Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 18

It is, however, consoling and inspiring to believe--yes, to know--that there are in Pittsburg--as in all cities--hundreds of thousands of decent, virtuous, wholesome, toiling people; that these make up by far the larger part of the population, too, and that they will save Pittsburg, and make her as good as she is great. It is a fact stimulating to the imagination and encouraging to the soul that, in all these stores and shops and mills, there are hard-working, modest, unknown thousands who are pure and loyal, who are humanity's hope; that even the most stunted and abused figures out of the Survey give more promise than that cla.s.s which rides upon their backs and devours them as it rides.

Good government, efficient government, if by those phrases is meant, as is usually meant, government by the "good"--whoever they may be!--and the efficient, will not do; it will avail nothing to Pittsburg or to any city, to subst.i.tute for grafters, great or petty, personally honest men who will legally give away franchises for nothing, instead of bartering them illegally for big bribes. Pittsburg can't be saved by an aristocracy of the better element, she can be saved only by democracy--with a very little "d." And she will be saved that way some day, never fear, though not until all the other cities are similarly saved.

I shall await with interest what you think of my suggestions.

Your ever sincere friend, BRAND WHITLOCK.

Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 215-226 part 1.}

By WILLIAM HARD

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 pa.s.sing 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, Va.s.sar, 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 Va.s.sar 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.sroom 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 cla.s.sroom 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 cla.s.s. 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. n.o.body 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.)

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.