II.Learning for Earning

“We have not sighed deep, laughed free,Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy.”

“We have not sighed deep, laughed free,

Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy.”

“It used to take two to start a home in colonial days,” Mary would say. “I am really an old-fashioned woman. I helped to make this home. We had twelve hundred dollars in the bank when I stopped working, and John was pretty well established.

“I don’t regret it,” she went on, still speaking as a woman of the future, “even for the children. Of course I do wish we had started earlier. But I would have wanted to wait a while for the children in any case. People risk too much when they start a family before they become sufficiently used to marriage and to each other to know that they can keep on loving33each other and to know that they have in them through their mutual, continued happiness the power to make a happy home, a noble home, for children to live in.”

As for the number of children she will have—we reserve that subject for future discussion. We call attention here only to this:

That the facts which were cited from the Smith College records are harmonious with many other facts and records tending to show that the fertility of the modern wife has been considerably underrated, just as the fertility of the colonial wife has been considerably exaggerated.

And this:

That Mary got to her childbearing period sooner than she would have if she hadn’t insisted on marrying John before he was ready to support her. Those two years would have been childless years in any case. But they would probably, if it hadn’t been for Mary’s money, have been lengthened into four or five.

Of course, later marriages in themselves tend to reduce the number of children. As to quality, however, the evidence is not clear. There34is even some reason to think that a moderate postponement is conducive to an improvement in quality.

Did you ever read Havelock Ellis’s book called “A Study of British Genius”?

He made a list of the most distinguished of eminent British persons and studied everything about them, from their religious opinions to the color of their hair.

In the matter of the age of their parents, he finds that the average age of the father at the birth of the person of genius was thirty-seven years, while the average of the mother was thirty-one. His conclusion is: “On the whole it would appear, so far as the evidence goes, that the fathers of our eminent persons have been predominantly middle-aged and to a marked extent elderly at the time of the distinguished son’s birth; while the mothers have been predominantly at the period of greatest vigor and maturity and to a somewhat unusual extent elderly. There has been a notable deficiency of young fathers and, still more notably, of young mothers.”

And did you ever see the study which Mr. R.35S. Holway made for the Department of Education of Leland Stanford University on “The Age of Parents: Its Effects upon Children”? His conclusions are:

“In most physical qualities the children of mature parents tend to come out best.

“In mental ability the children of young parents show best at an early age but rapidly lose their precocity.

“The elder children who show best tend to be the children of mature and old parents.

“The children of elderly mothers show a tendency to superiority throughout.”

Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong opinion to the effect that, in so far as the quality of her children could be affected by their home training, she was glad she had spent at least a few years earning her living.

“Every woman,” said Mary, “ought to have some little time for developing into an individual. Home won’t do it altogether. Not nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world. But what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a nook.36It’s something apart from the world. If a woman is going to prepare her son for a knowledge of the real world, if she’s going to be able to give him a training which has in it an understanding and an appreciation of the real world, if she’s going to be able to educate him into real living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There’s no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual will hereafter be urged, not opposed.”

“The trouble about that,” said John, “is that it makes you too independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your living till you’re pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn’t marry me till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?”

Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.

Isn’t there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in knowing,knowing, that Mary isn’t cleaving unto him simply because she can’t37shift for herself? Something exquisitely gratifying in being certain,certain, that it isn’t just necessity that keeps her a home woman?

“If I were a man living in wedlock,” said Mary, “I should want the door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering straight by it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should want her wings to be strong, and I should want her to know that if she went through the door she could fly.”

“For keeping her,” Mary went on, “I should want to trust to my own wings and not to bars.”

“However,” said Mary, looking farther into the future, “the process isn’t complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children! We want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to unions which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all uncleanness. Women will never be completely free till, besides being able to earn their bread when they arenotbearing children, they are relieved of dependence on the individual character of another human person while theyare. Mr. H. G. Wells is clearly right about it. When women bear38children they perform a service to the state. Children are important to the state. They are its future life. To leave them to the eccentricities of the economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The woman who is bringing up children should receive from the state the equivalent of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in the union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right relationship—love a necessity, money a welcome romance!”

“It’s remote, very remote,” concluded Mary. “And we can’t dream it out in detail. But when it comes it won’t come out of personal sentiment. It will come because of being demanded by the economic welfare of the community. It will come because it is the best way to get serviceable children for the state. It will come because, after all, it is the final answer to the postponement of marriage.”

41II.Learning for Earning

“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 man42found 254 who were still unmarried.In 1900, only ten years later, he found 275.

There is not so muchprocessionalasrecessionalabout 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 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 of trained men.

SIMMONS COLLEGE, BOSTON, WHICH HAS FOUR-YEAR COURSES IN SECRETARIAL STUDIES, LIBRARY WORK, SCIENCE, AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS.Photograph by Baer

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 some certain specific occupation—in Simmons there were enrolled last year, besides five hundred undergraduate women,43at least 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 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 get44from 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 thetheoryof color. You have never before observed in any classroom so intimate a45concern about rainbows, prisms, spectra, and the scientific sources of æsthetic 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 thepracticeof color every afternoon, over hats, ribbons, waists, gloves, costumes. When you begin once tostudya 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 toearnbut tolive. “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, “Secretarial46Studies” 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 theirmaturity. 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 them47again, 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, the48unmarried 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 at49home (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:

“Smaller cities,” to the Census, means cities having fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. In the larger cities, in the cities which havemorethan 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,”50the Census finds that the percentage of women breadwinners is as follows:

Therefore:

If, in educating girls, we do not educate them for thepossibilityof 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 doalmost anythingforalmost 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-mounting51and 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 familiar52that 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 someideasabout 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 education53of the early New England girl, rich or poor, began with the education of herhand.)

VEGETABLES DEPARTMENT1. 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 DEPARTMENT1. A course in Salting Meat in the “powdering” tub.2. A course in Smoking Hams and Bacons.543. A course in Pickling Pig’s Feet and Ears.4. A course in Headcheese and Sausages.LIQUOR DEPARTMENT1. 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 DEPARTMENT1. 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.55CLEANING DEPARTMENT1. 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 DEPARTMENT1. A course in Preserving. In this course everything will be preserved unless it already has been pickled.BREAKFAST-FOOD DEPARTMENT1. A course in Mush and forty kinds of Bread—Rhineinjun (sometimes called Rye and Indian), bun, bannock, jannock, rusk, etc., etc.LIGHTING DEPARTMENT1. A course in Dips. The melting of tallow or bayberries. The twisting of wicks. The attaching of wicks to rods. The dipping of56them 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.

1. A course in Gardening.

“In March and in April, from morning to night,In sowing and setting good housewives delight.”

“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.

“A speedy and a sovereign remedy,The bitter wormwood, sage and marigold.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

1. A course in Preserving. In this course everything will be preserved unless it already has been pickled.

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

1. A course in Dips. The melting of tallow or bayberries. The twisting of wicks. The attaching of wicks to rods. The dipping of56them 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 and57straightened 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.

THIS SKETCH OF A WOOLEN MILL OPERATED IN THE GROUNDS OF A PALACE BY A QUEEN AND HER LADIES-IN-WAITING IS TAKEN FROM A VERY OLD FRENCH TRANSLATION OF BOCCACCIO’S BOOK ON “NOBLE WOMEN.” IN THOSE DAYS EVERY HOME WAS A FACTORY AND A TRADE SCHOOL.Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago.

The daughters of theEmperor 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,59civic, æsthetic, 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 giveTo women kindly that they may live,”

“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 accomplish60some 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 to61support 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 onlythoughtto be grown up butwereso.

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 training62for 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 to63what 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 of64people. 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 thementalimmaturity resulting from Science is supplemented by thefinancialimmaturity 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 that65the 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 inhisenvironment 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.

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 and68university 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 and69Mount 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 tobesomething, 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 toteach, 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 that71the 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 pedagogical72knowledge 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 thevocationalduty 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 history73of educated women. It is a turning point in the history of women’s education.

At the 1909 annual convention of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, 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 from74six 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 fundamental75principles 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.

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