Not long since, a man of deep mental and spiritual insight said to the writer that he considered all legislation for making women’s industrial life easier a mistake, because intolerable conditions in the factory and workshop will ultimately force women back into the home. Just where “back into the home” is, no one seems to know! With the industrial processes in which woman has worked from time immemorial taken from the home, the exhortation to stay at home and follow the example of her industrious grandmother seems a bit hard to follow. This fear, however, on the part of educators, this restiveness on the part especially of men concerning women and the trades, should not be altogether ignored, though part of it is due to plain cowardice in refusing to face things as they are. The few courageous leaders who are trying to work out an adequate system of vocational training for women feel that they need definite knowledge of the effect of industrial work upon her.[44] This can be supplied only by learning the specific needs and characteristics of the girl, the actual happenings in her working life, and the wants and demands of the employer, who, whether we like it or not, is bound to determine finally all plans for training the wage-earning girl. We can lessen his injustice and his lordship over conditions by refusing him skilled workers unless he agrees to reasonable terms; but we can never lessen his authority as to the actual work to be done and the method the worker is to pursue. Much patient study is needed. The immediate task is to bring together the employer and the educator, who for too long have walked apart when their path, which led to the making of the worker, should have been a common one.
The need for a mediary to bring about this coöperation is clearly felt at the present time. After a recent interview dealing wholly with educational questions, Mr. Hamerschlag, Director of the Carnegie Technical Schools, said to the writer: “Do you suppose your fund would consider establishing some center or bureau that would be able to furnish really definite information concerning the occupations of girls? Don’t spend your time over present education—spend it in finding out what we should do! If some one could tell us as much about trades for women as the Anti-Tuberculosis League can tell us about that disease, we might accomplish better results. We simply do not know the effect of our present legislation upon women, or whether this or that trade means health, mental development, and reasonable pay.”
The employment bureau must become, it seems to me, this mediary; it must give this help to the educator, to the employer, and above all, to the girl. It will undoubtedly demonstrate that many occupations in which women are now engaged are eminently unsuitable, failing entirely to reach the standard set by Miss Marshall that they shall “develop that kind of efficiency which will be of value to the woman as a home maker, and which will not be detrimental physically or morally.”[45] By careful study authoritative knowledge must be gained of the girl’s experience, and of the possibility of readjustment of methods by the employer. The few of us who have attempted such intensive work have uniformly found the employer willing to discuss such readjustment with us, because he realizes that we are honestly trying to furnish him with efficient workers and that we realize the difficulty of dealing with the individual. The industrial record of a girl covering a period of three or four years may show that she was a shiftless, inert, indifferent worker, and hence drifted from job to job. Here the distinct vocational function of the bureau must be brought into play, the girl’s school record studied, and her temperament noted. She may be a “misfit” or she may need a stimulation which no amount of trade training will give, possibly a stimulation of the imagination by literature or history. If this girl could be released a few hours a week, or better, two days a week, from her employment, without the loss of pay which she cannot afford, she might be made into a valuable worker. Many employers are not averse to considering such an experiment. The records may show, however, not a shiftless worker, but one who has been laid off because of irregular work. This girl must have training for a skilled trade which is successful enough to give full employment to efficient workers. It is apparent that the contact of the bureau with the school must be exceedingly close. Perhaps here the bureau can help prevent the waste which is now so evident in the issuing of work certificates; the waste of opportunity for information concerning the girl and her work.
We are as yet too young in the field to state positively the outcome of the experiment. It is not an easy experiment and there are many possibilities of failure. But in any case it is better to fail trying than to be idly distrustful of the possibility of good coming out of the present conditions under which woman is living. The ignorant, the foolish and the cowardly are in despair because she is becoming base and sordid through the fate laid upon her by industrial evolution. They refuse to see that if she were assisted to a sane adaptation of her life to this fate, she would become only a finer and truer type of womanhood. And perhaps, heretical though it be to say so, it may be discovered that a woman who has missed opportunity for development through wifehood and motherhood, has often been able to reach the full fruition of her womanhood through wisely chosen work. To direct girls judiciously into vocations which may be theirs not for three or five years, but for life, and which may enable them, even without marriage, to fulfil the promise which their girlhood gave of a wise, tender, courageous womanhood, is in itself no mean task. As a precedent condition, the employment-vocation bureau, must help us to discover what is the best work for women to do, and under what conditions they can do it. It will thus aid them to perform that work intelligently, efficiently, and enthusiastically. Then, and then only, will come the just remuneration, the living wage for which women at present struggle in vain.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] The Alliance Employment Bureau, New York City; the Coöperative Employment Bureau for Women and Girls, Cleveland; Council of Jewish Women Employment Bureau, Pittsburg; Schmidlapp Bureau for Women and Girls, Cincinnati.
[42] A Handbook of Employments, by Mrs. Ogilvie Gordon, Aberdeen: The Rosemount Press; Report on the Desirability of Establishing an Employment Bureau in the City of New York, by Edward T. Devine, Russell Sage Foundation; The Chicago Employment Agent and the Immigrant Worker, by Grace Abbott, University of Chicago Press; Annual Reports of the Alliance Employment Bureau, Reports on Investigations, Mary A. Van Kleeck.
[43] An excellent selected bibliography on employment bureaus and unemployment is contained in the report of Mr. Devine above referred to.
[44] Besides private trade schools, interesting experiments have been made in continuation and coöperative training in Boston, Chicago and Cincinnati. In Cincinnati, the coöperative plan inaugurated by Dean Schneider in the university has been remarkably successful.
[45] Florence M. Marshall: Industrial Training for Women, Bulletin No. 4 National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, p. 17.