The Trade Union Woman

by Alice Henry

That a perfectly honest element of confusion and puzzle did enter into the thought of parents and the views of the community, it would be vain to deny. These young women were incomprehensible. Why were they not content with the education their mothers had had, and with the lives their mothers had led before them? Why did they want to leave comfortable homes, and face the unknown, the hard, perhaps the dangerous? How inexplicable, how undutiful! Ah! It was the young people who were seeing furthest into the future; it was the fathers and mothers who were not recognizing the change that was coming over the world of their day.

If then, for the combination of reasons outlined, women have always lagged in the rear as increasing educational advantages of a literary or professional character have been provided or procured for boys, it is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the new lines of industrial education, trade-training and apprenticeship we detect the very same influences at work, sigh before the same difficulties, and recognize the old weary, threadbare arguments, too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to be at least distrusted in this connection. This, however, must surely be the very last stand of the non-progressivists in education as regards the worker. The ideals of today aim at education on lines that will enable every child, boy and girl alike, born in or brought into any civilized country, to develop all faculties, and that will simultaneously enable the community to benefit from this complete, all-round development of every one of its members.

There is one consideration to which I must call attention, because, when recognized, it cannot but serve as the utmost stimulus to our efforts to arrange for vocational education for girls on the broadest lines. It is this. Whatever general, national or state plans prove the most complete and satisfactory for girls, will, speaking generally, at the same time be found to have solved the problem for the boy as well. The double aim, of equipping the girl to be a mother as well as human being, is so all-inclusive and is therefore so much more difficult of accomplishment, that the simpler training necessary for a boy's career will be automatically provided for at the same time. Therefore the boy is not likely to be at a disadvantage under such a coeducational system as is here implied. For it is to nothing short of coeducation that the organized women of the United States are looking forward, coeducation on lines adapted to present-day wants. What further contributions the far-off future may hold for us in the never wholly to be explored realm of human education in its largest acceptance, we know not. Until we have learned the lesson of today, and have set about putting it in practice, such glimpses of the future are not vouchsafed to us.

In such an age of transition as ours, any plan of vocational training intended to include girls must be a compromise with warring facts, and will therefore have to face objections from both sides, from those forward-looking ones who feel that the domestic side of woman's activities is overemphasized, and from those who still hark back, who would fain refuse to believe that the majority of women have to be wage-earners for at least part of their lives. These latter argue that by affording to girls all the advantages of industrial training granted or which may be granted to boys, we are "taking them out of the home." As if they were not out of the home already!

This assumption will appear to most readers paradoxical, if indeed it does not read as a contradiction in terms. A little thought, however, will show that it is just because we are all along assuming the economic primacy of the boy, that the girl has been so disastrously neglected. It is true that the boy is also a potential father, and that his training for that lofty function is usually ignored and will have to be borne in mind, though no one would insist that training for fatherhood need occupy a parallel position with training for motherhood. But popular reasoning is not content with accepting this admission; it goes on to draw the wholly unwarranted conclusion that while the boy ought to be thoroughly taught on the wage-earning side, and while such teaching should cover all the more important occupations, to which he is likely to be called, the girl's corresponding training shall as a matter of course be quite a secondary matter, fitting her only for a limited set of pursuits, many of these ranking low in skill and opportunities of advancement, and necessarily among the most poorly paid; these being all occupations which we choose to assume girls will enter, such as sewing or box-making. Only recently have girls been prepared for the textile trades, though they have always worked in these, first in the home and since then in the factories. Still less is any preparation thought of for the numberless occupations that necessity and a perpetually changing world are all the while driving girls to take up. There were in 1910, 8,075,772 women listed as wage-earners in the United States. Would it not be as well, if a girl is to be a wage-earner, that she should have at least as much opportunity of learning her trade properly, as is granted to a boy?

Setting aside for the moment the fact that girls are already engaged in so many callings, it is poor policy and worse economy to argue that because a girl may be but a few years a wage-earner, it is therefore not worth while to make of her an efficient, capable wage-earner. That is fair to no one, neither to the girl herself nor to the community. The girl deserves to be taken more seriously. Do this, and it will then be clear that a vocational system wide enough and flexible enough to fit the girl to be at once a capable mother-housekeeper, and a competent wage-earner, will be a system adequate to the vocational training of the boy for life-work in any of the industrial pursuits. It is self-evident that the converse would not hold.

And first, to those readers of advanced views who will think that I am conceding even too much in thus consenting apparently to sink the human activities of the woman in those of the mother during the greater part of maturity. Touching the question of personal human development, I concede nothing, as I assert nothing, but I accept present-day facts, and desire to make such compromise with them as shall clear the way for whatever forms of home and industrial life shall evolve from them most naturally and simply. We may observe with satisfaction and hopefulness that the primitive collection of unrelated industries which have so long lingered in the home to the detriment of both and which have confused our thoughts as to which were the essential and permanent, and which the merely accidental and temporary functions of the home, are gradually coming within the range of the specialized trades, and as such are freeing the home from so much clutter and confusion, and freeing the woman from so many fettering bonds. But the process is a slow one, and again, it may not even go on indefinitely. There may be a limit in the process of specializing home industries. So far as it has gone, different classes of women are very unequally affected by it. In the United States, where these changes have gone on faster and further than anywhere else, the two classes whose occupations have been most radically modified have been, first and chiefly, the young girl from fourteen to twenty-four, of every class, and next the grownup woman, who has taken up one of the professions now for the first time open to women, and this almost irrespective of whether she is married or single.

As to the young girl, the transformation of the home plus industries to the home, pure and simple, a place to live in and rest in, to love in and be happy in, has so far already been effected, that in the home of the artisan and the tradesman there is not now usually sufficient genuine, profitable occupation for more than one growing or grown girl as assistant to her mother. For two reasons the other daughters will look out of doors for employment. The first reason is that under rearranged conditions of industry, there is nothing left for them to do at home. The second is not less typical of these altered conditions. The father cannot, even if he would, afford to keep them at home as non-producers. If the processes of making garments and preparing food are no longer performed by the members of the family for one another, the outsiders who do perform them must be remunerated, and that not in kind, as, for example, with board and lodging and clothing, but in money wages, in coin. And their share of the money to enable this complicated system of exchange of services to be carried out, must be earned by the unmarried daughters of the house through their working in turn at some wage-earning occupation, also outside.

The young woman who has entered medicine, or law, or dentistry, who paints pictures or writes books, is on very much the same economic basis as the young working-girl. She, too, is accepted as part of the already established order of things, and the present generation has grown up in happy ignorance of the difficulties experienced by the pioneers in all these professions in establishing their right to independent careers. The professional woman who has married finds herself so far on a less secure foundation. Every professional woman who has children has to work out for herself the problem of the mutual adjustment of the claims of her profession and her family, but so many have solved the difficulties and have made the adjustment that it seems only a question of time when every professional woman may accept the happiness of wifehood and motherhood when it is offered to her without feeling that she has to choose once for all between a happy marriage and a successful professional career.

Not a few professional women, writers, and speakers, have gone on to infer that a similar solution was at hand for the working-girl on her marriage. Not yet is any such adjustment or rather readjustment of domestic and industrial activities in sight for her. Whatever changes may take place in the environment of the coming American woman, the present generation of working-girls as they marry are going to find their hands abundantly filled with duties within the walls of their own little homes. We know today how the health and the moral welfare of children fare when young mothers are prematurely forced back into the hard and exhausting occupations from which marriage has withdrawn them.