FOOTNOTES:
[7] From Puffer, Vocational Guidance, based on Census figures.
CHAPTER XI[ToC]
The Girl's Work (Continued)—Classification Of Occupations
It is well at the outset to recognize that vocation choosing is at best a complicated matter which, to be successfully carried out, demands not only much information, but information from different viewpoints. It is not enough to insure a living, even a good living, in the work a girl chooses. We must take into consideration the girl's effect upon society as a teacher, nurse, saleswoman, or office worker; and no less, in view of her evident destiny as mother of the race, must we consider society's effect upon her, as it finds her in the place she has chosen. In other words, will she serve society to the best of her ability, and will her service fit her to be a better homemaker than she would have been had no vocation outside the home intervened between her school training and her final settling in a home of her own making?
This double question must find answer in consideration of vocations from each of several viewpoints. We may classify occupations open to girls (1) from the standpoint of the girl's fitness, physical and psychological; (2) from the standpoint of industrial conditions, the sanitary, mental, and moral atmosphere, and the rewards obtainable; (3) as factors increasing, decreasing, or not affecting the girl's possible home efficiency or the likelihood of taking up home life; (4) from the standpoint of the girl's education; (5) from the standpoint of service to society.
Our first classification concerns the girl's fitness for this or that work. The everyday work of the world in which our girls are to find a part may be separated into three fairly well-marked classes: making things, distributing things, and service. The first question we must ask concerning a girl desirous of finding work is, then: Toward which of these classes does her natural ability and therefore probably her inclination tend? Natural handworkers make poor saleswomen; natural traders or saleswomen are likely to be uninterested and ineffective handworkers. The girl whose interests are all centered in people must not be condemned to spend her life in the production of things; nor, as is far more common, must the girl who can make things, and enjoys making them, spend her life in merely handling the things other people have made, as she strives to make connection between these things and the people who want them. Then there is the girl who is efficient and who finds her pleasure in "doing things for people." Service—and we must remember that service is a wide term, and that no stigma should attach to the class of workers which includes the teacher, the physician, and the minister—is clearly the direction in which such a girl's vocational ambition should be turned.