Vocational Training for GirlsBy Alice Henry(Of Australian birth. For a number of years editor of “Life and Labor,” the official organ of the “Woman’s Trade Union League.” Well-known speaker on suffrage and labor problems. Author of “The Trade Union Woman,”[15]from which the following is taken.)
By Alice Henry
(Of Australian birth. For a number of years editor of “Life and Labor,” the official organ of the “Woman’s Trade Union League.” Well-known speaker on suffrage and labor problems. Author of “The Trade Union Woman,”[15]from which the following is taken.)
Harvard was opened in 1636. Two hundred years elapsed before there was any institution offering corresponding advantages to girls....
If these women have always lagged in the rear as increasing educational advantages of a literary or professional character have been provided or procured for boys, it is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the few lines of industrial, educational trade training and apprenticeship we detect the same influences at work, sigh before the same difficulties, and recognize the old, weary, threadbare arguments too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to be at least in this connection....
In such an age of transition as ours, any plan of vocational training intended to include girls must be a compromise with warring facts, and will therefore have to face objections from both sides, from those forward looking ones who feel that the domestic side of woman’s activities is over emphasized, and from those who still look back, who will fain refuse to believe that the majority of women have to be wage-earners for at least a part of their lives. These latter argue that by affording to girls all the advantages of industrial training, granted, or which maybe granted to boys, we are “taking them out of the home.” As if they were not out of the home already!
[15]Copyright by Henry Holt Publishing Co.
[15]Copyright by Henry Holt Publishing Co.
[15]Copyright by Henry Holt Publishing Co.