EDITOR'S NOTE: It is commonly supposed that only the women of poverty are affected by modern industrial conditions. On the contrary, modern industrial conditions are having their greatest influence among the women who, before marriage, enjoy wide educational opportunities, and who, after marriage, enjoy the blessing of partial leisure. It is among these women that economic developments are producing the profoundest changes in habit of life and in character of mind. Mr Hard, who will be remembered by all readers of the "Woman's Invasion," has spent two years in the diligent investigation of this subject, and has acquired an authoritative knowledge of it.
EVERY Jack has his Jill." It is a tender twilight thought, and it more or less settles Jill.
When the Census Man was at work in 1900, however, he went about and counted 2,260,000 American women who were more than twenty-five years old and who were still unmarried.
It is getting worse (or better) with every passing decade, and out of it is emerging a new ideal of education for women, an ideal which seems certain to penetrate the whole educational system of the United States, all the way from the elementary schools to the universities.
The Census Man groups us into age periods. The period from twenty-five to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially because it is the one in which most of us get pretty well fixed into our life work. Out of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the Census Man found 254 who were still unmarried. In 1900, only ten years later, he found 275.
There is not so much processional as recessional about marriage at present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find ourselves in an age-period in which the number of single women has been reduced to less than ten per cent. of the total. The rebound from this fact hits education hard. As marriage recedes, and as the period of gainful work before marriage lengthens, the need of real technical preparation for that gainful work becomes steadily more urgent, and the United States moves steadily onward into an era of trained women as well as trained men.
In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons—the first of its kind in the United States—a regular four-year college of which the aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her living in a certain specific occupation, there were enrolled last year, besides some five hundred undergraduate women, some eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor's degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana.
These eighty women, after eight years in elementary schools, four years in high school, and four years in college, were taking one year more in technical school in order to be—what? Not doctors or lawyers or architects. Not anything in the "learned" professions. But to be "social workers" in settlements or for charity societies, to be librarians, to be stenographers and secretaries.
The Bachelor of Arts from Vassar who is going to be a stenographer, and who is taking her year of graduate study at Simmons, will go to work at the end of the year and then, six months later, if she has made good, will get from Simmons the degree of Bachelor of Science. At that point in her life she will have two degrees and seventeen years of schooling behind her. A big background. But we are beginning to do some training for almost everything.
Did you ever see a school of salesmanship for department-store women employees? You can see one at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. Under the guidance of Mrs. Lucinda W. Prince, the big department stores of Boston have come to think enough of this school to send girls to it every morning and to pay them full wages while they take a three months' course.