courses, makes the following common-sense
remarks:
"It is the purpose of this department to offer to students intending
to become teachers an opportunity to obtain a technical preparation
for their profession. Hitherto practical training has been thought
necessary for teachers of primary schools only, but similar
training is very desirable for teachers in high schools and colleges
also. Indeed, it is already becoming increasingly difficult for
college graduates without practical and theoretical pedagogical
knowledge to secure good positions. In addition to the lectures
open to undergraduates, courses will be organized for graduate
students only, conducted with special reference to preparation for the
headship and superintendence of schools."
There could hardly be a clearer recognition of the _vocational_ duty
of a college. There is meaning in that phrase "to secure good
positions." Bryn Mawr is willing to train girls not only to be
cultivated but to secure good positions, _as teachers_.
But the teaching trade is getting choked. There is too much supply.
Girls are going to college in hordes. Graduating from college, looking
for work, there is usually just one kind of work toward which they are
mentally alert. Their college experience has seldom roused their minds
toward any other kind of work. They start to teach. They drug the
market. And so the teaching trade, the great occupation of unmarried
educated women, ceases to be able to provide those women, as a class,
with an adequate field of employment.
It is a turning point in the economic history of educated women. It
is a turning point in the history of women's education.
At the 1909 annual convention of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae,
in Cincinnati, Miss Susan Kingsbury (acting for a committee of which
Mrs. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Miss
Breckenridge, of the University of Chicago, were members) read a real
essay on "The Economic Efficiency of College Women."
This essay was not written till detailed reports on income and
expenditure from 377 self-supporting college women had been got
together.
Out of these 377 there were 317 who were teachers. All of them had
gone all the way through college. More than half of them had
followed up their regular college course with from one to eight
years of graduate study. The capital invested in their education
was, in the average case, from $2,500 to $3,500. Often, however, it
amounted to $7,000 because of advanced work and travel. After all
this preparation, the average income achieved may be sufficiently
disclosed in the one fact that, among those graduates who had been at
work for from six to eight years, more than seventy per cent. were
still earning less than $1,100.
After drawing a complete statistical picture of the case, Miss
Kingsbury concluded with certain questions and recommendations, here
condensed, which show the new economic needs of educated women
knocking at the door of the higher education.
"Should not the oversupply of teachers be reduced by directing many of
our graduates into other pursuits than teaching? This will place upon
the college, just where the responsibility is due, the obligation of
discovering what those opportunities are and what preparation should
be given.
"This organization should endeavor to arouse in our colleges a sense
of responsibility for knowing the facts with regard to their
graduates, both social and economic, and should also endeavor to
influence our colleges through appointment secretaries, to direct
women, according to fitness, into other lines than teaching.
"Should not courses be added to the college curriculum to give women
the fundamental principles in other professions, or lines of industry
or commerce, than teaching?
"May not required courses be added to the college curriculum to
inculcate business power and sense in all women?"
This philosophy seems to aim at making the modern school as
informative about the occupations of modern women as the primitive
colonial home used to be about the occupations of the women of early
New England.
You see, we have always had vocational education. The early New
England girl was gradually inducted into her life-tasks by her mother.
The modern girl will be gradually inducted into her life-tasks by her
teachers.
You can observe the development toward this conclusion going on at any
educational level you please.
Let's look for a moment at the industrial level. Here's a girl, in the
north end of Boston, who is going to have to go to work young. She
knows it. Her family knows it. Well, even for this girl, whose
schooling will be brief, there are already three different periods of
gradual induction into industry.
First, when she has completed the lowest grades of her regular public
school, she may go for a while to the North Bennet Street Industrial
School. Here she will give just about half her time to manual work
such as machine- and hand-sewing. She will also study arithmetic,
literature and composition, geography and history; but (or, rather,
_and_) her interest in these subjects will be stimulated as powerfully
as possible by their practical applications, as well as by their
general relations, to the manual work she is doing and to the working
world she is so soon to enter.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
We are coming to admit the fact now that "pure" language and "pure"
mathematics unapplied to actual problems are, for the mass of boys and
girls, not only uninteresting but astonishingly unproductive of mental
results. One of the first discoveries made by Mrs. Mary Schenck
Woolman in her management of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was
that the public-school pupils who came to her after several years in
the grades were "unable to utilize their public-school academic work
in practical trade affairs." Their progress, if it could be called
so, had been toward reception, not toward action. In the North Bennet
Industrial School our Boston girl will make progress toward action.
Next, from the North Bennet, she may go to the Boston Trade School for
Girls. This school was given its first form under private management
by Miss Florence Marshall. It has now been absorbed into the
public-school system. What was a private fad has become a public
function.
In the Trade School the pupil whom we are following may decide to be a
milliner. But she will not yet confine her attention to millinery. She
will take courses in personal hygiene, business forms, spelling,
business English, industrial conditions, textiles, color-design. She's
not yet in the purely "technical" part of her education. She's still,
to some extent, in the general vocational part of it. But she is
entering deeper and deeper into technique. While in the Trade School
she will give much of her time for four months to plain sewing, then
for four months to making summer hats and finally for four months to
making winter hats.
She has now completed two of the industrial educational periods we
mentioned. She may go on to a third. She may proceed to spend a year
in the millinery trade-shop of the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union. Here she will get into technique completely. The conditions
will be virtually those of a factory. She will be trained to precision
and to speed. Her product will be sold. She will receive wages. Yet
she is still in school. She is still regarded not as an employee to be
discharged offhand for incompetency but as a pupil to be instructed
and assisted on into competency.
When that girl goes to a real commercial millinery shop she will be as
thoroughly ready for it as the New England girl was ready for a loom
when her mother let her at last run it by herself.
We have looked now at the industrial educational level. And, happening
to be in the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, we can look at
two other educational levels without going out of the building.
On the commercial level we can remind ourselves of the rapid spread of
modern commercial education by visiting the classroom of Mrs. Prince's
school of department-store salesmanship. It is such a successful
school now that the Women's Educational and Industrial Union offers,
in conjunction with Simmons College, to teach people to teach
salesmanship in other similar schools which are being started
elsewhere.
Leaving this commercial level, we can go to the academic level by
visiting the Appointment Bureau. We may call it the academic level
because the Appointment Bureau exists chiefly for the benefit of girls
who have been to college. Its purpose, however, is non-academic in the
extreme.
The Appointment Bureau is an employment agency, and one of the most
extraordinary employment agencies ever organized. Its object is not
merely to introduce existing clients to existing jobs (which is the
proper normal function of employment agencies), but to make forays
into the wild region of "occupations other than teaching," and there
to find jobs, and then to find girls to fit those jobs. In other
words, it is a kind of "Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson's
Bay" for the purpose of exploring, surveying, developing, and settling
the region of "occupations other than teaching" on behalf of college
women.
It is managed by Miss Laura Drake Gill, president of the National
Association of Collegiate Alumnae and former dean of Barnard College.
She is assisted by an advisory council of representatives of near-by
colleges--Radcliffe, Wellesley, Simmons, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and
Brown.
In harmony with this work the Women's Educational and Industrial Union
has just issued a handbook of three hundred pages, entitled "Vocations
for the Trained Woman." It is an immense map of the occupational world
for educated women, in which every bay and headland, every lake and
hill, is drawn to scale, from poultry farming to department-store
buying, from lunch-room management to organized child-saving.
We here see the educational system, at its college academic level,
moving not simply toward preparing girls for money-earning work but
also toward actually putting them into that work and, in order to put
them into it, finding it.
This last innovation, this advising of graduates with regard to the
occupational world and this guiding of them into the occupations for
which they are best fitted, will bring education closer to the
ultimate needs of those who are being educated than any other
innovation of recent years. It will establish the final permanent
contact between two isolations,--the isolation of aimless learning and
the isolation of ignorant doing. It is still, however, a project, a
prospect. The other two innovations which we have mentioned press
closer to immediacy. Immediate, certainly, is the demand of "middle
class" women for larger occupational opportunities. And almost
immediate is the success of the demand that the school system shall
fit them to the use of those opportunities.
In a small Illinois city there is a woman's college, founded as a
preparatory school in the forties and soon advanced to be a seminary,
which, with Anna P. Sill for its first head, Jane Addams for its
best-known graduate, and Julia Gulliver for its present president, has
come to be a college of standing and of leading. Only Troy Female
Seminary and Mount Holyoke Seminary preceded it, in date of
foundation, among the important women's institutions.
Rockford College is ranked to-day, by the reports of the United States
Commissioner of Education, in rank one--among the sixteen best women's
colleges in the United States. It hasn't risen to that rank by any
quick, money-spurred spurt. It brings with it out of its far past all
the traditions of that early struggle for the higher education which,
by friction, kindled among women so flaming an enthusiasm for pure
knowledge. It remains "collegiate" in the old sense, quiet, cloistral,
inhabiting old-fashioned brick buildings in an old-fashioned large
yard, looking still like the Illinois of war times more than like the
Illinois of the twentieth century, retaining all the home ideals of
those times--a large interest in feminine accomplishments, a strict
regard for manners, a belief in the value of charm.
But here, in this quiet, non-metropolitan college, so really
"academic," so really--in the oldest-fashioned ways--"cultural," here
is a two-year course in Secretarial Studies.
[Illustration: ROCKFORD COLLEGE, IN ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS. IN ITS
OLD-FASHIONED BUILDINGS, WHICH PRESERVE THE SPIRIT OF THE ACADEMIC LIFE
OF THE OLD DAYS, THERE IS NOW A VERY MODERN DEPARTMENT OF SECRETARIAL
STUDIES.]
It is the first time (within our knowledge) that such a thing has
happened in any of the old first-rank women's colleges.
The course in Secretarial Studies at Rockford gives the pupil English,
accounts, commerce, commercial law, and economic history in her first
year, and political science, English, and economics in her second
year. Shorthand and typewriting are required in both years, and a few
hours a week are reserved in each year for elective courses to be
chosen by the pupil among offerings in French, German, Spanish, and
history.
There is here a double concession: first, to the increased need of
"middle class" women for "occupations other than teaching"; second, to
the increased recognition of those other occupations as being worthy
of "cultural" training.
This turn in education has been made on an economic pivot. The
commercial and industrial occupations of the world are coming to
demand scholastic preparation. And the women who have had scholastic
preparation, even the most complete and long-continued scholastic
preparation, are coming to demand admission into the commercial and
industrial occupations of the world. The era of the purely scholastic
occupation _and no other_ for the scholastically trained woman has
come to an end.
We have observed the contraction of the home as a field of adequate
employment for daughters. We have observed the postponement of
marriage in its effect on the occupational opportunities of those
daughters. Deprived of adequate employment at home, we have seen them
seek it elsewhere. Marriage and housekeeping and child-rearing, as an
occupation, we have seen deferred to a later and later period in life.
Let us now assume that every woman who has a husband is removed from
money-earning work. It is an assumption very contrary to fact. But let
us make it. And then let us look at this compact picture of the extent
to which being married is an occupation for American women:
In the United States, in the year 1900, among women twenty years of
age and over, the married women numbered 13,400,000. The unmarried
women and the widows together numbered 6,900,000. For every two women
married there was one woman either single or widowed.
[Illustration: THESE CHILDREN IN THE FRANCIS PARKER SCHOOL IN CHICAGO ARE
GETTING AN EARLY START IN THEIR TRAINING FOR THEIR FUTURE WORK IN THEIR
HOMES.
_Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago._]
What futility, as well as indignity, there is in the idea that the
query of support for women gets its full answer in a husband!
Surely we may now say: If education does not (1) give women a
comprehension of the organization of the money-earning world, and (2)
train them to one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that
world, it is not education.
Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women's
education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning
technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the
battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide
battle cry, the sentiment: "The Home is also a technique. All women
must be trained to it."
At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides
the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home
Economics.
In an illustration in this chapter we show the tiny children of the
Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the
technique of the home. In another picture we show the post-graduate
laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois.
And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses
in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of
marketing, and other phases of home management.
The money-earning world, a technique! The home, a technique! The boy
learns only one. Must the girl learn two, be twice a specialist?
III.
Learning for Spending
The First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was
held in 1908 at Fribourg in Switzerland. It was no improvised,
amateur-uplift, private-theatricals affair.
The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of
Fribourg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were
printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered
seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of
three rival varieties of household-arts instruction--the German, the
Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of
Fribourg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate
system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in
order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their
duties as housekeepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted
to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International
Information Committee.
Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost
all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking
and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever
slaking concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders,--the
manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an
age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs down" and
let her put it out of its agony altogether--in such an age there
comes, at Fribourg, in this First International Congress on Domestic
Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition ever
given in any age to the home's economic value.
A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering
thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's own as well as
Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles--not always all that they
are cranked up to be.
Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds to
the mourners' bench every year.
At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in home
economics was gathered in the spring of 1910. They were seven. Of the
120 units of work required for graduation they had earned at least 38
in such subjects as "Textiles and Clothing," "Food Chemistry,"
"General Foods," "Advanced Foods," "Home Sanitation," "House
Furnishing and Decoration," and "Home Administration." Most of them,
besides taking a degree in Home Economics, took likewise a degree in
Education. We may therefore assume that schools as well as homes will
listen to their new message.
Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who subsequently left Missouri to
organize a department of home economics in the University of Kansas,
is a novel type of New Woman in that she has earned the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took graduate work in
the department of home administration in the University of Chicago and
achieved her doctorate with an investigation into "The Effect of
Cooking on the Digestibility of Starch." What she found out was
subsequently printed as a bulletin by the United States Department of
Agriculture.
In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over the home, it
perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic science
bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture excite a
demand for a million copies.
It is a wake like Mike McCarthy's.
Mike was lookin' iligant
As he rested there in state.
But
When the fun was at its height
McCarthy sat up straight.
This ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary successes)
goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has been in the
parallel case here considered--great enough to be felt all the way
around the world.
It is being felt in the Island Empire of the East. Miss Ume Tsuda's
Institute at Tokyo (which stands so high that its graduates are
allowed to teach in secondary schools without further government
examination) has installed courses in English domestic science as well
as in the domestic science of Japan.
It is being felt in the Island Empire of the West. King's College, of
the University of London, has organized a three-year course leading to
the degree of Mistress of Home Science, and has also established a
"Post-Graduates' Course in Home Science," in which out of fourteen
students (in the first year of its existence) four were graduates of
the courses of academic study of Oxford or Cambridge.
It is being felt in the United States at every educational level.
We expect domestic science and art now in the schools of agriculture
and we regard it as natural that the legislature of Montana should
appropriate $50,000 to the Montana State Agricultural College for a
women's dormitory.
We expect domestic science and art in the elementary schools and we
are not astonished to find that in Boston, in every grade above the
third, for every girl, there is sewing, or cooking, or both, for 120
minutes every week.