These eighty other women, after eight years in grammar school, 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 old “learned” professions. Their scholastic purpose was more modest than that. Yet, modest as it was, it was keeping them on the learner’s bench longer than a “learned” profession would have kept most of their grandfathers. These eighty women were taking graduate courses in order to be “social workers” in settlements or for charity societies, in order to be library assistants, in order 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 44 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.
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 color. You have never before observed in any classroom so intimate a 45 concern about rainbows, prisms, spectra, and the scientific sources of æsthetic effects. Your mind runs back to your college days and returns almost alarmed to this unacademic display of genuine, spontaneous, unanimous enthusiasm. 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 theory, the philosophy, of it.
Just 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 46 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 view, irradiating every subject, the beacon-light of her future working career.
“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! We lecture them, all the time, for postponing their marriage. We ought not to stop there. We ought to go on to lecture them for doing the thing which makes them postpone their marriage. We ought to lecture them for postponing their maturity. We ought to lecture them for prolonging their mental and financial infancy.
The big, impersonal, unlectureable industrial reasons for the modern prolongation of infancy were glanced at in chapter one of this book. In the present chapter we shall glance at them 47 again, more closely. Just now, however, for a moment, we must revert to the Census, and we must take one final look at the amount of marriage-postponement now existing in this country.