The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 8
To the girl thrown suddenly upon her own resources and forced to earn her living, not in a few months or weeks, but to-morrow, millinery offers no practical inducements. Neither is it the trade to be chosen by the girl who intends to remain in business just long enough to earn a trousseau or to support herself until her fiancé is financially able to marry.
It does not yield quick returns. Its apprenticeship is so ill-paid that it does not insure even the shelter of a working-girl's home. And there is no royal road to millinery success.
On the other hand, perhaps no trade, distinctly feminine, promises more certain, more lasting rewards to the ambitious girl with the true business instinct. Once thoroughly mastered, it places her in a position of absolute independence. She does not have to seek work. Positions and employers seek her. It is, therefore, worthy the consideration of the deft-fingered girl whose ambitions are commercial rather than matrimonial.
Openings are to be found in both the retail and the wholesale establishments. In the large cities, each branch of the trade has two distinct seasons. The spring retail season in the workrooms runs from February 1st to May 30th. The fall season in the retail shop runs from August 15th to November ist. In the wholesale establishments the spring trade lasts from January 1st to March 15th, the fall trade from July 1st to September 30th.
The girl who would succeed in millinery must have deft fingers, a genius for combining colors, ambition, energy and a tremendous capacity for hard work. Before her rise five uncomprising steps which lead to the capstone of efficiency and the coveted position of buyer.
Having decided that she has the natural ability and the persistency to learn the trade, she will apply to the owner or forewoman of a millinery establishment just before the season opens, which means in the retail field about the first of February or the middle of August. If she has traded regularly at a certain store, and if her family has a personal friend employed in a millinery workroom, an introduction through such a medium is invaluable. If she is accepted as a learner or apprentice, she will spend the first season making bandeaux, the bands tacked under the crowns and brims of hats to give them the correct tilt or raised effect. Day in and day Bras out, she will sew wire and canvas together. For this she will receive $1.50 per week, unless it is a small shop and she is willing to sweep and dust out, in which case she will be paid $3 per week. If she is particularly apt, at the end of the season she may be promised promotion to the post of improver. If she has not made a good record, she must return for a second season as an apprentice, and make more bandeaux for another three months.
As an improver, she makes frames and shirs maline, chiffon, lace, velvet and other fabrics for hat foundations at a salary varying from $5 to $8 per week. These two steps usually absorb at least a year and a half of her training.
The third step is the post of preparer or milliner. Outsiders call any woman engaged in the business a milliner. To the trade, the preparer or milliner is the worker who makes the hat, covers it, sorts out the trimmings suggested, and prepares everything as ordered by the woman above her—the trimmer. Her salary during this period varies from $8 to $15. With her next step upward, her dependance upon other women ceases. From this time on she rises or falls through her own ability or inefficiency.
The fourth step is the position of copyist. Here her work consists of reproducing imported models, and if she is accurate in her imitations and is able to give the copy the "air" of the model hat, she will command from $15 to $25 per week, according to the size of the shop and city in which she works.
Step number five makes her the autocrat of the shop—the trimmer. Now she originates her own designs and commands as high as $75 a week. The woman who reaches this point is in line for the position of buyer, which, with many establishments, represents semi-annual trips to Paris. The girl who combines with her practical knowledge of the trade a natural commercial instinct, or the knowledge of what to buy and how much, can name her own salary.
This sort of woman seldom has difficulty in securing financial backing, if she desires to open a shop of her own. In fact, there is no limit to the commercial possibilities which her trade opens up. But it must be borne in mind that fully five years of patient, conscientious work, together with intelligent observation and strict attention to the commercial end of the trade or merchandising are required to place a woman in this independent and assured position.
"Is there no way by which I can escape this irksome apprenticeship? Are there no schools where millinery is taught?"
These question come from every point of the compass, for the average American girl has begun to believe that anything and everything can be learned in one trade school or another, and thus save her the period of humble service through which her aunts and great-aunts passed.
In reply I can only say that the apprenticeship cannot be escaped. Millinery cannot be learned from books. Its theory can be presented by means of charts and blackboard drawings, but the finger—your fingers—must be come familiar with, and deft at, the various forms of stitchery. Familiarity and deftness come with practice, not with the study of theory. If the reader thinks she would like to become a milliner, provided she did not have to serve three or six months making bandeaux, then let her enter a trade high school, or elect the domestic arts course in her last years at school, and get what theoretical and practical training the public schools offer. Then when she enters the millinery shop—and enter it by the learners' door she certainly must—shetmay know how to make bandeaux, and, if she proves this to the milliner and trimmer, she will soon be intrusted with a better grade of work.
But if the reader has any idea that she can take a "get-the-salary-quick" course at a private school which offers to teach millinery in three to six months at a tuition fee varying from $15 to $50, and immediately secure a position as trimmer in a good shop, she is making a grave mistake. In any schoolroom, where an hour a day or perhaps a few hours each day are given to work on material provided by the pupil, to be made into a hat for her own wear, the training cannot be so thorough as where the worker spends eight hours a day with her needle, working on materials for which an employer pays and which she must neither waste nor spoil. Moreover, the teacher in a private class does not like to offend the student who is paying for tuition, and who may recommend the school to other pupils, so she kindly but injudiciously overlooks careless stitchery, slovenly work, and inefficient methods, and thus the student-worker acquires habits which no forewoman in a good shop would tolerate.
One of the most famous endowed schools for the technical training of women makes this announcement in its year book: "Millinery Course. Five days a week—three months. Applicants should be sixteen years of age, at least, and must be able to do simple sewing. The student provides her own materials for classroom work, and is recommended to have on hand old materials which may be renovated and used in making and trimming hats. A course in simple business methods is given on one afternoon each week. Two afternoons are devoted to drawing hats, that ability may be gained in sketching hats at exhibitions or openings. Students who are good workers and desire positions after completing this course are recommended to wholesale and retail houses in the city.
"Course of Study—Designing, drafting and making of buckram and wire frames. Study of form, color and textiles. Making plain covered hats with different finishing for brims. Making bows. Covering wire frames with straw braids and other materials. Making children's hats. Designing, making and trimming of all styles of hats, according to the season. Practice in pencil sketching of bows and simple hats. Time and memory sketches. The study of textiles as related to different types.
"Tuition fee—$25 for three months."
This little announcement, more clearly than any argument I might prepare, demonstrates the impossibility of cramming a millinery apprenticeship into three months of school work. And in justice to these recognized trade schools, it must be said that they do not deceive pupils by promising high-salaried positions, nor do they pretend to save a pupil the irksome months as an apprentice. When a girl talks with the head of such a training-school, she soon learns that an abbreviated course of this sort, in connection with other branches of the domestic or household arts, aims to develop the all-round, capable home woman, the woman who can administer her household economically, make her own simple clothes, and trim her own hats. The trade schools which promise to turn out competent trade workers or self-supporting graduates offer a two or three-year course, and the girl who elects this course serves as gradual and thorough an apprenticeship as she would in a shop.
Retailers and wholesalers who employ many girls tell me that occasionally a girl who has taken a short course in millinery makes a phenomenal record in the workroom, but she would do the same thing had she entered the room as an apprentice without training, because she is a born milliner and business woman combined. Again, girls who have been trained in a trade school must practically acquire the trade anew, or drop it entirely when they enter a workshop, because they did slovenly work in school and will not do conscientious, thorough work in the shop.
This chapter should not be misconstrued as an attack on the trade school. The girl who elects the technical high-school course and then enters a millinery workroom certainly has the advantage over the girl who never went to a trade school and whose fingers are awkward and unused to handwork of any sort. But I certainly do wish to warn girls against the type of private trade schools which assures the student that she will be saved all apprenticeship and be able to take a place as trimmer on leaving the school. These irresponsible managers of rapid-instruction schools are to blame for the tremendous influx of half-trained girls into the trade fields. Their "graduates" must compete with girls who have worked their way up by hard experience. Unwilling to start afresh and acquire a practical knowledge of the trade, they hang on the fringe of the millinery world, working for a mere pittance and never rising to that position of independence which a real knowledge of the trade insures.
"But I know a woman who is head of the millinery department of a store and she cannot trim a hat!" exclaims one reader.
Quite possibly this is true, for I know just such a woman. She cannot trim a hat—but she knows how it ought to be trimmed, and she knows a great many other important points in the business or she would not be head of the department. And she served a hard apprenticeship.
The successful woman to whom I refer started fifteen years ago as errand girl in the millinery department of a then young store. When the saleswomen in the department wanted some one to hold hats for them while serving a customer, or a girl to run upstairs and get a hat which the trimmer was just finishing, this little twelve-year-old worker did their bidding. When hats were to be delivered by special messenger, she carried them home. Thus she heard the comments of customers. She learned why some girls are better saleswomen than others. She found out that by changing the tilt of a hat, the direction of a feather, the arrangement of a bow or a flower, an unbecoming hat became becoming—and salable.
In the workroom she studied how waste was prevented by competent trimmers and forewomen. She learned the values of trimmings and of workers. She saw how the firm guarded against loss through carrying too heavy a stock.
When other errand girls went into the shop to sew, she preferred to remain in the showrooms and run errands between the shop and the showroom. When she was sixteen and donned long skirts, she commenced to sell hats. She studied the faces of her customers and never let one of them leave the store unless the hat suited the face. She drew trade such as the store had never been able to control.
In time the buyer of the department consulted her about styles preferred by her trade. The head saleswoman left the store to marry, and the one-time errand girl succeeded her. Armed with this authority, she entered the workroom and dictated the department's policy. She knew what her trade wanted and insisted that the milliners under her should please her trade. The firm, watching the growing profits in the department, backed her with its authority.
The buyer of the department, who also bought for the ribbon department, died suddenly of heart-disease. The one-time errand girl was appointed as his successor and at his salary.
She served an apprenticeship to become a buyer. She would have become the buyer in any department where she started, simply because it was in her to succeed. She made a study of the department, its trade, and its trend. She did not pretend to trim a hat, but she could tell a customer how an undesirable hat could be made becoming, and then from the customer she went to the milliner and had the change made. Some day she will own a shop, and no forewoman, milliner or trimmer will be able to waste her stock or distate the policy of her establishment.
And that brings us to the common mistake of the woman with a little capital.
"My husband died recently, leaving me three thousand dollars in life insurance. I want to invest at least half of it in some sort of business. We have no good millinery store in this town. How shall I start one?"
Any number of pitiful little tragedies of finance are suggested by these letters. For even when a woman is advised against the step she follows her own inclination and opens the shop, only to lose all through her ignorance of the trade. She does not know how to buy. She does not know how to direct the work of those whose knowledge of hat-making and trimming is necessary to draw custom. She is deceived by unscrupulous jobbers and wholesalers.
The woman with a little money to invest should not consider opening a millinery store unless she can spend at least two seasons actually working in a wholesale trimming establishment in a millinery center like New York, Chicago, or St. Joe. She should take any sort of work offered, and keep her eyes everlastingly open to what is going on around her in the workroom. At the end of her second season she may not know how to trim hats, but she will know many tricks of the trade, and how to select a trimmer for her venture, also something about buying goods. This work in a trade center may not even pay her board, unless she lives at a home for working-girls; but on the other hand it may open her eyes to the pitfalls of the business, and save for herself and her family the money she was so keen to invest.
If she cannot serve the commercial apprenticeship, then she should find a practical partner, rather than hire all of her workers. Perhaps there is a really competent milliner in her own town or vicinity, struggling with the problem of small capital or a shop which she cannot afford to make attractive or which is located far from the center of the town. If the practical trimmer and the widow with money to invest can join forces, the widow's investment will be much safer, for her partner's aim will be to buy as frugally as possible and thus insure the biggest possible profits. On the other hand, the milliner working on salary for the inexperienced investor of small capital will think only of making a big showing to the trade. She will order stock far beyond the needs of the town, and unless she is an unusual character she will not prevent the small leaks in the workroom which cut down profits and often lead to failure.