Amelia soon declared herself as the empiricist and pragmatist which she was. Learn by doing and have fun at it had guided her every step through life. At one of her first lectures she explained why she came to Purdue. It was her kind of school—a technical school where all instruction had its practical side. Education, she felt, had failed to discover individual aptitude soon enough. If a child’s bent could be determined early, much study and work in the wrong direction could be avoided.
“We have watched the colleges,” she said, “produce countless graduates who could only demand jobs for which, notwithstanding the adequacy of their formal education, they might be totally unprepared or unfitted, and in which they were often even just plain not interested.
“It’s a fundamental problem, and I can imagine that reform may involve the entire reconstruction of our educational system. Because Johnnie liked to play with tin soldiers, his mother has jumped to the conclusion, since the year one, that he wanted to be a soldier! So she packed him off to military school—which he hated—though maybe she never found it out—all because what really interested him about tin soldiers was that they were made of lead, and lead is metal, and you heat metal and melt it and make it into lots of things—steel for skyscrapers, decorative ironwork, leading for stained-glass windows....”
Although she would have liked to, AE soon discovered that it would be impossible to interview all 800 women students. She therefore sent out a questionnaire to them. In answer to one question she learned that 92 per cent of the coeds wanted to go into useful employment after graduation.
She would assemble the girls in large groups and talk to them.
“After all,” she said to them, drawing from her own experience, “times are changing and women need the critical stimulus of competition outside the home. A girl must nowadays believe completely in herself as an individual. She must realize at the outset that a woman must do the same job better than a man to get as much credit for it. She must be aware of the various discriminations, both legal and traditional, against women in the business world.
“I cannot tell you that you will be able to bounce right out of college into your life work. I believe, under existing conditions, that it is almost impossible to do. But I believe also that it doesn’t greatly matter, for the business world will draw out one’s aptitudes.
“Probably no sure way has yet been discovered for women—or men either—to know before they reach the age of sixty-five if they have done right by their lives; and even then I believe they can’t be exactly sure that something else they could have chosen would not have made their lives richer.
“Probably people of outstanding talent—like Lily Pons, for instance—couldn’t do anything but follow their natural bent. Such people must know they’re in the right profession. The rest of us, I fear, can never know for certain until we can take a backward look in old age, for we must have a background of experience against which to make comparisons. So our vocational starts are somewhat conditioned. But not fatally, surely. Of course if men and women are very unhappy in their work, they are entitled to a pretty good opinion that they are in the wrong work. Yet if they are happy in it—I don’t believe it means, necessarily, that they couldn’t be happier.
“And so I’m inclined to say that, if you want to try a certain job, try it. Then if you find something on the morrow that looks better, make a change. And if you should find that you are the first women to feel an urge in that direction—what does it matter? Feel it and act on it just the same. It may turn out to be fun. And to me fun is the indispensable part of work.”