On a different level of educational equipment from the Trade School Shops stands the School of Salesmanship. It gets many high school girls and even, occasionally, a girl who has been to college.
Finally, there is the Appointment Bureau, for college girls in particular.
This Appointment Bureau is the most extraordinary employment agency ever organized. Its object is not merely to introduce existing clients to existing jobs (which is the proper normal object of employment agencies), but to make forays into the wild region of "occupations other than teaching," and find jobs, and then find girls to fit those jobs. In other words, it is a kind of "Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay" for the purpose of exploring, surveying, developing, and settling the region of "occupations other than teaching" on behalf of college women.
It is managed by Miss Laura Drake Gill, President of the National
Association of Collegiate Alumnae and former Dean of Barnard
College. She is assisted by an Advisory Council of
representatives of near-by colleges—Radcliffe, Wellesley,
Simmons, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Brown.
There is no more important work being done for women to-day.
In connection with it, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union has just issued a handbook of three hundred pages, entitled "Vocations for the Trained Woman." It is an immense map of the occupational world for "middle class" women, in which every bay and headland, every lake and hill, is drawn to scale, from Poultry Farming to Department Store Buying, from Lunch-Room Management to State Child-Saving.
The responses made to this movement by certain educational institutions (including particularly Simmons College) will be observed in a future article. Just one response, from an unexpected quarter, must be noticed here.
In a small Illinois city there is a woman's college, founded as a Preparatory School in the forties and soon advanced to be a Seminary, which, with Anna P. Sill for its first head, Jane Addams for its best-known graduate, and Julia Gulliver for its present president, has come to be a college of standing and of leading. Only Troy Female Seminary and Mount Holyoke Seminary preceded it, in date of foundation, among the important women's institutions.
Rockford College is ranked to-day, by the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education, in rank one—among the sixteen best women's colleges in the United States. It hasn't risen to that rank by any quick, money-spurred spurt. It brings with it out of its far past all the traditions of that early struggle for the higher education which, by friction, kindled among women so flaming an enthusiasm for pure knowledge. It remains "collegiate" in the old sense, quiet, cloistral, inhabiting old-fashioned brick buildings in an old-fashioned large yard, looking still like the Illinois of war times more than like the Illinois of the twentieth century, retaining all the home ideals of those times—a large interest in feminine accomplishments, a strict regard for manners, a belief in the value of charm.
But here, in this quiet, non-metropolitan college, so really "academic," so really—in the oldest-fashioned ways—"cultural," here is a two-year course in secretarial studies.