Part 32

In the last calendar of Bryn Mawr College, the Department of Education, in announcing its courses, makes the following common-sense remarks:

"It is the purpose of the department to offer to students intending to become teachers an opportunity to obtain a technical preparation for their profession. Hitherto practical training has been thought necessary for teachers of primary schools only, but similar training is very desirable for teachers in high schools and colleges also. Indeed, it is already becoming increasingly difficult for college graduates without practical and theoretical pedagogical knowledge to secure good positions. In addition to the lectures open to undergraduates, courses will be organized for graduate students only, conducted with special reference to preparation for the headship and superintendence of schools."

But the teaching trade is getting choked. There is too much supply. Girls are going to college in hordes. Graduating from college, looking for work, there is usually just one kind of work toward which they are mentally alert. Their college experience has seldom roused their minds toward any other kind of work. They start to teach. They drug the market. And so the teaching trade, the great occupation of unmarried "middle class" women, ceases to be able to provide those women, as a class, with an adequate field of employment.

It is a turning point in the economic history of the class.

At the 1909 annual convention of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, in Cincinnati, Miss Susan Kingsbury (acting for a committee of which Mrs. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Miss Breckenridge, of the University of Chicago, were members) read a real essay on "The Economic Efficiency of College Women."

This essay was not written till detailed reports on income and expenditure from 377 self-supporting college graduates had been got together.

Out of these 377 there were 317 who were teachers. There were 183 who had followed up their regular college course with from one to eight years of graduate study. The capital invested in education was from $2500 to $3500 and often amounted to $7000 because of advanced work and travel. After all this preparation, the average income achieved may be sufficiently disclosed in the one fact that, among those graduates who had been at work for from six to eight years, more than seventy per cent. were still earning less than $1100.

After drawing a complete statistical picture of the case, Miss Kingsbury concluded with certain questions and recommendations, here condensed, which show the new economic needs of "middle class" women knocking at the door of present "middle class" education:

"Should not the over-supply of teachers be reduced by directing many of our graduates into other pursuits than teaching? This will place upon the college, just where the responsibility is due, the obligation of discovering what those opportunities are and what preparation should be given.

"This organization should endeavor to arouse in our colleges a sense of responsibility for knowing the facts with regard to their graduates, both social and economic, and should also endeavor to influence our colleges through appointment secretaries, to direct women, according to fitness, into other lines than teaching.

"Should not courses be added to the college curriculum to give women the fundamental principles in other professions, or lines of industry or commerce, than teaching?

"May not required courses be added to the college curriculum to inculcate business power and sense in all women?"

This philosophy seems to aim at making the modern school as informative about modern industry as the primitive home was about primitive industry. It seems to be the same educational philosophy which produced the course on Chicago in the Chicago elementary schools, which produced the Manhattan Trade School in New York, which produced the School of Salesmanship at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

At that Women's Educational and Industrial Union, at 264 Boylston Street, you may see the evolution toward the age of trained women proceeding at all levels of educational equipment.

There, before you, at one level, are the Trade School Shops--a shop in hand-work and a shop in millinery. The pupils are graduates of the Boston Trade School for Girls. They have had one year of training. They are now taking another.

Florence Marshall made the Boston Trade School, with a committee of women to help her. It has now been taken over by the public authorities and merged into the public-school system. What looked like a private fad has become a public function. The training of women for self-support has been recognized as a duty of the state.

The Trade School Shops at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union were started for the express purpose of supplementing the work of the Boston Trade School for Girls. One year was not enough.

In the Trade School the prospective milliner had spent four months on plain sewing, four months on summer hats, four months on winter hats. She had also taken short courses in Personal Hygiene, Business Forms, Spelling, Business English, Color Design, Textiles, Industrial Conditions. These latter courses were not, strictly speaking, "technical." They were "vocational." They were in the "middle ground" between general and technical training. They went beyond the general training of the elementary schools and furnished the girl with the background of her future vocation. But she often needed a little more of the foreground, a little more of actual trade technique.

Thus does her education divide itself up into periods:--general, vocational, technical.

The Trade School Shops are designed to give the girl her final technical finish. They are really more like a factory than like a school. Although the object of them is to convey a broad instruction, the pupil gets wages, the stuff she makes is sold, and the organization is that of a commercial establishment.

So, at the end of two years from the time she left the elementary school, the young milliner is ready to go out into the world organization. She is better fitted for her world than many a college girl is for hers.

On a different level of educational equipment from the Trade School Shops stands the School of Salesmanship. It gets many high school girls and even, occasionally, a girl who has been to college.

Finally, there is the Appointment Bureau, for college girls in particular.

This Appointment Bureau is the most extraordinary employment agency ever organized. Its object is not merely to introduce existing clients to existing jobs (which is the proper normal object of employment agencies), but to make forays into the wild region of "occupations other than teaching," and find jobs, and then 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 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 Alumnae 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.

There is no more important work being done for women to-day.

In connection with it, 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 "middle class" 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 State Child-Saving.

The responses made to this movement by certain educational institutions (including particularly Simmons College) will be observed in a future article. Just one response, from an unexpected quarter, must be noticed here.