THE GIRL’S WORK (Continued) VOCATIONS DETERMINED BY TRAINING

The question of vocation choosing begins to make itself felt far down in the grammar school, first among the retarded and backward children who are old for their grades and are merely waiting and marking time until the law will allow them to leave school and go to work. These children are usually either mentally subnormal or handicapped by foreign birth and so unable to grasp the education which is being offered them.

As soon as they are released the girls go to the factory, to the store, or to help with some one’s baby or with the housework. No other places are open to them, and their possibilities in any place are few. They cannot rise because they are mentally untrained.

The upper grades of the grammar school lose annually many children who would be able to profit by the help the school offers to those who can remain. Some drop out because they see no need of remaining when the factory will employ them without further knowledge. Others chafe at spending time on what seems to them, and what sometimes is, quite unrelated to the life they will lead and the work they will do. Some leave reluctantly, because their help is needed in financing a large family. Many go gladly, because they will begin to earn and to have some of the things they ardently desire. And until yesterday the school paid little attention to their going, regarding it as one of the necessary evils. Still less attention did it pay to what these pupils became after they left. The school’s responsibility ended at its outer door.

Now that these conditions are being changed, the school is finding responsibilities and opportunities on every hand. The foreign-born are taken out of the regular grades where they cannot fit, and are taught English by themselves first of all. The subnormal children are studied for latent vocational possibilities, and where minds are deficient, hands are the more carefully trained for suitable work. Courses are being revised with a view to holding in school the boy or girl who wants practical training for practical work. Secondary schools have taken their eyes off college requirements long enough to consider fitting the majority of their pupils to face life without the college. Studies of vocations are being made; vocational training is being offered; vocational guidance is at last coming to be considered the concern of the school.

Vocational work is sometimes concentrated in the high school, but this is reaching back scarcely far enough, since those who do not reach high school need help quite as much as the older ones, while those who expect to continue their training can do so better if they have some idea of the goal to be reached.

What are the options that the grammar-school teacher may present to the girls under her care?

First of all, as we have already said, the school records must be kept with care and discrimination, so that the teacher may know the girl to whom she speaks. With the records in hand, she will ask herself the following questions:

1. Is further training at the expense of the girl’s family
possible? Do the girl’s abilities warrant effort on her
parents’ part to give her further opportunity?

2. Could the girl’s parents continue to pay her living expenses
during further training if the training were furnished at the
expense of the state?

3. Could the girl obtain training in return for her personal
service, either with or without pay?

4. Would the girl be able to repay in skill acquired the expense
of her training, whether borne by herself, her parents, or the
state?

Lines between obtainable work for the trained and the untrained girl are fairly sharply drawn, and the possibilities for each type must be clearly understood by the guide. If it is evident that training cannot be obtained before the girl must begin to earn, the choice is necessarily a narrow one. The factories in the neighborhood should be thoroughly studied, and, under the guidance of the teacher, girls should prepare detailed reports with respect to their working conditions. The “blind-alley” job should be plainly labeled, that it may not catch the girl unaware. Girls who must take up factory work should at least be enabled to choose among factories intelligently, and if possible should be fortified with an avocation that will supply them with the interest their daily task fails to inspire and that will provide an anchor against the instability toward which the factory girl tends.

The possibilities for apprentice work with dressmakers or milliners or in other handwork should also be made known. Girls begin here, as in the factory, at simple and monotonous tasks, but the possibilities of advancement are far greater and mental development is unquestionably more likely. The ability acquired by such workers, as they progress, to undertake and carry through a complete piece of work is not only satisfying to the workers themselves, but of value in later years. They learn to analyze their constructive problems and to work out the various steps of the work to its ultimate conclusion a knowledge which the factory girl never attains.

Some few girls will need to be shown the possibilities which lie in independent productive work. For the girl who has talent or even merely deftness in manual work, coupled with initiative and some degree of originality, such work may bring a better return than working for others. Most girls, however, lack courage to start upon independent work, especially if they are in immediate need of earning and are untrained. It often happens, however, that they do not appraise at its true value the training they have received. The grammar-school girl, under present methods of teaching, is often fully qualified to do either plain cooking or plain sewing, but since she does not desire to enter domestic service, she considers these accomplishments very little or not at all in counting her assets for earning. Some girls have found ready employment and good returns in home baking, in canning fruit and vegetables, or in mending, making simple clothes for little children, or in making buttonholes and doing other “finishing work” for busy housewives. Work of these sorts, undertaken in a small way, has often assumed the proportions of a business, requiring all of a young woman’s time and paying her quite as well as and often better than less interesting work in shop or factory. A girl of my acquaintance earns a comfortable living at home with her crochet needle. Another has paid her way through high school and college by raising sweet peas.

The untrained girl who loves an outdoor life has fewer opportunities than other girls unless she is capable of independent work. If she is capable of this and has sufficient ability to study her work, gardening and poultry or bee culture may open the way for her to work and be happy. School gardens, poultry clubs, and canning clubs have shown many a girl what she may do in these ways.

Many times too little is realized of the possibilities of these grammar-school girls who are crowded by necessity into the working ranks. We cannot shirk our responsibilities in regard to them, however, although they escape from our school systems and bravely take up the burden of their own lives. Quite as many of these girls as of more favored ones will marry and be among the mothers of the next generation. The work they do in the interval between school and home will leave its impress even more strongly than upon the girl whose school life lasts longer and who is therefore older as well as better equipped when she enters upon her work. Few of these younger girls in times past can be said to have done anything other than drift into work which would make or spoil their lives and perhaps those of their children after them. It is well that the responsibility of the school toward them is being recognized and met.

A distinct duty of the grammar-school teacher is to make known the facts concerning short cuts for grammar-school girls to office work. Unscrupulous business “colleges” sometimes mislead these immature girls into believing that a short course taken in their school will enable the girls to fill office positions. Facts are at hand which show the futility of attempting office work under such conditions, and teachers should be very careful to see that all the facts are in the possession of their pupils.

In the early days of high schools usually the only distinction, if any, in courses was “general” and “classical.” To-day we have many courses, or in the larger cities different schools fit boys and girls for varying paths in life. The college-preparatory course or the classical high school leads to college. The commercial course or school leads to office work. The manual training or industrial or practical arts course or high school leads to efficient handwork. The trade school leads to definite occupations. The difficulty now is to help girls choose intelligently which course or school will best meet their requirements. This involves vocation study in the grammar school.

The girl who terminates her formal education with her graduation from high school may find herself not very much better placed, apparently, than the girl who has dropped out of school farther back. Many openings into desirable occupations are still closed to her. Often her opportunities, however, are much greater than they seem. All facts go to show that the high-school girl makes more rapid progress in efficiency, and therefore in pay, than the younger girl, even when she seems to begin at the same work. Some fields, too, are open to her that are not usually possible for the grammar-school girl. In office work the high-school girl who has specialized in her training may make a very creditable showing. Many thousands of high-school graduates are received into telephone exchanges where with a brief period of practice they become efficient workers. A very few high-school girls become teachers in country schools without further training, but the number is decreasing every year. If she meets the age requirement, the high-school girl may enter a training school for nurses, gaining her specialized training in return for her services to the hospital.

The high-school girl who can spare time and money for some further training finds a larger field open; but, to make the most of what high school has to offer, her plans should be made as early as possible in the high-school course at the very beginning if it can be managed. The girl must know what further training she is making ready for, must choose electives in high school to help her make ready, or possibly to offset the specializing of this later work by some general culture she may otherwise miss entirely. Vocation study, therefore, and vocational guidance must be quite as much a part of the course for the girl who will “train” for her special work as for the girl who goes directly from the secondary school to her vocation.

One high-school Senior writes: “My special vocation has not yet been chosen, but if it becomes necessary for me to earn my own living I should like to be either a nurse, a teacher, milliner, or director of a cafeteria. I would probably choose the position that was open at the time.”

Here we have the girl who is in no hurry to choose, and who probably has a more or less vague notion of the comparative conditions, requirements, and rewards of the four vocations she mentions. In contrast to this, listen to a high-school student who has been studying herself and her possible vocation in much detail in class work. She says: “I find that I have made good school records only in subjects where I had materials I could see and handle. I have never done well in arithmetic or mathematics, but in drawing, physics, elementary biology, and domestic science I made good marks. I do not like to sew, because it tires me to sit still. I enjoy cooking and marketing.

“I like to plan meals and to make up new recipes. I hear that hospitals and institutions employ women at very good salaries to buy all the foodstuffs used in their kitchens. The expert dietitian also plans meals and arranges dietaries. I learn that Teachers College, Columbia, has courses of study leading to this profession, and I have written to ask for full information.”

In the class of which this girl is a member, each girl is considering her future as this one is doing. Each gathers all available data in regard to the vocation she is studying. Her reports become a part of the class records. She makes as full a report as possible as to the duties and responsibilities of the occupation, the schools or training classes that prepare for it, the length and cost of preparation, possibilities of employment, salaries paid, and other details.

Since training cannot alter fundamentals, but merely builds upon the girl’s nature and heredity, the same classifications obtain in the choice of the girl who can have training as in that of the girl who goes untrained to her vocation. There are still the producers, the distributors, and those who serve; and it is still important that the girl should find a place in the right group.

The producers will include the designers, the interior decorators, the expert dietitians, the municipal inspectors of food and housing, rural consulting housekeepers, state or country canning-club agents, the women who organize and carry on model laundries, either cooeperative or otherwise, the managers of manufacturing enterprises, the farmers, the photographers, the artists, the journalists, and the authors.

The distributors are chiefly represented by the higher type of office workers, who are the “idea thinkers” of the business world, since they neither make nor handle products, but merely manipulate the symbols which stand for the products they seldom if ever see. The women who manage buying and selling enterprises for themselves usually belong to the trained group.

The service group among trained women is a large one, including nurses, teachers, doctors’ and dentists’ assistants, various social workers, librarians, secretaries and other confidential office assistants, directors or “house mothers” in school and college dormitories and in institutions, dentists, physicians, lawyers, ministers.

Within the group there is wide range of choice, differing qualifications are necessary, and varying training is to be undertaken. Girls, with the help of a vocational expert, should analyze their physical and mental qualities and habits, and should study somewhat exhaustively the vocation for which they seem to find themselves fitted.

“I should like to be a nurse, or a teacher, or a milliner, or the manager of a cafeteria” will not do, since those vocations presuppose some years of widely differing training. Perhaps the girl will narrow the choice to nursing or teaching. Then she must place over against each other the two professions special qualifications required, length and cost of training, personal obstacles to be overcome, and especially the demand and supply of nurses and teachers in her locality. Upon these depends the girl’s chance to succeed when she is fitted and launched.

The student who takes up college work, not as a specialized training, but as a completion of her general education, stands somewhat by herself. Such a girl may perhaps put off vocational decision until she is part way through her college years. The college sometimes awakens ambitions and brings to light abilities not hitherto discovered; and even when this does not occur, the choice may be made from the highest and most responsible positions filled by women. From the college girls we draw our high-school teachers and college instructors, our doctors, lawyers, and preachers, in so far as these professions are filled by women.

We are confronted by the statement, made again and again and reinforced by formidable rows of figures, that the more training a girl receives, the less she is inclined to marry or, if she does marry, to have children. The fact seems undeniable that in our larger eastern women’s colleges, at least, not more than half the graduates marry up to the age of forty, which we may accept as the probable limit of the marriage age for the average woman. The natural inference is that a college education in some way prevents or discourages marriage. This may or may not be true. To be quite fair, the statistics should cover the coeducational colleges as well as the colleges for women alone. Also some attempt should be made to discover how the likelihood of marriage is affected by the age at which girls finish their college course. Do the younger girls of a college class marry, while the older ones do not? Are the younger married graduates more often mothers than the older ones, or do they have more children?

If it is true that training is interfering with marriage and motherhood for our girls, the next step is not necessarily, as some modern hysterical students of the question seem to suggest, that we immediately cut out the training which, in case they do marry, will make them far more valuable wives, mothers, and members of the community; but rather so to time and place the training, and if necessary so to alter its character, that any such tendency away from marriage will be removed and that the trained women of the college and professional school shall be available for the great work of mothering the nation of the future.

A final word as to the place of the vocational guide in the choosing of vocations may not be amiss. That every teacher should consider himself or herself a helper in this most important work we must agree; but that any teacher must walk carefully, and use the guiding hand but sparingly, is equally true.

The object of vocational help is not merely to keep the “square peg” out of the “round hole.” The girl arbitrarily placed in a suitable occupation may never discover why she is there, and may be handicapped all her life by a deep conviction that she fits somewhere else. “Know thyself” is a good old maxim yet. The teacher or vocational guide is fitted by the place of observation she holds to help the girl to study herself and the possibilities that life holds out to such as she thus finds herself to be. The final choice should be made by the girl.