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.
There is here a double concession: first, to the increased need of “middle class” women for “occupations other than teaching”; second, to the increased recognition of those other occupations as being worthy of “cultural” training.
This turn in education has been made on an economic pivot. The commercial and industrial occupations of the world are coming to demand scholastic preparation. And the women who have had scholastic preparation, even the most complete and long-continued scholastic preparation, are coming to demand admission into the commercial and industrial occupations 84 of the world. The era of the purely scholastic occupation and no other for the scholastically trained woman has come to an end.
We have observed the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment for daughters. We have observed the postponement of marriage in its effect on the occupational opportunities of those daughters. Deprived of adequate employment at home, we have seen them seek it elsewhere. Marriage and housekeeping and child-rearing, as an occupation, we have seen deferred to a later and later period in life. Let us now assume that every woman who has a husband is removed from money-earning work. It is an assumption very contrary to fact. But let us make it. And then let us look at this compact picture of the extent to which being married is an occupation for American women:
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.
THESE CHILDREN IN THE FRANCIS PARKER SCHOOL IN CHICAGO ARE GETTING AN EARLY START IN THEIR TRAINING FOR THEIR FUTURE WORK IN THEIR HOMES.
Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago.
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!