EDITOR'S NOTE: It is commonly supposed that only the women of
poverty are affected by modern industrial conditions. On the
contrary, modern industrial conditions are having their greatest
influence among the women who, before marriage, enjoy wide
educational opportunities, and who, after marriage, enjoy the
blessing of partial leisure. It is among these women that
economic developments are producing the profoundest changes in
habit of life and in character of mind. Mr Hard, who will be
remembered by all readers of the "Woman's Invasion," has spent
two years in the diligent investigation of this subject, and has
acquired an authoritative knowledge of it.
EVERY Jack has his Jill." It is a tender twilight thought, and it
more or less settles Jill.
When the Census Man was at work in 1900, however, he went about
and counted 2,260,000 American women who were more than
twenty-five years old and who were still unmarried.
It is getting worse (or better) with every passing decade, and
out of it is emerging a new ideal of education for women, an
ideal which seems certain to penetrate the whole educational
system of the United States, all the way from the elementary
schools to the universities.
The Census Man groups us into age periods. The period from
twenty-five to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially
because it is the one in which most of us get pretty well fixed
into our life work. Out of every 1,000 women in that period, in
the year 1890, the Census Man found 254 who were still unmarried.
In 1900, only ten years later, he found 275.
There is not so much processional as recessional about marriage
at present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the
realistic pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach
the comparatively serene, landlocked years from forty-five to
fifty-four that we find ourselves in an age-period in which the
number of single women has been reduced to less than ten per
cent. of the total. The rebound from this fact hits education
hard. As marriage recedes, and as the period of gainful work
before marriage lengthens, the need of real technical preparation
for that gainful work becomes steadily more urgent, and the
United States moves steadily onward into an era of trained women
as well as trained men.
In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons--the first of
its kind in the United States--a regular four-year college of
which the aim is to send out every graduate technically trained
to earn her living in a certain specific occupation, there were
enrolled last year, besides some five hundred undergraduate
women, some eighty other women who had already earned their
bachelor's degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr,
Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the
University of Montana.
These eighty women, after eight years in elementary schools, four
years in high school, and four years in college, were taking one
year more in technical school in order to be--what? Not doctors
or lawyers or architects. Not anything in the "learned"
professions. But to be "social workers" in settlements or for
charity societies, to be librarians, to be stenographers and
secretaries.
The Bachelor of Arts from Vassar who is going to be a
stenographer, and who is taking her year of graduate study at
Simmons, will go to work at the end of the year and then, six
months later, if she has made good, will get from Simmons the
degree of Bachelor of Science. At that point in her life she will
have two degrees and seventeen years of schooling behind her. A
big background. But we are beginning to do some training for
almost everything.
Did you ever see a school of salesmanship for department-store
women employees? You can see one at the Women's Educational and
Industrial Union in Boston. Under the guidance of Mrs. Lucinda W.
Prince, the big department stores of Boston have come to think
enough of this school to send girls to it every morning and to
pay them full wages while they take a three months' course.
If you will attend any of the classes, in arithmetic, in
textiles, in hygiene, in color and design, in demonstration
sales, in business forms, you will get not only a new view of the
art of selling goods over the counter but a new vision of a big
principle in education.
In the class on color, for instance, you will at first be puzzled
by the vivid interest taken by the pupils in the theory of it.
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 toward a classroom
study of a theoretical subject. 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 philosophy of it.
Right 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 mind, irradiating every subject, the
light it may throw on the specific work she is to do.
"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! They get lectured at all the time about the
postponement of marriage, and they can no more control it than
they can control the size of the city of New York. Theoretically,
everybody on Manhattan Island could get up and go away and leave
the island vacant. Actually, it can't and won't be done.
Theoretically, we should all of us get married young. We fall in
love young enough. But, actually, we can't get married young, and
don't. The reasons are given later. Meanwhile, just notice, and
just ponder, the following facts.
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 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 period, the unmarried were 391. In New
Haven they were 393. In Boston they were 452.
In view of such facts, how can anybody object to the steps which
have been taken recently toward giving the women in the
manufacturing trades, as well as the women in the commercial
trades, some little preparation for the work in which they are
likely to spend so many years?
In the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in the last eighteen
months of record, the enrollment was 1,169. More and more the
girls in this school are willing to stay in it for a full year.
They have finished at least five grades of the public school, and
they are now learning to be milliners, to be dressmakers, to be
operators of electric-power machines, to be workers in paste and
glue in such occupations as candle-shade-making, to be workers
with brush and pencil in furnishing the manufacturing trades with
designs.
It is not only a matter of learning to do one particular thing in
one particular department in one particular trade. That they
could learn in a factory. It is a matter of getting some
understanding of a whole trade, or getting some kind of a view of
how the world is run. Nobody wants to make people into machines.
The object of a good trade school is precisely the reverse. It is
the common school which makes people into machines, when it sends
them directly from books, which do not explain the working world,
out into that world to become uncomprehending appendages to
minute processes in infinitely subdivided manufacturing
organizations.
A good trade school, besides teaching the technique of the
machine, covers what Mrs. Woolman, the director of the Manhattan
School, in her wonderful report of last year called the "middle
ground" between general academic preparatory work on the one hand
and practical trade training on the other. In this "middle
ground" the pupil takes simple courses in, for instance, "Civics"
and "Industries."
"Nothing to it," says an irritated manufacturer. "Nothing to it
at all! I can't get a good office boy any more. I can't get
anybody, boy or girl, who wants to do anything but just hold down
a job and grab a pay-envelope. Too much schooling! Those
inventors and pioneers who came out of New England and made this
country from a hunting-ground into an empire--they didn't have
all this monkey-business in technical schools and trade schools.
They just went to work. That's all. I say send 'em to work young
and let 'em sweat. That's what makes men and women."
My dear sir, those early New Englanders were in trade schools
from the time they began to crawl on the floor among their
mothers' looms and spinning-wheels. There was hardly a home in
early New England that didn't give a large number of technical
courses in which men and women were always teaching by doing, and
the boys and girls 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,
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.)