The economic position of women

by Academy of Political Science in the City of New York

4th. To aid by counsel and information as well as by employment the girl who must be a wage earner.

Even the short experience of less than a year has demonstrated the value of such a center in Cincinnati. The carelessness, the ignorance, and the short-sightedness of parents have been brought to view over and over again in the case of girls who have been taken from school and placed in unskilled occupations where there is no chance for advancement or growth. This is sometimes due to necessity and dire poverty; but more often parents feel that a year or two more in the public school will not increase the girl’s wage-earning ability, or else they cannot discover what work the child is best fitted for, and do not know in what occupations she can at least attain some growth and promotion. This persistent withdrawal from school of girls at the age of fourteen is a cause for serious concern. We shall be guilty of criminal neglect if we longer refuse to face the situation. The already overworked teachers cannot supply the necessary guidance in other than a general way. It must be supplied by an outside agency, and as Miss Van Kleeck of the Committee on Women’s Work so keenly points out, no agency for the purpose can be so helpful and efficient as one built on the needs of the individual girl.

Such a bureau will, in the first place, correct the evils and deficiencies of the present agencies. In the second place it will provide the only wise and strong foundation on which to build our educational and vocational structures for women.

To render the first service, an efficient employment bureau for women will of necessity attempt to do constructive work based on a knowledge of the evils and deficiencies which have been mentioned.

1st. Instead of no records, or inadequate ones, full and complete industrial records will be kept of both employer and employe. The one will show the conditions under which the girl does her work, and will give a careful description of the work to be done. The other will state the girl’s home environment, her education or training, and her industrial history both before and after application. Both of these records will be verified by personal visits to the place of work and the home of the applicant.

2d. Instead of the selfish attitude of the commercial agency based on greed, and the perfunctory attitude of the state agency controlled by politics, there will be an attitude of fairness toward both employer and girl, based upon the sole desire to supply the need of the just employer with the ability of the responsible worker.

3d. Instead of indifference toward the relation of employer and employe, there will be an attempt, with a good chance for success, we believe, to lessen unfairness on both sides. Often a mere word of explanation, which can be given most effectively by a third party, brings consideration in place of irresponsibility and injustice. Employers who complain constantly of the impossibility of securing steady workers, would be amazed at the reasons why the girls leave, as brought out in a recent inquiry based on work certificates issued to girls in 1907. Often through the unintelligent and short-sighted policy of a foreman—or, I regret to say, more often a forewoman—the employer loses a worker who proved, in another establishment, to be invaluable.

It may be of interest to note that the work we are trying thus to do in Cincinnati chanced to come to the notice of Governor Harmon and C. H. Wirmel, the commissioner of labor of Ohio. Both have evinced the greatest interest in the experiments and have asked for suggestions as to how the work of the state bureau in Cincinnati can be made more effective. Mr. Wirmel will attempt to use our system of records and in other ways to test the practicability of our methods. While, as Mr. Devine points out, a state or federal bureau can never do aggressive work, because the citizen can protest against “discrimination,” public bureaus can give most valuable coöperation in the matter of records.

A number of such adjustments would go a long way toward righting the general maladjustment which so evidently exists between the supply and the demand for labor.

The second justification for the existence of these employment bureaus is unquestionably to assist in the development of industrial education—a problem which is now presenting itself in a formidable manner. That we are still far from adjusting education to woman’s life is lamentably apparent. The public schools seem averse to training her for a trade lest they unadvisedly throw her into the employer’s hands. The plea is still loudly heard that the girl must be trained for home life and for home life alone. If a girl goes into a trade, the school will not assume the responsibility of placing her under the deadening influences she is sure to encounter there. Hence she enters her trade untrained, with every possibility that trade experience will make her unfit for the home—not because of the nature of the occupation, but because of her own lack of intelligence concerning the occupation. While the trade itself may not be essentially deadening, to permit a girl to be a purely mechanical worker in the trade, without an informing mind and a cultivated imagination, as Miss Addams has expressed it, leads inevitably to mental and moral stupefaction.