THE GIRL’S WORK

The adolescent girl, already the product of a general training which has aimed at all-round development of body, mind, and spirit, is now ready for the specializing which shall place her in tune with the world of industry and help her to make for herself a permanent and useful place in society. Henceforward the girl’s training must face her double possibilities. She must not be allowed to have an eye single to making an industrial place for herself; nor can those who educate her fail to see the double work she must do.

Any consideration of the subject of girls’ work outside the home or work in the home for financial return must begin with a general survey of the field of industry, discovering what women have done and are doing, together with the effects of gainful occupation upon the character and efficiency of women.

It will be observed that since the percentage of women at work decreases after twenty, the number of women who marry and presumably become homemakers is very largely increased.

These figures would seem to indicate that girls go to work early, that as yet industry does not largely prevent marriage, and that marriage does in many or most cases stop women’s industrial careers.

Inquiry as to what women are doing in the industrial world elicits important facts. It would seem that Olive Schreiner’s “For the present we take all labor for our province” is very nearly a bare statement of attested fact. The Census report includes 509 closely classified occupations. Women are found in all but 43. Even allowing for the inaccuracy of such figures, and passing over the occupations which take in only an occasional woman, it is seen that “woman’s sphere” can no longer be arbitrarily defined. The following facts and figures for women give us food for thought:

These are of course merely a few among the four hundred and fifty kinds of work in which women are found. Any survey of women’s work comes close to a general survey of industry. We shall find that in some occupations the proportion of men is much larger than that of women. In others women have made rapid strides. The accompanying diagram shows that in professional service, in domestic and personal service, and in clerical occupations women are found in largest numbers. In domestic and personal service the women outnumber the men more than two to one. In professional service there are four women to five men, a large proportion of the women being teachers. In the clerical occupations we have one woman to each two men, in manufacturing one woman to six men, in agriculture one woman to seven men, and in trade one to eight. The occupations for women have been changed somewhat by the new industrial conditions forced upon us by the war, but it is very probable that in a few years the industrial world will return to its normal status before the war for both men and women.

If it is true that women are claiming and will continue to claim “all labor” for their province, the claim must rest upon one of two assumptions: Either women are physically, mentally, and morally identical in their capabilities with men, or differences in physical, mental, and moral make-up must be considered as not affecting work. Most of us are not yet ready to agree to either of these premises. We must therefore believe that some occupations are more suitable for one sex than for the other. The fact is, however, that only a small group of radical thinkers have made the opposite claim. Women are found, it is true, in a large number of the occupations in which men are found. But they are there for some other reason than that they claim all labor as their sphere. Some are driven by the stern necessity of doing whatever work is at hand; some by ignorance of their unfitness, or of the unfitness of the work for them; some by the spirit of the age which says, “Come, be free. Try these things that men do. See if they suit you. Find your sphere.”

Probably, however, this last reason for entering unsuitable occupations is the one least often underlying the choice. Girls select vocations in the main as boys do. Until very lately chance has been the ruling element far oftener than anything else.

Studies in industry are now for the first time giving us adequate information as to requirements for efficiency, working conditions, wages, living possibilities, and the effects, moral and physical, of various occupations upon both men and women. The problems arising out of the crossing and recrossing of these various elements are as yet but vaguely understood. The great gain lies in the fact that their solution is being sought.

The community is of necessity interested in workingwomen as it is in workingmen. Without these workers the community does not exist. When they are ill-paid, overworked, underfed, discontented, or inefficient, the community necessarily suffers. When they work under proper conditions, the community shares their prosperity. It is thus coming to be seen that the condition of workers is the concern of all the members of the community.

In the case of the woman worker, however, and especially of the young woman worker, the community has a further interest because of the service that women render as the mothers of the next and indeed of all future generations. If, then, it is shown that women are physically unfit for certain occupations that men may follow with safety, it becomes the business of the community to protect women, even against themselves if necessary, and to deter them from entering such lines of work.

The community must make use of various agencies in bringing about the proper relations between women and their work. It may use legislation, thereby securing, for example, factory inspectors to improve the sanitary and moral conditions in the places where women and girls are employed. It may use the school, the library, and various civic improvement forces to inform both girls and their parents as to conditions under which girls should work. It may employ vocational guides to make proper connections between women and their work.

For all these agencies to do satisfactory work, the first requisite is knowledge of conditions. This means skillful work upon a vast and rapidly increasing body of facts, and wide dissemination of the results of such work.

We may not stop here to consider what legislatures have done and are doing to improve conditions, other than to mention that the number of hours that women may work is restricted in some states, as is night work, and that a minimum wage is required in some.

Our question, however, is not so much what is forbidden women in the way of work, as what women and girls will choose to do of the work which is not forbidden. Facts as to what women are doing concern us mainly as material from which to deduce information of value to the girls who have not yet chosen.

A serious obstacle to wise choice on the part of young girls who are pushing into industrial occupations is the uncertainty of their continuing as workers outside the home. The average length of the girl’s industrial life is computed to be only about five years. She enters upon work at an age when it is often impossible to tell whether she will marry or remain single. She is usually unable to know whether or not she will desire to marry. The great majority of girls have therefore no stable conditions upon which to build a choice. The work girls choose and their instability in the work they enter upon are direct results of these unstable conditions. Many girls feel the need of little or no training, and apply for any work obtainable, merely because they anticipate that their industrial career will soon be over.

These stores and factories were presumably filled by girls who seized the most available source of a weekly wage regardless of all but the pay envelope. Few of them remained more than five years, and those who did remain did not receive adequate increase in their pay by the tenth year for workers of ten years’ experience.

The whole industrial situation as it concerns women would indicate that women even more than men show lack of discrimination in seeking to place themselves, and that the sources of information for them have been few if not entirely lacking. Happily these conditions are changing. We have now to teach girls to avail themselves of the information and the guidance at hand and to learn to discriminate in their choice of work.

Girls must realize that unskillful, mechanical work, done always with a mental reservation that it is merely a temporary expedient, keeps women’s wages low, destroys confidence in female capacity, and has definite bearing not only on the individual woman’s earning capacity, but on her character as well. Girls must learn to choose in such a way that their work may be an opening into a life career or may be an enlightening prelude to marriage and the making of a home.

Some of the women who uphold the doctrine of equality between the sexes make the mistake of thinking and of teaching that there can be no equality without identical work. They take the attitude that unless women do all the sorts of work that men do, they are unjustly deprived of their rights. Our contention is rather that women have higher rights than that of identical work with men. They, above all other workers, should have the right of intelligent choice of work which they can do to the advantage of themselves, their offspring, and the community. Such a choice will ignore the question of sex as a drawback, accepting it, on the other hand, merely as a condition which, like other conditions, complicates but does not necessarily hamper choice. No girl need feel hampered by her sex because she chooses not to do work which fails either to utilize her peculiar gifts or to lead in what seems to her a profitable direction. No girl should feel that her industrial experience, however short, has nothing to contribute to the home life of which she dreams. No girl need waste the knowledge and skill gained in industrial life when she abandons gainful occupation for the home. Homemaking education, with industrial experience, ought to make the ideal preparation for life work.

This, however, can be true only when the girl’s industrial experience is of the right sort. Girls must therefore be led to choose the developing occupation. It is a part of the world’s economy to lead them to this choice.