The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate solution of problems of commercialized prost.i.tution includes for each girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete self-support. Hence, the family has no right to take from its members some present advantage which will handicap potential workers, either boys or girls, in their struggle to meet adult responsibilities of economic life. Hence, again, the whole question of vocational preparation for girls, as well as for boys, has right-of-way as against any temporary or easily dispensed-with helping in family emergencies which may seriously hamper the future wage-earner. This is now being seen clearly; and the consequence is that parents do without for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children.
This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on many of the common fields of effort.
=Farming and the Farmer"s Wife.=--There is one great area both of man"s work and of woman"s work which supremely needs better understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life, farming, and woman"s service in the farm home. We now generally place our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer"s wife, and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the more men laborers it demands for the owner"s successful conduct of the business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer"s helpmate. These are some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States more seriously than ever before.
The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work than their mother"s kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and often do. It is the lack of workers to adequately aid those in command of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep adequate numbers on the farms. The effect of the drift away from the country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any intensive statement here. The congestion of cities, the street life of children which makes legal offenses of acts natural and necessary to free play, the walking of city streets by armies of unemployed fathers and those who might be fathers while harvests are lost for want of laborers, the lack of food in one stratum of society while in another there are no people to eat what nature provides so abundantly--all this and more rises in the mind of everyone who understands that in the right adjustment of agriculture to the people"s needs lies the best interests of all. The sorry picture of the haggard woman, widow, deserted, or divorced, scrubbing on her knees all night long the marble floors of a vast office-building, to hurry back to her locked-in children in the early morning hours, to fall exhausted on the bed until the call of the alarm clock to get breakfast and send the little ones to school--this picture has been portrayed often to Consumer"s League and Women"s Club audiences and has made many women of position and of influence call for drastic prohibition of such overwork of mothers. It has also made women work diligently until they secured forms of help from the public purse to subsidize such mothers and give them state aid until the children were able to earn something for themselves. There are many who can visualize that scrubwoman, and who can place beside her as needing social aid the sewing-machine operator, the garment-finisher or the flower-maker in the tenement sweatshop, who can not see that the farm-house mother is often subjected to labor conditions that sap life and health and doom her children to weakness. These opposite poles of woman"s work both call for better social understanding and more intelligent and devoted social work. The scrubwoman, or the poverty-bound tenement worker may be proper subjects for public or private philanthropy; the farm-house mother is or should be the prime object of social justice and social engineering for ends of social well-being. Upon the farmer and his wife and also upon the miner and his wife and the forest worker and his wife rest the very foundations of economic stability and industrial security. Those who procure at first hand the raw material of manufacture and of commerce are too precious to social order for any neglect of conditions in their work. In many foreign countries the land seems to shrink dangerously as population grows. In our vast country and in the stretches of Canada, North America seems, as Lowell said, to have "room beside her hearth for all mankind." And yet, in New York City and in other centres of population, there are swarms of people, many of them of foreign birth, of varying races and of different nationalities, crowding each other to suffocation and many of them holding out hands for charity, who might, if rightly aided toward a different environment, work to full support of themselves and their families in the fresh air and healthful surroundings of the country. The need is to transfer city advantages to the country in far greater extent, and to transfer the people who cannot find or make a human chance in the city to the wide s.p.a.ces and work needs of the country. Rural life must be urbanized, city life must be relieved of those who hinder the making of a beautiful and n.o.ble civic life, not because they are incapable but because there are too many of them who have not yet arrived at full capacity for vocational achievement and cannot do so in the crowd with which they have to contend.
=Domestic Help and Family Life.=--For the relief of family life in the matter of domestic help there must be an intelligent and an earnest attack of educated women upon the problems involved. The admirable suggestions of Professor Lucy Salmon in her _Democracy in the Household_[16] indicate the chief difficulty in getting and keeping the right sort of domestic worker. The personal relation is not that of equals but of superior to inferior, and the helper in the home is isolated socially from the group he or she serves. This is felt peculiarly in cases where but one helper is employed within the household. The pet.i.tion of many housewives recently sent to Washington to beg that "the restriction upon immigration now in force may be lifted in the case of women who seek to enter the United States to engage in domestic labor" on the ground of a household need, dire and widespread, is an indication that many women, perhaps most, look forward to a continuance of the present conditions of domestic work but with ever-new sets of domestic workers from other lands. Their att.i.tude in this particular is wholly mistaken. Even if the races from all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to even learn how to do good work in those kitchens. The first chance they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open field of harvest would take them away. And this is not because the work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will long accept it. Miss Salmon"s ideas, if carried out, would stay the rapidity of the current away from domestic service. But a quite new approach to the whole problem must be defined and realized by women of light and leading if we would have adequate and efficient help In household work. The fact that most professional or business women find it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept, than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take a place where there were women in the family who could do the housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them."
The absurd hypocrisy that in one breath praises all work done for the comfort of the family as the highest form of service and in the next demands that the family "servant" accept all manner of inherited insignia of social inferiority must be outgrown. In the city and suburban towns the hour-service and the various forms of commercial aids to household tasks may work, as has been before indicated, to gradually do away with the servant cla.s.s, in the old sense of those words and without much social consciousness of the change. In the small towns and in the rural districts, where is now the most acute suffering and need of housemothers, there must be a conscious and a wholesale movement to reinstate domestic service on a plane compatible with democracy and amenable to high standards of intelligence and efficiency. When one thinks of the rural need for teachers, for nurses, for doctors, for kindergartners, for recreation managers, for community leaders, one is tempted to call for a social conscription that shall make all graduates from normal and teacher-training schools, from all schools for social work, and all hospitals, from all playground cla.s.ses and settlements, serve for a period of one year or two in the country districts as their part in social organization.
Surely if a government has the moral right to force youth to serve in war for purposes of destruction of enemies, it has a right to compel youth to serve in peace for purposes of human conservation and for the just sharing of social advantages by all the people of a common country!
=The Application of Democratic Principles to Life.=--Finally, the problems which inhere in work as related to the family have at their base the same great demand for equality of educational and economic opportunities which inhere in all that relates to the application of democratic principles to actual living. This is not an essay on economic theory or a statement of the results of special studies of economic condition. Still less is it an attempt to make an appeal for one or another type of economic reform. It is simply a partial view of certain work conditions as they come closest to family life. There is to this writer no more merit or demerit in any form of economic dogmatism than in any special theologic creed. We may all differ, and with reasons sufficient to our thought and without blame, on questions of how we can best attain a true democratization of the industrial order. We cannot now be of two minus as to the righteousness of such democratization. We must all believe in giving all human beings a fair chance at the best things of life; security against want, homes that offer conditions for family well-being, educational entrance into our common social inheritance, and leisure to enjoy the things that make for happiness. The baptism of religious idealism by the social spirit is now accomplished. As Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch, that great prophet of a new social order, well says in his last thought-compelling book, "The social gospel has become orthodox."
=Women Must be More Democratic.=--Women have been so long held within family interests that they, less than men, have had the discipline of democratic life within the labor world. They are often the vicarious expressions of man"s remaining aristocratic feeling, as Veblen has acutely outlined in his _Theory of the Leisure Cla.s.s_. Husbands still wish their wives to be more "select" than they find it wise longer to be themselves and more tenacious of inherited conventional forms than business or inclination longer allow for themselves. Hence, women have not, as a rule, organized their households on as democratic principles and methods as men have organized their own work. Women, now that they have attained the democratic position in the state which they have long worked for must apply the principles they have preached in that crusade for political equality in the very stronghold of social caste and rigid cla.s.s-feeling, the family life itself. And even if they have to educate their husbands in the process.
Woman may do this, first, by wiping out and forever the stigma that attaches or has attached to any woman who earns money outside her own home. They may do it, second, by so relating themselves to professional, clerical, manual workers among their own s.e.x as to show that they really believe in equality of rights and mutuality of duties among all cla.s.ses. They may do it, third, by taking hold of the household service problem radically and from the basis of actual knowledge of its importance to personal and family well-being. They may show actual regard for the dignity of the functions implied, by the treatment accorded the competent, faithful, and often indispensable domestic helper. There is a big social job waiting for women in matters concerning the work of their own s.e.x both within and without the family circle; and the social power of women will be best shown, perhaps, in settling the worst problems of domestic service by the wiser and more efficient use of better educated, more socially respected, and more definitely standardized workers within the home.
=The Social Effect of Trade Unions.=--No study of the relation of modern industry to family life, however brief and inadequate, can ignore the question, "How has the Trade Union organization of wage-earners affected the home?" The immediate and direct effect has often been disastrous when strikes and lockouts marked the course of industrial warfare. All war is bad for family life and especially injurious to the development of children. And economic war lacks the appeal to the imagination and the ceremonial prestige of war between nations or of civil war in one country. We have had in our race-experience for untold ages the linking of military training with military defence of political ideas and of the fatherland. To fight for one"s country seems highly honorable. This lift of the sense of community unity into the area of supreme struggle gives to men often what no other experience so far accomplishes, namely, a feeling of spiritual union with all other men who also struggle for what they believe to be right. In labor wars; in the strife between employer and employed, that sense of race unity even when struggling against a national enemy, that which gives what Professor James well called the "mystic element in militarism," is lacking. It is a fight between men who have and those who have not and feel themselves defrauded of just due. Hence, although the fight may be bitter even unto death, and the sacrifices of immediate comfort for ultimate ends beyond measure heroic and even wise, there can be little of the pomp and circ.u.mstance that accompany national and international warfare. The Decoration Days when heroes of past conflicts are praised and receive from all the reverence which patriotism pays to those believed to have saved some precious inheritance from harm do not yet, perhaps will never, include heroes of labor struggles for equal right and mutual justice. Yet the history of industrial changes shows beyond cavil or doubt that in this field, as in others, he who would be free himself must win his freedom. The basic principle of the Trade Union, the right and usefulness of collective bargaining, inheres in the conditions of machine-dominated and capitalized industry. In this form of labor organization the individual worker cannot bargain individually; his place in the factory is too infinitesimal and his power measured by that of his employer too invisible for such personal alignment. This fact is now not questioned by any but those so enamoured of old methods of control of the worker by those who hire him that they cannot see what has really happened both to the employer and the employed. The labor struggle had to come. The right of workers to combine and to work together for what seems to them their best interests is as inherent a part of modern democratic ideals as is the right of all citizens to vote. And since modern industry has given enormous power to a few master leaders and requires so many wage-earners to carry out its enterprises the struggle has necessarily been hard and long. No one can justly place all good behavior on one or the other side in this conflict. No one can fail to see that power attained by the Trade Unions has at times been used as selfishly as the power of the employers has been. But when we remember that until the first quarter of the nineteenth century combinations of workmen, even to respectfully ask an increase of wages or a bettering of work conditions in lessening of hours and in sanitary and moral provisions in work-places, was legally a "conspiracy," and liable to harsh punishments, we must be glad that at any temporary cost the main army of laborers has been organized from a mob of oppressed individual workers. But what a cost to the family has been often paid! Mothers already overworked and under-nourished still further starved by the "strike relief" that only serves to maintain wretchedness, not to abolish it. The sufferings of children who miss even the meagre family comfort which the too small pay of the father when at work was able to supply. The greater suffering of children shunned and ill-treated by school mates when the father is called a "scab." The deeper tragedy of experience of men who take work that their labor comrades have refused because of the claim of wife and children, and are abused, both in body and in denial of sympathy and respect, because they are thought to be traitors to their striking fellows. What is hinted at in these few words could be made into one of the great dramas of the ages if only the social imagination could take into understanding and show without partiality both sides of the picture. The time may come when it will be seen that in all wars some heroes fall on the side that is called wrong and have right to meed of deferred praise. When that time comes, the history of labor conflicts will show that in the struggle between the father"s duty to his children and the wife who shares his service to them, and his duty toward the democratizing of labor by force of battle for justice and a fair chance for all his cla.s.s, heroes and martyrs have fallen on both sides of the line. Meanwhile, the encouraging thing is that Labor Commissions and permanent Boards of Investigation and Arbitration and many government devices for securing a more even justice all around the circle of wage-earning activity are increasing in evidence as a sign that we are on the way to bring the common need for peace and order in industry to bear upon its warring elements. It only needs that the great consuming public, the final and the worst sufferer when labor wars are waged, shall understand and use its overmastering social power to bring order out of the chaos of opposing interests.
=Women"s Trade Unions.=--The entrance of women into the Trade Union field is a significant feature of modern industry. Denied in many men"s Unions the right of membership and in many fields of work competing only with those of their own s.e.x, yet obviously in need of the same declaration of rights and the same cla.s.s support of each other in securing better conditions of labor that men realized before them, the Women"s Trade Union members have much the same spirit and many of the same methods that men have used in similar bodies. They, as a rule, stand, however, for more protective legislation for women than men demand for themselves and have one element unique in such bodies. That element is the membership within Women"s Trade Unions of women of social position, of financial security and even of wealth and of broadest culture. These women who join the Trade Union League not to benefit their own cla.s.s, which is usually the professional or the employing cla.s.s, but to help wage-earning women to better conditions, have often been the laboring oar in the organization and maintenance of such Unions. Nothing a.n.a.logous to this is found in the Men"s Trade Union movement in the United States. It bears witness to two elements, one that women of the so-called privileged cla.s.ses are growing very sensitive to the claims of social justice as these are related to wage-earning women, and the other that the average age of wage-earning women is so much younger than that of men employed in similar work that the need for help from without in any effective effort for relief from bad conditions is more apparent. The transitory character of much of women"s work makes the permanent personnel of any Trade Union League of women a smaller minority of its membership than in the case of men. It is said that in any trade where both the men and the women are well organized the membership of the men"s Union will be fairly stable for twenty years, that of the women"s Union will show a radical change each five years, making almost a complete turn-over in the twenty years" count. That is, of course, due to the fact that most women use for wage-earning only the period between leaving school and marrying, usually about four and a half years. That makes the term "working-girls" most appropriate and is a contrast to the working man"s longer hold upon his trade.
=The New Solidarity of Women.=--The fact that women of all types of social advantage and disadvantage are already linked together in the Women"s Trade Union movement, has, however, deep social significance, especially as wage-earners" organizations relate themselves to family life. No woman who has had right opportunities for education and family life in her own experience can work in intimate comradeship with those who have been denied such advantages without aiming directly for social arrangements in labor which will no longer cheat any young life of its joy, its culture, or chance for its possibility of right relation in the home. The signs are full of hope that more and more members of each cla.s.s will feel that society as a whole has claims upon them above all that any group may attain by working only for its own advantage. No law of justice will stand the test of time save that which ordains an order in which "Each for All, and All for Each" will be the rule in industry as in the n.o.bler state!
QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS
1. What is most important to the success of the modern family, a minimum wage for working women or a minimum wage for men which can supply decent living for a man, his wife, and at least three children?
2. What effect has the wage-earning of married women and mothers in gainful employments outside the home had upon the stability and happiness of the family?
3. What effect have the laws protecting women and children in industry had upon family life?
4. What effect would the proposed increase of legislation placing men and women, married and single women, and unionized and non-unionized labor upon an identical legal plane be likely to have upon family life? As, for example, in the case of "deserting husbands," or in work especially inimical to women"s health?
5. How can the admitted evil of industrial exploitation of children be best and most surely prevented?
FOOTNOTES:
[16] See _American Journal of Sociology_ for January, 1912.
CHAPTER XIV
THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL
"To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge, and we judge the value of any training solely by reference to this end. For complete living we must know in what way to treat the body, in what way to treat the mind, in what way to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of others."--HERBERT SPENCER.
"The final value of all inst.i.tutions is their educational influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight, judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of regard."--JOHN DEWEY.
"Socialized education has four aims:
First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods of social intercourse,--language, number, social forms and conventions.
Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and through partic.i.p.ation in present social life.
Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.
Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized."--GEORGE ALBERT COE.
"The unbeliever says, "You can never construct a true society out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be."
But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last culture shall absorb, chaos itself."--EMERSON.
"At the present time it may be that only the least effort is needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public opinion become established in conformity with the existing conscience and the entire social organization become transformed.
It depends upon us to make the effort."--TOLSTOI.
=New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry.=--When the power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the journeyman"s right and public recognition to give distinction to the skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be called upon by kings and n.o.bles to give a.s.sent to wars and to furnish the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there has as yet developed in modern government no subst.i.tute for this older and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work, to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal service from each cla.s.s to each cla.s.s above to the tax system of modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash instead of in such personal service, took place in the era of handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on cla.s.s distinctions, and cla.s.s distinctions as wide and deep as those which modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred.
When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there was a movement to introduce into the school system a subst.i.tute for that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr.
Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called the Workingman"s School, to introduce manual training and some definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in doing.
The connection between these movements in education and the family well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker or makes him seem but a machine for others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated.
=Education a Social Process.=--These elements are attempts to socialize education. We say that education is a process in the development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life.
Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people, in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the ideals, the customs, and the inst.i.tutional forms deemed by them necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education, have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor Todd in his book, _The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_.
=The Three Learned Professions.=--When there were but three learned professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action, soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those of selected cla.s.ses. Now the social need is for trained talent in a far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most part on a par with each other.
=New Calls for Trained Leadership.=--This pressure of the new subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new conceptions of common social need. All this movement in the educational world has a direct and immediate influence upon family life. What was good in the old domestic training for individual life-work we are trying to put into the school, and what is needed for skill and leadership in the modern industrial order we are trying to put into the college and university. This means not only that the family rule is less deferred to in the education of even the youngest child, it also means that if we would save the family influence in education we must bring the parents and teachers together in council and in united control as never before. This is being attempted; the Mothers" Club and the Parent-Teacher a.s.sociations now in evidence being impressive symbols of a larger social movement through books, pamphlets, magazines, reports, and "Foundations," together with clubs of more general social type. The value of the Trade Unions and of other special forms of organization of workers in the matter of securing rights and opportunities in the labor world has been alluded to, but the definite educational value of such cla.s.s organizations must not be ignored. It is true that there is a loss of emphasis upon skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and coa.r.s.eness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other organizations. To emphasize cla.s.s feeling, it is said, is to work against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one cla.s.s is ignored, as "hands," not heads, is still more detrimental to democratic government. The cla.s.s consciousness of the worker was strong in the days when the Guilds had political power, and it was a wholesome check upon the claim of divine right of kings and n.o.bles to rule. The cla.s.s consciousness of wage-earners is needed in modern times and should have its due representation in halls of legislation where it could meet naturally, in healthful compet.i.tion and debate, the cla.s.s consciousness already there in the persons of employers of labor and managers of legal interests of great corporations. The education that will finally unite in better understood cooperation all cla.s.s interests in public well-being is to be found in such use of the school as will show how we are all bound together in industry, as in the political body; in work as in voting power. That education which, with more or less intelligence and with deeper or more shallow understanding, society is now working toward will make the home life more secure as well as the state more united.
=The Special Education of Girls.=--The application of new educational ideals and methods to the training of girls and young women is of first-rate importance in the matter of home relationship to the school. And this is the case not only because there are far more women than men at work in carrying out those ideals and methods in the schools but because if there is to be made valid and useful, conscious and definite, union of school and home in one educational approach to childhood it must be largely through the mothers and women-teachers that such union can be effected. The reasons for this are too obvious to require explanation.
There are those who believe that there is no question of s.e.x-differences in education, that all that is needed is to open all educational opportunities to boys and girls alike and give both precisely the same instruction. There are also those who still believe that some varying elements of child-training and the instruction of youth should be retained and further developed in the case of boys and girls. Some basic facts must be in mind when we attempt to answer the question, Shall we try for somewhat divergent schooling for the two s.e.xes?
First of all, we must remember that we have inherited the fruits of a long race-experience in which men and women were for the most part so separated from, each other in functioning that the education of boys and girls was made wholly unlike after s.e.x-differentiation began, and sometimes, as in Sparta, before that period. The difference in ideal and in method of training was not, as some have said, that "boys were trained for human and socialized work" and "girls were fitted for personal and generally menial service alone." Both were trained for personal character and for social ends. The men were tied to the land, and the political order, and the family responsibility for parenthood, and some distinct personal service in behalf of the group life, as were the women. The difference, the tremendous difference, was this: that the service demanded of men, whatever their part or lot might be, was early seen to require a definite schooling for some particular vocation, demanding some measure of intellectual concentration and technical skill; while the service demanded of women was supposed to be of a nature requiring only general apprenticeship within the family life. The specialization of labor, as is often shown, took from that family apprenticeship of women, one by one, its vocational elements of manual work until the housemother seemed to need only that general ability which can quickly and wisely use the fruits of others" expert knowledge and technical training. It as surely added for men, in every division of vocational alignment, an increasing differentiation of training and of labor. The reaction upon the educative process of this specialization and organization of industrial and inst.i.tutional life has been distinct and far-reaching. The girls were left to the experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculture manufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation, women were again left out of control of the processes which man"s organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any conception of the need for sending girls to school. In point of fact, as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of the human race" and have had to "break in" to man"s more highly organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all other social inst.i.tutions to itself too vitally for the s.e.xes to be wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to make a cross instead of signing their names on official doc.u.ments and could not have pa.s.sed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were denied formal school training so long after such denial became actively injurious to the family and group life was because the popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to fit boys for "a man"s part in the world."
=Formal School Training of Women New.=--When the principle of democracy began to work in women"s natures with an irrepressible yeast of revolt against longer denial of opportunity for individual achievement, and the vitally necessary and too-long-delayed "woman"s rights movement" was born, its first pressure was against the closed doors of the "man-made" school. Enlightened women now demanded equal chance with men for preparation for vocations. The school they sought to enter was inherited from a past in which not only s.e.x lines but cla.s.s lines held the opportunities of higher education for a small clique. The ancient college and university did indeed lead towards vocations, but only the three "learned professions" and general training for commanding leadership in state and industrial affairs.
When physical, economic, and social sciences were born the study disciplines they introduced into higher education appeared in answer to an imperious social demand that leadership should be provided in a vastly more varied range than the older civilization required. At first the leaders in the higher education of women, like all _nouveaux riche_, showed determination to prove themselves adept in the traditions of the scholastic world into which they had so recently entered. Cla.s.sic curricula were strictly adhered to and all "practical" courses viewed with open distrust except those leading to the inherited professions, and to teaching, as these were pushed upward toward college professorships. Happily, however, almost coincident with the entrance of women into larger educational opportunity came the broadening of that educational opportunity itself to which reference has been made; and the marvelous growth of the State Universities in the United States rapidly increased both the more varied vocational stimuli and the wider preparation for leadership now opening in our country for women as for men.
=New Training for Social Service.=--Two movements have resulted from the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease, poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack of rational social consciousness and effective social control, then it speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture and of social organization for common human welfare. This conviction led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply, housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment.
It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers, doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for the most part women are true to their s.e.x-heritage now that they have a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life, the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the wayward, and the undeveloped--these, which have been their special tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their main business in the more complex situations of modern life.
=Departments of Household Economics in Colleges.=--When the departments of household economics were added to college courses they were hailed on one side as a needed attempt to "make the higher education fit women for wifehood and motherhood;" and on the other side they were opposed as a base concession to conservative views of woman"s position, and as leading toward a lowering of standards in women"s higher education. They were, and are, neither of these. The college courses in subjects related to the scientific improvement of human beings and their environment are courses leading toward new vocational specialties, which the newly outlined science of race-culture demands. Women who excel in these specialties do so as paid functionaries and are oftener unmarried than married. Nor are these studies limited to feminine students, although far more women than men choose them. The interrelation of the present social order by which a milk or a water supply has to do with "big business" and with law, and "a garbage can is a metal utensil entirely surrounded by politics," requires some knowledge of these things on the part of men; especially if they are to be "heckled" in political campaigns by women voters. There are, to be sure, now outlined school training "departments of homemaking" intended to help individual women in their work in private homes, but such departments are generally of the nature of "extension courses." Regular college courses, especially those of four years and leading to a special degree, in household economics, as in other groups of studies, lead directly toward a vocational career, standardized and salaried, related to general social organization, and subject to the "factory" tendencies of the modern industrial order. Students in such courses, generally speaking, graduate either to teach household arts in schools and extension work, or to take positions as expert diet.i.tians, managers of hospitals and other public inst.i.tutions, directors of laundries and restaurants, as trained nurses, a.s.sistants or directors in chemical laboratories, architects, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, and what not.