If you will attend any of the classes, in arithmetic, in textiles, in hygiene, in color and design, in demonstration sales, in business forms, you will get not only a new view of the art of selling goods over the counter but a new vision of a big principle in education.
In the class on color, for instance, you will at first be puzzled by the vivid interest taken by the pupils in the theory of it. You have never before observed in any classroom so intimate a concern about rainbows, prisms, spectra, and the scientific sources of aesthetic effects. Your mind runs back to your college days and returns almost alarmed to this unacademic display of genuine, spontaneous, unanimous enthusiasm toward a classroom study of a theoretical subject. At last the reason for it works into your mind. These girls are engaged in the practice of color every afternoon, over hats, ribbons, waists, gloves, costumes. When you begin once to study a subject which reaches practice in your life, you cannot stop with practice. A law of your mind carries you on to the philosophy of it.
Right there you see the reason why trade training, broadly contrived, broadens not only technique but soul, trains not only to earn but to live. "Refined selling," some of the girls call the salesmanship which they learn in Mrs. Prince's class. They have perceived, to some extent, the relation between the arts and sciences on the one hand and their daily work on the other.
To a much greater extent has this relation been perceived by the young woman who has taken the full four-year course in, say, "Secretarial Studies" in Simmons and who, throughout her English, her German, her French, her Sociology, and her History, as well as throughout her Typewriting, her Shorthand, and her Commercial Law, has necessarily kept in mind, irradiating every subject, the light it may throw on the specific work she is to do.
"Ah! There, precisely, is the danger. Every Jack should have his Jill; but if every Jill has her job, why, there again the wedding day goes receding some more into the future. Let them stop all this foolishness and get married, as their grandparents did!"
Poor Jack! Poor Jill! They get lectured at all the time about the postponement of marriage, and they can no more control it than they can control the size of the city of New York. Theoretically, everybody on Manhattan Island could get up and go away and leave the island vacant. Actually, it can't and won't be done. Theoretically, we should all of us get married young. We fall in love young enough. But, actually, we can't get married young, and don't. The reasons are given later. Meanwhile, just notice, and just ponder, the following facts.
It was in the United States as a whole that the Census Man found 275 out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age—period unmarried. But the United States consists of developed and undeveloped regions. The cities are the high points of development. Look at the cities:
In Chicago, out of every 1,000 women in the age period from
twenty-five to twenty-nine, there were 314 who were unmarried. In
Denver there were 331. In Manhattan and the Bronx there were 356.
In Minneapolis there were 369. In Philadelphia there were 387.
Southern New England, however, is the most industrially developed part of the United States, the part in which social conditions like those of the older countries of the world are most nearly reached.
In Fall River, out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine period, the unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In Boston they were 452.