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Page 29
In the second place, girls must get ready to be women. The education of
the home and the school must be unified, and together they must give a
training that will lead girls into the actualities of the life that lies
before them. Our present elementary schools, and still more our high
schools, lead girls neither to intelligent work nor to intelligent
living as women and mothers. Up to at least the age of fourteen, the
education should be general, looking to the development of all the
powers of body, mind and sensibilities. But through all these eight or
ten years of training, two factors should receive constant and
intelligent attention. In the first place, we should realize that we are
not fitting women for drawing-rooms nor for convents, but for a working
world; therefore well graded and interesting manual training should run
through all these years and should furnish a well-developed base for
later special industrial preparation of some kind. In the second place,
the girls should be taught by men and women, married and unmarried, and
fine ideals of actual womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in
school-rooms, and in professions--but also in homes, should be
constantly held before them. Our present education leaves this training
mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic rich nor our eight
million wage-earning women, when mothers, can or will attend to it.
After the girl reaches the age of fourteen, she should have at least two
years of further education in which she could master the details of some
necessary work which would enable her to look the world in the face and
offer fair payment for her living. With most girls, this work would be
connected with children and the service of the home; for domestic
service, no matter how organized, must always occupy a multitude of
women. All girls should have at least rudimentary training in these
matters.
During the period of transition from schools to their own family life,
the girls might well give a half dozen years to work in factories and
stores where the conditions should be as good, and as well guarded, as
in our best school buildings--in factories, in a word, where the
employers would be willing that their own daughters should work. This is
surely a fair standard. Work which is not safe or fit for me to do, is
not fit for me to hire done. If this principle fails, then democracy is
but a dream.
But during all this period of preparation we should never forget that,
as Madame Gnauck-K�hne so admirably points out, "women's work has to a
large extent an episodic character."[39] All women confront romantic
love, marriage and children; and any woman who misses them misses the
crowning joy and glory of her life. Vicarious realization may save the
soul, but it can never fill the place of reality. The man fronts these
same experiences, but they are not related to his work as they are
related to the work of women. Surely there can be no doubt that the
ideal solution, in this period, is a man and woman so deeply bound
together by love that there is no question of self-protection, either in
terms of work or money; and the man being freed from the burdens of
maternity, should mainly earn the income. We shall discuss the new type
of home and family in a later chapter, but in any home where there are
children there is need of an intelligent mother's very constant care.
[39] Madame GNAUCK K�HNE, _Die Deutsche Frau_.
If a happy home were the universal destiny of women, our problem would
be greatly simplified; but this is far from being the case. Not more
than one-half of all women over fifteen are married at any one moment.
From the ages of twenty to thirty-five, one-half are married; but it is
only from thirty-five to fifty-five that as many as three-fourths are
married; over fifty-five there are less than one-half married, and most
of the others are widows.[40] Most of these women who are not married
must work outside the home, and no girl, rich or poor, should be allowed
to reach maturity without being prepared to face this possibility. Work
is not a curse but a blessing; it is an indispensable part of every
well-ordered life; and without it, the individual and the group will
certainly degenerate. Rich and foolish parents, who cannot realize this
basal fact, should nevertheless see that, even as insurance, their
daughters must be able to pay their way in life, if need comes, without
selling themselves either in marriage or out. Even if the woman marries
happily, she is never sure that she may not some day have to face
self-support, and possibly for more mouths than her own.
[40] B.L. HUTCHINS, Woman's Industrial Career in _The Sociological
Review_, October, 1909.
But the woman who marries during her adolescent period, between the ages
of twenty-five and fifty, must also work, and here we meet the hardest
problem of all. More money is often needed than the man can earn; the
wife may bring an industrial or professional equipment which is too
valuable to discard; often the demands of the home, especially where
there are no children, do not call forth the best energies of the
woman, and she needs the larger life of outside work. Hence many married
women must continue to work away from the home. In any of these cases,
the problem is difficult. Bearing and rearing a child should retire a
mother from fixed outside occupation for at least a year. Arguments born
out of conflict cannot change this primitive fact.[41] Women should not
do shop or factory work during the last months of pregnancy, and babies
should be nursed from seven to nine months. A baby should be nursed for
twenty minutes, every two or three hours of its waking time; and since
it does not always waken regularly, the nursing mother is debarred from
most continuous work, even if it does not interfere with her
effectiveness as a milk producer.
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