THE GIRL’S WORK (Continued) CLASSIFICATION OF OCCUPATIONS

It is well at the outset to recognize that vocation choosing is at best a complicated matter which, to be successfully carried out, demands not only much information, but information from different viewpoints. It is not enough to insure a living, even a good living, in the work a girl chooses. We must take into consideration the girl’s effect upon society as a teacher, nurse, saleswoman, or office worker; and no less, in view of her evident destiny as mother of the race, must we consider society’s effect upon her, as it finds her in the place she has chosen. In other words, will she serve society to the best of her ability, and will her service fit her to be a better homemaker than she would have been had no vocation outside the home intervened between her school training and her final settling in a home of her own making?

This double question must find answer in consideration of vocations from each of several viewpoints. We may classify occupations open to girls (1) from the standpoint of the girl’s fitness, physical and psychological; (2) from the standpoint of industrial conditions, the sanitary, mental, and moral atmosphere, and the rewards obtainable; (3) as factors increasing, decreasing, or not affecting the girl’s possible home efficiency or the likelihood of taking up home life; (4) from the standpoint of the girl’s education; (5) from the standpoint of service to society.

Our first classification concerns the girl’s fitness for this or that work. The everyday work of the world in which our girls are to find a part may be separated into three fairly well-marked classes: making things, distributing things, and service. The first question we must ask concerning a girl desirous of finding work is, then: Toward which of these classes does her natural ability and therefore probably her inclination tend? Natural handworkers make poor saleswomen; natural traders or saleswomen are likely to be uninterested and ineffective handworkers. The girl whose interests are all centered in people must not be condemned to spend her life in the production of things; nor, as is far more common, must the girl who can make things, and enjoys making them, spend her life in merely handling the things other people have made, as she strives to make connection between these things and the people who want them. Then there is the girl who is efficient and who finds her pleasure in “doing things for people.” Service and we must remember that service is a wide term, and that no stigma should attach to the class of workers which includes the teacher, the physician, and the minister is clearly the direction in which such a girl’s vocational ambition should be turned.

It would be idle to assert that all women are suited to marriage, motherhood, and domestic life, although there is little doubt that early training may develop in some a suitability which would otherwise remain unsuspected. When, however, early training fails to bring out any inclination toward these things, we may well consider seriously before we exert the weight of our influence toward them. Home-mindedness shows itself in many ways, and it should have been a matter of observation years before the girl faces the choice of a vocation. It is usually of little avail to attempt to turn the attention of the girl who is definitely not thus minded toward the domestic life. On the other hand, the girl who is naturally so minded will respond readily to suggestions leading toward the occupations which require and appeal to her domestic nature. The great majority of girls, however, are not definitely conscious of either home-mindedness or the opposite. They are in fact not yet definitely cognizant of any natural bent. It is these girls who are especially open to the influence of environment, of what may prove temporary inclination, or of false notions of the advantage of certain occupations in choosing a life work. These are the girls, too, who are likely to drift into marriage as they are likely to drift into any other occupation, and whose previous vocation may have added to or perfected their homemaking training or, on the other hand, may have developed in them habits and traits which will effectually kill their usefulness in the home life. These, then, are the girls who are most of all in need of wise assistance in choosing that which may prove to be a temporary vocation or may become a life work. The temporary idea must be combated vigorously in the girl’s mind. Many an unwise choice would have been avoided had the girl really faced the possibility of making the work she undertook a life work. The temporary idea makes inefficient workers and discontented women.

There is in most cases, especially among the fairly well-to-do, no dearth of assistance offered to the young girl in making her choice. Much of the advice, unfortunately, is not based on real knowledge either of vocations or of the girl. Knowledge is absolutely necessary to successful judgment in this delicate matter.

From a large number of letters written by high-school girls let me quote the following typical answers to the question: Why have you chosen the vocation for which you are preparing?

“Ever since I could walk my uncle has been making plans for
me in music.”

“My first ambition was to be a stenographer, but my father
objected. My father’s choice was for me to be a teacher, and
before long it was mine too.”

“My ambition until my Junior year in High School was to be a teacher. From that time until now my ambition is to be a good stenographer. My reason for changing is due partly to my friends and parents. My parents do not want me to be a teacher, as they consider it too hard a life.”

“I have been greatly influenced by my teacher, who thinks I
have a chance [as a dramatic art teacher]. I am willing to
take her word for it.”.

“Mother says it is a very ladylike occupation”
[stenography].

“My music instructor wishes for me to become a concert
player, or at least a good music teacher, and I now think I
wish the same.”

These answers all show the customary ease of throwing out advice, and also the undue significance attached by girls to these probably inexpert opinions.

Parents often fail in their attempts to launch their children successfully. Sometimes they attempt unwisely to thrust a child into an occupation merely because “it is ladylike,” or the “vacation is long,” or “the pay is good,” regardless of the child’s aptitude or limitations. Quite often they await inspiration in the form of some revelation of the child’s desires, regardless of the demand of society for such service as the child may elect to supply or the effect of the vocation upon the child’s health or character. Undue sacrifice on the part of parents has without question swelled the ranks of mediocre physicians and lawyers and clergymen. It has doubtless produced thousands of teachers who cannot teach, nurses who are quite unsuited to the sick-room, and office workers who have not the rudiments of business ability.

It would seem that truly successful guidance in a girl’s search for a vocation can come, like much of her training, only from wise cooeperation of school and home. Teacher and parent see the girl from different angles. Their combined judgment will consequently have double value.

As the time of vocational choice approaches, school records should cover larger ground than before, and should be made with great care, with constant appeal to parents for confirmation and additional facts.

The record should cover:

1. Physical characteristics: Height; weight; lung capacity; sight; hearing; condition of nasal passages; condition of teeth; bodily strength and endurance; nerve strength or weakness.

2. Health history: Time lost from school by illness; school work as affected by physical condition when the girl is in school; probable ability or inability to bear the confinement of an indoor occupation; any early illness, accident, or surgical operation which may affect health and therefore vocational possibilities.

3. Mental characteristics: The quality of school work; studious or active in temperament; best suited for head work, handwork, or a combination; ability to work independently of teacher or other guide; studies most enjoyed; studies in which best work is done; evidences, if any, of special talent, and whether or not sufficient to form basis of life work.

4. Moral characteristics: Honesty; moral courage; stability; tact; combativeness; leader or follower.

5. Heredity: Physical statistics in regard to parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts; occupations followed by these, with success or otherwise; family traditions as to work; special abilities in family noted.

6. Vocational ambitions.

7. Family resources for special training.

Without some such record as this and it need scarcely be said that the one given here is capable of wide adaptation to special needs teachers, parents, or other friends of the girl are poorly equipped for giving advice as to the girl’s future. And yet it is common enough for such advice to be thrown out in the most casual manner, with scarcely a thought of the ambitions awakened or of the future to which they may lead.

“You certainly ought to go on the stage,” chorus the admiring friends of the girl who excels in the work of the elocution class. And sometimes with no other counsel than this, from people who really know nothing about the matter, the girl struggles to enter the theatrical world, only to find that her talent, sufficient to excite admiring comment among her friends, has proved inadequate to make her a worth-while actress.

“Why don’t you study art?” say the friends of another girl; or, “You like to take care of sick people. Why don’t you train for nursing?” or, “You’re so fond of books. I should think you would be a librarian” quite regardless of the fact that the girl advised to study art has neither the perseverance nor the health to study successfully; that the one advised to be a nurse lacks patience and repose to a considerable degree; or that the one advised to be a librarian is already suffering from strained eyes and should choose her vocation from the great outdoors.

Knowledge of the girl must, however, be supplemented by a wide knowledge of vocations to be of real value to the teacher or parent who is preparing to give vocational counsel. Final choice may be reached only after the girl and the vocation are brought into comparative scrutiny, and their mutual fitness determined. In rare cases the choice may be made by the swift process of observing a great talent which, in the absence of serious objections, must govern the life work. Oftener the process is one of elimination, or of building up from a general foundation of the girl’s abilities and limitations, and her possibilities for training sufficient to make her an efficient worker in the line chosen.

A knowledge of vocations presupposes, first of all, a grasp of the essentials of the work, and hence the characteristics required in the worker to perform it. What sort of girl is needed to make an efficient teacher, nurse, saleswoman, or office worker? How may we recognize this potential teacher without resorting to a clumsy, time-wasting, trial-and-error method? These are matters with which schools and vocational guides all over the country are occupying themselves. Perhaps we cannot do better than to examine somewhat these requirements for some occupations toward which girls most often incline.

THE PRODUCING GROUP

The girl who is by nature a maker of things may be a factory worker, a needlewoman, a baker, a poultry farmer, a milliner, a photographer, or an artist with brush or with voice, or in dramatic work. She is still one who makes things. We see at once how wide a range of industry may open to her.

How shall we know this type of girl? First of all, by her interest in things rather than in people. With the exception of, the singer and the dramatic artist, whose production is of an intangible sort, the girl who makes things is a handworker by choice. The extent to which her handwork is touched by the imaginative instinct of course measures the distance that she may make her way up the ladder of productive work. The girl’s school record will usually show her best work with concrete materials. She draws or sews well, has excellent results in the cooking class, works well in the laboratory. At home she finds enjoyment in “making things” of one sort or another. She displays ingenuity, perhaps, in meeting constructive problems. If so, that must be considered in finding her place.

Handwork for women includes a wide range of occupations. Let us now examine some of these kinds of work.

Factory work. This term covers many departments of manufacturing industries. In the main, however, they may be classed together, since in practically all of them the worker contributes only one small portion of the work incidental to the making of candy, or artificial flowers, or coats, or pickles, or shoes, or corsets, or underwear, or anyone of a hundred different products, some one or several of which may be found in nearly every American town.

The great advantage of factory work, as the untrained girl sees it, is that it is usually easy to obtain and that it promises some return even from the start. Hence a large proportion of untrained girls who leave school as soon as the law allows enter the factories near their homes.

The great disadvantages of factory work, laying aside for a moment many minor disadvantages, are that it not only requires no skill in the beginner, but that it produces little if any skill even with years of work and offers practically no advancement for a large proportion of the workers. It should therefore, be reserved for girls of less keen intelligence, and other girls should if possible be guided toward other occupations.

Teachers must make themselves thoroughly familiar with working conditions in local factories, since there will always be girls who, because of their own limitations or the limitations of their environment, will find themselves obliged to take up factory work. Under the teacher’s guidance girls should make definite studies and prepare detailed reports of local conditions with respect to working hours, character of work, wages, possible advancement, dangers to health, moral conditions, advantages over other occupations open to girls with no more training, and disadvantages. Girls should at least go into factory work with their eyes open, that they may pass their days in the best surroundings available.

Dressmaking. The possibilities for the girl entering upon work connected with dressmaking with the ultimate object of becoming a dressmaker herself are far wider than in the case of the machine worker in shop or factory. The immediate return for the untrained girl is far less, but the farsighted girl must learn to look beyond the immediate present. Not all girls, however, will make good dressmakers. Not all, even of the producing type of girl, will do so. Certain definite qualities are required. The girl who would succeed as a dressmaker must possess ingenuity, imagination, and the visualizing type of mind. She must see the end from the beginning, and must be able to find the way to produce that which she visualizes. She must be a keen observer. She must have confidence in her own power to create. She must possess manual dexterity, artistic ideas, and, if she aims at a business of her own, a pleasing personality and keen business sense.

Millinery. Millinery requires in its workers the same general type of mind required for dressmaking, and in addition a certain millinery faculty or creative ability. The girl who can make and trim hats usually discovers her own talent fairly early in life.

Arts and crafts. This somewhat elastic term we use to include a wide range of occupations which have to do with articles of use or ornament which are handmade and which require skill in designing or in carrying out designs. Embroidery, lace making, rug and tapestry weaving, basketry, china painting, wood and leather work, handwork in metals, bookbinding, and the designing and painting of cards for various occasions are familiar examples of this kind of work. Photography, map making, designing of wall paper and fabrics, costume designing and illustrating, making of signs, placards, diagrams, working drawings, advertising illustrations, book and magazine illustrating, landscape gardening and architecture, interior decorating, are other lines offering work to men and women alike.

The range of work here is no greater than the range of qualities which may be happily and usefully employed in arts and crafts. All branches of the work, however, are alike in demanding a certain degree of artistic sense and deftness of manual touch. An accurate, observant eye is an absolute essential, and, for all but the lowest and most mechanical lines of work, imagination, originality, and an inventive habit of mind make the foundation of success. In some lines a fine sense of color values must underlie good work, in others the ability to draw easily. All work of this sort requires the ability to do careful, painstaking, and persevering work. Given this ability and the artistic sense before mentioned, the girl’s work may be determined by some special talent, by the special training possible for her, or by the openings possible in her chosen line of work within comparatively easy access.

Agriculture. The Census figures which report one-fifth of all women gainfully employed as engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry are somewhat startling until we observe that southern negro women make up a very large number of the farm workers reported. Even aside from these, however, there are many women who are finding work in gardening, poultry raising, bee culture, dairying, and the like. The girl who is fitted to take up work of this sort is usually the girl who has grown up on the farm or at least in the country and who has a sympathy with growing things. She is essentially the “outdoor girl.” She must be willing to study the science of making things grow. She must be able to keep accounts, that she may know what she is doing and what her profits are. Above all, she must have no false pride about “dirty work.” Properly such a girl should have entered upon her career even before she has finished her formal education, so that “going to work” means merely enlarging her work to occupy her time more fully and to bring in as soon as possible a living income.

In this sort of work the girl possessing initiative and an independent spirit will naturally do best, since there are comparatively few opportunities for such work under supervision. Care must, however, be exercised by vocational guides in suggesting, and by girls in choosing, the independent career. Usually it is the girl who has shown promise in independent work at school or at home that will make a success of such work later in life. The girl who relaxes when the pressure of compulsion is removed will not be a success as “her own boss.” It goes without saying that the girl who does well as her own superior officer will be happier to do work upon her own initiative than merely to carry out the plans made by others. Agricultural work will sometimes offer her exactly the conditions she desires. Many successful farm-owners are women, and their work compares favorably with that of men.

Food production. It is common, in these days, to meet the assertion that the preparation of food, once woman’s undisputed work, has been almost if not quite removed from her hands; and that, even where she may still contribute to this work, she must do so in the factory, the bakery, the packing house, or the delicatessen shop. There are, nevertheless, still many women who are fitted for cooking and kindred pursuits who will not find an outlet for their abilities in any of the places mentioned. In the main, factory production of food is like factory production of other things a highly differentiated process, in which the individual worker finds little satisfaction for her desire to “make things” and little, if any, opportunity to contribute from her ability to the final result.

In the canning factory she may sit all day before an ever-moving procession of beans or peas, from which she removes any unsuitable for cooking. Or it may be an endless procession of cans, upon which she rapidly lays covers as they pass. In the pickle factory she may pack tiny cucumbers into bottles. In the packing house she may perform the task of painting cans. None of these occupations is more than mere unskilled labor. None is suitable for the girl who likes to cook, and who can cook. The number of such girls is already fairly large and will undoubtedly increase as the domestic science classes of our schools do more and better work.

Opposed to the theoretical statement that food is or at least to-morrow will be prepared entirely in the public-utility plants outside the home is the practical fact that home-cooked food, home-preserved fruits and jellies, and home-canned vegetables and meats find ready sale and that women who can produce these things do find it profitable to do so. There is, consequently, a field for some girls in such work.

Not all girls, on the other hand, who have taken the domestic science course are fitted to take up this work, even if a market could be found for their work. Only the expert, that is, the precise, accurate, painstaking cook, can secure uniform results day after day. Only the rapid worker can do enough to insure pay for her time. Only the girl with a keen sense of taste can properly judge results and devise successful combinations. Only a business woman can buy to advantage and compute ratios of expense and return. This combination, of course, is not to be found every day.

THE DISTRIBUTING GROUP

Salesmanship. Passing from the class of work which has to do with making things to that group of occupations which has to do with the distribution of various products to the consumer, we shall naturally consider, first of all, the saleswoman. In any given group of young and untrained girls drawn as in our schools from varying environment and heredity, the natural saleswomen will probably be in the minority. I do not mean that girls may not often express a desire to “work in a store” as apparently the easiest and most immediate employment for the untrained girl. This may or may not indicate that the girl has a commercial mind. The girl who is really interested in commercial undertakings is easily distinguished from her fellow workers in any salesroom. She is not the girl who lingers in conversation with the girl next to her while a customer waits, or who gazes indifferently over the customer’s head while the latter makes her choice from the goods laid before her. To the real saleswoman every customer is a possibility, every sale a victory, and every failure to sell distinctly a defeat. The fact that we see so few girls and women of this type behind the counters in our shopping centers is sufficient indication that many girls would have been better placed in other occupations.

We find, however, in 1910, the number of saleswomen reported as 257,720, together with 111,594 “clerks” in stores, many of whom the report states are “evidently saleswomen” under another name. There are also about 4,000 female proprietors, officials, managers, and floorwalkers in stores, and 2,000 commercial travelers. This gives us a large number of women who are engaged in the sale of goods. For the girl of the commercial mind, salesmanship in some form presents certain possibilities, although there is far less chance for her to rise in this work than for a boy. She must begin at the most rudimentary work, as cash or errand girl, and her progress will necessarily be slow. She will require an ability to handle with some skill elementary forms of arithmetic, an alert and observing mind, an interest in and some knowledge of human nature, and good health to endure the confinement of the long day. She will be fortunate if she finds a place in one of the stores in which a continuation school is conducted. At such a school in Altman’s department store in New York the girls pursue a regular course designed to be especially helpful in their work, and are graduated with all due formality, in which both public-school and store officials take part. Such a school helps girls to feel a pride in their work and to feel that they are under observation by those who will recognize and reward real endeavor. Filene’s in Boston and Wanamaker’s in New York and Philadelphia are other notable examples of such schools.

The disadvantages and dangers of salesmanship for girls, other than small pay and improbability of much advancement, we shall consider in a later chapter. We may say here, however, that these disadvantages and dangers, for the really commercially minded girl, are to a certain extent neutralized by her nature and possibilities. She is the girl whose mind is more or less concentrated on “the selling game.” Her nerves are less worn because of a certain exhilaration in her work. She is the girl who passes beyond the underpaid stage and is able to live decently and to rise to a position of some responsibility, partly because of her concentration and partly because she has been able to resist the influences about her which make for mediocrity or worse.

Office work. The girl emerging from high school and looking for work is usually on the lookout for what in a boy we call a “white-collar job.” Especially in the case where the girl has been kept in school at more or less sacrifice on the part of her parents, both they and the girl feel that the extra years of schooling entitle her to a “high-class” occupation of some kind. Girls are far less willing than boys to “begin at the bottom” and work up through the various stages of apprenticeship to ultimate positions near the top. They resent being asked to take the “overall” job and fear mightily to soil their hands.

Twenty-five years ago a large proportion of high-school graduates went at once into the teaching force, where they succeeded (or not) in “learning to do by doing,” without professional training of any sort. Now, however, teaching as a profession is in many places fortunately reserved for the girls who prepare in college or normal school; and a larger proportion of girls who cannot have this professional training are looking for other occupations. Office work attracts a large number, and, with present-day business courses in high schools, many girls find employment as stenographers, typists, cashiers in small establishments, bookkeepers, or general office assistants. In any of these positions girls without special training or experience must begin at very low wages. Whether they rise to higher ones depends to some extent at least upon the girls themselves.

What sort of girl shall we encourage to enter office work? Not the girl whose talent lies in making things, for to her the routine of the office will be a weary and endless treadmill entirely barren of results; nor the girl who requires the stimulus of people to keep her alert and keyed to her best work; nor the girl who cannot be happy at indoor work. Office work seems to require a temperament in which pleasure in arrangement takes precedence over joy in production; in which neatness, accuracy, and precision afford satisfaction even in monotonous tasks. Coupled with these a mathematical bent gives us the cashier or accountant or bookkeeper; mental alertness and manual dexterity, the stenographer; a talent for organization, the secretary.

Girls who enter upon office work directly from high school must be content with rudimentary tasks and must beware lest they remain at a low level in the office force. Girls with more training may begin somewhat farther up, the best positions usually going to those whose general education and equipment are greatest. Stenographers are more valuable in proportion as their knowledge of spelling, sentence formation, and letter writing is reinforced by a feeling for good English and an ability to relieve their superiors of details in outlining correspondence. It is not enough that bookkeepers know one or several systems of keeping business records, or that cashiers manipulate figures rapidly and well. More important than these fundamental requirements is the determination to grasp the details of the business as conducted in the office in which they find themselves and to adapt their work to the needs of the person whose work they do. General knowledge and the ability to think not only supplement, but easily become more valuable than, technical training.

A careful study of local conditions as they affect office positions will enable girls and their guides to have a better conception of requirements and rewards in this field. A valuable study of conditions among office girls in Cleveland has recently been published which sheds considerable light on the ultimate industrial fate of the overyoung and poorly trained office worker. A more general study is found in the volume on Women in Office Service issued by the Women’s Educational Union of Boston.

THE SERVICE GROUP

The third, or service, group of workingwomen covers without doubt the widest range of all. Here we find the domestic helper (or servant, as she has usually been called), the telephone operator, the librarian, the teacher, the nurse, the physician, the lawyer, the social worker, the clergyman or minister. All degrees of training are represented, and many varieties of work, from the simplest to the most complex.

Strictly speaking, service has to do with personal attendance and help, but it is constantly overlapping other lines of work. The household assistant is not only a helper, but at times a producer; the telephone operator and the librarian are distributors as well as public helpers; the secretary is an office worker, although she is a personal assistant to her employer as well. For successful work in any of these lines, however, a girl must possess certain definite characteristics, to which her peculiar talent or tendency may give the determining direction as she chooses her work.

In service of any sort the girl is brought into constant relation with people. Hence she must be the sort of girl to whom people and not things are the chief interest of life. She should have an agreeable personality, that she may give pleasure with her service; she needs tact, that she may keep the atmosphere about her unruffled; she needs to find pleasure for herself in service, seeing always the end rather than merely the often wearisome details of work. Beyond these general qualities we must begin at once to make subdivisions, since the additional traits necessary to make a girl successful in one line of service differ often widely from those required in any other line. We must therefore take up some of the lines of work in more or less detail.

Domestic work. The untrained girl who naturally falls into the service group has a rather poor outlook for congenial and successful work as conditions exist. With ability which she perhaps does not possess, and with training which she cannot afford, she would naturally become a teacher, a nurse, a private secretary, a librarian, or a social worker. Without training, she finds little except domestic service open to her; and domestic service finds little favor with girls, or with students of vocational possibilities for girls.

These are unfortunate facts. For the untrained girl of merely average abilities, with no pronounced talent or inclination, but with an interest in persons and a pleasure in doing things for people, helping in the tasks of homemaking ought to prove suitable work. It is, however, the one vocation for the untrained girl which requires her to live in the home of her employer, thus curtailing her independence, rendering her hours of work long and uncertain, and cutting off the natural social environment possible if she returned to her own home at the end of the day’s work. The social position of girls in domestic service, especially in the towns and cities, is peculiarly hard for a self-respecting girl to bear. It is in large part a reflection upon her sacrifice of independence. The derisive slang term “slavey” expresses the generally prevalent public contempt. It is small wonder that a girl fears to brave such a sentiment and as a result avoids what is perhaps in itself congenial work in pleasanter surroundings than most noisy, ill-smelling factories.

Almost all the conditions surrounding the domestic worker are such that it is practically impossible to say except of each place considered by itself whether or not it is a suitable and desirable place for a girl, or whether work and wages are fair. Practically no progress has been made in standardizing household work. The factory girl knows what she is to do and when she is to do it and how long her day is to be. The housework girl seldom knows any of these things with any degree of certainty. Any plan which will make it possible to regulate these matters according to some recognized standard, and which will enable domestic workers to live at home, going to and from their work at regular hours as shop, factory, and office employees do, will help very materially to solve the problem of opening another desirable vocation to the untrained girl.

The untrained girl who is willing to accept a difficult and trying position in a private kitchen with the idea of making her work serve her as a training school for better work in the future may make a success of her life after all. Such a girl will have good observing powers and ability to follow directions and gauge the success of results. She will have adaptability, patience, and a very definite ambition. For domestic service may be a stepping stone.

For the high-school girl a better opening may sometimes be found as a mother’s helper. Many women who find the ordinary household helper unsatisfactory give employment to girls of refinement and high-school training who are capable of assisting either with household tasks or with the care of children. Girls in such positions are usually made “one of the family,” and are sometimes very happily situated. Their earnings are often more than those of other girls of their intelligence and training who are in offices or stores; but there is of course little chance of advancement, and there is still the prejudice against domestic work to be reckoned with. Here, as with household assistants, the greatest drawback is probably lack of standardization of work and of working conditions.

The girl who wishes to become a “mother’s helper” must have a natural refinement and some knowledge of social usage if she is to be a sharer in the family life of her employer. She must use excellent English, must know how to dress quietly and suitably, and must not only know how to keep herself in the background of family life, but must be willing to remain somewhat in the shadows.

Probably no better field for the investigation of these trying questions could be found than the high school. The ranks of employers of domestic help are being constantly recruited from the girls who were the high-school students of yesterday and have now taken their places as housekeepers. The high school then, where the problem may be approached in an impersonal manner quite impossible later when the question has become a personal one, is the proper place in which to study the domestic service question and to attempt its standardization.

The higher positions involving domestic work are more in the nature of supervisory employment. Many women are employed as matrons in hospitals, boarding schools, and other institutions, as housekeepers in hotels, club buildings, or in large private establishments. These positions of course call for women who are not only thoroughly familiar with the work to be done, but are skilled in managing their subordinates who do the actual work. They require women who have administrative ability, knowledge of keeping accounts, proper standards of living and of service, and initiative.

For the woman who has a desire to enter business for herself there are openings in the line of domestic work. From time immemorial women have managed lodging and boarding houses, sometimes with good returns. They are also the owners and managers of tea rooms, restaurants, laundries, dyeing and cleaning establishments, hairdressing and manicure shops, and day nurseries. All these occupations can be followed successfully only by the woman of business ability and some technical knowledge. They require not only knowledge but aptitude on the part of the worker. They are usually undertaken only by women of some experience, and are the result of some earlier choice rather than the choice of the vocation-seeking girl.

Teaching. The teacher differs from the person who has merely an interest in human kind in the abstract, because she has a special interest in one particular class of human beings those who are most distinctly in the process of making. She is interested in children, or she should not be teaching. This, however, is not enough. The girl who wishes to teach must possess certain well-defined characteristics. Her health must be good, and her nerve force stable. Temperamentally she must be enthusiastic and optimistic, but capable of sustained effort even in the face of apparent failure. Her outlook must be broad, and her patience unfailing. Intellectually she must be a student, and if she possess considerable initiative and originality in her study, so much the better. She must not, however, become a student of mathematics or history or languages to the exclusion of the more absorbing study of her pupils, nor even to so great a degree as she studies them. The true teacher represents a high type of social worker. Many girls enter upon the work of teaching badly handicapped by the lack of some of these essential qualities and are in consequence never able to rise to real understanding and accomplishment of their work.

Teaching in these days is a broad vocation, covering many different lines of work; probably no occupation for girls is so well known with both its conditions and rewards as this. In general, more girls than are by nature fitted for the work stand ready to undertake it. There is nevertheless difficulty for school officials in finding real teachers enough to fill their positions. For the right girl, teaching has much to offer.

Library work. The librarian in these modern days is a most important public servant, and many openings in library work are to be found. The services to be performed range from purely routine work to a very high type of constructive service for the community. In the small libraries an “all-round” type of worker is required. In the larger ones specialties may be followed. In these larger libraries there are to be found permanent places for the routine workers. In smaller ones each worker should be in line for even the highest type of constructive work.

The routine worker in the library is merely an office worker, and the same girl who would do well at the mechanical tasks of an office will do well here. The real librarian is of a different sort. She must have the neatness, precision, and accuracy of the office worker, to be sure; but to these she must add a broad conception of the place of the library in the community, and must display initiative and originality in bringing it to occupy that place. She must know books; she must know people. She must be in touch with current history, and be alert to place library material bearing upon it at the disposal of the people. She must have quick sympathies, tact, the teaching spirit (carefully concealed), and much administrative ability. And she must be trained for her work.

Nursing. The nurse is in many ways like the teacher, and the girl who has the right temperament for successful teaching will usually make a successful nurse, temperamentally considered. Her mental traits, or perhaps more exactly her habits of thought, may be somewhat different. The teacher must be able to attend to many things; the nurse must be able to concentrate on one. Originality and initiative are less to be desired, since the nurse is not usually in charge of her case directly, but rather subject to the doctor’s orders. She must, nevertheless, be resourceful in emergencies, and of good judgment always. She should be calm as well as patient, quiet in speech and movement, a keen observer, and willing to accept responsibility. Absolute obedience and loyalty to her superiors is expected, and a high conception of the ethics of her calling. Underlying all these qualifications, the nurse must have not only good health but physical strength.

Social work. This term covers many occupations which overlap the work of the teacher, the nurse, the secretary, the house mother or matron, and even that of the physician and lawyer. The field of work is a large one, including settlement leaders and assistants, workers in social and community centers and recreation centers, vacation playgrounds, public and private charities, district nurses and visiting nurses sent out by various agencies, deaconesses and other church visitors, Young Women’s Christian Association leaders and helpers, missionaries, welfare workers in large manufacturing or mercantile establishments, probation officers, and many others.

The social worker must of course have the same suitability for teaching or nursing or any other of the various tasks that she may undertake as has the teacher or nurse or other person who works under different auspices. She must have in addition a truly altruistic spirit, a deep earnestness which will survive discouragement, and a real insight into the circumstances, handicaps, and possibilities of others. This insight presupposes maturity of thought; and the young girl must serve a long apprenticeship with life before she is at her best as a social worker. It sometimes seems as though no field was so exactly suited to the abilities of the married woman who has time for service, or the mother whose children are grown, leaving her free again to teach or nurse the sick or bring justice to the little child as she was trained to do in her youth.

Less common vocations for women but still often chosen after all are reserved for those whose abilities are so specialized and so striking that they compel a choice. Singers, artists with brush or pen, the natural actress, the journalist or author, need usually no one to guide their choice. Our great difficulty here is not to open the girl’s eyes to her opportunity, but to restrain the one who has not measured her ability correctly from attempting that which she cannot perform. The same is true of girls who aspire to be physicians, lawyers, or ministers. Some few succeed in all these vocations. Many more have not the scientific habits of mind, the stability, or the endurance to make a successful fight for recognition against great odds.

Many girls mistake what may be a pleasant and satisfying avocation for a life work. For the girl who will not be held back, there may be a life of achievement ahead, with fame and all the other accompaniments of successful public life; or there may be the disappointments of unrealized ambition. We must see that girls face this possibility with the other.