Part 9

And not only saleswomen, but customers and merchants suffer from this state of things. Constantly annoyed by the inadequacy of their force, some merchants have already made a beginning toward stemming the tide of unsatisfactory service. Many a store now has classes to instruct newcomers for an hour or so each morning in making out saleschecks, and to inform them as to the policy of the store. In some cases regular morning talks for a half hour every day must be attended by new and old hands as well, with the idea that matters of common interest may be freely discussed and that ideas of loyalty may thereby be instilled. Yet while these classes tend to produce right feeling toward the work and hence are fundamentally useful, they represent only the germ of vocational training.

For that is what saleswomen need--training for their particular occupation, instruction in the definite principles of applied psychology upon which their day’s work is based. What form such instruction will ultimately take is still matter for conjecture. No one will assert that experiments now in the making are final, but simply that by their initial success they point the way to more conclusive organization. It may be of interest if a statement is made here about the training for saleswomen now offered in Boston and New York.

The Boston experiment was begun in 1905 under the auspices of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. A class was started with eight young girls who were given lectures and some practise selling in the food salesroom and handwork shop of the Union, but after their three months’ course those who found store positions had to go in as stock or cash girls. In January, 1906, when the second class was started, the coöperation of one store was secured. The Union class was allowed to sell in the store on Mondays for the experience and a small compensation, and the firm expressed a willingness to consider promising candidates for positions in their store. Yet as the school had nothing definite to offer its pupils, it failed to attract the type of girl most wanted by the stores.

It was felt that more coöperation with the stores was necessary. The plans of the course were explained to several of the merchants and the coöperation of six leading stores was obtained to the extent that the superintendents formed an advisory committee, meeting once a month with the president of the Union and the director of the class for conference. The policy, as planned with the advisory committee, was that candidates should be sent to the Union class from the stores, and admitted to the school if approved by the director. After one month in the class, candidates were promised store experience in the store which had accepted them, on Mondays, and the stores paid for this service $1 per day. They were also guaranteed permanent positions in these stores at the close of the course, if their work was satisfactory after one month’s probation. On this basis, a class with sixteen pupils opened in October, 1906. It was found, however, that more store experience was necessary for the best results, and the time schedule was accordingly changed so that every day from 8.30 to 11. and from 4.30 to 5.30 the pupils were in school and the rest of the day in the stores. This half-time work was paid for by the stores at the rate of three dollars a week.

When the next class opened in February, there were nearly one hundred applicants, from which the school selected twenty-one, the limit of the class room. Many applicants gave up positions which they had already secured, for the sake of the training, and others for whom there was then no room, filled a waiting list. Since then, the school has been busy making history. The following statements by Mrs. Prince, director of the school, explain the most recent changes: “At first, the stores paid the girls $3 a week for half time, but since last September (1908), the girls have been given full-time wages and allowed the three hours each morning for three months of training. The stores found the graduates so efficient that they cordially made this concession, and at the same time asked if I would choose candidates from the stores. This I do now, going to the superintendents’ offices and interviewing the girls there.

“The girls chosen are usually from the bargain counter, or those who are to be promoted from cash and bundle work or those who have shown good spirit, but who have gone to work at fourteen years and lack training and right standards. Sometimes girls who have just entered the store are chosen. Wages of candidates range from $5 to $8, but at the end of the course a graduate is guaranteed $6 as a minimum wage, and her advance depends upon her own ability.

“The girls are in the school every day from 8.30 to 11.30; then after an hour for luncheon, they go to the stores for the rest of the day, that is, from 12.30 to 5.30. My plan with the class is to take one big subject every day: all lectures are reviewed orally and the girls write all significant points in note books.”

The subject matter of the class, planned with the view of making efficient, successful saleswomen, has emphasized five main lines of study: 1. The development of a wholesome, attractive personality. Hygiene, especially personal hygiene. This includes study of daily menus for saleswomen, ventilation, bathing, sleep, exercise, recreation. 2. The general system of stores: sales-slip practice, store directory, business arithmetic, business forms and cash accounts, lectures. 3. Qualities of stock: color, design, textiles. 4. Selling as a science: discussion of store experiences, talks on salesmanship, such as attitude to firm, customer, and fellow-employe, demonstration of selling in class, salesmanship lectures. 5. The right attitude toward the work.

The following schedule gives the present arrangement of lectures and talks in the Boston school:

-----+----------+----------+-------------+----------+---------+-------- | | | | | | | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |Saturday | | | | | | -----+----------+----------+-------------+----------+---------+-------- | | | | | | 8:30 |Store |Hygiene |Sales slip |Arithmetic|Sales |Business |discussion| | | | slip | forms & | | | | | | cash | | | | | | acct. | | | | | | 9:15 |Salesman- |Outline in|Demonstration|Color |Outlines |Textiles | ship talk| note-book| of sales- | |and notes| | | | manship by | | | 10:00|Notes |Lecture | selling in |Color |Lecture |Textiles | | | class | | | | | | | | | 11:00|Spelling |Notes |Notes on |Spelling |Review of|Notes |English | | sales |English | Lectures| | | | observed | | | | | | | | | -----+----------+----------+-------------+----------+---------+--------

The New York experiment is of more recent date, and has shaped itself differently. Its beginnings in the fall of 1908 are due chiefly to the efforts of Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, who persuaded the officers of the board of education to introduce a class in salesmanship in the public night schools, and to Miss Diana Hirschler, formerly welfare secretary in Wm. Filene’s Sons Co. of Boston, who conducted the class. The class was intended primarily for saleswomen already at work who wished to equip themselves more thoroughly. The first night there was not a single enrolment, but as news of the course spread, the attendance reached an average of twenty-five. This in itself--this attendance night after night of girls already tired by their work during the day--is evidence of the strong appeal made by the class.

Unlike most other kinds of industrial training, salesmanship classes require neither tools nor special equipment. They do require teachers and a text book. While Miss Hirschler was teaching her classes, she began writing a text book and making plans for training other teachers so that the value of the class might be extended to more than could be enrolled for her instruction. The newly-established New York Institute of Mercantile Training engaged Miss Hirschler and adopted her plans. Classes for window trimmers and sign writers were already under way. To them were added offices and staff for a school of salesmanship. It was a moot point for a while whether classes for salespersons should actually be held in these offices, or whether the scope of the work should be extended to reach the present directors of salespersons,--the store superintendents who now in so many cases hold morning classes for sections of their force. This latter course, Miss Hirschler decided, would be the best one to follow. Whereas by the former plan she might make more efficient a handful out of the thousands of salespeople in this one city, by the latter plan she would indirectly be reaching thousands not only in New York, but in as many other American cities as had stores to coöperate with her. The essential thing, she felt, was to train teachers. At present there were few even would-be teachers. While we were waiting for them, we might use the present situation by helping to make more efficient the involuntary teachers, the men at the head of stores who now ineffectually seek to grapple with the difficulties of their selling force.

Accordingly a correspondence school was started for store superintendents. While the general outline of the text book is followed, this course is adapted individually to each student. In a number of cases Miss Hirschler has visited the stores, personally looked over the situation, and made suggestions as to the organization of salesmanship classes, the selection of applicants, and the best methods of securing the coöperation of the salespeople. Enrolled in her course are store superintendents from New England, the South and the far West. Each one of these men is in turn reaching hundreds, sometimes thousands of salespeople.

The next step neither Miss Hirschler nor we who are the consumers can prophesy with certainty. Yet it seems reasonable to expect that in time store officials, who at best can give only a small part of their time to teaching their employes, will wish to be relieved of this task by professional teachers of salesmanship who, like other vocational teachers, give all their time to their work. By that time we shall have passed out of the period of experimentation. We shall have reached a point where we can say with definiteness what part of the student’s time should be spent in the study of textiles, what part in the study of color and design, what part in the study of applied psychology. We shall have reached a conclusion as to the relative value of lecture work and practise selling.

Selling goods may thus have become as definite and recognized a vocation as plumbing or dressmaking. Thus defined and established, this vocation which could have been taught in the beginning only by the faith and courage of private interests, may come to its own by recognition among the vocational day courses now being started in our system of public instruction.

FOOTNOTES:

The Art of Retail Selling, by Diana Hirschler. New York Institute of Mercantile Training, 1909.

Training for Saleswomen, by Lucinda W. Prince. Federation Bulletin, February, 1908.

THE EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN

EMILY GREENE BALCH

Wellesley College

Women in modern production are a misfit. They are like the dog that puzzled the expressman in the classic story. “He don’t know where he wants to go, and we don’t know where he wants to go; he’s eat his tag.”

Is not this sense of misadjustment, of being astray, due to the fact that, industry being arranged to meet its end of private profits, human nature has to adjust itself as best it can to industrial conditions, instead of industrial conditions adjusting themselves to human nature? The troubles that result from this system make themselves felt everywhere, among men as well as women, but most seriously among the weakest competitors, and especially among wage-earning children and women.

My subject is education and efficiency, but I do not propose to go over the well-worn arguments to show that we ought at once to establish schools for trade training. It is now pretty generally understood that this is true. I want to raise a more far-reaching question--can women be economically efficient in production, production being organized as it now is?

The lives of both men and women have certain permanent aspects; whether in the stone age or in the twentieth century they must rear their descendants, they must between them produce material support for themselves and for the growing generation, they must lead their own personal lives and feed and discipline and “invite” their own souls and minds. There is always this trinity of their racial, their economic, and their inner life.

But while both men and women have this three-fold function, the differences in their racial life involve far-reaching economic consequences. Motherhood is an occupation as fatherhood is not, and this deeply affects woman’s industry. Even in the primitive world, where industry is largely a household matter for all, woman’s activity is bound to the hearthstone more closely than man’s, for the bearing and rearing of children is intertwined with all her other business, and conditions it. This makes housework with all its ramifications and outlying branches the great feminine profession throughout the ages.

Consequently when industry, passing from the control of the worker to that of the owner of the business, assumed its modern specialized form and took work and workers out of the home into the factory and workshop, this change, carried out with no regard for the results on the workers themselves, affected the lives of women in ways which are not paralleled in those of men. Besides other consequences, it greatly lessened woman’s efficiency both as mother and as worker.

Under the old régime there was an effective unity in women’s lives, an organic harmony of function with function. The claims of motherhood and of work upon woman harmonized, because she herself was in control and arranged the conditions of her industry to fit her duties and disabilities as wife and mother. For herself and for her household she planned the various tasks with a view to strength, convenience and training for development. Besides the unity of motherhood and industry, there was unity of education and industry, of preparation and practise. The girl was essentially an apprentice of the housekeeper, whether mother or mistress. Her lessons were indistinguishable from her labor. From a little child she was working as well as learning, and also till she was at the head of her own home she was learning as well as working. Read Solomon’s description, or even better, Xenophon’s charming sketch in his Economicus, for a picture of feminine household industry on a rather large scale. We need not conceive this stage as ideal. The point is that there was a natural adjustment of work to worker which modern industry undermines in three ways--in separating work from the home, in separating work from education, and in shaping the conditions and concomitants of work without regard to the powers, tastes, or needs of the workers.