Demonstration by teacher in domestic science. Teaching affords excellent preparation for the prospective homemaker.
Teaching and nursing may be grouped together as excellent preparation for the prospective homemaker. It may be contended that the teacher and the hospital nurse spend years outside the home environment and that their minds are turned to other problems than those of housekeeping. This contention is undoubtedly true; and if we were striving merely to make housekeepers, it might be worthy of serious consideration. The home, however, as we have defined it, is a place in which to make people, and both the nurse and the teacher serve a long apprenticeship in this sort of manufacture. Expert workers in either line concern themselves with the bodies and the minds of their pupils or patients. They, together with physicians, lawyers, and social workers, have opportunities which can scarcely be equaled for learning by observation and experiment about the human relations that will confront them in their own homes. They learn to be resourceful and to meet the emergencies of which life is full; they have the advantage of trained minds to set to work upon the administrative problems which underlie successful home life.
by Underwood & Underwood
Women medical students. Physicians and surgeons have unusual opportunities for learning by observation and experiment about the human relations that will confront them in their own homes
A question may arise as to the physical fitness for marriage and motherhood of the girl who has given her nerve force to the exacting and often depleting work of nurse, teacher, or physician. It is unquestionably true that nurses and teachers do often wear out after comparatively few years at their vocation, although of the majority the opposite is true. This merely means that conditions surrounding these vocations should be studied with a view to their improvement, if necessary, since we believe the vocations to be suited to women and women to the vocations.
Office work may prove an excellent training for certain phases of homemaking work. Neatness, accuracy, precision, the doing again and again of constantly recurring tasks, all find their place and use in the housekeeper's routine. The calm atmosphere of the well-kept office even when typewriters and calculating machines are rattling is a better preparation for an orderly home than the rush of the department store or the factory. Purely routine workers, who put little or no thought into their daily tasks, will enter upon homemaking lacking the initiative that homemakers need. But the able office worker is not merely a follower of routine. The greatest lack of office work as preparation for a homemaking career is that the girl's interests during so large a part of her day are led away from the home and all that pertains to it. She works neither with people nor with the things which go to make homes. Probably, on the whole, office work in a general way may be classed as a neutral occupation, which neither adds to, nor reduces, in any great degree the girl's possibilities as a homemaker.
Salesmanship for girls, especially in the great department stores of the cities, is a vocation of at least doubtful advantage for the home-minded girl to pursue as a step in her training for managing her own home. In the quiet of the village store, with few associates in work, and with one's neighbors and fellow townsmen for customers, salesmanship takes on a somewhat different aspect. But the city store means usually hurry, excitement, nerve strain, a long day, with quite probably reaction to excessive gayety and hence more nerve strain at night. It means spending one's days among great collections of finery which tend to assume undue importance in the girl's eyes. It means constant association with people who spend, until spending seems the only end in life. It means almost always pay lower than is consistent with decent living if the girl must depend alone upon her own earnings. And none of these things tends toward steady, skillful, contented wifehood and motherhood in later years. This question of underpaid work is of course not found alone in the department store. But, wherever it is found, we may be sure that it tends on the one hand toward marriage as a way of escape from present want, and on the other toward inefficiency in the relation so lightly assumed.
The factory girl is in many respects in a position parallel to that of the saleswoman. She earns too little to make comfortable living possible. She too must leave home early and return late, wearied by the monotony of a day in uninteresting surroundings, with neither energy nor inclination for anything other than complete relaxation and "fun." This desire for relaxation leads her often away from a crowded, ill-supported home in the evenings, until the habit settles into a confirmed disposition. This is a decided handicap for a homemaker. Coupled with the mental inertia resulting from years of mechanical work without thought, it provides poor material from which to make steady, responsible, efficient women. We have already noted, however, that factories differ widely. It follows of necessity that the girls who work in them come from their work with all grades of ability.
The actress, the artist, and the literary woman are usually spoken of as far removed from the true domestic type. This I cannot believe to be true, except in individual cases. All these women, as makers of finished products, stand far nearer to the traditional type of woman than many others we might name. The life of the actress tends more than the others perhaps to break home ties, but in the case of real talent in any direction ordinary rules do not apply. The actress, the artist, and the writer are much more likely to carry on their work after marriage than the teacher, the office worker, or even the factory woman. Many of them succeed to a remarkable degree in doing two things well. Many more, of course, are less successful, but we must not overlook the fact that the failures are more noised abroad than the successes.