Part 19

It was after the new year that the endurance of the girls was put to the test. During the thirteen weeks benefits were paid out averaging less than $2 for each striker. Many of them refused to accept benefits, so that the married men could be paid more. The complaints of hardships came almost without exception from the men. Occasionally it was discovered that a girl was having one meal a day and even at times none at all.

In spite of being underfed and often thinly clad, the girls took upon themselves the duty of picketing, believing that the men would be more severely handled. Picketing is a physical and nervous strain under the best conditions, but it is the spirit of martyrdom that sends young girls of their own volition, often insufficiently clad and fed, to patrol the streets in mid-winter with the temperature low and with snow on the ground, some days freezing and some days melting. After two or three hours of such exposure, often ill from cold, they returned to headquarters, which were held for the majority in rooms dark and unheated, to await further orders.

It takes uncommon courage to endure such physical exposure, but these striking girls underwent as well the nervous strain of imminent arrest, the harsh treatment of the police, insults, threats and even actual assaults from the rough men who stood around the factory doors. During the thirteen weeks over six hundred girls were arrested; thirteen were sentenced to five days in the workhouse and several were detained a week or ten days in the Tombs.

The pickets, with strangely few exceptions, during the first few weeks showed remarkable self-control. They had been cautioned from the first hour of the strike to insist on their legal rights as pickets, but to give no excuse for arrest. Like all other instructions, they accepted this literally. They desired to be good soldiers and every nerve was strained to obey orders. But for many the provocations were too great and retaliation began after the fifth week. It occurred around the factories where the strikers were losing, where peace methods were failing and where the passivity of the pickets was taunted as cowardice. But curiously enough, during this time the arrests in proportion to the number still on strike were fewer than during the earlier period and the sentences in the courts were lighter. The change in the treatment of pickets came with the change in the city administration. Apparently, peaceful picketing during the first two months of the strike had been treated as an unlawful act.

The difficulty throughout the strike of inducing the strikers to accept compromise measures increased as the weeks wore on. However, seventeen contracts were signed in these latter weeks which did not give the union a voice in determining conditions of work of all workers in the factory. During the ten weeks previous, contracts were signed which covered all the workers in three hundred and twelve factories. Before the strike every shop was “open” and in most of them there was not a union worker. In thirteen short weeks three hundred and twelve shops had been converted into “closed” or full union contract shops.

But the significance of the strike is not in the actual gain to the shirtwaist makers of three hundred union shops, for there was great weakness in the ranks of the opposition. Trade-union gains, moreover, are measured by what an organization can hold rather than by what it can immediately gain. The shirt-waist makers’ strike was characteristic of all strikes in which women play an active part. It was marked by complete self-surrender to a cause, emotional endurance, fearlessness and entire willingness to face danger and suffering. The strike at times seemed to be an expression of the woman’s movement rather than the labor movement. This phase was emphasized by the wide expression of sympathy which it drew from women outside the ranks of labor.

It was fortunate for strike purposes but otherwise unfortunate that the press, in publishing accounts of the strike, treated the active public expression of interest of a large body of women sympathizers with sensational snobbery. It was a matter of wide public comment that women of wealth should contribute sums of money to the strike, that they should admit factory girls to exclusive club rooms, and should hold mass meetings in their behalf. If, as was charged, any of the women who entered the strike did so from sensational or personal motives, they were disarmed when they came into contact with the strikers. Their earnestness of purpose, their complete abandon to their cause, their simple acceptance of outside interest and sympathy as though their cause were the cause of all, was a bid for kinship that broke down all barriers. Women who came to act as witnesses of the arrests around the factories ended by picketing side by side with the strikers. These volunteer pickets accepted, moreover, whatever rough treatment was offered, and when arrested, asked for no favors that were not given the strikers themselves.

The strike brought about adjustments in values as well as in relationships. Before the strike was over federations of professional women and women of leisure were endorsing organization for working women, and individually these women were acknowledging the truth of such observations as that made by one of the strikers on her return from a visit to a private school where she had been invited to tell about the strike. Her story of the strike led to questions in regard to trade unions. On her return her comment was, “Oh they are lovely girls, they are so kind--but I didn’t believe any girls could be so ignorant.”

The strike was an awakening for working women in many industries, and it did more to give the women of the professions and the women of leisure a new point of view and a realization of the necessity for organization among working women than any other single event in the history of the labor movement in this country.

VOCATIONAL TRAINING FOR WOMEN

SARAH LOUISE ARNOLD

Dean of Simmons College, Boston

Popular discussions of industrial training are rendered difficult by the fact that the subject has as yet no fixed vocabulary. Professional training, vocational training, industrial training, manual training, are often used interchangeably. We shall use the phrase “vocational training,” and shall understand it to include such education as aims to secure efficiency in the occupation followed for self-maintenance, whether such occupation be the merest task or the complex administration of a business or a profession.

It is evident that such training involves education for general intelligence, as well as technical training with a specific end in view. It is also clear that the training may be brief and elementary if the task is simple; the trade school, or apprenticeship, or even the brief course of lessons given by another worker may suffice where the work calls for little skill and involves little variety. As the task grows in difficulty, requiring application of principles, demanding judgment, broad experience, ability to deal with and to direct others, the training must be proportionately increased. The demand for general intelligence also grows correspondingly.

The instrument for vocational training, then, may be the shop, in which knowledge of the art is handed along from one worker to another through simple apprenticeship; or the trade school, in which a brief course of instruction is given, with emphasis upon technical details and swiftness of accomplishment; or the technical college, which provides longer courses of instruction, combining academic and technical programs, alternating the lecture room with the shop; or actual apprenticeship in business; or professional training, superadded to the ordinary program afforded by school and college.

Is vocational training necessary for women? As a matter of fact, women are already in trades and professions. For years they have been filling our factories, stores, offices and schools. We have made public provision for the preparation of teachers, and many states likewise train women for the practice of medicine. Hospitals have provided training schools for nurses. In these fields some provision has been made for the appropriate education of women for their work. Enough experience has been accumulated to show that training for the vocation is always beneficial, and usually essential.

The ordinary woman, however, has little specific training for the most important work which she has to do in the world. It is left to her mother alone to teach her how to maintain her home and to meet the needs of her children. If the mother is ignorant, the daughter is untaught, and a long train of evils follows in consequence. As this matter concerns the general welfare the evils should be prevented, if possible, by general education.

It is generally conceded that in preparing a girl for her work we have to consider two vocations as probable or possible:--first, maintenance of the home, with the care and rearing of children; second, the vocation by which self-maintenance may be assured in the period before she becomes a homemaker, or during the time when she is obliged to support herself and her children. Since the first or major vocation is essential to the general welfare it must always be linked with the second or minor vocation. Therefore no work for woman can be urged or defended which tends to lessen her efficiency in her major occupation.

Yet at this point we neither think nor speak clearly. Vocational training for women would be less complex if their economic contribution as homemakers were fairly considered. A woman is said to “earn her living” only when she works outside her own home, receiving money for her work. The moment her wage-earning power is transferred to her home she is supposed to be dependent upon father or husband, no matter how great the compensating service which she renders. A teacher earning twelve hundred dollars a year resigns her position, marries, cares for home, husband and children, transferring her income-earning power to the duties required in the service of the household. Is she not still self-supporting,--more than self-supporting? Out of the family income, through her ability, knowledge and skill, she is enabled to save a fair margin. If the family were bereft of her contribution the margin would be quickly swallowed by wages paid to housekeeper, nurse, seamstress, cook and others, who together fail to fill her place. Many a family becomes a public charge when the mother dies. If it were possible to fix according to some scale the economic value of woman’s contribution in the home, it would immediately be evident that the training which makes her a better and more efficient homemaker is of direct economic advantage to the community. Vagueness of preparation would probably disappear with clearer understanding of the relation of her work to the public good.

One of the first principles of vocational training for women, then, is that such training should insure greater ability, judgment and skill in the major vocation, thus securing the intelligent maintenance of the home. The second principle, or corollary, is that the minor vocation should be so conducted as not to interfere with the fulfilment of the first or major task.

The need of vocational training for women presses most heavily where self-support is imperative in early years. Discussion of the subject may be clouded by the fact that the obvious need varies widely--according to the opportunity and environment of the group under discussion. For the sake of clearness, then, we will consider three groups. In the first group we count the young girls who are forced to leave school at the earliest possible or permitted age in order to engage in some specific occupation for self-support or to assist in the support of the family. In this large company we find most of the daughters of recent immigrants, as well as many other girls whose families have very limited means, or who have suffered stress through illness or other unusual hardship. The farm, the factory, the office, the store, are already employing these girls in large numbers, unskilled in the beginning and often, except as to some small task, unskilled in the end.

Should such girls be deprived of the essential instruction formerly accredited to the home, and go from their years of employment to their future homes as ignorantly as they entered upon their daily task in the shop? Are they in any sense fitted for the larger responsibility which the major vocation brings? Are their years of trade experience made profitable by wise choice and fair preparation, or do they encounter by chance the immediate demand of some trade, using them for its advantage as part of a machine demanding swiftness and dexterity in a single operation, repeated countless times, and considering the salability of the product and not the welfare of the young worker?

If such conditions exist--and we know that they do--these girls should be as far as possible protected by suitable education in advance, which should develop skill and judgment, acquaint them in some measure with fair trade conditions, make choice of occupation to some degree possible, and safeguard their health and the interests of their future homes. Concerning the need of such trade training there is now little disagreement--the fact is generally conceded. The main question is whether it should be supplied at public expense, and by what means. Private philanthropy, by intelligent and generous experiment, has paved the way.

The second group to be considered may roughly include the girls whose entrance upon gainful occupations is longer delayed, but who must as a matter of course look forward to self-maintenance. These girls avail themselves of the opportunities afforded by the ordinary program of the graded schools, and may or may not add some portion or all of the high-school course. They have had a more generous inheritance than the first group. Their homes are usually better endowed, or they may be the younger sisters of members of the first group. Their need is less pressing--but by no means less real. The school should test, and if need be, supplement their preparation for the responsibilities centering upon the home. It should also make them to some degree technically ready for a wholesome occupation, affording a living wage. Otherwise they too are at the mercy of trade conditions, earning a scant income at an employment selected by chance.

To the third group will be assigned all women whose opportunities of education exceed high-school training. For them vocational preparation may be assigned to the college period or may possibly follow it.

It is often assumed that academic training in itself gives technical skill, that the young woman who graduates from college is thereby prepared for any task which may confront her. This is a misconception of the function of the college. If it does its work well, a good foundation is laid, certain aptitudes and habits of thought are developed, which should make progress in any art or craft more rapid, and judgment more intelligent. On the other hand, long years given to purely academic work, away from the normal conditions of the working world, permit certain powers to lie dormant. Students are trained to deliberation rather than to action. The college woman may need adjustment to the conditions of the shop, the office, or even the school. Training which presupposes the task and keeps it in mind certainly advances the general preparation of any student for her work. If we acquaint her with the immediate problems of the task the necessary period of apprenticeship is shortened and rapid advancement assured. Such training seems reasonable. Why should the education of the girl lie completely outside her work in the world? Why should so deep a gulf be fixed between the school and the later task?

The vocational aim need not diminish the so-called cultural value of a subject. Need the study of bacteriology become less “broadening” because the nurse-to-be recognizes its relation to her future work, knowing that she is to apply its truths in sanitation and disinfection, in antiseptic precautions, in securing surgical cleanliness? Is the “social worker” of tomorrow a less intelligent student of economics to-day because she is conscious of the problem with which she personally is to deal? On the other hand, is a girl more liberally educated because for four “finishing” years of her education her program of studies tacitly ignores all reference to the sacred responsibility which she is so soon to assume--or which she must help others to meet? Rather, is not the whole course of study enlightened and informed by recognition of the goal and by conscious endeavor to reach it? If this be true, education which includes vocational training is far more liberal than that which ignores or excludes it.

It seems to the writer that the trend of educational thought is in this direction. The college woman as well as her less favored sister must be trained, “not simply to be good, but to be good for something”, not simply to be wise, but to be fully and definitely prepared for service;--and this conception is perhaps the most important contribution of higher education to the advancement of vocational training. Remote as it may seem, it nevertheless influences the general ideal. We cannot expect the average parent to take pains to insure in his daughter’s education the thing which the college despises.