few girls were found to have used the trade that records from this school were not tabulated for the report previously mentioned. From the Cambridge and Worcester schools girls are sent out by the day as seamstresses, but there is opportunity for comparatively little real dressmaking as the expensive hand-made gowns worn in these cities are for the most part made in Boston shops. Since power-machine operating is responsible for the decrease in opportunity offered in dressmaking, it is to power machine operating that girls should look for new opportunities. This year the demand in Boston for power machine operators far "exceeded the supply. In addition to the courses given in the Boston and Worcester trade schools, classes in power machine operating have been organized in Boston at the La Grange Street Continuation School and at the North Bennet Street Industrial School. Employers are, for the most part, glad to take girls from these schools, and if the training is efficient, they should be able to earn from $8 to $14 per week soon after leaving school. In most shops they must count on slack work during some season. Many firms are making efforts to make the work less seasonal. One manufacturer of children's dresses, for example, is introducing a line of cotton-flannel nightgowns, aprons, and bloomers to fill in dull seasons. The large shoe manufacturing companies keep their employees busy when orders run low by making a stock of sample shoes. To be successful in power machine operating, a girl must be able to take directions and apply them without error. She must also be quick and accurate in her manipulation of material. Like most other lines of factory work under present conditions, power machine operating offers a woman little chance of advancement. If expert she may become a sample maker, in which position she will get a greater variety of work with more uniformly high pay, or she may become an inspector or a fore woman. Most other lines of factory work do not call for trade school training. They are so highly specialized that the individual processes required of the worker are quickly learned. This is true of women's work in the manufacture of paper, cloth, candy, rubber goods, and electrical apparatus. Boxmaking, as still carried on in some factories, possibly requires enough skill to justify a trade school course. Trade school instruction in book-binding and hand ironing might be profitable. Were it not for the opposition of a strong trade union intent on decreasing the number of women in the industry, printing might be an exceptionally good trade for girls. The costliness of equipment, however, the constant change in factory machinery, and the difficulty of obtaining the right environment and instruction in the school shop render such training better fitted for schools of the co-operation and the continuation school type. The difficulty of making a trade school curriculum that meets the demand of the pupils is illustrated by the experience of the Worcester school. It was found here that girls of the type for which the school in New York was founded were going directly from the grades into the factories and were earning satisfactory wages. The girls attending the Worcester school came from families where the economic pressure was less. They were entering trade training classes chiefly to learn how to make their own clothes. Since these courses as now offered are not adapted to this purpose, a new four-year course is being planned. In Somerville also there is a strong tendency to throw the emphasis from trade training to training for household activities. Both this school and the one in Cambridge differ little from the so-called home-making schools, in which girls are taught cooking, sewing, laundry work, the care of the home, and hand and machine sewing. The New Bedford school illustrates the situation of a homemaking school in an industrial community. New Bedford is one of the New England cotton mill towns. Girls in the poorest families must, of course, go directly into the mills as soon as they reach the required age, but many parents will make great sacrifices in order to give their girls the education which they feel may lead to better occupations. When girls in such circumstances attempt to find work along the line of their vocational school training, domestic service is practically the only profitable employment open to them. The American-born girl who is willing to go into domestic service is a marked exception. These girls, although assured of constant, healthful employment at better wages than the factory can offer, consistently refuse to become servants. In spite of the fact that the present courses of vocational schools lead directly toward this line of work, little or no effort is being made to combat this feeling on the part of the girls. Indeed the authorities in trade schools and placement bureaus sympathize with the girls' point of view. The basic reasons for this feeling are clearly stated in a social workers' report, published under the title Young Working Girls, from which I quote: "The house worker is cut off from her family; the hours are long and irregular; there is only slight opportunity for recreation and that unsupervised; holidays are few; the work takes the girl out of the main currents of modern life, and isolates her in a back eddy; she is constantly conscious of a galling lack of freedom, independence, consideration from others, and of a distinctly lowered social standing; and the danger of moral contamination is even greater than in many other lines of work." III. The vocational school should not attempt to reconcile girls to domestic service; it should follow the trend of modern industry and enter into competition with the work of the servant in the home. Its aim should be a future in which housework is done by specialists. Suppose an enterprising vocational school advertised to become a center for different branches of organized household activities. It might begin by making a study of the best methods of house cleaning, getting together as many of the women who go out cleaning by the day as might be willing to co-operate and giving them, as well as the girls who enter the school from the grades, the benefit of the best instruction the school could obtain. Such a school would become the authority for standardizing wages and hours of employment, as well as the quantity and quality of work to be expected; it would organize a comprehensive and effi-cient placement bureau, placing regular workers, and substituting students for practice work when necessary. This particular line of work might well develop into a cleaning company for which the school would simply act as a feeder. A company of this sort might well supply the need of women working outside their homes whose weekly cleaning must be neglected or done at strengthbreaking cost. The cooking departments in a number of schools have already begun to do similar practical work. Every girl at the Boston Trade School takes her turn in preparing the noon day meal for the school. In Worcester the girls furnish lunch for themselves and for the boys' school as well. Since no organization can furnish only one moderate priced meal a day as a money making scheme, the lunch for schools and factories gives an excellent field for students' practice work. In Cambridge the girls are encouraged to obtain customers for cooked food and are allowed. to retain these customers when they complete the school course. This latter plan is hardly feasible on a large scale, as few girls would have the home facilities to carry on the work and increase their trade. The plan of the Montclair Co-operative Kitchen might be possible. The Boston High School of Practical Arts has begun to get in touch with families who want at least one meal a day prepared by some one coming in from the outside. With the conveyances made possible by thermos containers, these meals could be prepared in the school kitchen to be served in individual homes. From this school work a business enterprise might in time develop which would furnish full time employment for graduates. The relation between the schools and the industries fostered by them would ultimately become somewhat similar to that which at present exists between the co-operative schools and established concerns. The vocational school is in its very nature transitional. The school of the future will not be content to take pupils for a year or two of work which may or may not be effectual and then turn them loose to varying chances of success or failure. Since the vocational school deals at best with girls who develop slowly, its ideal must be a continued interest in the graduate, showing itself through placement work, in the suggestion of new possibilities, and added training where necessary. With such an ideal in mind the vocational school is confronted by a question of its policy in regard to pupils of the less desirable sorts. We have today industrial schools for girls who are a detriment to the community in which they live. These schools are entered for the most part through the law courts, thus eliminating one type of applicant for the vocational schools. There remain many who are somewhat mentally deficient and who if not cared for will be come a menace to society. Shall the vocational schools shut out such girls? To refuse entrance to the girl who comes poorly recommended or to drop her from school if she fails, is unfair to the community as well as to the girl; to hold her in school and place her in employment where she cannot succeed is equally unfair, and ruins the reputation of the school. The vocational school may be an introduction to a system which with increased facilities will be able to consider such girls individually without infringing upon the rights of pupils who are better endowed mentally. Out of it, once its potentialities are recognized, may come economic independence for all girls of good mentality and at least partial self-support for many who are now, through lack of direction and care, becoming state charges. Lowell. The glories of the past he learned, Longfellow. Poet of home, and of humble devotion, Whittier. Patriot, seer, and godly soul, Who straightway guides to heavenly goal. Men act it with their fullest might. -Norman C. Schlichter. |