Part 14 (1/2)
Such education would make the girl unwomanly, it would unfit her for her true functions, a man could not wish to marry her, and so on. The first women teachers and doctors had indeed a hard time. After being admitted to the profession only at the point of the sword, so to speak, they had to make good, and in face of all prejudice, prove their ability to teach or to cure, so as to keep the path open for those who were to follow after them. No similar demand should be logically made of the working-girl today when she demands coeducation on industrial lines. For she is already in the trades from which you propose so futilely to exclude her, by denying her access to the technical training preparatory to them, and for fitting her to practice them.
Take some other occupations which employ women in great numbers: textile mill operatives, saleswomen, tobacco-workers, cigar-workers, boot-and shoe-workers, printers, lithographers, and pressmen, and book-binders. You can hardly say that these are exceptions, for here are the figures, from the occupational statistics of the census of 1910.[A]
[Footnote A: The statement that appeared in the report on ”Occupations” in the census returns of 1910, that there were but nine occupations in which women were not employed, has been widely commented upon.
An explanation appearing in the corresponding volume of the census report for 1910 shows the great difficulties that enumerators and statisticians experience in getting at exact facts, wherever the situation is both complex and confused. The census officials admit their inability to do so in the present instance, although they have revised the figures with extreme care. With all possible allowance for error, women still appear in all but a minority of employments. The cla.s.sification of occupations is on a different basis, and the number of divisions much larger; yet even now out of four hundred and twenty-nine separately listed, women are returned as engaged in all but forty-two. On the other hand there is only one trade which does not embrace men, that of the (untrained) midwife.]
Textile mill operatives 330,766 Saleswomen 250,438 Tobacco-workers and cigar-makers 71,334 Boot- and shoe-makers and repairers 61,084 Printers, lithographers and pressmen 27,845 Book-binders 22,012
Just here we can see a rock ahead. In the very prospects that we rejoice over, of the early introduction of public industrial training, we can detect an added risk for the girl. If such technical instruction is established in one state after another, but planned primarily to suit the needs of boys only, and the only teaching afforded to girls is in the domestic arts, and in the use of the needle and the pastebrush for wage-earning, where will our girls be when a few years hence the skilled trades are full of her only too well-trained industrial rivals? In a greater degree than even today, the girl will find herself everywhere at a disadvantage for lack of the early training the state has denied to her, while bestowing it upon her brother, and the few industrial occupations for which instruction is provided will be overcrowded with applicants.
That women should take such an inferior position in the trades they are in today is regrettable enough. But far more important is it to make sure that they obtain their fair share of whatever improved facilities are provided for ”the generation knocking at the door”
of life. Working-women or women intimately acquainted with working-women's needs, should have seats on all commissions, boards and committees, so that when schemes of state industrial training are being planned, when schools are built, courses outlined, the interests of girls may be remembered, and especially so that they be borne in mind, when budgets are made up and appropriations asked for.
If not, it will only be one other instance of an added advantage to the man proving a positive disadvantage to the woman. You cannot benefit one cla.s.s and leave another just as it was. Every boon given to the bettered cla.s.s increases the disproportion and actually helps to push yet further down the one left out.
Among the many influences that make or mar the total content of life for any cla.s.s, be that cla.s.s a nation, a race, an industrial or economic group, there is one, the importance of which has been all too little realized. That influence we may call expectance. It is impossible for anyone to say how far a low standard of industrial or professional attainment held out before the girl at her most impressionable age, a standard that to some degree, therefore, develops within her, as it exists without her, ends in producing the very inefficiency it begins by a.s.suming. But psychology has shown us that suggestion or expectance forms one element in the developing of faculty, and this whether it be manual dexterity, quickness of memory or exercise of judgment and initiative.
In all probability, too, this element of expectance has indirect as well as direct effects, and the indirect are not the least fruitful in results. To ill.u.s.trate: it is certain that if we start out by a.s.suming that girls are poor at accounts, that they cannot understand machinery, that they are so generally inefficient as to be worth less wages than boys, any such widespread a.s.sumption will go a long way to produce the ignorant and incompetent and inefficient creatures it presupposes girls to be. But it will do more than this. Such poor standards alike of performance and of wages will not end with the unfortunate girls themselves. They will react upon parents, teachers, and the community which so largely consists of the parents and which employs the teachers. Those preessentials and antecedents of the competent worker, training, trainers, and the means and instruments of training, will not be forthcoming. What is the use of providing at great expense industrial training for girls, when the same money, spent upon boys, would produce more efficient workers? What is the use of giving girls such training, when they are presumably by nature unfitted to benefit by it?
X
WOMEN AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING
The United States started its national existence with an out-of-doors people. Until comparatively recent years, the cities were small, and the great bulk of the inhabitants lived from the natural resources of the country, that is to say, from the raw products of the mines and the forests, and the crops grown upon the plains by a most primitive and wasteful system of agriculture. But the days have forever gone when a living can be s.n.a.t.c.hed, so to speak, from the land in any of these ways. The easily gotten stores of the mines and forests are exhausted; the soil over many millions of acres has been robbed of its fertility. The nation is now engaged in reckoning up what is left in the treasury of its natural resources, estimating how best to conserve and make profitable use of what is left.
The nation might have done this sooner, but there was in the West always fresh land to open up and in the East, after a time, a new source of income in the factory industries, that were more and more profitably absorbing capital and labor. So that although pioneer conditions gradually pa.s.sed away, and it became less easy to wrest a living from plain or mountain or mine, the idea of finding out what was wrong, improving methods of agriculture, conserving the forest wealth by continual replanting or working the less rich mines at a profit through new processes, or the utilization of by-products, did not at first suggest itself.
When, on the other hand, we turn to the manufacturing occupations, we find that they have followed an a.n.a.logous, though not precisely similar, course of evolution. Certainly from the first the manufacturers showed themselves far ahead of their fellows in the economical management of the raw material, in the adoption of every kind of labor and time-saving device and in the disposal of refuse.
But in their way they have been just as short-sighted. They carried with them into the new occupations the very same careless habits of national extravagance. They, too, went ahead in a similar hustling fas.h.i.+on. This time the resources that were used up so recklessly were human resources, the strength and vitality of the mature man, the flesh and blood of little children, their stores of energy and youthful joy and hope. By overwork or accident, the father was cut off in his strong manhood, the boy was early worn out, and the young girl's prospects of happy motherhood were forever quenched.
There are now signs of a blessed reaction setting in here, too, and it is largely owing to the efforts of organized labor. The principles of conservation and of a wise economy, which are re-creating the plains of the West and which will once more clothe with forests the slopes of the mountains, are at work in the realm of industry. Not a year pa.s.ses but that some state or another does not limit anew the hours during which children may work, or insist upon shorter hours for women, or the better protection from dangerous machinery, or the safeguarding of the worker in unhealthy occupations. Organized labor, ever running ahead of legislation in its standards of hours and sanitary conditions, provides a school of education and experiment for the whole community, by procuring for trade unionists working conditions which afterwards serve as the model for enlightened employers, and as a standard that the community in the end must exact for the whole body of workers.
But more must be done than merely keeping our people alive, by insisting they shall not be killed in the earning of their bread.
Leaders of thought and many captains of industry have at last grasped the fact that the worker, uneducated and not trained in any true sense, is at once a poor tool and a most costly one. Other countries add their quota of experience, to back up public opinion and legislative action. Hence the demand heard from one end of the land to the other for industrial training. The public everywhere after a century of modern factory industry are at length beginning to have some definite ideas regarding industrial training for boys who are to supply the human element in the factory scheme. (Regarding girls, they still grope in outer darkness.)
For many years economists were accustomed to express nothing but satisfaction over the ever-advancing specialization of industry. They saw only the cheapening of the product, the vast increase in the total amount produced, and the piling up of profits, and they beheld in all three results nothing but social advantage. Verily both manufacturer and consumer were benefited. When the more thoughtful turned their attention to the actual makers through whose labors the cloth and the shoes and the pins of specialized industry were produced, they satisfied themselves that the worker must also be a sharer in the benefits of the new system; for, said they, everyone who is a worker is also a consumer. Even though the worker who is making shoes has to turn out twenty times as much work for the same wages, still as a consumer he shares in the all-round cheapening of manufactured articles, and is able to buy clothes and shoes and pins so much the cheaper. That the cost of living on the whole might be greater, that the wage of the worker might be too low to permit of his purchasing the very articles into the making of which his own labor had gone, did not occur to these _a priori_ reasoners. It has taken a whole century of incredibly swift mechanical advance, a.s.sociated at the same time with the most blind, cruel, and brutal waste of child life and adult life, to arrive at the beginning of an adjustment between the demands of machine-driven industry and the needs and the just claims of the human workers. We have only just recovered from the dazed sense of wonderment and pride of achievement into which modern discoveries and inventions, with the resultant enormous increase of commerce and material wealth, plunged the whole civilized world. We are but beginning to realize, what we had well-nigh totally overlooked, that even machine-driven industry with all that it connotes, enormously increased production of manufactured goods, and the spread of physical comfort to a degree unknown before among great numbers, is not the whole of national well-being; that by itself, unbalanced by justice to the workers, it is not even an unmixed boon.
I have tried to follow up the evolution of our present industrial society on several parallel lines: how industry itself has developed, how immigration affects the labor problem as regards the woman worker, and the relation of women to the vocations in the modern world. Let us now glance at our educational systems and see how they fit in to the needs of the workers, especially of the working-women. For our present purpose I will not touch on education as we find it in our most backward states, but rather as it is in the most advanced, since it is from improvement in these that we may expect to produce the best results for the whole nation.
Free and compulsory public education was established to supply literary and cultural training at a time when children still enjoyed opportunities of learning in the home, and later in small shops something of the trades they were to practice when grown-up. I know of a master plumber, who twenty years ago, as a child of eleven, made friends with the blacksmith and the tinsmith in the little village where he lived, and taught himself the elements of his trade at the blacksmith's anvil and with the tinsmith's tools. At fourteen that boy knew practically a great deal about the properties of metals, could handle simple tools deftly, and was well prepared to learn his trade readily when the time came.
As the most intelligent city parents cannot as individuals furnish their children with similar chances today, we must look to the public schools, which all citizens alike support, to take up the matter, and supply methodically and deliberately, that training of the eye and hand, and later that instruction in wage-earning occupations which in former days, as in the case quoted, the child obtained incidentally, as it were, in the mere course of growing up.
On the literary side, it is true, schools are improving all the time.
History is now taught by lantern slides, showing the people's lives, instead of by a list of dates in a catechism. Geography is ill.u.s.trated in the garden plot of the school playground. But in responding to the new claims which a new age and a changed world are making upon them, schools and teachers are only beginning to wake up. The manual training gradually being introduced is a hopeful beginning, but nothing more. The most valuable and important work of this kind is reserved for the upper grades of the grammar schools and for certain high schools, and the children who are able to make use of it are for the most part the offspring of comfortably off parents, enjoying all sorts of educational privileges already. Education, publicly provided, free and compulsory, therefore presumably universal, was established primarily for the benefit of the workers' children, yet of all children it is they who are at this moment receiving the least benefit from it. Many circ.u.mstances combine to produce this unfortunate result. The chief direct cause is poverty in the home. So many families have to live on such poor wages--five and six hundred dollars a year--that the children have neither the health to profit by the schooling nor the books nor the chance to read books at home when the home is one or perhaps two rooms. The curse of homework in cities ties the children down to willowing feathers or picking nuts or sewing on b.u.t.tons, or carrying parcels to and from the shop that gives out the work, deprives them of both sleep and play, makes their attendance at school irregular, and dulls their brains during the hours they are with the teacher. In the country the frequently short period of school attendance during the year and the daily out-of-school work forced from young children by poverty-hara.s.sed parents has similar disastrous results.
Even in those states which have compulsory attendance up to fourteen, many children who are quite normal are yet very backward at that age.
The child of a foreign-speaking parent, for instance, who never hears English spoken at home, needs a longer time to reach the eighth grade than the child of English-speaking parents.