Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

In the class room Lillian, a frail girl of thirteen, had apparently made only the impression of being a slow, sleepy, listless child. The first interviews showed her ill at ease. She studied hard every evening, she insisted; but when she was questioned in the class all the carefully memorized facts flew to the winds, she was so afraid. History was her Waterloo. Try as she would, she could not conquer. The outlook was not promising. The visit to the home revealed that she loved to draw. Tony, the black and white spaniel, and Nellie, his fox-terrier companion, had up to that time been her only models. In her leisure moments she sketched them lying before the kitchen stove, or curled up, asleep, under the table.

When her teacher was told how she was found occupying her time at home, her reply was prompt: “Yes, I remember now, she does seem fond of drawing.” A conference was arranged with the principal and a way was found of giving Lillian a chance to develop further this gift, her one excellency. Her fifth grade work was so re-arranged as to allow her to take drawing with the seventh grade, where she found greater variety and a teacher eager to let her express herself. At the same time she was introduced to a volunteer worker, a woman to whom history was an unending joy and with her she spent evening after evening making friends with facts, people, and dates that up to that moment had been total strangers to her. Later she was transferred to a trade school in which she was given an opportunity to specialize in designing.

In some pupils what appears as indifference or inattention may in truth be only a temperamental peculiarity which, if individual attention were possible, would in time be modified. The relation of pupil and teacher is at bottom one of sympathetic understanding. This is why sometimes, where one fails, the other succeeds, and herein lies the advantage of having several teachers to a grade. It makes possible a shifting about and increases the child’s chances of being understood. The desirability of this cannot be overestimated.

Another way in which the need of unusual children is met is the so-called “rapid progress class,” into which are put those children who are capable of making more than two grades in a year. Strange as it may on the surface appear, some of the children entrusted to the charge of the visiting teacher prove in the end to be just this type. For one reason or another, the routine of the regular class does not hold the child’s interest, and, as we all know, in such instances energy like that will not remain pent up. It is in its determination to find an outlet that it comes into conflict with established order.

Sometimes it is best to give the child a training wholly different from that offered by the school he is attending. Not all minds respond alike to the same stimuli. It often seems an utter waste to insist upon children plodding doggedly at subjects which make no appeal to them. Here lies the opportunity for vocational training. More than one case of apathy on the part of a child has been dispelled when a chance was given him to express himself in some sort of manual or industrial activity.

Occasionally it is found that at neither the door of the home nor at that of the school can the whole blame for the child’s failure to live up to his best moments be laid. There are times when he is under the kindly influence, if such it be, of neither one nor the other. It is at such times that his energies should be given a chance at wholesome expression, so that they may not be tempted to seek the baser kinds, in which the streets of a large city abound. It is interesting to note how a beneficient “wider view” reacts upon the school and home environment, making of what was once a listless, joyless, or obstinate, untractable, child one that gives out in “measure brimful and overflowing” the happiness that was but his birthright.

The question that naturally suggests itself is What is the result of the action taken? What outcome can be expected from having secured active co-operation in 568 homes; from having changed the class of 92 children, the school of 56, and made other school adjustments for 125; from having called into play 288 outside agencies in the shape of clubs, classes, and excursions and 604 agencies such as hospitals, relief societies, day nurseries, scholarship funds, reformatories, settlements, public libraries, etc., and from having sent 208 children to the country on extended visits?

A statistical reply is not always feasible. Certain stages in the child’s school career are marked: certain data about it definite enough; but whether in the final summing up these shall be given precedence over the subtler, more elusive changes that have come about, that is the real question. Just as in the matter of method employed, so in the matter of result achieved, it must be remembered that the numerical reckoning does not tell the whole story.

To the casual observer it might appear that the test to be applied to the visiting teacher’s work is embraced in the single word “promotion.” The greater the number of promotions, therefore, the greater her measure of success. In a measure this is true and the work stands it. But this is not all. Our object is to find for each child his suitable niche, and if to achieve this means a de-motion instead of a promotion, it must not on that account be reckoned as a failure. To the child it may mean a new birth. In his changed surroundings he may gain self-confidence and no longer be a laggard and a drag upon his class. To his teacher and his classmates little by little he will present a different front. The magic door has been opened. Into what lies beyond he can enter and with the rest can follow, and because of this there springs up between him and them a new relation, one that satisfies his human craving for friendship and sympathy. In which column, the debit or the credit, of our yearly ledger, are such items to be placed?

With final judgments tempered by such considerations, the following possibilities may be offered:

Promoted, including graduates, 568.

Left back, 237.

Graduated, 39.

Transferred to

(a) Trade school, 38.

(b) Other public and parochial schools, 133.

Employment certificate or equivalent, i. e., sixteenth year, 118.

Improvement in

(a) Scholarship, 328[4].

(b) Conduct, 252[4].

(c) Attendance, 310[4].

Left city, 39.

Difficulty adjusted, 531.

Cases in which some change that gives promise of permanency has been effected.

Proved unsuitable or unnecessary, 108.

Cases which, as a result of the initial investigation, are placed in the hands of the school nurse or attendance officer, as well as those which are dropped because the suspicion that inspired the inquiry has proved to be false.

WHAT DO YOU CARE?

WILLIAM EDWARD ROSS IN _PEARSON’S_

Out to the mines in the chill of the morn,
Stunted, ill nourished comes the forlorn
Stream of humanity—undersized men,
Slaving and toiling for life blood; but then,
Dressed warm and cosy, with slate, book, and rule,
George and your Nellie have started to school;
They are _your_ children, _their_ cheeks warm and fair,
While Tony’s a hunky, so—What do you care?

Over the bridges, the hills, and the fen,
Streams the procession of undersized men
Climbing the stairs to the waiting machines:
Lowered in cages to death-marked ravines.
Look at their faces; sad, pinched and worn!
Look at their garments; threadbare and torn!
Look at their swagger, their precocious air,
Some mother’s babies, but—What do you care?

_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee._

CHOSE HIS LIFE WORK AT FOURTEEN

Already a child laborer, this chap is typical of the class for whom
vocational guidance is being introduced in Boston and elsewhere.
]

THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR IN ACTION

MEYER BLOOMFIELD
DIRECTOR VOCATION BUREAU, BOSTON

LAURA F. WENTWORTH
SECRETARY VOCATIONAL INFORMATION DEPARTMENT, BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS

[_The philosophy of vocational guidance has been often written.
But it is from the actual cases of boys and girls, influenced to
this course of conduct or that, that the general public can best
get an intimate notion of how this new function of the schools
counts in the life of youth. The stories in the following
article represent typical experiences and services of such
teacher-counselors as Miss Wentworth, who was formerly
vocational counselor in the High School of Practical Arts, and
Eleanor M. Colleton, whose work among the Italians and other
children of the North End in Boston has had merit of a high
order._

_The latter part of the article is a digest, telling of past
performances and future plans, of a report which the Vocation
Bureau will shortly make public, covering its work for the last
three years._—Ed.]

In the morning mail of the Boston Vocation Bureau appeared, not
long ago, an interesting letter. It came from a sixteen-year-old
boy who had heard of the bureau, but was prevented by his job from
coming to it for help. He wrote asking for a special appointment,
which was granted.

At the interview following, the boy, Charles Lee, told of his
position and of his home conditions. He was an only son, living
with a widowed mother in Cambridge, and had been obliged to leave
school and go to work, taking whatever place he could find. This
was a position as assistant shipper in the sub-basement of a
clothing store in Boston. The employer in the beginning had
promised him promotion or transfer, but had failed to do anything
for so long a time that it became clear nothing would be done as
long as the boy was content to remain in the sub-basement at $3.00
a week.

Young Lee was a boy of attractive appearance, earnest manner, and
evidently of more than average ability. He seemed well equipped
for a business position and desired one with a good line of
advancement.

The Vocation Bureau had just completed the investigation of a
large and well known dry goods store in the city, and now sent Lee
with a letter to its employment manager, who took him into the
office at $6.00 a week. The boy has been followed up by the
bureau, and has shown marked business ability in his new position.
He is now in line for promotion to an executive position in the
firm. The help given him was based upon his home and employment
conditions, apparent abilities, and desire to find the right place
in a mercantile occupation.

Mary Schenck confided to her teacher that she wanted to take up
stenography and typewriting because she “knew a girl who had a
good job in that line.” A vocational counselor called at her home
and talked with her mother. During the visit it developed that
Mary’s mother and grandmother were both successful dressmakers and
that the girl herself had obtained very good marks in her sewing
in the grammar school. In fact, she had made the dresses for her
two little sisters for the past two years. As a result of this
information the counselor talked again with Mary and suggested
that she take up sewing in the school. Mary did so, even going out
to work in a shop for a while. Then she started in business for
herself. Today she is employing two assistants. Thus by a little
common sense and thought a girl was prevented from entering the
overcrowded field of stenography in which she probably would not
have been very successful and started in a line of work for which
she possessed natural ability and real love.

What is a vocational counselor? There are over a hundred of them
in the public schools of Boston. They are regular teachers,
designated by the school principals to advise and co-operate with
boys and girls leaving school for work. Two years ago an agreement
between the Boston School Committee and the Vocation Bureau called
for their appointment and they have been meeting twice a month
ever since to discuss the educational opportunities of the city,
the vocational problems of the children and to confer with
employers and others interested. Let us see just how their
influence is made to count in the lives of children.

Vocational guidance in a school involves three definite objects:

Guiding the child while in the school.

Guiding the child after leaving school.

Following up the child, i.e., ascertaining what becomes of him
after he goes into work.

_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee._

THEY NEVER KNEW A VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR.

There is a growing belief among those who are exploring the twilight
zone between education and industry that what youngsters like these
need is not more help in finding jobs but more and better training
before they find them.
]

In the first place the ordinary high or vocational school offers a
choice of several lines of work, and it is highly advisable to
have the child make a wise choice as to the line he is to pursue.
The best way is to have a general course offered at the beginning
during the pursuit of which the vocational counselor studies the
child and confers with the parents as to the child’s natural
ability, etc. This combined judgment of counselor and parent is
sure to result in a much wiser choice of work in the school than
if the matter had been left to the discretion of the child, who is
too immature to see the various occupations in their true
relationship. Parents and counselor may meet at the school, or the
counselor may go to the home. By going into the home discoveries
are often made which could not have come from only seeing the
child and parent at school.

During the school course it is often advisable to change a pupil
from one course to another. For example, Clara Bartlett had been
taking the millinery course with the intention of entering the
trade on graduation. Owing to her mother’s death, she found that
she must become her father’s housekeeper at the end of the school
year. Accordingly, after talking the matter over with the
vocational counselor, Clara changed from the millinery to the
domestic science course and obtained a very good training in
cooking and housewifery. The result was that when her school life
was over she was able to enter upon her new work as housekeeper
with a marked degree of success.

Sometimes it is necessary for a child to change from one school to
another in order that he or she may receive the best training for
a particular need. This implies a very close and cordial
relationship between the various kinds of vocational schools in
the city. Thus a girl who can give only one year to the
preparation for a trade should spend that year in a school where
she will get intensive work in that trade. If she is not advised,
there is danger that she will spend her year in a school which
offers a general course in preparation for the trade course, which
will then follow in the next two or three years. In other words,
it is necessary to take into consideration the girl’s outside
obligations and adapt her school life to them as closely as
possible.

Again, it is the duty of the vocational counselor to see that the
graduates of the school are given the most auspicious start on
life’s journey. This may imply definitely organized placement work
or it may mean simply making recommendations. If the work of
placement is definitely organized it should be done on a broad
social basis, for it may mean finding a position for one girl in a
millinery establishment and guiding another into a higher
institution of learning.

_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee._

HE LEAPED BLINDLY

And his only school now is the school of hard knocks, his only teacher
a factory boss.
]

If the work of placement is to be done by the vocational school,
great insight into the true ability of the girl under actual
business conditions may be obtained by “part time” work. For
instance, Susan Williams, who is taking the course in dressmaking,
was placed by the school in a near-by establishment where she
spent her afternoons and Saturdays. Here she obtained a very
definite idea of trade conditions, also earned a little money to
help with her expenses and secured for herself by her own
desirable personality and excellent workmanship a permanent
position on graduation. In the same way Josephine Riley, who was
taking a course in designing, was placed by the school in an
embroidery shop where she did work in designing on Saturdays
during the latter part of her course. She too worked herself into
a permanent position for which she had demonstrated her
qualifications.

Occasion often arises to provide a girl with an opportunity to
earn enough money to keep her in school until graduation.
Sometimes the work found is similar to that pursued by the girl in
the school. Often it is not, however, for many times the girl can
earn more money in some other kind of work. Frances Newton, who is
taking designing, can earn more money by acting as assistant in an
office on Saturdays than she possibly could in any designing
establishment owing to her present limited knowledge of her trade.
Thus she is tided over a financial crisis without being deprived
of her school work.

_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee_

ONE OF THE “BLIND ALLEY” TRADES

This group is declared to be typical of every city and town in
Massachusetts.
]

The third line of work for the vocational counselor in a
vocational school is that of “following up.” This is the only way
of ascertaining whether schools are fitting the children for those
walks of life for which they are attempting to train them. If the
school is doing this satisfactorily _we want_ to know it, and if
it is not doing it _we ought_ to know it. The child may be
followed up by a regular system of reporting by mail, by visits to
employes and by alumni meetings. Alumni meetings are particularly
profitable when turned into experience meetings at which the
children tell what they have been doing with especial emphasis on
the relation of their training in the school and their work in the
world. In this way schools can keep in touch with their graduates
and create a spirit of friendly intercourse even after they leave.
The best advertisement a school can have is an enthusiastic body
of loyal graduates.

The work of the vocational assistant in a vocational or other
school is thus one of adjustment; adjusting children to the right
course in school; adjusting them to the right course after they
leave school; and adjusting the relationship between the school
and the home, and that between the school and the business life.

If this work is needed in a vocational school how much more it
must be needed in a regular school! For it is an adjustment which
tends always toward keeping the children in school, but if they
must leave, insists upon seeing that they are at least given a
helping hand toward that new life which is so different from
school life and so bewildering to the youthful mind.

There is plentiful testimony that fathers and mothers now turn to
the Boston schools as never before for advice and help in their
perplexities concerning their children’s future. It has been most
pathetic in the past to see how little parents knew of real
industrial conditions, and of what educational and vocational
opportunities existed in Boston, entirely within their reach. Our
experience has been that the vast majority of parents have
heretofore known nothing about the various high schools and their
specialties, except what they have learned through the vocational
work of the school itself. The attitude of the parents when
visited in the homes, makes it appear only too clear that
practically all welcome such guidance and are anxious to avail
themselves of it.

These, then, are pictures of the vocational counselor at work.
What is the machinery behind her? Every school in the city has at
least one teacher who has given her time freely to this service.
In some schools committees of teachers have formed voluntarily to
take thought over the dropping out of boys and girls, and to
organize that assistance which a school can give to parents and
children in administering to the life-career motive. The work of
the vocational counselors has been a labor of love. Nobody has
expected that the occupational talks to which they have listened
twice a month would equip them for effective vocational guidance.
But no group of persons can listen to intimate discussions of the
shoe industry, department stores, machine industries, stenography
and typewriting, mechanical and civil engineering, building trades
and needle trades—which have been actual subjects in these
meetings—without being better fitted than before to advise and
guide those who are making hit-or-miss guesses at work in the fond
hope that it will pay well and that it is suited to their
particular capacities.

The Vocation Bureau, through whose influence the Boston schools
were induced to introduce vocational guidance, does not aim at the
placing of individual boys and girls in particular jobs. It
endeavors to study the causes of the waste which attends the
passing of unguided and untrained young people from school to
work, and to assist by experiments to prevent this waste. It aims
to work out the problem of co-operation between schools and
occupations, for the purpose of enabling both to make a more
socially profitable use of human talents and opportunities. It
publishes studies of vocations from the viewpoint of their
educational and other efficiency requirements. It conducts a
training course for qualified men and women who desire to prepare
themselves for vocational guidance in the public school system,
philanthropic institutions, and business establishments. Its
interests therefore lie both in the direction of personal service
to the individual and of constructive experiment and research in
the field of education and employment.

A capable investigator spends his entire time in studying
occupations open to boys and young men, what these occupations
require, and what they lead to. From three months to a year is
devoted to each study. The result of these inquiries is published
in tentative pamphlet form. Such pamphlets have already been
published on the machinist, banking, the baker, confectionery
manufacture, the architect, the landscape architect, the grocer,
the department store, and the profession of law.

In each of these studies it is sought to supply parents, teachers
and others interested with the material necessary to an
intelligent conception of the occupation, its needs, demands,
opportunities, relative desirability and its training,
requirements and possibilities. It is further sought to analyze
the relation of aptitudes, interests and habits to modern
industrial demands, and thus to lay an adequate foundation for a
system of training that regards social as well as economic needs.

The Vocation Bureau has constantly borne in mind that a sound
development of vocational guidance requires that contact with the
employments be more than mere onlooking. To leave the employer out
of such a plan, to fail to profit by his criticism and point of
view, is to omit one of the most important elements in such
guidance. The bureau has therefore been in close touch with a
large number of industrial and commercial concerns in sympathy
with its purposes. Manufacturers have approved its methods, and
have even supported its demands for more thorough-going protection
and opportunity for the young worker.

To understand better the employer’s relation to vocational
guidance, the bureau organized last year a conference of
employment managers. Men representing a score or more of important
manufacturing and business establishments have met regularly for
informal discussions. In December an employment managers’
association was formed. One of the most important fruits of this
close contact is the possibility of formulating plans for
organizing the generally chaotic entrance into occupations. It is
now planned to undertake some experiments in placement work in
co-operation with several social agencies and a group of
employers. The bureau believes that the country is ready to
undertake through responsible agencies, having in mind primarily
the needs of young workers, experiments to point the way to some
less wasteful and costly method of bringing together what has been
called “the manless job and the jobless man.”

Persons of constructive imagination throughout the country, alert
to the needs of coming generations of workers, and interested in
the reforms which must succeed if our future citizens are to enter
into their inheritance, have come to recognize that a new
co-ordinating agency is needed—an agency which shall secure team
play in home, school and occupation, to the end that a richer
vocational life of all the workers may be realized. It is likely
that in the near future there will not only be for the work in the
public schools a specially trained vocational counselor, but that
there will also be in business and manufacturing establishments a
new type of employment manager, especially trained and empowered
to develop in the worker not only the efficiency which the
employer requires, but also that efficiency which society
requires. Through the working together of such employment managers
and school counselors, society will gain an important factor in
making for its progress.

HOUSEKEEPING CENTERS IN SETTLEMENTS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS

MABEL HYDE KITTREDGE

THE HOME OF A GRADUATE
]

Home-making has not kept pace with our great industrial
advancement. The average home-maker of today is less thoroughly
prepared for her business in life than the woman of a generation
ago. It would seem that she considers the home-making profession
of much less importance than such occupations as curling feathers
and making shirtwaists. The latter has a commercial value, the
former has not; and we have learned to weigh things by their money
value. Then, again, competition has become the one incentive to
work. Tie badly the million little knots in the willow plume and
the next girl in the line gets the job. Feed the baby with poor
milk, let the air in the room become polluted, ignorantly buy and
ignorantly cook, and no one takes the work from you. Why worry
over the way it is done?

There are many reasons why the woman of a generation or two ago
was a better home-maker than the woman of today. The home duties
today often are only part of the daily work of a woman’s life. The
housekeeper today is (in millions of cases) a wage earner as well.
She cannot be as single-minded as the old-fashioned mother whose
only thought was the home. Schools, newspapers, settlements, the
trend of the times, all fill the mind with outside interests.
These things are important, but they have a tendency to crowd out
domestic responsibilities and make women restless under the homely
tasks. Suffrage we will have, and we must interest and educate
women until we do have it; but, at the same time, the dishes have
to be washed clean, the beds have to be aired and made well, and
the babies have to eat nourishing food, or we’ll have an anaemic,
poor race to govern when we get the suffrage.

Is it the fault of the home-maker of today if weakness instead of
strength is the inheritance of her children, and will it be the
fault of the home-maker of tomorrow if she bears and rears a weak
race? If household administration is to take its place in the
front rank with the other professions of the day, educators as
well as women must wake up and realize that the whole housekeeping
question is dependent upon scientific management, efficiency,
skilled labor, and effective tools.

There are those who say that this training should be taught at
home, and in many cases our school children, whether foreign or
American, do come from homes where the mothers are good
housekeepers according to their light; but the last generation
cannot teach the coming one everything. As Samuel Merwin says in a
recent book, “the accumulated experience of the ages is the
grandmothers, and yet she is authority no longer; since her day
science has stepped in. To her mind the gulf between herself and
her daughter is nothing but the old gulf between age and youth.
She is wrong. It is a million miles wide and if the mother keeps
to the old way she risks the life of her child.”

Again, home-making must be made interesting. The man regards his
business as a pleasure. He plays it as he plays a game, and he
plays to win. And so housekeeping has become a “game, not a duty.”
In a natural, enjoyable way our girls should be taught to play the
game of household administration. Home duties are not mere duties
any longer; the old way of “doing up the housework” made every act
an end in itself. Now every act is simply a means to an end; every
move is important,—the way the dishes are washed, the beds made,
the cooking done, may win or lose the game. In the child’s mind
must be a perfect plan; to work out that plan correctly will bring
health, order and happiness as the prize.

The world must stop trying to make progress by walking backward.
We must make room for a vaster scheme of household economics than
the last generation ever dreamed of. The home must be made to
catch up with the factory, the store and the office, and we know
that in comparison with these industries home-making has lagged
behind. Now—suddenly—we realize that feeble-minded children are
becoming more numerous, that malnutrition in school children is
becoming so great that the highest standard of study is impossible
and that street life is taking the place of home life. We wake up
and ask what we can do to make the home-maker realize that she is
responsible for these things.

But is she?

Educators who admit that life and health are absolutely dependent
on the home have failed to find room in the educational scheme to
provide this home knowledge. There were in the elementary schools
in New York city last year 388,000 girls. Only 43,500 of them were
in cooking classes. That means that 344,500 girls in this one year
never had a suggestion given them that home-making was a
profession worth studying. Only seventh and eighth grade girls are
permitted to have cooking lessons, and that means that during the
entire grammar school course a few fortunate girls received nine
full days of domestic science instruction. I say a few, for out of
560 elementary schools only 170 are equipped for cooking; and for
these 170 schools, there are only 135 domestic science
teachers—some cooking rooms are closed altogether and others
running on half time. A girl is fortunate if she happens not to be
in one of the 390 schools where no instruction in domestic science
is given, and still more fortunate if she stays in one of the few
selected schools until she reaches the seventh grade. There she
first learns that home-making is worth studying. But 20,000 left
school last year before this grade was reached.

Our public school children may be cash girls, or sales women, or
factory hands. These things may or may not be; but one thing is
certain, and that is that every girl must live in a home and take
her part in home responsibilities.

A MODEL FLAT

The little children of the neighborhood come in to play before lesson
time.
]

The New York board of education would be the first to admit that
it is the home more than anything else that gives, to children
health or feebleness, life or death, happiness or wretchedness and
yet they and we calmly let this neglect go on.

The school lunch committee made an investigation a short time ago
to ascertain whether malnutrition was as great an evil as we
feared. Two thousand and fifty-one children were thoroughly
examined. Half of these from an Irish neighborhood, half from an
Italian. They were selected at random from the four lower grades.
Two hundred and eighty-three or 13 per cent were found to be
suffering from pronounced malnutrition. Their homes were visited.
With the exception of eighteen tea and coffee was a part of the
daily diet. Sixty families had no prepared luncheon or dinner at
home. One hundred and fifty-seven were supplying the wrong or
insufficient food and it was found to be more ignorance than
poverty that was the cause of this condition.

If we take 13 per cent of 388,000 children we have 29,846 poorly
nourished girls who are not even taught that the heavy, dull, sick
feeling is due to the wrong kind of food. How can we place other
knowledge ahead of this? When we watch this large, half fed army
of children marching on to take up a woman’s battle with life it
does seem as if we had been asleep to our responsibilities.

We must establish an adequate twentieth century theory of
household economics and then we must put this within the reach of
every girl in our public schools.

My desk is covered always with pamphlets entitled The Profession
of Home-making, Food Values, Freehand Cooking on Scientific
Principles, and so on, but does this knowledge reach the people?
Does it reach the 388,000 school girls? Recently I heard an hour’s
talk by a member of the Board of Health on how we ought to know
good milk from bad, how careful we should be about canned
vegetables, and the horrors of buying tainted meat: but when I
asked how the common people could know these facts I could get no
satisfaction other than that the way to know whether the milk was
good or not was to examine the barns where the cows were milked or
have the milk tested; but the people I know are ignorant as to how
to wash milk bottles, or why it is wrong to leave the milk
uncovered, or why the nipple from the milk bottle can’t be played
with, fall on the floor and then be used. This representative from
the Board of Health told startling facts about candies and ice
cream, sold on push carts, but the audience at this lecture were
land owners along the Hudson River, and I doubt if one of them had
ever seen an East Side push cart, and I know that not one was ever
tempted to buy. Why can’t these facts reach the thousands of
children who do buy dyed ice cream and varnished candy, and whose
fathers sell these very things?

A COOKING LESSON
]

We not only have to establish an up-to-date, scientific way to
live, but we cannot do this without the help of the tenement house
woman. We contribute the ideals, the theories and the science; she
must contribute experience. We are up in the air with our castles,
she is down in the thick of the fight where the smallness of the
tenement room presses upon her, where every day she faces the high
price of food and an insufficient income, where a gentle love for
her children is constantly at war with a nervous irritability, the
product of disorder, noise and confusion.

Do you think this woman does not want a real home? Look at the
energy and thought she puts into furnishing her house, the
scrimping that preceded the buying of the ugly red carpet and the
plush chairs. There were hours of work given to hemming and
hanging the ruffles over every door, around every shelf and even
around the bath tub. Look at the tarletan festooned around the
chandelier and over the pictures; see the dozens of calendars
collected and pinned on the wall. Isn’t this a reaching out with
all the power that is in a woman to express to her family and her
neighbors what, in her ignorance, she believes to be a home? We
need the energy and the courage and the experience of these
tenement housekeepers, but we must add education; and do we?

Take the daily life of any one of our thousands of little school
girls and see how much chance she has to know the science of
home-making or even to acquire respect for housework. She is born
with the controlling desire to copy. She sees high-heeled shoes on
another’s foot; she longs for and saves until she gets shoes like
them. Her tight skirt, her big hat, her very walk, are seen first
and admired somewhere else, and so the home, whether it is perfect
or imperfect, and the school, and the teacher, and what the
teacher stands for, make the same vivid pictures in her mind; and
some day she is going to grow up and copy as nearly as she can.

This little girl wakes in the morning in one of our crowded
tenement houses, wakes to the vivid blue walls, to rooms filled
with feather beds which have been thrown all over the floor the
night before for the family and the possible boarders to occupy.
The dusty carpets, stuffed furniture, long lace curtains and
draped mantle meet her eye, and in this home of unrest there is
always the crying baby, the naturally cross father and the demand
(so well known to every little girl) to hurry up and go to the
store and buy breakfast. Poor little tenement girl, she does not
even know that in well-managed homes breakfast is bought the day
before. She may learn to respect the energy in her home, but she
will never forget the disorder, the picture of congestion and
confusion and of overwrought, tired nerves that has been stamped
forever upon her mind. And no right idea of home is given her to
correct this wrong impression.

Everyone knows the way work is done in our tenement homes; how the
beds are so large that it is impossible to move them out in the
small rooms and make them properly, and how the bed clothes are
pushed across, often with a broom handle kept for the purpose; how
often the small income makes it necessary to rent out the beds in
the day time to night workers, so they are always occupied and
never aired. And every one knows how all these things make a girl
lose respect for her home, then for her family and, finally, for
herself; and how the street seems a peaceful place in comparison.

Ideals of right home-making should in the school correct the home
mistakes, but as it is now, not until she reaches the seventh
grade does this little tenement girl get her first idea that
making a home is a part of education. After she leaves home in the
morning she gets only a picture of a schoolroom with forty or
fifty desks; of a teacher who in no way is associated in her mind
with any house, who, as I heard Mrs. Kelley say not long ago,
often brings her lunch in a music roll so that no one will suspect
that it is food.

The windows in the schoolroom are washed after school hours (and
at that only once or twice a year) by the janitor, the floors are
swept by men, swept badly, and always after school. And if this
pupil happens to be one of the twenty thousand who leave school
each year before reaching the seventh grade, she goes into
business not knowing that there is such a thing as scientific
knowledge regarding food and air and sun and cleanliness.

And yet this girl is going to marry, bear children and rear them,
and you and I are going to hold her responsible if those children
are not good citizens. Surely this is not a fair placing of
responsibility.

Eleven years ago I started the first housekeeping center in New
York. These centers are ordinary tenement flats which find their
motive power and are successful by means of the universal love in
every little girl to play at keeping house, and the universal
desire in every one to copy that which is just above her.

A girl wants her kitchen messes, her dishes, her make-believe baby
and her tiny bed or broom just as every boy wants his bat and
ball. A housekeeping center takes these natural desires and
cultivates them. It is furnished as a home should be furnished,
and such questions are answered there as: What shall be done with
the floors to insure health and save labor; what with the walls?
What curtains are the best to admit light, give beauty to the room
and wash easily? What proportion of the sum laid aside for
furnishing should go into the buying of pots and pans, what part
into mattresses, and is there any reason to spend money for
ruffles? What are the proper and necessary tools to work with?

In the housekeeping center the neighbors and the scientifically
trained teacher work out these problems together. The teacher’s
training in chemistry has taught her that a certain quality of
water and a certain kind of soap are necessary for perfect laundry
work. The tenement house woman adds what she has learned from
bitter experience; that it is hard to heat enough of any kind of
water on the stove with coal at ten cents a pail and the stove
crowded with pots and pans.

A LESSON IN BED-MAKING
]

Regular lessons are given in these housekeeping centers morning,
afternoon and evening, and as the flat is like the home from which
the pupils come (only perfected) its lesson is not dissociated
with the daily home duties but is performed under home conditions
and, therefore, easy of imitation. Do the pupils want this
instruction? The answer is that every class is full and there is a
waiting list, and every girl pays for the lessons.

I find it often difficult in selling luncheons in the public
schools to persuade the children to give up three cents for a full
meal, and yet the children under fourteen in the housekeeping
centers are ready always to pay three cents a lesson, and the
working girls five cents. And what do they pay for? To learn to
clean the sink so that the pipes will not get clogged, to learn to
cook substitutes for meat (for meat is too high for many of them),
to scrub closets and floors, to make and clean beds. Only last
week a class of working girls came to one of the centers and asked
for a bedbug lesson. “The people above us are moving out” they
said, “and we want to prevent the bugs getting into our house.” A
bedbug lesson is not a lecture, it means to roll up one’s sleeves,
put on a big apron, get on your knees and scrub, this after
working hard all day in a factory or shop. The desire for this
knowledge must be very real to make a girl willing to do this
extra labor, and to pay for the privilege of doing it out of her
scanty wages.

In a housekeeping center it is easy and natural to borrow a baby
from the neighbor across the hall when the lesson is “how to bathe
and dress a baby.” There is nothing embarrassing about being the
patient when the lesson is “how to give a bath in bed and how to
change the sheets without disturbing the patient.” Then there are
the dinner classes where the pupils make out the menu, do the
marketing and cook the meat, and there are lessons in food values.

What I feel that we need today is a housekeeping center in every
settlement, so that every girl who is a part of the settlement
will feel it almost compulsory upon her to take the course before
she marries, and if she is enjoying the intellectual life of the
settlement, or the play side, or the social side, she must be
learning the home-making side too. We must make our settlement
girl feel that the home-making training is more important than
mere recreation. The public school will follow the settlement and
then, not for one-ninth of our girls will home-making instruction
be given, but for every one.

A KITCHEN-CLEANING LESSON
]

Then there will be in every school the cooking-room, with its
individual equipment (necessary, but nothing in it to suggest the
kitchen at home). Next to this will be the model flat or center,
this to resemble the homes from which the children come, but
furnished on scientific lines. For eight years every school girl
will see this home, this home made right, and she will work in it.
It will be no smattering of cooking at the end of the school
course,—but in the beginning, when the love of playing house is
strong, then the training will begin. Even in the lowest school
grade a child could dust her desk with a damp duster and be told
why it should be damp; she could wash her own cup, if milk is
served; learn to handle dishes carefully; and train the eye to see
things straight and the hand to steadiness.

From these small tasks, the children would graduate to larger
duties in the housekeeping center; making beds and washing many
dishes. From dusting one desk, the pupil would soon be able to
give the flat a thorough cleaning. We find in our center that the
love of playing house disappears if it is not cultivated, and the
girl of fourteen never drops entirely the wrong way of doing
housework, which she need never have acquired if the domestic
science teacher could be in her training early enough.

Scientific management means more than “having system.” You may be
ever so systematic in the way you do things, but if you happen to
be doing them the wrong way, you are doing the way that is
unnecessarily expensive in time, energy, money, comfort and
beauty.

I believe that the labor in the kitchen will become more and more
professionalized. It is too serious a work to be handled by
unskilled hands, and we must lose the nervous, irritable,
overtired slave of housework and make woman more of a
child-trainer and cheerful home-maker. She must guide her home
with the quiet and skill and delight with which the engineer
drives his engine or the chauffeur his car. This, some day, will
be brought about by centralizing the work and by an army of
trained workers who will expeditiously and noiselessly do a large
part of what each woman is now trying to do herself. But that day
can come only when women through universal home-making education
push forward and demand this better management of the home.

We must have restlessness and dissatisfaction first. This comes
from a realization of the right way and a disgust with the wrong
way, and then will come the push from the home-maker herself, not
from a few outside reformers. The tenement house occupant now is
too ready to accept the fallen plaster, the dish-water that leaks
through from the flat above and the dirty and dark halls. Her own
senses are dull and she does not see or think about these things,
and the tenement house reformer sometimes feels his work has been
accomplished by a few bath tubs and a little more light, and then
wonders at the indifference with which these gifts are received
and blames the abuse of them. Train a girl to know a home of order
from one of unrest. Teach a woman to be miserable at the thought
of a close room or an unaired bed for her baby, and the social
worker can go off and do something else. The power of action is
where it ought to be, in the awakened tenement house mother. She
will not be content to crowd her family into dark rooms; she will
work until she gets space enough and light enough for her
children. She will be driven to action because she knows the value
of what she has to fight for. When the suffrage comes to women,
how naturally then these intelligent, orderly home-makers will
take their part in municipal housecleaning!

Let us not be satisfied to force through bills at Albany that
improve our tenements; at the same time the tenement girl must be
receiving her scientific home training, so that she too, can take
her part in this great home-making profession.

A YIDDISH POET

MARY BROWN SUMNER

Whither, whither, pretty child? The world is not yet open. Oh,
see how quiet is all around! ’Tis before daybreak, the streets
are mute, whither, whither, do you hurry? ’Tis now good to
sleep, and do you see, the flowers are still dreaming; every
bird’s nest is still silent? Whither pray are you driven now?
Whither do you hurry, tell me, and what to do?

To earn a living.

Whither, whither, pretty child walking so late at night? Alone
through the darkness and cold? And everything is at rest, the
world is silent. Whither does the wind carry you? You will yet
lose your way. Scarcely has day smiled on you, how can the night
help you? For it is mute and deaf and blind. Whither, whither,
with easy mind?

To earn a living.[5]

Thus, ten year before vice commissions began to probe into the
connection between white slavery and low pay, wrote Morris
Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet. In March the fiftieth anniversary of
his birth was celebrated in Carnegie Hall by a great gathering of
the Jewish East Side, under the auspices of the Jewish _Daily
Forwards_, to which he is a contributor.

Morris Rosenfeld, as a boy a fisherman on the shores of a Polish
lake, early an emigrant from home, and until his health broke down
a few years ago a worker in the sweatshops of London and New York,
expresses in verse the cry of suffering from persecuted and broken
Jew and from exploited and broken worker.

He is no pitiful East Sider struggling for expression, “found” by
a Harvard scholar. He is a poet offering no halting rhymes for
which apologies are necessary. Yiddish literature has many poets
of real genius, but the major part of Rosenfeld’s verse alone, in
his Songs from the Ghetto, has been presented to us in English
prose, in the translation of Leo Wiener, instructor in Slavonic
literature in Harvard.

Through the medium of a language in which, in the expression of
Mr. Wiener, German, Polish, Russian and English—the tongues of all
countries through which the Jew has passed—contend with Hebrew for
the possession of each word, Rosenfeld expresses his meaning with
the note of inevitableness and the adaptation of form to thought
that is seen only in the work of a great poet.

MORRIS ROSENFELD

_From an etching by Herman Struck_
]

His poems are cries of pain out of his own life interpreted in
terms of the life of his class. He is always lyric, he is always
personal, but he is never egotistical. The story runs that at his
machine in the midday hour he would write a lyric of the workshop
instead of eating his meager lunch. The song to the working-girl
prostitute is one of these workshop poems which like a flash
reveal working and living conditions such as in less revealing
form have been put before us by investigators.

The twelve-hour day may be said to be the subject of My Boy. The
tailor’s baby was always asleep when his father got home from
work:

MY BOY

I have a little boy, a fine little fellow is he! When I see him
it appears to me the whole world is mine.

Only rarely, rarely I see him, my pretty little son, when he is
awake; I find him always asleep, I see him only at night.

My work drives me out early and brings me home late; oh, my own
flesh is a stranger to me; oh, strange to me the glances of my
child!

I come home in anguish and shrouded in darkness—my pale wife
tells how nicely the child plays.

* * * * *

I stand by the cradle.

I stand in pain and anguish and bitterness, and I think: “When
you awake some day, my child, you will find me no more.”

Seven-day labor is the burden of the song Despair:

DESPAIR

Is it not allowed to rest even one day in the week and to be at
least one day free from the angry growl of the boss, his gloomy
mien, his terrible looks; to forget the shop and the cries of
the foreman; to forget slavery, to forget woe? You wish to
forget yourself and be rested? Never mind, you will soon go to
your rest!

Soon the trees and flowers will have withered; the last bird is
already ending his song; soon there will be cemeteries all
around! Oh, how I should like to smell a flower and feel, before
the grass is dead, the breath of zephyr in the green fields! You
wish to be in the fields where it is airy and green? Never mind
you will be carried there soon enough!