The economic position of women

by Academy of Political Science in the City of New York

Professor of Domestic Art, Teachers College, Columbia University, and Director of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls

At the present time, even though the work has been but lately begun, excellent examples of trade and vocational education for girls can be seen in both Europe and America. The European schools have long since passed the experimental stage and are usually a regular part of the system of public instruction, supported by governmental grants. On the other hand with us this class of training, being new and as yet in a more or less tentative stage, is chiefly in private hands. The foreign schools give us valuable suggestions, but the direct copy of their work, successful as it is according to the special needs of paternal governments, is not altogether fitted to a growing democracy like the United States. National desires and needs plus the requirements of the community where the schools are placed must influence the trades selected, the course of study and the methods of instruction in every good school. European systems are adapted to the national and municipal conditions of their varied peoples.

The majority of the professional schools for girls abroad are planned for the middle classes who are in fairly comfortable circumstances and can therefore pay fees and take several years for training. It is only incidentally that such institutions help the poorer working people. With us such instruction must be arranged for all classes. It is no unusual thing to hear those who have visited the professional schools abroad recommend the incorporation of such instruction into our educational system to help wage earners, forgetting that four or five-year trade courses, often with fees and competitive examinations for entrance, would be impossible for the daughters of the poor working classes in our large industrial cities. Our problem deals with the poorest as well as the well-to-do, the foreigner and the native-born.

The meeting of the need of the lowest-class worker is perhaps more pressing with us, for in European countries children are apt to continue in the occupation of their parents, and labor on the farm or at small home trades or in little shops or markets, as their ancestors did before them. Lines of class demarcation greatly effect schemes of education in Europe, and such discrimination is accepted as necessary. With us on the other hand the workers of the lowest rank are always struggling to get ahead, hence our schools must allow for such upward movement. Moreover, the wages of workers in this group are at the lowest figure, as they are forced by poverty to accept any wage they can get. The schools, then, must also study the industrial condition of the group and improve it.

Different types of education have been organized to train the youthful workers who rush into positions the moment the law will allow them to obtain working papers. The girls of this type cannot take advantage of the Ecoles Professionnelles of France, Italy and Belgium, of the Frauenarbeitsschulen of Germany or of the vocational and technical high schools of America. They have not the requisite education for entrance in the majority of cases and they have at best but a few months or a year to spare for training. The schools which have been planned to aid them in self-support may be grouped roughly under the following heads:

1. Elementary Vocational Schools.—Industrial training of a general character in the last two or three grades of the elementary school, which sends the pupils into life with a good practical working foundation.

2. Continuation Schools.—Weekday or Sunday classes for workers under sixteen years of age, which will help them to obtain a further practical education while they are working for self-support.

3. Apprenticeship, Trade or Factory Schools.—Special trade training after the compulsory school age is passed or in the year following graduation from the elementary school, consisting of shop practice which can be taken by those who can still give a little additional time to training and who can thus be prepared to enter some good trade or business position closed to the untrained. Girls can thus enter industry with the ability to make a living wage and with the hope of rising.

1. The elementary vocational school aims to help the poorest and youngest workers. As large numbers of girls in the great industrial cities of the world are forced, on account of the poverty of their families, to go to work as soon as they reach the age when the law allows them to take out working papers, this class of school aims to provide them with an education immediately available for use. The Volksschulen of Germany and the Ecoles Primaires of France and Belgium have tried to meet this situation by making handwork compulsory through each year of the school. The American public school has done this intermittently, but now that the country is awake to the needs of the working class, severe criticism is heard everywhere of the general trend of our common schools in helping the few who go on to higher education, but doing little for the many who do not. Investigation of the mental and manual condition of the great body of our young wage earners shows them unable to use their hands well or to utilize their academic education. The unskilled trades which alone are open to them do not require much use of their academic education which after a year or two is almost forgotten. If they manage to get into the better positions they are unable to hold them, for their education has not been of the kind to help them practically in trade. The trouble is not that the education is not good, but that it is not put to practical use by these young wage earners after they leave school.

Workers of the lowest grade in the large industrial cities of the United States have to face a difficult economic problem. The father can seldom make enough to support his family well, so the mother is compelled to assist. The children as they reach fourteen, usually before they have completed the elementary school, are forced to take any position they can get, whether healthful or not, whether offering opportunities or not. These fourteen-year-old workers are too young to go to school at night to continue their education, for their strength is sapped by day work; they are too poor to go to a trade school, for their wage cannot be given up by their families and the public school can offer them no more than free education (except in rare instances). Competitive examinations to obtain a supporting scholarship are generally beyond their reach, for they are handicapped by foreign birth, underfeeding and lack of mental acumen. As a consequence they are easily distanced in scholarship by the children of the middle-class workers who need the help less. The girls have to meet the most severe strain of the labor market; they must have money; they underbid their fellows and overcrowd the unskilled trades. The life itself is harder on them than on the boys, both physically and spiritually. These little girls are crowding into the labor market in appalling numbers. Their parents naturally want them to be self-supporting, but know not how to help them. They are often willing to sacrifice themselves and keep the children in school until graduation, but the girls resent the present course of study as useless and get out of school as quickly as possible. On the other hand both parents and children appreciate a curriculum which offers directly available, practical training, and they will do much to obtain it. Hence lately some of the wiser educators have offered industrial courses in the last three grades of the school to induce children to remain longer and to give them a good foundation adaptable to trade or to home use.