The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 16
In planning a future of self-support a girl will do well to choose a trade or profession which is as yet uncrowded. She will avoid any field already filled to overflowing, all work to which other girls flock not by scores but by hundreds, thereby reducing not only the number of openings, but the standard of wages. She should not be content to study the various lines of work for women as they appear to-day, but as they will look a year, five years, ten years from now.
This is particularly true of the girl who plans to engage in educational or social work. Specialization and success are synonymous terms for the teacher or the philanthropic worker, but specialization in any study which may be discarded or abbreviated in public or private schools during the next five years is sheer waste of time.
Before taking any special course of training
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as a teacher or social worker, study the tendencies of the schools or charities in that State where you expect to find employment. The newer educational movement is toward a readjustment of the curriculum to meet the peculiar needs of the twentieth-century child. Those who lead the movement maintain that we have been teaching the child how to study, but not how to live. We have been giving him the right view-point for studying books, but the wrong methods of meeting life's stern problems. Educational prophets predict that during the next five years courses of study will fall like so many card-houses, and from the ruins will rise a beautiful new structure of practical schoolroom work in which hands and bodies, as well as minds, will be trained.
One result of the new eductional movement is a general awakening to the importance of introducing the domestic arts into public and private schools. Dressmaking, millinery, cookery, laundry work, general housekeeping and the eare of children and the sick will soon become features of every course in both city and rural schools. Whether it is true or not that the modern mother no longer trains her daughter in the domestic arts and that the girl must be taught home-making in the schoolroom or not at all, is a question quite apart from this chapter, but the fact remains that any girl who has domestic instincts and the time to specialize as a teacher or a social worker, will make no mistake in taking a course in domestic science or the domestic arts.
Such workers are now in very serious demand and will be until the oncoming army of teachers realizes the importance of substituting such practical branches for the old classical or academic branches. Graduates from schools of domestic science or the domestic arts have no trouble in securing positions to-day. In fact, the position seeks the graduate if she has made any sort of record in the training-school. Boards of education all over the country and principals of private schools are looking for earnest teachers and supervisors, and one great mid-West city has announced that it will pay three thousand a year to the right woman for the post of supervisor of domestic arts in its public schools.
Ten years from now domestic science may be an overcrowded field. To-day it is practically uncultivated and offers many opportunities to the woman who takes special training along that line.
The graduate from a training-school for teachers like Teachers College, connected with Columbia University, New York, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, or Simmons College, Boston, is eligible for the position of teacher or supervisor in city or country schools, or she may become matron of an institution, such as a home or orphanage or asylum or hospital; or she may teach domestic arts in settlement houses, Young Women's Christian Association classes, girls' friendly clubs, etc., or she may establish herself as a private teacher and demonstrator of cookery and dietetics, and travel from city to city, organizing classes. The domestic arts are on the verge of a revival, and rich and poor alike will come under the spell.
First—Domestic science for teachers.
Every first-class school of domestic science demands as the entrance qualification a high-school education or its equivalent. This means that it is practically useless for a girl who has never gone beyond the eighth grade to apply for entrance into a college where domestic science is taught as a special course. The course generally occupies two years, and the minimum cost of tuition is twenty-five dollars per term, three terms in a year, or $150 in all. During the first year the pupil studies elementary sewing, drawing and other manual arts, as well as various kitchen accomplishments, such as cookery, serving, laundry work, etc. At the end of the first year the student elects to specialize either on advanced domestic science alone or on advanced arts, such as dressmaking, millinery, basket-weaving, etc.
Those who elect domestic art must have shown during the first year more than ordinary artistic ability and hand skill, and they are prepared upon graduation to teach elementary and advanced handwork, sewing, dressmaking, millinery, embroidery and elementary cookery.
Those who elect domestic science are prepared to teach cookery, dietetics, marketing, serving, household accounts, household economics, including cleaning, laundry work and hygiene and sanitation for the elementary, grammar and high, public and private schools, colleges and technical schools, including training-schools for nurses; to be dietitians, supervising institutional housekeepers and caterers; instructors in elementary domestic art (handwork, including braiding, knotting, netting, crocheting, knitting, weaving, caning, basketry, hand and machine sewing, drafting and household furnishing) for the elementary and grammar, public and private schools, and wherever else elementary domestic art is taught.
To the uninitiated it would seem as if very little difference existed between the two courses, but in reality the domestic-science course appeals most strongly to the practical girl; domestic arts to the artistic or theoretical mind.
Salaries for this work vary. At an orphan asylum in New York City a teacher of domestic science or cookery receives thirty dollars per month, in addition to being furnished with a nice private room and excellent board, and she is permitted to teach a private class outside the orphanage one afternoon in the week. A teacher of cooking, serving and domestic science in its elementary form in one of the model schools receives fifty dollars per month, while the supervising teacher of domestic arts, including many, forms of manual training for boys and girls, is paid $1,200 per year.
Positions as teachers of domestic science presuppose city life, and the country girl who has decided to take this course must realize that any position offered to her on graduation will entail her remaining in the city.
While not mentioned in the catalogue of any college, university or institute, the study of domestic science includes the development of the business instinct. Long before a student receives her diploma she realizes that she requires something beside mere knowledge to advance in her profession. She must have "push" if she will secure a desirable position and rise to the post of supervisor.
The private teacher of domestic science must overcome the prejudice of old-fashioned parents and the indifference of society-absorbed young women before she can hope to organize her class. She must develop some novel scheme of instruction or surround herself with some unusual environment before she can attract the attention of matrons for whom the ordinary cooking-class has lost its charm. In one fashionable suburban town, a clever graduate, who had sent out circulars in vain, deserted the kitchen of her mother, where she had expected to teach, and rented a quaint, old-fashioned cottage, furnishing living-room, dining-room and kitchen with the last remnant of her inheritance. The living-room was for afternoon tea, the dining-room for luncheons, and the kitchen, furnished in Delft effects, was for lectures and demonstrations. In her tea and lunch-rooms she offered such dainty refreshments and such odd food combinations that pupils flocked to her lectures. She admits that had she sought to establish herself by ordinary methods she might have failed.
Another lecturer on domestic science has acquired great popularity in various States because of her apparent enthusiasm for the dishes for which each community is famous. In reality she is simply tactful and diplomatic. While she taught Northern cookery to Southern women, and vice versa, she left the impression that, after all, the specialties of each city or community were far superior to anything she had to offer. While she praised chicken gumbo in New Orleans, she did not pretend to teach her class of Southerners how to make gumbo, but she did manage to secure many an old family recipe to bring back to her Northern pupils. When she found that in certain cities mistresses of homes took no interest in cookery or dietetics, she quickly announced classes for servants, and wealthy women subscribed in large numbers and sent their maids to the lectures.
In a mid-West city, a pioneer in domestic science tried in vain to establish herself as a lecturer and demonstrator, and finally when a salary of five dollars per week looked very desirable to her she accepted an offer from an editor of a local paper to conduct a household column on his woman's page two days in each week. Women began to write to her for advice on household questions, and she answered their questions conscientiously, in a happy, personal vein. To-day she has all the cooking classes she can handle, drawn largely from the ranks of the very women who had tossed her neatly-engraved announcement cards into the waste-basket. Another Western student of domestic science is now State Inspector of Foods.
For women who wish to do, rather than to teach, there is offered a special course, one year in length, known as the course in dietetics and housekeeping, designed to prepare women to become dietitians, matrons and skilled housekeepers for institutions. I quote from a catalogue of a school whose graduates are in great demand:
"It is essential that the applicants who desire to be dietitians, matrons or professional housekeepers be mature women of fair general training, with executive ability, experience in life, skill in practical housework, physical strength and endurance. Only such women as possess these qualifications, which are necessary elements of success in housekeeping, are advised to take this training for professional use."
This course prescribes two terms, three months each, of student work in the school, and three months of probationary professional service in any institution where the candidate for a certificate can find employment. In this respect it resembles the probationary period of the trained nurse. Among the studies are principles of cookery, dietetics, marketing, serving and accounts, physiology, chemistry, physical training, diet for children, diet for invalids, laundry work, household economics, fancy cookery, dietaries for families and general household sanitation.
Graduates from this one-year course are frequently employed as matrons in schools, homes and hospitals, where sanitary kitchens and properly prepared food are essential to the good—health of the institution.
Women often ask: "But how do I know that I can secure a position after I graduate?"
In learning any trade, there comes to you gradually the knowledge of how to secure work. It is part of your training. The modern school is a veritable clearing-house of energies, and in this process the girl who has graduated from a school with credit to herself and her alma mater generally steps directly into a position. But you must bear in mind that there are some women who, with a diploma in one hand and a bunch of influential letters in the other, would fail to secure a position because they lack personality. Diplomas must have the backing of patience, personality, enthusiasm and an earnest desire to "make good" in the first opening that comes your way.
If you lack the ability to make friends, and the gift of organization, do not study domestic science even to become a matron. The matron must organize a staff of servants and maintain discipline. She must know that others are doing their work properly, rather than drop into small routine duties herself. She must be dignified yet show by her instructions that she could do every stroke of the work herself.
"What will the complete course in domestic science, including board, cost?" inquire many correspondents.
That depends entirely upon the girl, her tastes and her mode of living. The tuition (minimum) averages $75 per year of three terms. Board at $6 per week can be obtained in the neighbor—hood of the average institution where domestic science is taught, and this for the average school-year of nine months or thirty-eight weeks would amount to $228. There will be some incidental expenses, such as visiting institutions to study domestic economics in actual operation, outside lectures, etc. A graduate of such a course tells me that each pupil should allow at least $10 a week for board, clothing and in—cidental expenses.