Part 3
These eighty other women, after eight years in grammar school, 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 old "learned" professions. Their scholastic purpose was more modest than that. Yet, modest as it was, it was keeping them on the learner's bench longer than a "learned" profession would have kept most of their grandfathers. _These eighty women were taking graduate courses in order to be "social workers" in settlements or for charity societies, in order to be library assistants, in order 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 color. 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. 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 theory, the philosophy, of it.
Just 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 view, irradiating every subject, the beacon-light of her future working career.
"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! We lecture them, all the time, for postponing their marriage. We ought not to stop there. We ought to go on to lecture them for doing the thing which makes them postpone their marriage. We ought to lecture them for postponing their _maturity_. We ought to lecture them for prolonging their mental and financial infancy.
The big, impersonal, unlectureable industrial reasons for the modern prolongation of infancy were glanced at in chapter one of this book. In the present chapter we shall glance at them again, more closely. Just now, however, for a moment, we must revert to the Census, and we must take one final look at the amount of marriage-postponement now existing in this country.
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 of 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 age-period, the unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In Boston they were 452.
Therefore:
If, in educating girls, we educate them only for the probability of ultimate marriage and not also for the probability of protracted singleness, we are doing them a demonstrably grievous wrong.
But how is their singleness occupied?
We all know now that to a greater and greater degree it is getting occupied with work, money-earning work.
The unmarried women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period constitute more than one-fourth of the total number of women in that age-period in the United States. In the large cities they constitute usually more than one-third of the total number of women in that period. Wouldn't it have been remarkable if their families had been able to support them all at home? Wouldn't it have been remarkable if the human race had been able to carry so large a part of itself on its back?
We now admit the world's need of the labor-power of women. If women aren't laboring at home (at cooking, laundering, nursing, mothering, _something_), they will be (or ought to be) laboring elsewhere.
In the smaller cities and country districts of America home-life is still (by comparison) quite ample in the opportunities it offers the unmarried daughter for participation in hard labor. Nevertheless the Census finds that the percentage of women "breadwinners" in the "smaller cities and country districts" is as follows:
Age-Periods Breadwinners
From 16 to 20 years of age 27 women out of every 100 From 21 to 24 years of age 26 women out of every 100 From 25 to 34 years of age 17 women out of every 100
"Smaller cities," to the Census, means cities having fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. In the larger cities, in the cities which have _more_ than 50,000 inhabitants, in the urban environment in which home-life tends most to contract to an all-modern-conveniences size, in the urban environment in which the domestic usefulness of unmarried daughters tends most to contract to the dimensions of "sympathy" and "companionship," the Census finds that the percentage of women breadwinners is as follows:
Age-Periods Breadwinners
From 16 to 20 years of age 52 women out of every 100 From 21 to 24 years of age 45 women out of every 100 From 25 to 34 years of age 27 women out of every 100
Therefore:
If, in educating girls, we do not educate them for the _possibility_ of money-earning work, we are exposing them to the possibility of having to do that work without being schooled to it; we are exposing them to the possibility of having to take the first job they see, of having to do _almost anything_ for _almost nothing_; we are doing them a wrong so demonstrable and so grievous that it cannot continue.
The schools which give a direct preparation for industrial life are growing fast.
In the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in New York City, many hundreds of young girls are, in each year, enrolled. These girls have completed the first five public-school grades. They are learning now to be workers in paste and glue for such occupations as sample-mounting and candle-shade-making, to be workers with brush and pencil for such occupations as photograph-retouching and costume-sketching, to be milliners, to be dressmakers, to be operators of electric-power sewing-machines.
"Nothing to it," says an irritated manufacturer. "Nothing to it at all. I can't get any good help any more. Back to the old days! Those early New Englanders who made the business of this country what it is, they didn't have all this technical business. They didn't study in trade schools."
My dear sir, those early New Englanders not only studied in trade schools, but worked and played and slept in trade schools. They spent their whole lives in trade schools, from the moment when they began to crawl on the floor among their mothers' looms and spinning-wheels. There were few homes in early New England that didn't offer large numbers of technical courses in which the father and the mother were always teaching by doing and the sons and the daughters 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 the word "soap," 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. And the reader will also note that the education of the early New England girl, rich or poor, began with the education of her _hand_.)
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 barm 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 housework. 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 Soap-Making.
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. In this course everything will be preserved unless it already has been 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, let us take a look at the picture reproduced in this chapter from a book published in the year 1493. This 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 owner of the plant, has the best job. She is weaving the yarn into cloth on a loom.
The daughters of the Emperor Charlemagne, who, besides being an emperor, was a very rich man, learned how to card and spin and weave. Noble women had to direct all that kind of work 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 the school.
On the first of January of the year 1910 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 Subdepartment of Flax, after heckling the 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 Subdepartment of Wool, in addition to being carders, spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color resources of the times, boiling pokeberries 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 narrow fabrics used for hair laces, glove ties, belts, garters, and hatbands; nothing about the incessant knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings. Those details 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, during all those early years when eyes and finger-tips are the nourishing points of the intellect. Does it astonish you that they were soon ready for the duties of adult life?
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, 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 not only _thought_ to be grown up but _were_ so.
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?
Science has done part of it.
By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution of the compact industries of the home out and into 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 with the previous mental experience of the race. This is true first with regard to what is commonly called General Culture and next with regard to what is commonly called Specialization. Growth into General Culture takes longer and longer. And then so does the specialized mastery of a specialized technique. The high-school 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.
A complicated and distant world instead of a simple and near one, a large mass of human experience to assimilate instead of a small one, a long technique to master instead of a short one,--for all this part of the extension of immaturity we may thank Science. For the remaining part of it we may thank 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.
Thus the _mental_ immaturity resulting from Science is supplemented by the _financial_ immaturity resulting from System.
Both kinds of immaturity last longest among the boys and girls who come from that large section of society which is neither rich nor poor.
This is not to say that rich and poor escape unaffected. Shall we ever again, from the most favored of homes, see a William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, by merit, at 23? And, in the mass of the people, shall we ever again see that quickness of development toward adulthood which gave us the old common-law rule validating the marriage of a male at 14 and of a female at 12? The retardation of adulthood is observable in all social groups. But it comes to its climax in what is commonly called the "middle" group. For it is in that group that the passion for education is strongest, or, at any rate, most effective. It is from the families of average farmers, of average business men and of average professional men that we get our big supply of pupils for the most prolonged technical training of our schools and universities.
In this matter, as in many other matters, the historian of the nineteenth century may possibly find that while public attention was being given principally to the misery of the poor and to the luxury of the rich it was in the "middle" part of society that the really revolutionary changes in family life were happening.
It is with the financial reason for prolonged immaturity just as it is with the mental. The rich boy may be supported into marriage by his family. The son of the laborer soon reaches the wage-earning level of his environment. But the son of the average man of moderate means, after his years of scholastic preparation, must spend yet other years in a slow climb out of the ranks into a position of commercial or professional promise of "success" before he acquires what is regarded in _his_ environment as a marrying income.
They say that college girls marry late. It's true enough. But it's not well put.
The girls in the social group from which most college girls are drawn marry late.
Late marriage was not started by college. It would be safer to say that college was started by late marriage.
Out of the prolongation of infancy, out of the postponement of marriage, came the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of the world.
We can learn something about the nature of education by following the history of that conquest.
When the old New England homestead furnished adequate employment to all its daughters, and when those daughters passed directly from girlhood to wifehood and were still most adequately employed, there was really little reason why they should attend the schools in which their brothers were being taught the knowledges of the outside world. The girls did not belong to the outside world. Nor did the outside world have anything to teach them about their work in the household.