y speaking, women
have been secluded from the influences of the world.[4]
The increase in the proportion of girls engaged in non-domestic pursuits
means that industrial vocations for women are becoming more dissociated
from the arts of home-making,--a fact which is doubtless the cause of many
an inner struggle.
In the present lack of industrial education young girls who must work to
support themselves or their families drift about from place to place with
no definite vocational aims. Frequently they come to the offices of child
labor commissions wanting work, but not knowing what they can do, or even
what they would like to do. If they do find work, it is rarely of a sort
that offers incentives for a career. Lack of skill, of interests, and of
ambitions result in industrial inefficiency. They are also the usual
accompaniments of moral delinquency.
Even where opportunities for industrial training are offered, they may not
lessen the disparity between industrial opportunities that exist for girls
and womanly tastes. A recent report on the need for a trade school for
girls in Worcester, Massachusetts, advocates a school that will train for
skill in the machine-operating trades, because there is most demand for
workers in these trades.[5] One might think in reading the report that
machines for stitching corsets and underwear provided the ideal vocation
for women. Biological considerations, if no others, would favor
distribution of wage-earning women away from the mechanical pursuits into
those which are more or less associated with the domestic arts.
A further significance for social hygiene of the entrance of women into
industry is that it places a strain upon the spirit of chivalry which is a
basis of right relations between the sexes. Chivalry in men has
accompanied the comparative seclusion of women from the world, and is due
to those instincts which lead men to protect those who are weaker than
themselves. The term "the weaker sex" has a sound physiological basis.
With the passing of the domestic system of industry, however, the
seclusion of women becomes more and more a thing of the past. In factory
and shop they mingle promiscuously with men. Crowds of young working-girls
in every large city at the noon hour throng the streets. If they walk to
and from work they sometimes have to pass unprotected through parts of
the city given over to vice.[6] They thus become familiar with vice
conditions and are often subje
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