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, we call attention to a picture reproduced
in this article from a book published in the year 1493. The 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 boss, has the best job. She is weaving the yarn into
cloth on a loom.
The daughters of the Emperor Charlemagne, who was a very rich
man, learned how to card and spin and weave. Noble women had to
boss all that kind of thing 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 in the school.
On the first of January of this year Mrs. 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 Sub-Department of Flax, after heckling that 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 Sub-Department of Wool, in addition to being
carders, spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all
the color resources of the times, boiling poke-berries 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 the narrow fabrics for
hair-laces, glove-ties, belts, garters, and hat-bands; nothing
about the incessant knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings;
nothing about a host of other details. They 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, all through those early years when
eyes and finger-tips are the nourishing points of the intellect.
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, in Revolutionary days, in Massachusetts, 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 mature.
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?
No individual.
Science has done part of it.
By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution
of the compact industries of the home through 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, in any degree, with
the previous experience of the race. And till we have done that,
to some degree, we are not mature.
With this postponement of personal maturity, there is an even
greater postponement of what might be called "technical"
maturity. The real mastery of a real technique takes longer and
longer. The 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.
What is left undone by Science in keeping us immature is finally
accomplished by 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.
This is just as true of the boy from a "middle class" family as
it is of the boy from a "working class" family. There follows,
however, a most important difference between them. The "middle
class" boy will have to work longer and go farther than the
"working class" boy in order to rise to the financial standards
of his class. In this respect the "working class" boy will be a
man, ready for marriage, long before his "middle class"
fellow-worker.
It is among "middle class" boys, then, that the period of infancy
is most prolonged. They get a good deal of schooling. The stores
of human knowledge are put in their hands, to some extent, and,
to some extent, they catch up with the experience of the race.
This takes a longer and longer effort, particularly if real
mastery of any real technique is attempted. Then, on going to
work, they find that System, supplementing Science, has perfected
such an organization of the world of work that they must stay for
quite a while in the ranks of the organization. They will not
soon be earning what is regarded among their friends as a
marrying income. In money, as well as in mind, they approach
marriage with increasing tardiness. Their prolonged infancy is
financial, as well as mental.
They say that college girls marry late. It is true enough. But it
isn't properly stated.
The girls in the kind of family which college girls come from
marry late.
It can be definitively established by statistics here
considerately omitted that the age of marriage of college girls
is no later than the age of marriage of their non-college sisters
and acquaintances.
College is not a cause. It is a symptom.
Out of the prolongation of infancy in the "middle class" has come
the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of the world.
It was by no vagary of chance that the demand of women for the
higher education came simultaneously with the change from the old
industrial home to the new, more purely domestic home. (It may be
a higher, nobler type of home. We are not here discussing that
point.)
As the home ceased to provide its daughters with adequate
education and with adequate employment, what was their situation?
In the "working class" it was simply this: That they went into
factories and that their sweethearts married them somewhat later
than had previously been the case, because their share as wives
in the support of the family was increasingly smaller. But the
"working class" man soon reaches his maximum earning capacity in
his craft and stays there. His financial infancy is short,
compared with that of the "middle class" man. He therefore
marries younger.
In the "middle class," however, Science and System began to
lengthen the mental and financial infancy of the men to such an
extent that the "old maid" of twenty-three became common. What
were the girls in the "middle class" to do while the boys were
growing up to be men, in mind and in money?
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 in to 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 colleges.
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 makes us veil our eves before 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.
But the needs were there, the need to be something, the need to
do something, self-respecting, self supporting. The existence of
these 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 goes back to the fountainhead 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, Connecticut, 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 and stealthily sidle off, taking note of just 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 classroom 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.
We are more interested in observing 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 the 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."
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 "middle class" 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 the class.
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 graduates had been
got together.
Out of these 377 there were 317 who were teachers. There were 183
who had followed up their regular college course with from one to
eight years of graduate study. The capital invested in education
was from $2500 to $3500 and often amounted to $7000 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 $1100.
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 "middle
class" women knocking at the door of present "middle class"
education:
"Should not the over-supply 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 modern industry as the primitive home was about
primitive industry. It seems to be the same educational
philosophy which produced the course on Chicago in the Chicago
elementary schools, which produced the Manhattan Trade School in
New York, which produced the School of Salesmanship at the
Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.
At that Women's Educational and Industrial Union, at 264 Boylston
Street, you may see the evolution toward the age of trained women
proceeding at all levels of educational equipment.
There, before you, at one level, are the Trade School Shops--a
shop in hand-work and a shop in millinery. The pupils are
graduates of the Boston Trade School for Girls. They have had one
year of training. They are now taking another.
Florence Marshall made the Boston Trade School, with a committee
of women to help her. It has now been taken over by the public
authorities and merged into the public-school system. What looked
like a private fad has become a public function. The training of
women for self-support has been recognized as a duty of the
state.
The Trade School Shops at the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union were started for the express purpose of supplementing the
work of the Boston Trade School for Girls. One year was not
enough.
In the Trade School the prospective milliner had spent four
months on plain sewing, four months on summer hats, four months
on winter hats. She had also taken short courses in Personal
Hygiene, Business Forms, Spelling, Business English, Color
Design, Textiles, Industrial Conditions. These latter courses
were not, strictly speaking, "technical." They were "vocational."
They were in the "middle ground" between general and technical
training. They went beyond the general training of the elementary
schools and furnished the girl with the background of her future
vocation. But she often needed a little more of the foreground, a
little more of actual trade technique.
Thus does her education divide itself up into periods:--general,
vocational, technical.
The Trade School Shops are designed to give the girl her final
technical finish. They are really more like a factory than like a
school. Although the object of them is to convey a broad
instruction, the pupil gets wages, the stuff she makes is sold,
and the organization is that of a commercial establishment.
So, at the end of two years from the time she left the elementary
school, the young milliner is ready to go out into the world
organization. She is better fitted for her world than many a
college girl is for hers.
On a different level of educational equipment from the Trade
School Shops stands the School of Salesmanship. It gets many high
school girls and even, occasionally, a girl who has been to
college.
Finally, there is the Appointment Bureau, for college girls in
particular.
This Appointment Bureau is the most extraordinary employment
agency ever organized. Its object is not merely to introduce
existing clients to existing jobs (which is the proper normal
object of employment agencies), but to make forays into the wild
region of "occupations other than teaching," and find jobs, and
then 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.
There is no more important work being done for women to-day.
In connection with it, 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 "middle class" 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 State Child-Saving.
The responses made to this movement by certain educational
institutions (including particularly Simmons College) will be
observed in a future article. Just one response, from an
unexpected quarter, must be noticed here.
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.
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.
This is a notable concession not only to the increased need of
"middle class" women for "occupations other than teaching" but
also to the increased recognition of those other occupations as
being worthy of "cultural" training.
We keep moving forward into an era of trained women as well as
trained men. The extraordinary prolongation of mental and
financial infancy in the "middle class," bringing with it an
extraordinary postponement of marriage, makes this training
particularly necessary in the case of the women of that class.
But the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment
for daughters exists everywhere, increasing the cost of living
for the family and driving daughters to supplementing the family
income.
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!
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.
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 one photograph in this article 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, and be twice a
specialist?
(In the September number Mr. Hard will discuss The Home Economics
Movement.)
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VOL. XXIII September 1910 NO. 3