Part 13 (1/2)
Handwork for women includes a wide range of occupations. Let us now examine some of these kinds of work.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _In the packing room of a wholesale house. The untrained girl finds it easy to obtain factory work_]
_Factory work._ This term covers many departments of manufacturing industries. In the main, however, they may be cla.s.sed together, since in practically all of them the worker contributes only one small portion of the work incidental to the making of candy, or artificial flowers, or coats, or pickles, or shoes, or corsets, or underwear, or anyone of a hundred different products, some one or several of which may be found in nearly every American town.
The great advantage of factory work, as the untrained girl sees it, is that it is usually easy to obtain and that it promises some return even from the start. Hence a large proportion of untrained girls who leave school as soon as the law allows enter the factories near their homes.
The great disadvantages of factory work, laying aside for a moment many minor disadvantages, are that it not only requires no skill in the beginner, but that it produces little if any skill even with years of work and offers practically no advancement for a large proportion of the workers. It should therefore, be reserved for girls of less keen intelligence, and other girls should if possible be guided toward other occupations.
Teachers must make themselves thoroughly familiar with working conditions in local factories, since there will always be girls who, because of their own limitations or the limitations of their environment, will find themselves obliged to take up factory work.
Under the teacher's guidance girls should make definite studies and prepare detailed reports of local conditions with respect to working hours, character of work, wages, possible advancement, dangers to health, moral conditions, advantages over other occupations open to girls with no more training, and disadvantages. Girls should at least go into factory work with their eyes open, that they may pa.s.s their days in the best surroundings available.
_Dressmaking_. The possibilities for the girl entering upon work connected with dressmaking with the ultimate object of becoming a dressmaker herself are far wider than in the case of the machine worker in shop or factory. The immediate return for the untrained girl is far less, but the farsighted girl must learn to look beyond the immediate present. Not all girls, however, will make good dressmakers. Not all, even of the producing type of girl, will do so.
Certain definite qualities are required. The girl who would succeed as a dressmaker must possess ingenuity, imagination, and the visualizing type of mind. She must see the end from the beginning, and must be able to find the way to produce that which she visualizes. She must be a keen observer. She must have confidence in her own power to create.
She must possess manual dexterity, artistic ideas, and, if she aims at a business of her own, a pleasing personality and keen business sense.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Photograph by Brown Bros.
A millinery cla.s.s. Millinery requires of the girl a certain degree of creative ability]
_Millinery_. Millinery requires in its workers the same general type of mind required for dressmaking, and in addition a certain millinery faculty or creative ability. The girl who can make and trim hats usually discovers her own talent fairly early in life.
_Arts and crafts._ This somewhat elastic term we use to include a wide range of occupations which have to do with articles of use or ornament which are handmade and which require skill in designing or in carrying out designs. Embroidery, lace making, rug and tapestry weaving, basketry, china painting, wood and leather work, handwork in metals, bookbinding, and the designing and painting of cards for various occasions are familiar examples of this kind of work. Photography, map making, designing of wall paper and fabrics, costume designing and ill.u.s.trating, making of signs, placards, diagrams, working drawings, advertising ill.u.s.trations, book and magazine ill.u.s.trating, landscape gardening and architecture, interior decorating, are other lines offering work to men and women alike.
The range of work here is no greater than the range of qualities which may be happily and usefully employed in arts and crafts. All branches of the work, however, are alike in demanding a certain degree of artistic sense and deftness of manual touch. An accurate, observant eye is an absolute essential, and, for all but the lowest and most mechanical lines of work, imagination, originality, and an inventive habit of mind make the foundation of success. In some lines a fine sense of color values must underlie good work, in others the ability to draw easily. All work of this sort requires the ability to do careful, painstaking, and persevering work. Given this ability and the artistic sense before mentioned, the girl's work may be determined by some special talent, by the special training possible for her, or by the openings possible in her chosen line of work within comparatively easy access.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Photograph by C. Park Pressey A youthful farmer. The Census figures for the year 1910 report one-fifth of all women employed in gainful occupations as engaged in the pursuit of agriculture and animal husbandry]
_Agriculture._ The Census figures which report one-fifth of all women gainfully employed as engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry are somewhat startling until we observe that southern negro women make up a very large number of the farm workers reported. Even aside from these, however, there are many women who are finding work in gardening, poultry raising, bee culture, dairying, and the like. The girl who is fitted to take up work of this sort is usually the girl who has grown up on the farm or at least in the country and who has a sympathy with growing things. She is essentially the ”outdoor girl.”
She must be willing to study the science of making things grow. She must be able to keep accounts, that she may know what she is doing and what her profits are. Above all, she must have no false pride about ”dirty work.” Properly such a girl should have entered upon her career even before she has finished her formal education, so that ”going to work” means merely enlarging her work to occupy her time more fully and to bring in as soon as possible a living income.
In this sort of work the girl possessing initiative and an independent spirit will naturally do best, since there are comparatively few opportunities for such work under supervision. Care must, however, be exercised by vocational guides in suggesting, and by girls in choosing, the independent career. Usually it is the girl who has shown promise in independent work at school or at home that will make a success of such work later in life. The girl who relaxes when the pressure of compulsion is removed will not be a success as ”her own boss.” It goes without saying that the girl who does well as her own superior officer will be happier to do work upon her own initiative than merely to carry out the plans made by others. Agricultural work will sometimes offer her exactly the conditions she desires. Many successful farm-owners are women, and their work compares favorably with that of men.
_Food production_. It is common, in these days, to meet the a.s.sertion that the preparation of food, once woman's undisputed work, has been almost if not quite removed from her hands; and that, even where she may still contribute to this work, she must do so in the factory, the bakery, the packing house, or the delicatessen shop. There are, nevertheless, still many women who are fitted for cooking and kindred pursuits who will not find an outlet for their abilities in any of the places mentioned. In the main, factory production of food is like factory production of other things--a highly differentiated process, in which the individual worker finds little satisfaction for her desire to ”make things” and little, if any, opportunity to contribute from her ability to the final result.
In the canning factory she may sit all day before an ever-moving procession of beans or peas, from which she removes any unsuitable for cooking. Or it may be an endless procession of cans, upon which she rapidly lays covers as they pa.s.s. In the pickle factory she may pack tiny cuc.u.mbers into bottles. In the packing house she may perform the task of painting cans. None of these occupations is more than mere unskilled labor. None is suitable for the girl who likes to cook, and who can cook. The number of such girls is already fairly large and will undoubtedly increase as the domestic science cla.s.ses of our schools do more and better work.
[Ill.u.s.tration: An up-to-date factory. In the factory the work is necessarily routine, and the individual worker finds very little satisfaction for her desire to make things]
Opposed to the theoretical statement that food is or at least to-morrow will be prepared entirely in the public-utility plants outside the home is the practical fact that home-cooked food, home-preserved fruits and jellies, and home-canned vegetables and meats find ready sale and that women who can produce these things do find it profitable to do so. There is, consequently, a field for some girls in such work.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Cooking cla.s.s at Benson Polytechnic School for Girls, Portland, Oregon. In spite of the statement that foods will be prepared in the public utility plants, the trained, accurate worker may find a ready sale for home-cooked foods]
Not all girls, on the other hand, who have taken the domestic science course are fitted to take up this work, even if a market could be found for their work. Only the expert, that is, the precise, accurate, painstaking cook, can secure uniform results day after day. Only the rapid worker can do enough to insure pay for her time. Only the girl with a keen sense of taste can properly judge results and devise successful combinations. Only a business woman can buy to advantage and compute ratios of expense and return. This combination, of course, is not to be found every day.
THE DISTRIBUTING GROUP
_Salesmans.h.i.+p_. Pa.s.sing from the cla.s.s of work which has to do with making things to that group of occupations which has to do with the distribution of various products to the consumer, we shall naturally consider, first of all, the saleswoman. In any given group of young and untrained girls drawn as in our schools from varying environment and heredity, the _natural_ saleswomen will probably be in the minority. I do not mean that girls may not often express a desire to ”work in a store” as apparently the easiest and most immediate employment for the untrained girl. This may or may not indicate that the girl has a commercial mind. The girl who is really interested in commercial undertakings is easily distinguished from her fellow workers in any salesroom. She is not the girl who lingers in conversation with the girl next to her while a customer waits, or who gazes indifferently over the customer's head while the latter makes her choice from the goods laid before her. To the real saleswoman every customer is a possibility, every sale a victory, and every failure to sell distinctly a defeat. The fact that we see so few girls and women of this type behind the counters in our shopping centers is sufficient indication that many girls would have been better placed in other occupations.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Photograph by Brown Bros.