Chapter 13

But beyond all this--and here I think I touch on the real story--there is the peculiar temper and tendency of Pittsburg. Pittsburg is an artistic center; fortunes have been lavished in endowing schools and universities and palaces for art, on symphonies and oratorios. All the expressions of a new, ruling plutocracy are easily discernible here, as in all such epochs of society recorded in history; just, for instance, as Ferrero describes them in the last phases of the Roman Republic. And when Carnegie returns, he sheds tears and wrings his hands because of the corruption that has been exposed, and he fails, as many in Pittsburg seem to fail, to note the necessary, if subtle, relation that must exist between all this corruption and debauchery between all this art and music, and--shall I say?--the tariff on steel.

This, however, isn't all; though this is part. Pittsburg is a moral town; the most moral, in the conventional sense, in all America. She won't even allow the kids to play baseball on a back lot on Sunday. A woman, an old friend of mine who lives in Pittsburg, said: "I think it very unfortunate that the Survey was published. It overlooks Pittsburg's good points. For instance, Pittsburg has more churches than any city of its size in America. More people of our class go to church than in any place I ever saw; more money is given to charity. People just pour out of their houses and into the churches on Sunday morning." She was quite serious--and she expressed Pittsburg, or the ruling class of Pittsburg, exactly.

Now I don't mean to say that Pittsburg is especially hypocritical; but she does seem to be pharisaical. The article about Pittsburg should find its beginnings, perhaps, away back in the days of scholasticism, and come down through the moss hags of Scotland; and its title should be "Pious Pittsburg," or something like that. Written properly--if I am right--it would be an eloquent exposition of phariseeism at its apotheosis.

THE REAL STORY OF PITTSBURG

Now I can't write this, because I haven't the evidence to prove what I see, or think I see. All I have is the mere outline--and the outline applies, as I have said, to most cities. What one should have is the color, the detail, the thousand and one little things in the way of personality--you know what I mean; all that which is necessary to "lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." (I wish I were in New York to-night! I'd go to the Casino and see the revival of "The Mikado.") The Pittsburg story can't be written, and it should not be written, without this; and to do it properly one would have to spend much time in Pittsburg and become saturated with the atmosphere of the place; and when he emerged, if he ever did emerge, he would be ready to undertake this rather stupendous study in psychology. I do not feel at all equipped for this task, and no amount of material without the personal contact could equip me for this service. With my material, I could only write the old and squalid story of a rather commonplace exposure of municipal grafting, and that wouldn't be worth while.

The story of Pittsburg would be all that the story of any city is--as I have indicated: the bi-partisan machine, the public service corporation, etc.--but it would be more. It would illustrate the curious effects of long acceptance of cold, intellectual theories in place of religion, and how this develops the ability to separate morals and manners; how one's theology needn't interfere with one's religion, and all that. It would be the story of the union of politics and business; and the trail would lead up to those proud and insolent aristocracies that are founded on the purchase of the privilege of making the laws, and down to those stews of horror where they pay for the privilege of breaking the laws. It would be the story of Chris Magee, the good-natured, human boss; of Blakeley, the upright prosecutor; of the methods of hired detectives and the corruption of officialdom. Pittsburg has riches, art, organized charity, and piety; but she lacks wealth, beauty, social justice, and religion. And sending the "bad" to prison, and electing the "good" to office, and changing the paper charters of the city, are not going to work any real reform. They think they'll get "good government" and "civic righteousness," and then their problems will be solved. This is what they propose to do; this is all they tell us now, and I can't write a story on that. The story would be as futile as little legal reforms.

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 class 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 substitute 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 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.)

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.

1. A course in Salting Meat in the "powdering" tub.

2. A course in Smoking Hams and Bacons.

3. A course in Pickling Pig's feet and Ears.

4. A course in Headcheese and Sausages.

LIQUOR DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Beer. The making of wort out of barley. The making of harm out of hops. The fermenting of the two together in barrels.

(This course is not so much given now in New England, but it is an immemorial heritage of the female sex. Gervayse Markham, in his standard book, "Instructions to a Good Housewife," says about beer: "It is the work and care of woman, for it is a house-work. The man ought only to bring in the grain.")

2. A course in Light Drinks, such as Elderberry Wine.

CREAMERY DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Making Butter.

2. A course in Making Cheese, Curdling, breaking curds in basket, shaping in cheese press, turning and rubbing cheese on cheese ladder.

CLEANING DEPARTMENT

1. A course in Soapmaking.

2. A course in Making Brooms out of Guinea-wheat Straw.

3. A course in Starch making.

4. A course in Cleaning.

(This last course is very simple. Having manufactured the things to wash and sweep with, the mere washing and sweeping won't take long.)

FRUIT DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Preserving--everything that can't be pickled.

BREAKFAST FOOD DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Mush and forty kinds of Bread--Rhineinjun (sometimes called Rye and Indian), bun, bannock, jannock, rusk, etc., etc.

LIGHTING DEPARTMENT.

1. A course in Dips. The melting of tallow or bayberries. The twisting of wicks. The attaching of wicks to rods. The dipping of them into the melted mass in the kettle. Patience in keeping on dipping them.

(Pupils taking this course are required to report each morning at five o'clock.)

2. A course in Wax Candles. The use of molds.

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.