It is the first time (within our knowledge) that such a thing has happened in any of the old first-rank women's colleges.
The course in secretarial studies at Rockford gives the pupil English, Accounts, Commerce, Commercial Law, and Economic History in her first year, and Political Science, English, and Economics in her second year. Shorthand and Typewriting are required in both years, and a few hours a week are reserved in each year for elective courses to be chosen by the pupil among offerings in French, German, Spanish, and History.
This is a notable concession not only to the increased need of "middle class" women for "occupations other than teaching" but also to the increased recognition of those other occupations as being worthy of "cultural" training.
We keep moving forward into an era of trained women as well as trained men. The extraordinary prolongation of mental and financial infancy in the "middle class," bringing with it an extraordinary postponement of marriage, makes this training particularly necessary in the case of the women of that class. But the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment for daughters exists everywhere, increasing the cost of living for the family and driving daughters to supplementing the family income.
What futility, as well as indignity, there is in the idea that the query of support for women gets its full answer in a husband!
In the United States, in the year 1900, among women twenty years of age and over, the married women numbered 13,400,000. The unmarried women and the widows together numbered 6,900,000. For every two women married there was one woman either single or widowed.
If education does not (1) give women a comprehension of the organization of the money-earning world, and (2) train them to one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that world, it is not education.
Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women's education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide battle-cry, the sentiment: "The Home is also a technique. All women must be trained to it."
At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home Economics.
In one photograph in this article we show the tiny children of the Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the technique of the home. In another picture we show the post-graduate laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois. And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of marketing, and other phases of home management.