Part 4

In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that in 1684 the New Haven Grammar School should have ordered that "all girls be excluded as improper and inconsistent with such a grammar school as the law enjoins."

In proportion, however, as the work of the household was shifted out into the outside world, and in proportion as women began to follow that work out into the outside world, the knowledges of the outside world became appropriate and necessary for them. Hence, a hundred years later, in 1790, it was as much a changing industrial condition as a changing psychological one which caused the school authorities of Gloucester, Mass., to resolve that "two hours (in each school-day) be devoted to the instruction of females, as they are a tender and interesting branch of the community."

But grammar-school education, even high-school education, was not long enough for the women in the families in which the prolongation of infancy, and the consequent postponement of marriage, was greatest. While their future husbands were going through the long process of education in school and college and university and then through the long process of commercial and professional apprenticeship, these girls were passing through the grammar-school age, through the high-school age, and then on into what in those days looked like old-maidhood. Their social environment did not lead them into factory work. Yet their families were not rich. How were they to be occupied?

The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick at her and say: "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps indoors."

Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went into a job. The "middle class" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.

Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's college.

There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid, blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day dazzles us with the nobility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of the needs, of the women of the times.

But the needs were there, the need to _be_ something, the need to do something, self-respecting, self-supporting. The existence of those needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once issued a large supply of teachers.

This flow of teachers goes back to the very fountain-head of the higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was running her school in Middlebury, Conn., was training young women to _teach_, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school in the United States.

From that time to this most college women have taught school before getting married. _The higher education of women has been, in economic effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher._

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 shore 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 class-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.

Passing 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 class, 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 Association of Collegiate Alumnae, in Cincinnati, Miss Susan Kingsbury (acting for a committee of which Mrs. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute 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.

We are coming to admit the fact now that "pure" language and "pure" mathematics unapplied to actual problems are, for the mass 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 assisted 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 classroom 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 Association of Collegiate Alumnae and former dean of Barnard College. She is assisted 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, entitled "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 class" 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 institutions.

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.

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 class" 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.

We have observed the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment for daughters. We have observed the postponement of marriage in its effect on the occupational opportunities of those daughters. Deprived of adequate employment at home, we have seen them seek it elsewhere. Marriage and housekeeping and child-rearing, as an occupation, we have seen deferred to a later and later period in life. Let us now assume that every woman who has a husband is removed from money-earning work. It is an assumption very contrary to fact. But let us make it. And then let us look at this compact picture of the extent to which being married is an occupation for American women:

In the United States, in the year 1900, among women twenty years of age and over, the married women numbered 13,400,000. The unmarried women and the widows together numbered 6,900,000. For every two women married there was one woman either single or widowed.

What futility, as well as indignity, there is in the idea that the query of support for women gets its full answer in a husband!

Surely we may now say: If education does not (1) give women a comprehension of the organization of the money-earning world, and (2) train them to one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that world, it is not education.

Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women's education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide battle cry, the sentiment: "The Home is also a technique. All women must be trained to it."

At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home Economics.

In an illustration in this chapter we show the tiny children of the Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the technique of the home. In another picture we show the post-graduate laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois. And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of marketing, and other phases of home management.

The money-earning world, a technique! The home, a technique! The boy learns only one. Must the girl learn two, be twice a specialist?

III.

Learning for Spending

The First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was held in 1908 at Fribourg in Switzerland. It was no improvised, amateur-uplift, private-theatricals affair.

The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of Fribourg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of three rival varieties of household-arts instruction--the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of Fribourg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their duties as housekeepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International Information Committee.

Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever slaking concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders,--the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs down" and let her put it out of its agony altogether--in such an age there comes, at Fribourg, in this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition ever given in any age to the home's economic value.

A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's own as well as Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles--not always all that they are cranked up to be.

Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds to the mourners' bench every year.