Woman's work in municipalities. Mary Ritter Beard
Table of Contents
One of the most constructive pieces of work recently done on vocational education was the survey of the problem made by Alice Barrows Fernandez under the auspices of the Public Education Association of New York. The portion of the report of this Survey, presented to the subcommittee on vocational guidance of the Committee on High Schools and Training Schools of the Board of Education and submitted at the public hearing of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of New York City, June 16, 1914, shows with what clear analysis of social conditions and forces the chairman and her committee have studied this question.
The report emphasizes the need of pre-occupational education for children under sixteen who are to be wage-earners. The incompatibility between the demands of industry and the education of the child is recognized and is met by the proposal to train the child in underlying principles in various processes of work which will enable it to adapt itself to changes in industry and make it later continually intelligent. It proposes to study the metal industry first, which comprises forty-one different branches, and to make an experiment in pre-occupational training in some schools on the basis of this study. It proposes to do this under the Board of Education, and if it works, let it lead to continuation work for employed children.
The question now being discussed is whether this committee of the Vocational Education Survey shall go on with their work under the authority of the Board of Education or whether it must remain a private enterprise. Mayor Mitchel, who made a trip in 1914 through the West to study vocational training, was greatly interested in the Survey. The suggestion that the Board of Education take over the work of the Survey was made by Dr. Ira S. Wile, a member of that board who is also a member of the Survey.[6] The New York Evening Post in reporting this discussion said: “This was after the Board had conducted a year’s general survey of the field of vocational education. In that time the members came to the conclusion that the subject was too comprehensive to admit of an adequate knowledge being gained by a general investigation. Facts, details, painstaking study of varied industries were needed, and this is what the Vocational Education Survey has been gathering in the year and a half of its existence. Mrs. Fernandez, the prime mover in this work, is most practical in her suggestions.”
Women are also actively connected with the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. Under Miss Cleo Murtland, assistant secretary of the Society, a study of the dress and waist industry was made by the New York committee of the Society, and that study together with a study of the cloak, suit and skirt industry, made under the direction of Charles Winslow of the United States Department of Labor, have resulted in a practical program for factory schools which has been approved both by the unions and the manufacturers.
An illustration of the necessity of the woman’s point of view being brought into the discussion and organization of vocational training and guidance is afforded by the criticism made by Alice Barrows Fernandez, of the Vocational Education Survey, in reviewing the report of Dr. Schneider, of the School Inquiry, on “Trade Schools.”
It is unfortunate that Dr. Schneider’s report, which is so valuable in regard to boys’ vocational training, is no different from other reports on the subject of training for girls. One and all devote themselves to what is to be done for boys, and then in an aside mention the girls. Out of every four persons at work in this city one is a woman, and out of every four women here one is earning her livelihood. You can’t dismiss 400,000 women in a parenthesis. This will happen as long as there are not more women on the Board of Education, more women who are workers engaged in gainful employment.
Dr. Schneider says in his report that the New York trade schools for girls should extend their courses so as to give the girls a chance to enter occupations which are not merely humdrum and mechanical, but he does not suggest specifically what trades they should enter. At such schools now the traditional women’s trades are being taught: sewing and millinery, fancy box making, and machine operating. Boys’ trade schools teach the building trades. Women, as shown by the census in New York City, actually work in these trades. There are women carpenters, bricklayers, painters, glaziers, paper hangers, plasterers, and plumbers. These are the energizing trades, as Dr. Schneider himself would call them, and why should girls be fitted only for the enervating trades as they are today, especially as these trades are already overcrowded?
Why should girls not be taught the principles of machinery? Such knowledge should be useful to them in energizing as in enervating occupations. It is only a matter of getting used to the idea. Women who own automobiles know how to run and repair them. Why shouldn’t a girl who works at a machine have a knowledge of mechanics which will enable her to handle the machine better? Women swing golf clubs, hockey sticks, and tennis rackets. Why shouldn’t girls swing hammers?
Dr. Schneider brings in the usual double standard idea of fitting the boys for the world and the girls for the home. He says girls’ trade education must be modified by training for the home. He adds that this is true because most factory girls stop work at the end of seven years. So far as I know, there are no facts to support that statement. It is most important to break down this general impression that women leave work at the end of seven years. As a matter of fact, 50 per cent. of the mothers of boy and girl workers in homes I have investigated still work, although they are no longer single. Since women work after marriage, it is essential that they be given as sound and thorough and concentrated industrial training as boys.
Girls, like boys, should be trained to know the joy of doing a piece of work well. It would be interesting to see what effect that would have on their wages. Women do not earn as high wages as men. The mothers of the children investigated receive only one-half to two-thirds the wages of the fathers. If girls were trained to find the same joy in work that boys do they would be better workers when they returned to work after marriage, and they would respect their work enough to demand at least as high wages as men do for the same work.
Dr. Schneider’s analysis of why boys and girls leave school typifies the usual vague treatment of the girls’ problem as compared with the boys’. Boys leave, he says, because “they want to do things, to be out-of-doors, to build, to earn money, to assert partial independence; they hate books, they crave action.” He says girls leave “because their desire for wider social activity is dominant, because they want to break away from home ties, because their instinct for personal adornment is strong, and because they want to earn money to satisfy it.” What is a desire for wider social activity? That is vague compared with the statement that boys leave because they want to do things, and yet they mean the same thing. When these two series of reasons are boiled down they come to the same thing for both boys and girls—a desire for activity and for independence.
Again he seems inconsistent in suggesting that girls should learn trades intensively earlier than boys in order that they may get higher wages at an earlier age. If early specialization is bad for the boys it is even worse for the girls, because at the present time industry tends to make them machines. Early specialization will increase that tendency and thereby reduce rather than advance their wages. Contrary to the usual point of view, a broad and general industrial training is perhaps more important for those in the automatic trades than in any others, and therefore it is of special importance for girls.[7]
School Buildings
While thus interesting themselves in educational administration and the content of school curricula, women have not neglected the physical aspects of school buildings. The movement for sanitary school buildings in which women have sometimes led, instigated officials to lead, helped personally, or inspired janitors to act, has been followed up by the decoration of the buildings. The beneficial effect of artistic interiors on children, who spend so large a proportion of their waking hours in school buildings, is incalculable. Their physical comfort and their moral and artistic natures are advanced in a measure difficult to estimate.
Organized first for self-culture of a literary and artistic character, the expansive nature of club women has expressed itself in the extension of that