Next, from the North Bennet, she may go to the Boston Trade School for Girls. This school was given its first form under private management by Miss Florence Marshall. It has now been absorbed into the public-school system. What was a private fad has become a public function.
In the Trade School the pupil whom we are following may decide to be a milliner. But she will not yet confine her attention to millinery. She will take courses in personal hygiene, business forms, spelling, business English, industrial conditions, textiles, color-design. She’s not yet in the purely “technical” part of her education. She’s still, to some extent, in the general vocational part of it. But she is entering deeper and deeper into technique. While in the Trade School she will give much of her time for four months to plain sewing, then for four months to making summer hats and finally for four months to making winter hats.
She has now completed two of the industrial 78 educational periods we mentioned. She may go on to a third. She may proceed to spend a year in the millinery trade-shop of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. Here she will get into technique completely. The conditions will be virtually those of a factory. She will be trained to precision and to speed. Her product will be sold. She will receive wages. Yet she is still in school. She is still regarded not as an employee to be discharged offhand for incompetency but as a pupil to be instructed and assisted on into competency.
When that girl goes to a real commercial millinery shop she will be as thoroughly ready for it as the New England girl was ready for a loom when her mother let her at last run it by herself.
We have looked now at the industrial educational level. And, happening to be in the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, we can look at two other educational levels without going out of the building.
On the commercial level we can remind ourselves of the rapid spread of modern commercial education by visiting the classroom of Mrs. Prince’s school of department-store salesmanship. 79 It is such a successful school now that the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union offers, in conjunction with Simmons College, to teach people to teach salesmanship in other similar schools which are being started elsewhere.
Leaving this commercial level, we can go to the academic level by visiting the Appointment Bureau. We may call it the academic level because the Appointment Bureau exists chiefly for the benefit of girls who have been to college. Its purpose, however, is non-academic in the extreme.
The Appointment Bureau is an employment agency, and one of the most extraordinary employment agencies ever organized. Its object is not merely to introduce existing clients to existing jobs (which is the proper normal function of employment agencies), but to make forays into the wild region of “occupations other than teaching,” and there to find jobs, and then to 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 80 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 Alumnæ 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.
In harmony with this work 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 educated 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 organized child-saving.