FOOTNOTES:
[34] The Art of Retail Selling, by Diana Hirschler. New York Institute of Mercantile Training, 1909.
[35] Training for Saleswomen, by Lucinda W. Prince. Federation Bulletin, February, 1908.
THE EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN[36]
EMILY GREENE BALCH
Wellesley College
Women in modern production are a misfit. They are like the dog that puzzled the expressman in the classic story. “He don’t know where he wants to go, and we don’t know where he wants to go; he’s eat his tag.”
Is not this sense of misadjustment, of being astray, due to the fact that, industry being arranged to meet its end of private profits, human nature has to adjust itself as best it can to industrial conditions, instead of industrial conditions adjusting themselves to human nature? The troubles that result from this system make themselves felt everywhere, among men as well as women, but most seriously among the weakest competitors, and especially among wage-earning children and women.
My subject is education and efficiency, but I do not propose to go over the well-worn arguments to show that we ought at once to establish schools for trade training. It is now pretty generally understood that this is true. I want to raise a more far-reaching question—can women be economically efficient in production, production being organized as it now is?
The lives of both men and women have certain permanent aspects; whether in the stone age or in the twentieth century they must rear their descendants, they must between them produce material support for themselves and for the growing generation, they must lead their own personal lives and feed and discipline and “invite” their own souls and minds. There is always this trinity of their racial, their economic, and their inner life.