require neither tools nor special equipment. They do require teachers
and a text book. While Miss Hirschler was teaching her classes, she
began writing a text book and making plans for training other teachers
so that the value of the class might be extended to more than could be
enrolled for her instruction. The newly-established New York Institute
of Mercantile Training engaged Miss Hirschler and adopted her plans.
Classes for window trimmers and sign writers were already under way.
To them were added offices and staff for a school of salesmanship. It
was a moot point for a while whether classes for salespersons should
actually be held in these offices, or whether the scope of the work
should be extended to reach the present directors of salespersons,--the
store superintendents who now in so many cases hold morning classes for
sections of their force. This latter course, Miss Hirschler decided,
would be the best one to follow. Whereas by the former plan she might
make more efficient a handful out of the thousands of salespeople in
this one city, by the latter plan she would indirectly be reaching
thousands not only in New York, but in as many other American cities as
had stores to coöperate with her. The essential thing, she felt, was to
train teachers. At present there were few even would-be teachers. While
we were waiting for them, we might use the present situation by helping
to make more efficient the involuntary teachers, the men at the head of
stores who now ineffectually seek to grapple with the difficulties of
their selling force.
Accordingly a correspondence school was started for store
superintendents. While the general outline of the text book is
followed, this course is adapted individually to each student. In a
number of cases Miss Hirschler has visited the stores, personally
looked over the situation, and made suggestions as to the organization
of salesmanship classes, the selection of applicants, and the best
methods of securing the coöperation of the salespeople. Enrolled in her
course are store superintendents from New England, the South and the
far West. Each one of these men is in turn reaching hundreds, sometimes
thousands of salespeople.
The next step neither Miss Hirschler nor we who are the consumers can
prophesy with certainty. Yet it seems reasonable to expect that in
time store officials, who at best can give only a small part of their
time to teaching their employes, will wish to be relieved of this task
by professional teachers of salesmanship who, like other vocational
teachers, give all their time to their work. By that time we shall have
passed out of the period of experimentation. We shall have reached a
point where we can say with definiteness what part of the student’s
time should be spent in the study of textiles, what part in the study
of color and design, what part in the study of applied psychology. We
shall have reached a conclusion as to the relative value of lecture
work and practise selling.
Selling goods may thus have become as definite and recognized a
vocation as plumbing or dressmaking. Thus defined and established,
this vocation which could have been taught in the beginning only by
the faith and courage of private interests, may come to its own by
recognition among the vocational day courses now being started in our
system of public instruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] _The Art of Retail Selling_, by Diana Hirschler. New York
Institute of Mercantile Training, 1909.
[35] _Training for Saleswomen_, by Lucinda W. Prince. _Federation
Bulletin_, February, 1908.
THE EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN[36]
EMILY GREENE BALCH
Wellesley College
Women in modern production are a misfit. They are like the dog that
puzzled the expressman in the classic story. “_He_ don’t know where he
wants to go, and _we_ don’t know where he wants to go; he’s eat his
tag.”
Is not this sense of misadjustment, of being astray, due to the fact
that, industry being arranged to meet its end of private profits, human
nature has to adjust itself as best it can to industrial conditions,
instead of industrial conditions adjusting themselves to human nature?
The troubles that result from this system make themselves felt
everywhere, among men as well as women, but most seriously among the
weakest competitors, and especially among wage-earning children and
women.
My subject is education and efficiency, but I do not propose to go over
the well-worn arguments to show that we ought at once to establish
schools for trade training. It is now pretty generally understood that
this is true. I want to raise a more far-reaching question--can women
be economically efficient in production, production being organized as
it now is?
The lives of both men and women have certain permanent aspects;
whether in the stone age or in the twentieth century they must rear
their descendants, they must between them produce material support for
themselves and for the growing generation, they must lead their own
personal lives and feed and discipline and “invite” their own souls and
minds. There is always this trinity of their racial, their economic,
and their inner life.
But while both men and women have this three-fold function, the
differences in their racial life involve far-reaching economic
consequences. Motherhood is an occupation as fatherhood is not, and
this deeply affects woman’s industry. Even in the primitive world,
where industry is largely a household matter for all, woman’s activity
is bound to the hearthstone more closely than man’s, for the bearing
and rearing of children is intertwined with all her other business,
and conditions it. This makes housework with all its ramifications and
outlying branches the great feminine profession throughout the ages.
Consequently when industry, passing from the control of the worker
to that of the owner of the business, assumed its modern specialized
form and took work and workers out of the home into the factory and
workshop, this change, carried out with no regard for the results on
the workers themselves, affected the lives of women in ways which are
not paralleled in those of men. Besides other consequences, it greatly
lessened woman’s efficiency both as mother and as worker.
Under the old régime there was an effective unity in women’s lives, an
organic harmony of function with function. The claims of motherhood
and of work upon woman harmonized, because she herself was in control
and arranged the conditions of her industry to fit her duties and
disabilities as wife and mother. For herself and for her household
she planned the various tasks with a view to strength, convenience
and training for development. Besides the unity of motherhood and
industry, there was unity of education and industry, of preparation and
practise. The girl was essentially an apprentice of the housekeeper,
whether mother or mistress. Her lessons were indistinguishable from
her labor. From a little child she was working as well as learning,
and also till she was at the head of her own home she was learning as
well as working. Read Solomon’s description, or even better, Xenophon’s
charming sketch in his _Economicus_, for a picture of feminine
household industry on a rather large scale. We need not conceive this
stage as ideal. The point is that there was a natural adjustment of
work to worker which modern industry undermines in three ways--in
separating work from the home, in separating work from education, and
in shaping the conditions and concomitants of work without regard to
the powers, tastes, or needs of the workers.
Before endeavoring to analyze these effects let us consider various
types of modern women in whose lives all the different difficulties
interact, shaping their fate, too often, in most strange and
inharmonious fashion.
First let us take the professional woman. If she leads a single life
she cuts the Gordian knot of the incompatibility of work and marriage.
This is simple, certainly, but quite abnormal. While it is doubtless
a happy solution in many cases, it is certainly undesirable that
large numbers of women should adopt it, especially if we may suppose
that a class of celibate professional women withdraw from the race
the inheritance of some degree of picked intellectual ability. It
has been argued, by Sidney Webb if I remember rightly, that the rule
disqualifying married women for public-school teaching tends to keep
a selected group of women out of marriage; a practical exclusion from
marriage of women who succeed in medicine, law, architecture, art and
business would be, from this point of view, at least an equally serious
loss as regards quality if not quantity.
If a woman is able to combine professional activity with marriage and
motherhood, as some have been so brilliantly successful in doing, this
is because professional work is often more like the old housework than
is factory work as regards elasticity and the possible adjustment of
time and amount of work to personal convenience.
As our second group let us take well-to-do married women who command
domestic service and nursery assistance. Such a woman has the maximum
of freedom in ordering her own life, yet, even so, under the mould
of the general situation, how chaotic her life history is likely to
be. Suppose that she is at a finishing school till she “comes out”
in society, or that she goes to college and at twenty-two comes home
again to live, not choosing a professional career. Although she is only
half conscious of the situation she practically waits for a few years
to see whether or not marriage is to be her lot. Probably her natural
mates are not yet financially able to offer marriage, and, again, more
or less conscious of her rather humiliating situation, she becomes
seriously and definitely interested in some specialized activity. By
distinct preparation or simply by practise she fits herself for the
work that she has found to do; then, just as she is well engaged in
this work, the critical moment arrives and she marries. For some years
her profession is motherhood, though this is the last thing for which
she has thought of fitting herself; and then again her life takes a new
turn. Her children are no longer children; they are at college or at
work or married; or her daughter at home, perhaps without liking to say
so, yearns to be intrusted with the home administration, for a while
at least. Whether or not the mother resigns any of her housekeeping
duties, motherhood is no longer a business that fills her days and
gives adequate employment to her powers; again she seeks for occupation.
Such women, with the unmarried women of leisure, make the most
disposable force in our society, but one very variously disposed. Some
of them, the spenders, live purely parasitic lives, absorbing the
services of others and consuming social wealth without rendering any
return. Others, at the opposite extreme, perform work that is unpaid
and that could not be paid for, work that demands experimentation,
initiative and devotion. The work of a man or woman who combines
with the chance gift of economic freedom the chance gift of genius
consecrated to service--the work of a Charles Darwin, a William Morris,
a Josephine Shaw Lowell, or a Jane Addams--is a pearl beyond price,
but probably common people (that is, most of us) work better under a
reasonable degree of pressure.
Our next social class is the married women who do their own work, as we
say. For them life retains in the main its primitive harmony, except
that they are less likely than women of old to come to their life
work adequately prepared to carry on a household on the highest plane
practicable with the resources available under contemporary conditions.
Our last class is the working women. The woman who does her own work is
not, in the curious development of our phraseology, a working woman,
though we may believe that the mother of a brood of children for whom
she cleans, cooks, sews, washes and nurses does some work. On the
other hand, the working woman is not, in our common phrase, occupied
in “doing her own work,” and truly, the work at which she is set might
appear to be almost anybody’s rather than hers, if its unsuitability
to her needs and powers is any criterion. While her school, however
imperfect it may have been, was designed to meet her needs, was
administered with the object of advancing her interests, her workshop,
on the contrary, seeks quite a different end--the owner’s profits. If
she prospers or suffers through its conditions, that is a wholly alien
consideration. The work is not her own, both because the product is not
hers and because the conditions under which the work is carried on have
no relation to her needs.
The education of the girl who is to enter industry generally fails as
yet, however well intended, to fit her effectively for her working
career. Most working girls, indeed, leave school at fourteen, when they
are in any case too young to be efficient. Then come the proverbial
wasted years of casual and demoralizing employment, till at eighteen
or so the young workers find their footing and for five years, it may
be, rank as working women. Then to most of them comes marriage. They
entered industry untrained, now they enter married life untrained, if
not unfitted, for such life, and at a less adaptable age than earlier.
To a considerable extent the economic virtues of the factory are
virtues that the girl cannot carry over into her housework, and its
weaknesses are weaknesses that lessen her success as wife and mother.
Industry tends to unfit her for home making if it tends to make her a
creature of mechanical routine, unused to self-direction, unplastic,
bored by privacy and not bored by machine monotony; if it accustoms her
to an inapplicable scale and range of expenditure which assigns too
much money to clothes (which are necessary to the status and earning
power of the worker as they are not to mothers and children) and too
little to adequate nourishment which, important to the adult, is
fundamental to the health of children. Worst of all, the employments
of working women tend, as has now been shown, more commonly and more
seriously than has been at all generally understood, to unfit women,
nervously and physically, for bearing children.
When we try to disentangle the confusions illustrated in these varying
types of lives we see that one of the main causes of trouble is the
fact that modern industry is largely incompatible, while work lasts,
with the functions of wife and mother or that at least it militates
against them. We have seen some of the ways in which this simple fact
of the incompatibility of two fundamental functions distracts and
deforms women’s lives.
A result of this divorce of industrial and married life is the fact
that it is impossible to predict whether a given girl will spend her
life in the home or in the working world, commercial, industrial or
professional, and that consequently she commonly fails to prepare
for either. We have indeed some professional training, some business
training, and are just beginning to have some trade training; training
for the home vocations has hardly got commonly beyond some cooking and
sewing in the grades--most desirable as far as it goes. In Utopia,
I dare say that every girl when she becomes engaged to be married,
receives, besides her general education and her trade training,
six months of gratuitous and compulsory vocational preparation for
homemaking, and that this training for the bride, and a course in
the ethics and hygiene of marriage for both bride and groom, is
there required before a marriage license can be issued; moreover, I
imagine that there every woman expecting her first child is given a
scholarship providing instruction and medical advice for some months
before and after the child is born, the conditions depending upon
individual circumstances. In the real world some of our grossest evils
are related to the lack of preparation for the most vital relations of
life. Uncertainty as to her vocation not only prevents a girl’s being
trained for either household or industrial life, but it makes her a
most destructive element in competitive wage earning. She does not care
to make herself efficient in industry, for she hopes soon to marry, and
meanwhile the semi-self-supporting woman drags down the pay of women
wholly dependent on their own earnings and also that of men, perhaps
including that of the man who might marry her but cannot afford it,
thus increasing the chances against her in the lottery of marriage.
While this conflict between the call to industry and the call to
marriage confuses women’s lives but not men’s, the divorce of education
from practise is much the same for men and for women both in its
grounds and in its results. And first as to the causes.
Industry being organized by the employer for his own purposes, the
worker is regarded simply as a means to the commercial end of maximum
cheapness of production. This cheapness is attained, or at any rate has
been commonly supposed to be attained, by the maximum of specialization
and the maximum of routine and uniformity. The specialization of
functions has appeared to the employer to make any education of the
worker unnecessary and to make it possible to eliminate from the
workshop the costly and troublesome business of teaching the trade,
a policy that has had consequences to industry and citizenship that
we are just beginning to realize. Up to this time the school has
not averted these consequences by creating an effective substitute
for apprenticeship. In the old days it could properly devote itself
to academic branches, and even today, largely as a matter of habit
inherited from those days, schooling continues as a general thing to
have no bearing on the productive labor that the pupils engage in
later, but is wholly general, with the marked defects as well as the
merits of education of this type.
Not only has industrial training thus fallen between two stools, having
been dropped from the workroom and not undertaken by the school, but
the whole program of general education is controlled by the industrial
situation. The routine and uniformity of modern production mean that
the worker must work at the standard pace for the standard number of
hours or drop out. This is less true of piece work, at least in theory;
in practise the worker’s need of money is likely to force the pace and
stretch the hours to the limit of possibility. As regards occupation
it is all or nothing; the employer will not accept workers who cannot
give themselves entire. This is, I think, the element of truth in the
emphasis of socialists on their thesis that the worker sells not his
labor, but his labor power. So children once surrendered to competitive
industry are surrendered altogether and for good--they are absorbed and
exhausted.
Because work is so organized that it is not fit for young people
immature in body and mind and that they are not fit for it, we keep
them out of all real work until we are ready to have them do nothing
but work. And conversely, until they go to work once for all they are
occupied with schooling and schooling only. Consequently life is broken
into great indigestible lumps--first all study, then all work,--into
unrelated phases which fail mutually to strengthen each other. Work and
study ought to go on together, work beginning in the kindergarten years
and education continuing to the end of life or at least so long as the
mind remains receptive.
When boys and girls are needed to help at home while they are getting
their schooling the situation is more natural, and if the child is
not under too much pressure, better. But the child of the tenement or
the fashionable apartment house cannot get this training in helpful
labor parallel with his schooling as does the boy on the farm. So all
work is postponed till school days are over and all schooling stops
when work begins. One result is that some of us are busy teaching
subjects fit only for mature minds to immature boys and girls on the
assumption that they will never have another chance at education. I
was once in a French boarding-school where the pupils learned by heart
critical estimates of classical authors whom they had not read. On my
questioning the practise I was told that though these sentences were
not intelligible now they would recur to the pupils’ minds when in
later life they read the authors in question.
We need to study the psychology of intellectual hunger and the history
of the ripening of the human mind. Surely there should be opportunities
for the mature to study history, economics, politics, natural science,
religion, literature and philosophy,--opportunities, I mean, for
intervals of continuous, intensive study by those inclined to it, not
solely opportunities for weary, sleepy men and women in fag ends of
time to hear lectures or to prepare for examinations.
In work planned as employers have planned it not only is education
eliminated from employment and employment deferred to the close of
the generally meager period of education, but the advantage of the
individual is disregarded in the arrangement of the work, to the great
disadvantage of the worker and the community at large, if not, in the
first instance, of the employer.
One of the effects of this is the waste or misuse of all laborers,
like the married woman or child, who cannot give standard work under
standard conditions. In the work of the school or the household,
which is planned with reference to the worker, there is room for the
delicate, the dull, the special student, the child and the elderly
person. No one is unemployable, no portion of strength or capacity is
unusable. In the factory of the Amana community, which is conducted,
as one might say, on family principles, I was struck by the large
number of really old men at the looms. Those who can no longer endure
the hot work in the hay fields find occupation here, and those who can
advantageously work irregularly for a few hours a day, but not more,
are given the employment that they are fit for and that is good for
them. This capacity to use all available labor power is one reason,
perhaps, why the Amana communists wax richer year by year and hire
outside workers to do much of their hardest work; perhaps, too, it
makes for a happier and longer, because more occupied, old age.
But in competitive employment workers who are below the standard, if
not excluded and therefore wasted, are likely to be forced to conform
to unsuitable hours and working arrangements. Moreover they are likely
to drag down wages and to render more difficult the attempts of the
normal workers to improve conditions. The standard minimum wage, with
provision of “sub-minimum” wage scales for the handicapped, seems the
only device to prevent their destructive effect on wage standards. As
regards children, society adopts the policy of complete withdrawal from
industry, not because it is good for a child to spend all his time in
schooling, but because, as has been said, industry will not adapt its
routine to juvenile requirements, and precludes almost all chance for
education after work is once entered upon.