MANUAL LABOR IS MAKING NEW CONVERTS.
Men Who Have Won Their Way With Their Brains Now Give Their Hands a Chance.
Men of standing are more willing to work with their hands than they used to be. The new love for outdoor life may be in part responsible; as also the growing interest in art-craft, and a steady reaction against the “machine-made.” In any event manual work has been acquiring new dignity.
The Saint Paul Dispatch says that until within a few years we were so bent on emphasizing the intellectual that the manual had no honor.
To a certain appreciable extent this is changing. Men are interested to-day in seeing how much they can do for themselves. It is not alone that the art-craft movement has been inaugurated. We speak of a very much more intimate and amateurish thing than that.
It is that men are resuming the ax and hammer for the little common duties. They are making things for the house instead of calling in the casual carpenter. Younger men still in school are employing their vacation with carpenter work.
It is no longer quite so respectable to spend a college long-vacation canvassing for books. It is now entirely respectable to offer one’s services to a carpenter and be employed in some concrete service which shall at the summer’s end have a visible aspect.
This is a genuine triumph, and will work toward the accomplishment of that balancing of functions which has been much disturbed of late.
Now that men have reformed, we wonder if a similar development can be expected of women. There has been the drift in woman work away from the work of the hand to that of the mind.
School teaching has been a pervading ambition, and housework has been an evil from which only the most skilled failed of escape. In essence, one is no less worthy an employment than the other; each has certain philanthropic aspects which should appeal equally to women. But one has been exalted and the other debased because of the manual work, the esteem of the work of the hands.
There is a slightly detectable drift back toward manual labor, although much less apparent than in men’s work. But at least there has been discovered a science of household economics, and concrete exemplification of this science may secure recognition.
It will probably be long before women of colleges during the summer vacations may with impunity, social impunity, go into the hotels or the private kitchens, to work, as college men are going into the carpenter shop.
Why there should be this invidious distinction we do not know, since, so far as we can judge, it is quite as noble to feed mankind as to provide shelter. But the evolution will be worth watching and assisting.