The Women of Tomorrow Part 7

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 sh.o.r.e 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 cla.s.s-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.

Pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sociation of Collegiate Alumnae, in Cincinnati, Miss Susan Kingsbury (acting for a committee of which Mrs. Richards, of the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute 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.

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We are coming to admit the fact now that "pure" language and "pure"

mathematics unapplied to actual problems are, for the ma.s.s 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 a.s.sisted 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 cla.s.sroom 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 a.s.sociation of Collegiate Alumnae and former dean of Barnard College.

She is a.s.sisted 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, ent.i.tled "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 cla.s.s" 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 inst.i.tutions.

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.s" 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.