WOMEN AS TEACHERS
There is one occupation for women which is thoroughly established, entirely respectable, socially uplifting, and fully approved by even the most conservative and fastidious. This is teaching. The result is that the profession of teaching, for women, is overcrowded and becoming more overcrowded. The work done is, on the whole, mediocre or worse, and, as a result of these two conditions, the pay is pitifully small considering the importance of the results.
Because women can become teachers without losing one notch of their social standing in even the most hide-bound communities, thousands of women become teachers who ought to be housewives. Thousands of others struggle in the schoolroom, doing work they hate and despise, for a miserable pittance, when they might be happy and successful in a store or
an office. We have met women teachers who ought to have been physicians; others who ought to have been lawyers; others, many of them, who ought to have been in business; and still others, thousands of them, who ought to have been in their own homes. And, naturally enough, we have also met women in the professions and in business and in their homes who ought to have been teachers—but not nearly so many.
The true teacher has three fundamental qualifications. First, a love of knowledge; second, a desire to impart knowledge, and third, a love of young people. Added to these should be patience, firmness, tactfulness, knowledge of human nature, facility in expression, reasoning power, enthusiasm, and a personality which inspires confidence. Can any county superintendent discover these qualities by means of the examination upon which first, second and third-grade certificates are based? Have the members of any average school board the discrimination necessary to determine the presence or absence of these qualities in any candidate who brings her certificate?
WOMEN IN BUSINESS
The business world suffers from the presence in the ranks of its workers of thousands of hopelessly inefficient girls who have no aptitudes for business, or even for the minor detailed processes of commercial activity. They take no real interest in their work. They have no particular ambition for advancement. Their one motive for condescending to grace the office with their presence at all is to earn pin-money or, perhaps, to support themselves in some fashion until they marry. It is true that some of these girls might be taught to be reliable and efficient in their work if they could be persuaded to take an interest in it, to look upon it as something more potent and more important than a mere stop-gap. Many of them, no doubt, could be trained to earn salaries which would pay them to continue in business even after marriage.
WOMEN IN DOMESTIC SERVICE
Others of these girls are utterly unfitted for office work.
Some of them would succeed very well as teachers, some as artists, and others as musicians. Like so many of their brothers, however, they have followed the line of least resistance—regardless of their aptitudes. Most of these girls belong in the home. They are quite justified in looking forward to matrimony as their true career. How much better if they would only earn the necessary pin-money in domestic service! From a monetary point of view, thirty dollars a month, with board, room, laundry, and many other necessities furnished, is a princely compensation compared with the five or eight dollars a week received by most girls in an office. From an economic point of view, the coming into our homes of thousands of intelligent, fairly well educated, trained, and ambitious young women would be a blessing and benefit. Socially, of course, the first young women who adopted such a radical change in custom would be pariahs. They would also, doubtless, suffer many hardships in the way of irregular hours, small, dark, stuffy rooms, unreasonable mistresses, no adequate place to entertain their friends, and other such injustices. But, with a higher and more intelligent class of household servants, doubtless these abuses would disappear.