Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

In Boston also there are several privately supported social workers of this character, chiefly working for women’s organizations like the Women’s Educational Association, the Home and School Association, and some settlements. Such visitors are connected with a particular school or district and work there only. Worcester, Massachusetts, and Rochester, New York, also carry on some of this work to help the over-burdened teacher get better results in school.

Eleanor H. Johnson of the Public Education Association of New York, writing in The Survey on “Social Service and the Public Schools,” demonstrates the usefulness of the visiting teacher if further evidence were necessary. One of the visitors herself in her report to her Boston supervisors says: “This new work of visiting the homes of the school children is one of continual coöperation with principals, teachers, truant officers, janitors and the children themselves, also with hospitals, dispensaries, employment agencies, the Associated Charities, or whatever the emergency may demand. Too often this sort of effort is scattered and ineffective because of the lack of connection between agencies. With a visitor working from the school as a starting-point and not from any private organization, the connection is quickly made and the influence of each helping agency is strengthened by the added influence of every other. This has proved to be just as true in the case of medical social service, particularly that of public hospitals and institutions, and one might almost prophesy that some day the relief work of philanthropic agencies will come only in response to calls from the social service departments of church, hospital, public institution and school, and that a great clearing house for these agencies, public and private, will be the best way of organizing charity.”

There is great need of the extension of this work. The regular teachers do not have the time and strength to do the visiting that is requisite for successful teaching. Women understand women well enough to know that. They understand teaching of little folks well enough to know that, to keep fit for the classroom, the teacher must have her play time too; and the whole visiting teacher movement which women are fostering is based on their appreciation of the significance of the regular teacher and their realization of the need of her 100 per cent. efficiency for the sake of the child, for the sake of the teacher, for the sake of the taxpayer even, and for the sake of the future.

Vocational Guidance

Not quite as comprehensive in her function as the visiting teacher, but extremely valuable, is the teacher-counselor or vocational guidance visitor. To be able to advise a child intelligently about a preparation for a later vocation, the advisor must know something at least of the family history of the child. Visitors therefore are engaged by those organizations interested primarily in vocational guidance. Miss Marshal, director of the Boston Trades School for Girls and agent of the Industrial Commission, in a paper read before the National Society for Industrial Education, set forth the idea of community responsibility for letting boys and girls drift into low-paid, mechanical and often degrading or health-endangering work. She said: “What happens to girls who must earn their living when they go out from the grammar schools untrained for any trade? They inevitably drift into low-paid, mechanical, wearing, or even into dangerous work as packers in factories, as errand girls in stores, with little chance of rising and less chance of real life. The trade-school training for girls—definite preparation for a trade—rapidly increases a girl’s wages and makes her at once self-supporting and self-respecting.”

There are over one hundred vocational counselors in the public schools of Boston whose duty it is to guide the child while in school, after leaving school, and to follow-up the child to ascertain what becomes of him after he goes to work.

Important work for vocational guidance and education has been done in Boston by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and by the Women’s Municipal League. The latter supervised the investigations made by college students into employments for boys and girls in different districts in Boston as a preparation for the dissemination of knowledge of educational possibilities in occupations. It also prepared a complete city directory of vocational schools and classes which is of great value to teachers, parents, vocational counselors, employers, business directors, social workers, and to organizations for vocational guidance. This association has moreover financed research workers like Mr. McCracken who investigated for it all commercial schools maintained for profit in Boston.

The Placement Bureau of the Boston Women’s Municipal League developed into a city-wide employment bureau extending to all the schools of Boston. This League and the Girls’ Trade Education League, both interested in, and experimenting with, vocational guidance, realized that there should be a close connection between a Placement Bureau and the Employment-Certificate Department, between the Placement Bureau and the Health Examining Department, and the Placement Bureau and the Department of Vocational Guidance and Counseling recently established in the school system. “The Girls’ Trade Education League and the Women’s Municipal League saw therefore that a Central Placement Bureau was the inevitable next step, that the value of what we had already done would be lost unless we carried our work to this further stage and were able to show to School Committee and employers alike, to teachers and parents, to the boys and girls, the real worth to the city of vocational advice, placement, and follow-up. We saw this for the reasons I have already given and also for other reasons, namely: information in regard to industries and individual firms ought to be pooled and centrally filed; for the children also, as well as the employers and the school authorities, the advantages of a general clearing house are large.”[^[5]] The women therefore supported the Boston Placement Bureau as a central board and its directors include representatives of the League and the Girls’ Trade Education League.

The women went into this work originally because they felt they had a distinct contribution to make in follow-up work. That contribution they have carried into the Central Bureau, and its follow-up work is strengthened through the use of evening recreational centers to which children are required to report and where they can be guided in other ways than in the matter of labor only and so correlate the recreation of the evening with the work of the day.

A connection is also being worked out between the Placement Bureau and the evening schools.