Part 33

In a small Illinois city there is a woman's college, founded as a Preparatory School in the forties and soon advanced to be a Seminary, which, with Anna P. Sill for its first head, Jane Addams for its best-known graduate, and Julia Gulliver for its present president, has come to be a college of standing and of leading. Only Troy Female Seminary and Mount Holyoke Seminary preceded it, in date of foundation, among the important women's institutions.

Rockford College is ranked to-day, by the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education, in rank one--among the sixteen best women's colleges in the United States. It hasn't risen to that rank by any quick, money-spurred spurt. It brings with it out of its far past all the traditions of that early struggle for the higher education which, by friction, kindled among women so flaming an enthusiasm for pure knowledge. It remains "collegiate" in the old sense, quiet, cloistral, inhabiting old-fashioned brick buildings in an old-fashioned large yard, looking still like the Illinois of war times more than like the Illinois of the twentieth century, retaining all the home ideals of those times--a large interest in feminine accomplishments, a strict regard for manners, a belief in the value of charm.

But here, in this quiet, non-metropolitan college, so really "academic," so really--in the oldest-fashioned ways--"cultural," here is a two-year course in secretarial studies.

It is the first time (within our knowledge) that such a thing has happened in any of the old first-rank women's colleges.

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.

This is a notable concession not only to the increased need of "middle class" women for "occupations other than teaching" but also to the increased recognition of those other occupations as being worthy of "cultural" training.

We keep moving forward into an era of trained women as well as trained men. The extraordinary prolongation of mental and financial infancy in the "middle class," bringing with it an extraordinary postponement of marriage, makes this training particularly necessary in the case of the women of that class. But the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment for daughters exists everywhere, increasing the cost of living for the family and driving daughters to supplementing the family income.

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!

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.

If education does not (1) give women a comprehension of the organization of the money-earning world, and (2) train them to one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that world, it is not education.

Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women's education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide battle-cry, the sentiment: "The Home is also a technique. All women must be trained to it."

At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home Economics.

In one photograph in this article we show the tiny children of the Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the technique of the home. In another picture we show the post-graduate laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois. And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of marketing, and other phases of home management.

The money-earning world, a technique! The home, a technique! The boy learns only one. Must the girl learn two, and be twice a specialist?

(In the September number Mr. Hard will discuss The Home Economics Movement.)

***************************************************************** VOL. XXIII September 1910 NO. 3

Law and Order

By O. HENRY

AUTHOR OF "THE FOUR MILLION," "THE HEART OF THE WEST," STRICTLY BUSINESS," ETC.

I found myself in Texas a recently, revisiting old places and vistas. At a sheep-ranch where I had sojourned many years ago, I stopped for a week. And, as all visitors do, I heartily plunged into the business at hand, which happened to be that of dipping the sheep.

Now, this process is so different from ordinary human baptism that it deserves a word of itself. A vast iron cauldron with half the fires of Avernus beneath it is partly filled with water that soon boils furiously. Into that is cast concentrated lye, lime, and sulphur, which is allowed to stew and fume until the witches' broth is strong enough to scorch the third arm of Palladino herself.

Then this concentrated brew is mixed in a long, deep vat with cubic gallons of hot water, and the sheep are caught by their hind legs and flung into the compound. After being thoroughly ducked by means of a forked pole in the hands of a gentleman detailed for that purpose, they are allowed to clamber up an incline into a corral and dry or die, as the state of their constitutions may decree. If you ever caught an able-bodied, two-year-old mutton by the hind legs and felt the 750 volts of kicking that he can send through your arm seventeen times before you can hurl him into the vat, you will, of course, hope that he may die instead of dry.

But this is merely to explain why Bud Oakley and I gladly stretched ourselves on the bank of the near-by charco after the dipping, glad for the welcome inanition and pure contact with the earth after our muscle-racking labors. The flock was a small one, and we finished at three in the afternoon; so Bud brought from the morral on his saddle horn, coffee and a coffeepot and a big hunk of bread and some side bacon. Mr. Mills, the ranch owner and my old friend, rode away to the ranch with his force of Mexican trabajadores.

While the bacon was frizzling nicely, there was the sound of horses' hoofs behind us. Bud's six-shooter lay in its scabbard ten feet away from his hand. He paid not the slightest heed to the approaching horseman. This attitude of a Texas ranchman was so different from the old-time custom that I marveled. Instinctively I turned to inspect the possible foe that menaced us in the rear. I saw a horseman dressed in black, who might have been a lawyer or a parson or an undertaker, trotting peaceably along the road by the arroyo.

Bud noticed my precautionary movement and smiled sarcastically and sorrowfully.

"You've been away too long," said he. "You don't need to look around any more when anybody gallops up behind you in this state, unless something hits you in the back; and even then it's liable to be only a bunch of tracts or a petition to sign against the trusts. I never looked at that hombre that rode by; but I'll bet a quart of sheep dip that he's some double-dyed son of a popgun out rounding up prohibition votes."

"Times have changed, Bud," said I, oracularly. "Law and order is the rule now in the South and the Southwest."

I caught a cold gleam from Bud's pale blue eyes.