To understand better the employer’s relation to vocational guidance, the bureau organized last year a conference of employment managers. Men representing a score or more of important manufacturing and business establishments have met regularly for informal discussions. In December an employment managers’ association was formed. One of the most important fruits of this close contact is the possibility of formulating plans for organizing the generally chaotic entrance into occupations. It is now planned to undertake some experiments in placement work in co-operation with several social agencies and a group of employers. The bureau believes that the country is ready to undertake through responsible agencies, having in mind primarily the needs of young workers, experiments to point the way to some less wasteful and costly method of bringing together what has been called “the manless job and the jobless man.”
Persons of constructive imagination throughout the country, alert to the needs of coming generations of workers, and interested in the reforms which must succeed if our future citizens are to enter into their inheritance, have come to recognize that a new co-ordinating agency is needed—an agency which shall secure team play in home, school and occupation, to the end that a richer vocational life of all the workers may be realized. It is likely that in the near future there will not only be for the work in the public schools a specially trained vocational counselor, but that there will also be in business and manufacturing establishments a new type of employment manager, especially trained and empowered to develop in the worker not only the efficiency which the employer requires, but also that efficiency which society requires. Through the working together of such employment managers and school counselors, society will gain an important factor in making for its progress.
HOUSEKEEPING CENTERS IN SETTLEMENTS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS
MABEL HYDE KITTREDGE
THE HOME OF A GRADUATE
Home-making has not kept pace with our great industrial advancement. The average home-maker of today is less thoroughly prepared for her business in life than the woman of a generation ago. It would seem that she considers the home-making profession of much less importance than such occupations as curling feathers and making shirtwaists. The latter has a commercial value, the former has not; and we have learned to weigh things by their money value. Then, again, competition has become the one incentive to work. Tie badly the million little knots in the willow plume and the next girl in the line gets the job. Feed the baby with poor milk, let the air in the room become polluted, ignorantly buy and ignorantly cook, and no one takes the work from you. Why worry over the way it is done?
There are many reasons why the woman of a generation or two ago was a better home-maker than the woman of today. The home duties today often are only part of the daily work of a woman’s life. The housekeeper today is (in millions of cases) a wage earner as well. She cannot be as single-minded as the old-fashioned mother whose only thought was the home. Schools, newspapers, settlements, the trend of the times, all fill the mind with outside interests. These things are important, but they have a tendency to crowd out domestic responsibilities and make women restless under the homely tasks. Suffrage we will have, and we must interest and educate women until we do have it; but, at the same time, the dishes have to be washed clean, the beds have to be aired and made well, and the babies have to eat nourishing food, or we’ll have an anaemic, poor race to govern when we get the suffrage.
Is it the fault of the home-maker of today if weakness instead of strength is the inheritance of her children, and will it be the fault of the home-maker of tomorrow if she bears and rears a weak race? If household administration is to take its place in the front rank with the other professions of the day, educators as well as women must wake up and realize that the whole housekeeping question is dependent upon scientific management, efficiency, skilled labor, and effective tools.
There are those who say that this training should be taught at home, and in many cases our school children, whether foreign or American, do come from homes where the mothers are good housekeepers according to their light; but the last generation cannot teach the coming one everything. As Samuel Merwin says in a recent book, “the accumulated experience of the ages is the grandmothers, and yet she is authority no longer; since her day science has stepped in. To her mind the gulf between herself and her daughter is nothing but the old gulf between age and youth. She is wrong. It is a million miles wide and if the mother keeps to the old way she risks the life of her child.”