Vocational Guidance for Girls Part 11

2. That a single s.e.xual misstep has ruined thousands upon thousands of girls' lives;

3. That ignorance or the one misstep has led thousands to a permanent life of shame;

4. That such a life means, sooner or later, sorrow, impaired or destroyed health, disgrace, and early death to its woman victims;

5. That the social evil destroys the efficiency and the moral worth of men;

6. That it sets free deadly disease germs to permeate society, causing untold misery among the innocent,

then, and not until then, can they be taught

1. To recognize and fear animal instinct unrestrained by higher motive;

2. To guard their own instincts;

3. To hold men to a high standard of social purity and to help them attain it.

Nor does this teaching necessitate morbid consideration of the subject. It will, in fact, in many cases clear away the morbid curiosity and surrept.i.tious seeking after information in which untaught girls indulge. Skillfully and delicately taught this knowledge as an important and serious part of woman's work, girls will be sweeter and more womanly for the knowledge of their responsibility to society and to their unborn offspring.

Schools that attempt such a course for girls are finding their chief difficulty in discovering people properly endowed by nature and properly trained to teach it. To give such work into any but the wisest hands invites disaster. To make it a study of the physical basis of s.e.xual life is disaster in itself. Service, through making one's self a pure member of society, and through helping others to keep the same standard--this must be the keynote of the teaching, an education toward social efficiency and social uplift.

CHAPTER X

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.

The United States Census reports for 1910 give the following figures:

Number of Females Ten Years and Over Year Engaged in Gainful Occupations 1880 2,647,157 1890 4,005,532 1900 5,319,397 1910 8,075,772

It is thus seen that gainful occupations for women have increased greatly in the thirty years covered by the report. At present 21.2 per cent of all females, or 23.4 of all over ten years of age, are engaged in work for wages. Further tabulation brings out the fact that, whereas the age period from twenty-one to forty-four shows the largest percentage of men employed in gainful work, women show the largest proportion of their numbers so employed during the age period from sixteen to twenty. Evidently the girls are at work. The figures follow:

MALES TEN YEARS AND OVER FEMALES TEN YEARS AND OVER Age Period Per Cent Age Period Per Cent 10-13 16.6 10-13 8.0 14-15 41.4 14-15 19.8 16-20 79.2 16-20 39.9 21-44 96.7 21-44 26.3 45 and over 85.9 45 and over 15.7

Compare with these figures the following table:

AGES AT WHICH WOMEN MARRY[7]

11.2 per cent, or 1/9, of all women marry before 20 47.3 " " " 1/2 " " " " " 25 72.4 " " " 3/4 " " " " " 30 83.3 " " " 5/6 " " " " " 35 88.8 " " " 8/9 " " " " " 45 92.1 " " " 11/12 " " " " " 55 93.3 " " " 14/15 " " " " " 65 93.8 " " " 15/16 " " " " " 100

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 cla.s.sified occupations. Women are found in all but 43. Even allowing for the inaccuracy of such figures, and pa.s.sing 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:

Farm laborers (working out) 337,522 Iron and steel industries 29,182 Chemical industries 15,577 Clay, gla.s.s, and stone industries 11,849 Electrical supply factories 11,041 Lumber and furniture industries 17,214 Steam railroad laborers 3,248

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photograph by C. Park Pressey The 1910 Census showed over three hundred and thirty thousand women employed as farm laborers. This number did not include wives or daughters of farm-owners]

The foregoing facts concern occupations which were once a.s.sociated entirely with men. If we enter the ranks of more womanly work we shall find:

Dressmakers 447,760 Milliners 122,070 Sewers and sewing-machine operators 231,106 Telephone operators 88,262 Nurses 187,420 Clerks and saleswomen in stores 362,081 Stenographers and typists 263,315 Bookkeepers, cas.h.i.+ers, and accountants 187,155 Cooks 333,436 Laundresses (not in laundries) 520,004 Teachers 478,027

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Proportions of men and women in the United States engaged in special occupations]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by Underwood & Underwood Farmerettes. During the World War women at home and abroad rendered especially valuable services in agricultural work]

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 a.s.sumptions: 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 s.e.x 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photograph by Brown Bros.

Factory workers. Sewers and sewing-machine operators to the number of over 230,000, according to the 1919 Census, are employed in the United States]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by Underwood & Underwood Unemployed utilizing their spare time to make themselves more efficient. The community may make use of the schools for such purposes]

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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 antic.i.p.ate that their industrial career will soon be over.

A government report on the condition of woman and girl wage-earners in the United States gives the following facts concerning 1,391 women working in stores:

Average length of service 5.17 years Average wage: First year $4.69 per week Second year 5.28 " "

Tenth year 9.81 " "