The Bureaus have found the demand for women in industrial chemistry and physics, for instance, to be greater than the supply because the graduates of women's colleges have not been carried far enough in mathematics, and in chemistry have been kept too much to theoretical text-book work. For example, the head of a certain industry was willing to give the position of chemist at his works to a woman. He needed some one to suggest changes in process from time to time, and to watch waste. He set down eight simple problems such as might arise any day in his factory for the candidates to answer. Some of the women, all college graduates, who had specialized in chemistry, could not answer a single problem, and none showed that grip of the science which would enable them to give other than rule of thumb solutions. He engaged a man.
In answering the questionnaire which the New York Bureau of Occupations sent to one hundred and twenty-five industrial plants, the manager in almost every case replied, in regard to the possibility of employing women in such positions as research or control chemists, that applicants were "badly prepared." As hand workers, too, women are handicapped by lack of knowledge of machinery. In this tool age, high school girls are cut off from technical education, although they are destined to carry on in large measure our skilled trades. I am told that in Germany many factories had to close because only women were available as managers, and they had not been fitted by business and technical schools for the task.
If women individually are looking for a soft place, if they are afraid, as one manager expressed it, "to put on overalls and go into a vat," even when their country is so in need of their service, it is futile for them to ask collectively for equal opportunity and equal pay; if they individually fail to prepare as for a life work, regarding themselves as but temporarily in business or a profession, their collective demand upon the world for a fair field and no favor will be as ineffective as illogical.
The doors stand wide open. It rests with women themselves as to whether they shall enter in.
To the steady appeals of the employment bureaus, backed by the stern facts of life, the colleges are yielding. On examination I found that curricula are already being modified. None but the sorriest pessimist could doubt the nature of the final outcome, on realizing the pooling of brains which is going on in such associations as the Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations and the League for Business Opportunities. They work to the end of having young women not only soundly prepared for the new openings, but sensitive to the demands of a world set towards stern duty.
Not only is there call for a pooling of brains to look after the timid and unready, but there is need of combination to open the gates for the prepared and brave. Few who cheered the Red Cross nurses as they made their stirring march on Fifth Avenue, knew that those devoted women would, on entering the Military Nurse Corps, find themselves the only nurses among the Allies without a position of honor. The humiliation to our nurses in placing them below the orderlies in the hospitals is not only a blow to their esprit de corps, but a definite handicap to their efficiency. A nurse who was at the head of the nursing staff in a state hospital wrote from the front: "There is one thing the Nursing Committee needs to work for, and work hard, too, and that is, to make for nurses the rank of lieutenant. The Canadians have it, why not the Americans? You will find that it will make a tremendous difference. You see, there are no officers in our nursing personnel. One of our staff says we are the hired extras! It is really a great mistake." Uncle Sam may merely be waiting for a concentrated drive of public opinion against his tardy representatives.
Down the street they come, beginning their pilgrimage of alleviation and succor on the battlefields of France.
And why should it be necessary to urge that while scores of young men are dashing to death in endeavors to learn to fly, there are women unmobilized who know how to soar aloft in safety? They have never, it is true, been submitted to laboratory tests in twirlings and twistings, but they reach the zenith. Two carried off the records in long distance flights, but both have been refused admission to the Flying Corps. Will it need a campaign to secure for our army this efficient service? Must women pool their brains to have Ruth Law spread her protecting wings over our boys in France?
To any one who realizes the significance of the military situation as it stands, and who is cognizant of the contrast between Germany's use of her entire people in her national effort, and the slow mobilization of woman-power among the Allies and entire lack of anything worthy the name of mobilization of the labor-power of women in the United States, there will come a determination to bury every jealousy between woman and woman, all prejudice in men, to cut red tape in government, with the one object of combining all resources.