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{{c|
{{xxx-larger|The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living}}
{{dhr|3}}
{{asc|By}} 
{{uc|[[Author:Anna Steese Richardson|Anna Steese Richardson]]}} 
[[File:B. W. Dodge & Company logo (1909).png|100px|center]]
{{dhr|7}}
{{uc|New York B. W. Dodge & Company 1909}}
}}

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{{c|{{sb|Copyright, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, by 
{{uc|The Crowell Publishing Co.,}} 
Publishers of the ''[[Woman's Home Companion]]''
{{rule|3em}}
Copyright, 1909, by 
{{uc|B. W. Dodge & Company}}
{{rule|3em}}
''Registered at Stationers' Hall, London'' 
(''All Rights Reserved'')
{{rule|3em}}
Printed in the United States of America
}}
}}

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/dedic/
{{c|{{asc|Dedicated to}} {{sc|[[Author:Gertrude Battles Lane|Gertrude Battles Lane]]}} {{asc|whose cordial support and unfaltering faith in the work which this represents have vitalized its pages}}}}

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{{c|{{larger|{{uc|Contents}}}}}}
{{TOC begin}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|{{asc|Chapter}}||{{asc|Page}}}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|class=wst-toc-aux||[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Preface|Preface]]|ix}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|I|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 1|Stenography]]|1}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|II|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 2|Salesmanship]]|17}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|III|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 3|Trained and Semi-trained Nursing]]|31}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|IV|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 4|Art for the Girl Who Must Be Self-supporting]]|46}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|V|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 5|Dressmaking]]|60}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|VI|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 6|Work in Libraries]]|74}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|VII|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 7|Duties of the Companion, Secretary and Governess]]|87}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|VIII|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 8|Millinery]]|100}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|IX|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 9|Telephone Operating]]|113}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|X|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 10|Working for Uncle Sam]]|125}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XI|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 11|In the Beauty Shop]]|135}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XII|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 12|The Girl in the Factory]]|157}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XIII|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 13|Social Service]]|173}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XIV|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 14|Proof-reading and Work in Publishing Houses]]|183}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XV|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 15|Kindergartening]]|200}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XVI|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 16|Domestic Science for Teachers and Social Workers]]|210}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XVII|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 17|Physical Culture Plus Dancing and Elocution]]|221}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XVIII|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 18|The Girl and the Pen]]|233}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XIX|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 19|The Girl the Business World Wants]]|250}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|XX|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 20|Living Expenses of the Self-supporting Girl in Big Cities]]|262}}
{{TOC end}}

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{{c|{{larger|{{uc|Illustrations}}}}}}
{{dhr}}
{{TOC begin}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 1#img|Transcribing Phonographic Dictation]]|1}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 3#img|Student-Nurse Assisting the House Physician]]|31}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 4#img|Class in Applied Design]]|46}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 5#img|A Typical Scene in a Dressmaking School]]|61}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 6#img|Carrying the Library Into the Public School. The Story Reading Hour]]|74}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 9#img|Operators at Work in a Telephone Exchange]]|113}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 11#img|Girls at Work in a School of Manicuring, Hairdressing and Massage]]|135}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 12#img|Girls Making Crepe-paper Boxes and Novelties]]|157}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 13#img|Scene in a City Farm-school, One of the New Philanthropic Movements for Improving the Condition of the Poor]]|173}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 16#img|Student-teachers Training in Domestic Science]]|210}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 19#img|Applicants for General Office Work Crowd the Business Marts]]|250}}
{{TOC row 2-1|[[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 20#img|Dining-room in Trowmart Inn, New York City, Said to Be the Best Managed Hotel for Self-supporting Women in America]]|262}}
{{TOC end}}

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{{sc|According}} to the report issued by the Census Bureau in 1907, entitled "[[Statistics of Women at Work|Women at Work]]," the census enumerators of 1900 found that nearly five million women and girls of the United States were engaged in what are known as gainful occupations, and were therefore either partly or wholly self-supporting. Three-fifths of these workers were found in six occupations, domestic service leading, with farm labor a close second because of the large number of colored women employed on Southern plantations; dressmaking, laundry work, teaching and actual farming followed in the order named. Seventh in point of numbers employed were the textile mill operatives. Saleswomen came tenth in numerical order, and office workers still further down the list./begin/

At the time this census was taken, there were 23,485,559 women in the United States, of whom 20.6 per cent. were engaged in gainful occupations. Students of economics and sociology, who have gathered statistics regarding women wage-earners since that census was taken, an-

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nounce that on January 1, 1909, the number of women employed on wages or any form of regular pay in the United States had leaped to six millions. At the present rate of increase, when the next census is taken, the number of women workers will have increased out of all proportion to the increase in population.

In other words, the feminine conquest of the industrial world in America is practically complete, and woman's financial independence is practically assured. She has invaded and now occupies firmly all but nine of the 303 fields of wage-earning listed by the United States Census Bureau. Furthermore, her education and interests all tend toward the evacuation of domestic service and farm labor in favor of the various trades and professions, or a distinctly mercantile or commercial career.

Question girls graduating from district village or city schools, and you cannot fail to mark this tendency. Department editors of women's magazines are deluged with letters from country girls all over the United States, begging for information as to gainful operations in manufacturing or business centers.

In a mid-West city, I studied the bent heads of girls in an upper grade grammar class, taking their final examinations.

"How many of these girls will enter the high school?" I asked.
{{nop}}

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"Ten per cent.," answered the principal. "Fifty per cent. will go into stores as cash-girls and wrappers, or take up the study of stenography. The remaining 40 per cent. will find employment in factories or in dressmaking or millinery shops as {{SIC|apprentices.|apprentices." }}

The country over, only one girl out of every hundred entering the elementary schools completes the high school course. This means that 99 out of every 100 leave school at the expiration of their last year in the grammar schools, or even sooner.

What becomes of the ninety and nine? For a time, at least, the vast majority pursue some gainful occupation and then marry. During the period of wage-earning, the ninety and nine want to secure the highest possible pay.

In the last sentence lies the excuse for this book. It has been written to meet the needs of the American girls graduating from grammar or high school and facing the problem of self-support. It has been written to answer the question: "How shall I earn my living?" a question which is hurled at every school-teacher, every writer for women, every editor of a magazine or newspaper in the United States to-day.

For the past five years I have been answering that question in personal letters written to more than ten thousand girls. These answers, and the result of five years of investigation, I am

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giving in this book. The chapters are not arranged in the order of occupation named by the United States Census, but according to the number of questions received concerning the gainful occupations which ambitious girls desire to enter.

Each chapter has been written with the hope that it may make clear to would-be workers the personal qualifications needed to succeed in a trade, profession or commercial career, the time and the money required for preparation, the best method of securing a position when that preparation is completed, the salaries paid, and the chances for advancement.

If this book shows one girl the folly of entering upon a career for which she is unsuited, and if it helps another girl to find the work for which she is best qualified by temperament and training, it will have accomplished its object.

In conclusion, I desire to express to the editors of the ''[[Woman's Home Companion]]'' and [[the Philadelphia Press|the Philadelphia ''Press'']], my appreciation for permission to use material published in their columns, where an unusual amount of space is allotted to the problems of the self-supporting woman.

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{{ph|class=title-header|The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living}}
{{hr|3em}}
{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter I}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Stenography|level=2}}

{{sc|"When}} in doubt, study stenography," has been the motto of the would-be business girl for the past ten years, with the result that thousands of young women, never intended by education, training or natural ability to become stenographers, have reduced office wages and overcrowded business marts, while hundreds of their sisters, who might develop into admirable office workers, have drawn back, alarmed by the ever-increasing army of incompetents.

There is room in the business world for the competent, earnest stenographer, and opportunities for advancement were never better nor more numerous than to-day. There is no reason at all for the existence of the incompetent worker. She will find thousands there before her.
{{nop}}

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Please bear in mind that stenography is a trade, and you must work at it months, and even years, before you become an expert and draw the same salary an expert milliner or fitter does. There is no royal road to success in stenography simply because your parents can afford to pay for your lessons. By earnest study and practice you can advance yourself more rapidly than can any teacher or school in America.

Perhaps you have decided that you are what might be termed a "born stenographer." Then you possess the following characteristics:

You are accurate. Stenography is built on accuracy.

You have great power of concentration. Without that you will never master the mechanical side of stenography or develop the fundamental principles of shorthand.

You are neat. No employer of any standing will send out letters daubed with blots and blurs from erasing and rewriting.

You are a good speller and grammarian, and have a fair knowledge of English. If you cannot spell correctly writing longhand, how much more confused will you become when you have to transcribe stenographic notes? Neither is there time in a busy office for you to consult a dictionary.

You are close-mouthed. The stenographer of even a small and unimportant firm is often en-

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trusted with secrets that hold success or failure for her employer. If you are the sort of girl who simply must tell some one everything you know, don't try to be a stenographer.

You have quickness of mind and movement. Without these you will find it difficult to take erratic and sometimes almost inaudible dictation without annoying your employer by questions.

You have good eyesight; or if you have any visual defect, it can be minimized by learning what is known as the touch system on the machine, and using glasses while at work. A stenographer or office assistant of any sort uses her eyes practically eight hours a day.

And of course your hearing is perfect.

Does this list of natural qualifications sound formidable? Then do not take up stenography, for as sure as you think any one of them unimportant, so surely will you drift into the rank of incompetents.

Perhaps you possess these qualities, or are willing to acquire them by study and practice. Then how shall you begin?

If you are attending the public schools of your city, and planning to take stenography a year or two from now, do not wait. If your school offers stenography as an elective branch, take it by day. If not, enter an evening class two or three nights in the week, and study

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stenography slowly and conscientiously, during your last year or two in day school. If it is not taught free in any of your city schools, then see what the Young Women's Christian Association or some working-girl's organization offers you in the way of a night class at reasonable rates. It will take from seven months to one year for you to learn thoroughly a good method of shorthand in this way, but in the end, working slowly but earnestly, you will have absorbed the fundamental principles of what is nothing more nor less than a new language. In fact, Dickens is said to have called shorthand "harder than ten new languages." At Cooper Institute, in New York City, where a generous endowment has established a free course, no pupil is permitted to complete the lessons in less than a year, which would indicate that "get-your-diploma-quick" methods in stenography do not pay.

If you live in a small town, and have not the money to pay your way through a city business college, then learn stenography through some reliable correspondence school. When you feel well-grounded in the rudiments, take a few special lessons for speed. The only assistance you will need for home study consists of a hired machine, and some member of the family to dictate to you.

If you have funds to attend a business col-

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lege, select a small one where you will receive individual instruction, and a school where only stenography, typewriting, spelling and English are taught. The average employer gives preference to the girl grounded in stenography over one who has a smattering of bookkeeping, stenography and general office work. Beware of the school that offers a diploma at the end of three months.

Be sure you read your notes, even single words, as you are learning.

This is the secret of quick, clean transcription. Of what avail is it to write a hundred words a minute and then take thirty minutes trying to decipher those same hundred words? Nothing is more detrimental to your interests than slow transcription.

Do not neglect your typewriting. Select one of the standard machines, and practice on it until you become rapid and accurate, and know every trick of the machine. When you are ready for a position, the knowledge of the machine will be of enormous value to you. Nearly all agencies of typewriter builders maintain an employment bureau, and the girl who is an expert on their machine is always recommended first. After taking an examination you can enroll at these employment agencies without charge.

Most excellent positions are secured through

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advertisements. If an employer asks for a personal interview, be on hand at the first hour named, not the last, and be prepared to take any test which may await you. If he asks for an application by mail, make this as brief as possible and to the point. State your qualifications, including speed in taking dictation, the machine you use, and your references.

A very good time for an out-of-town girl to apply for work in a large city, like New York, Boston or Chicago, is July ist, when regular stenographers begin to take vacations. Agencies then enroll "substitutes." A girl who is quick and adaptable will be kept busy all summer as substitute; then in the fall a regular position is sure to crop up in one of the offices where she substituted to the satisfaction of all concerned.

The small-town girl coming to the city will find that most of the advertisers offer six or eight dollars a week. If she is in dire need of a position, she must start at this salary and then watch for something better. If she really is an expert, she can find something better by waiting, provided she enrolls with the right agency and makes a favorable impression.

Fifteen dollars a week is the average salary of a competent girl in New York. The exceptional girl works her way up as high as twenty-five or thirty dollars a week. In many small

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cities a girl is compelled to start at five dollars a week, no matter what her ability; but even here there are opportunities for advancement, which depend entirely upon the girl.

In a few offices the phonograph has replaced stenographers, but it has not yet come into general use, nor does it promise to do so. The girl who transcribes phonograph records does not need to know stenography. Her employer, at his leisure, dictates his letter to a sensitized phonograph record. The phonograph machine is then set beside the operator's typewriter. She starts and stops the dictation or alters the speed at her will by means of a pedal. Both ears are covered by receivers such as telephone operators use. They are exactly like those employed in the penny arcades when you listen to phonograph music.

The operator, concentrating on what comes to her over the wire, transcribes this directly on the typewriter. This work requires perfect hearing, remarkable powers of concentration, and quick wit to separate sentences and to punctuate, in case the man dictating does not furnish paragraphs and punctuation. In this work men have been more successful than women, who generally find phonograph dictation nerve-racking. The salary paid is about the same as that for general stenographic work, $15 a week.

The girl who wishes to use stenography as

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the first step in a business career is the girl who is business-like from the very beginning.

First, she makes sure of her trade, stenography, before she applies for a position. Then she selects her position with judgment. She does not accept the first offer of work unthinkingly, unquestioningly.

If she desires to advance rapidly she seeks a position with a small concern, where she will not lose her individuality, and where she will come in direct contact with her employers. The employer is always looking for good people to advance; but often where there are chiefs and various assistants between stenographer and employer, the latter does not know that good timber is going to waste in his forest of office clerks.

If she is interested in a certain line of business or a certain profession, she seeks her position where the work will be congenial. If she has the commercial instinct, she will advance more rapidly with a wholesale cloth, shoe or lace house than with a publishing house. If she thinks she would make a good saleswoman, let her enter a real-estate office and study land values, rental problems, commissions, etc., while she handles the firm's correspondence. The stenographer has the very best opportunities for grasping the firm's method and details of

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the business, because she can study the situation from both sides of the correspondence.

If she means to be a lawyer, then by all means she should seek a position with a law firm, and, if possible, with some bright, ambitious lawyer who has not yet acquired an influential partner or a corporation position and a staff of clerical help. If she shows a natural grasp of legal problems, her employer will be the first to find this out.

Many girls start wrong. They want a position so badly that they do not stop to investigate the conditions under which they are to work. Do not make this mistake. Go into details with your prospective employer. Have a very clear understanding with him as to hours, half holidays and vacations, your hour for lunch, and extra pay allowed for overtime, especially in the evening. Your employer will not resent this demand for a perfect understanding. Rather he will respect you the more for asking it in advance, instead of accepting the position blindly and then complaining afterward about the hours, etc.

After having been informed as to hours and having accepted them as satisfactory, keep them. If you live at a distance and know that you cannot get to the office as early as the man asks, tell him so and decline the position. Do

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not take the place and then invent fresh excuses daily.

Directly you begin your work, study the technical phrases peculiar to the trade or profession or line of goods of which you must write day after day. Every trade or profession has these phrases. It is yards and bolts in dry-goods, pounds and barrels in groceries. You will have certain regular correspondents, too. Be accurate in the use of firm-names and addresses, so that when your chief tells you to write the "Browns" to hurry up that order of wire nails you will know that it is James Hayden Brown & Son without asking him which Brown or having to hunt through the files. And if your new employer says Brown Bros., and no more, it is your business to find out somewhere, somehow, in the main office, who Brown Bros. are, and where to direct their letter. If you are looking for advancement do not turn the question-mark on your employer. He hires you to save him trouble and annoyance. If you cannot imagine what he means, make a guess, until you can reach the other room to ask the other clerks.

If sometimes you have to play the rôle of office boy and meet callers, learn to do this properly. Don't go to your employer's private office and say: "There's a man wants to see you."

The girl who does not know enough to find

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out who the man is and what right or object he has to interrupt her employer will never be paid several thousand dollars a year to stand between the public and that employer if some day he becomes great enough to need a confidential secretary to shield him.

If you come in direct contact with patrons of the firm, learn their names and never forget them. A regular patron considers a girl clever who always remembers his name and receives him courteously.

Dress to suit your position. If you work in a dirty office, such as a printing concern, wholesale grocery or a hardware shop, wear skirts that clear the ground by at least three inches; but if you are employed in the private office which has been well furnished and nicely carpeted, wear longer skirts, not trains, but cut to escape the ground. Your employer will want you, like furniture and pictures, to dress in harmony with the furnishings of his office. Avoid garish colors. Be dignified in your dress as well as your manner. Do not consider that money spent on office clothes is wasted. It will bring you better returns than money spent on party frocks or feather-trimmed hats.

Be immaculately neat about your person, especially your hair and your hands. Radiate health and faith in yourself. Do not talk of your domestic troubles nor your ailments. The

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girl who is always ill, however slightly, who details her aches and her quarrels with her dressmaker, arid neighborhood gossip to her fellow-clerks, or even to her chief, if he allows her to talk on such subjects, is not in line for promotion. Men promote girls who have the health to do more work' not those who complain of being tired from what they are doing already.

Business colleges and commercial schoois, however thorough, generally neglect one branch in preparing girls for office work. Perhaps the word "branch" is misleading. Properly speaking, they fail to train or develop the bump of discretion. They preach accuracy, but they forget to inculcate the golden gift of silence. Many a graduate, wise in stenographic pot-hooks and rapid on the typewriter, has lost her first position, and more, because she did not realize that there is a time to talk and a time to keep silent.

There are times when to tell what you know is almost criminal. Your employer must trust you more or less if you are his stenographer or secretary. Even small matters, appealing to you as unimportant, may be vital to him. You are not the judge. In silence lies safety.

A lawyer, who was just making a name for himself, was blessed, or cursed, with a jealous wife. His private stenographer knew this and used rare discretion in replying to telephone calls, to which his wife was particularly given.
{{nop}}

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The day came when this girl was taken ill. Her substitute, selected from the main office, was a woman of thirty, the talkative kind. The third day after her promotion, the wife called the lawyer up by telephone during the noon hour. The substitute stenographer answered-as follows:

"No, Mr. J. is not in. He has gone out to lunch. No, I don't know where. Oh, is this Mrs. J.? Well, of course, I can teil you. He has gone out with Mrs. Bull, the woman who owns those big mines in Nevada, whose case your husband has just taken."

The old stenographer would have answered briefly that Mr. I had gone out to lunch and would not be back until two. The absolutely unasked and unnecessary information furnished by the new girl caused a domestic cyclone. The husband's privilege of showing courtesy to an important client was questioned, and when he resented interference on his wife's part, she actually went to the client's hotel and made a scene. The lawyer lost his client, the Western woman lost the services of a capable attorney, and the wife lost her husband's respect—all because a silly, talkative woman of thirty did not appreciate the fact that silence is a golden gift.

Another girl lost an excellent position through just such futile chatter. Her employer

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had gone out, and a most personable young man called. She was quite alone, her notes had all been transcribed, and she had forgotten to bring down a new novel.

Informed that her employer was not in, the young man turned to leave, but, seizing the first conversational straw that blew her way, she exclaimed: "Oh, you are not Mr. Beveridge, then?"

The young man shook his head, but paused with his hand on the door-knob.

"I just thought you might be, because Mr. Blank has been expecting Mr. Beveridge for several days, and I know he would want him to wait."

The young man leaned against the door and remarked that she had a very pleasant office. His desire to hurry seemed to have fallen from him. When he went away he had a pretty good idea why his chief competitor, Beveridge, was mixing in with Blank. And the girl lost her position, because in her frantic effort to make conversation she had dropped just enough clues to her employer's affairs to make him trouble.

As a rule, the woman who advances most rapidly in her trade or business is the one who talks the least while on duty. This does not mean being stupid when addressed, but simply in knowing just when to stop talking, how to talk intelligently on topics connected with the

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business, and how to ayoid personalities which are dangerous and banal.

Trust no confidant with the affairs of your employer.

"Let out that girl with the green dress and the red hair—right over there—at the second desk," said the senior partner of a large concern one day as he came in from lunch. The man addressed followed his employer into the latter's private office and closed the door behind him. "I beg your pardon, Mr. M. for questioning your orders, but Miss Brown is one of our most rapid workers{{bar|2}}"

"And a dangerous girl to have in our office. My boy came in here to-day and bothered me just when I was working at some important papers. He wanted some clothes or something or the sort for a college jamboree, and I told him, with strong trimmings, to get out. I want domestic and family questions settled where they belong, in our home, and not at my office during business hours. That was all there was to our row.

"That girl had lunch with a man at my restaurant to-day, and I was just a few feet from her, screened by some palms. I heard her tell that man about a sensational quarrel between me and my boy over a chorus girl. The boy is singing in the chorus of his class show. That was all she caught of our high words 'chorus'{{peh|—}}

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and she goes out of here to talk scandal. If she will enlarge on what she catches of my private affairs, she will do the same with our business affairs, on which she is well posted. Let her out—she is dangerous.

That is the general verdict on the girl who carries tales—she is dangerous.

I hear girls say: "But the men drew us out." So they do, and laugh at you for being so easily misled. Many a girl has lost a good position because she has allowed some man to draw her out and to use the information thus gained for his own advancement.

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{{sc|In}} every city of any size the public schools are sending forth, at the end of each school year, hundreds of girls who must earn their living, or part of it, immediately, and yet who have absolutely no training for a business or professional career. Some of these girls graduate from the high schools, others go no further than the highest elementary or grammar grade. And none of them has either the time or money to take a special course or to serve a longdrawn, unpaid apprenticeship.

These girls have good health, a reasonable amount of common sense, ordinary intelligence, a knowledge of elementary English branches, willingness, and the desire to learn.

Where will this human raw material find a market?

In retail establishments, selling goods.

I hear a murmur of disapproval rising, from girls who already stand behind the counter, but despite their murmurings I propose to continue

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this practical talk on salesmanship for ambitious, inexperienced girls.

When I told an acquaintance that I intended to advise the untrained, unequipped girl in need of a position to seek one behind the counter, she gave me a glance which held both pity for my ignorance and scorn for apparent indifference to the fate of the girls who will read this article.

"Well, if you knew the work as I do you would never advise any girl to go into a store. I've been in this store seven years. I'm getting ten dollars a week, and I'll never get any more. It's just drudgery, cross customers, spiteful floor-walkers, and no appreciation or thanks from any one."

Now it just happens that I have stood behind the counter and know just what I am advising girls to do. Ninety saleswomen out of every hundred will echo the sentiments expressed by the girl quoted above. The other ten have either secured promotion or see it looming up joyously in the near future.

Any sort of wage-earning may degenerate into drudgery. We make our lives, in shop or store or office, drudgery or pleasure by the way we tackle the work. The secret of finding either drudgery or pleasure in work lies in ourselves.

Given average intelligence, good health and a brave spirit, and yoai can transform the drudgery of life behind the counter into success. But

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of course if, like the girl already quoted, you intend to lean back against the shelving and say: "Well, I have gone as far as I can go, so what's the use of trying?" you will not progress.

It is for the girl who must work that I am writing this article, not for the girl who wants to earn a little pin money; for the girl who must secure some sort of a salary from the very start of her business life, not the girl whose parents can afford to send her through an art school, a business college or a course in domestic science. This talk is with the girl who is face to face with the problem of clothing and food and a roof over her head.

We will start by assuming that you have a neat appearance, good manners, and a clear handwriting and are quick at figures. These are valuable assets.

If you live in or near a good-sized city, first make the round of the stores there. Study the appearance of the girls already employed, and the conditions under which they work. You will soon learn whether seats are provided behind counters, whether the counters and shelving are so arranged that the girls between them have room to work comfortably, whether the light and air are as good as one can expect to find in the modern store. In your inexperience these may seem like trifles, but once you get on

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the other side of the counter you will find that these very trifles have much to do with making your daily life livable. Many of the better stores have yielded to public opinion, or rather the pressure of their customers, and have installed stools or upturned boxes for the use of the saleswomen. Others still maintain the barbarous custom of expecting clerks to remain standing from morning until night.

It is very easy to learn whether the girls are well or ill-treated in a store. When shopping, start a chat with one of the clerks, and you will soon learn the character of the store's management.

This preliminary line of inquiry is important. No girl should rush blindly into a position. Managers are interested in the applicant who seems to know something about the store.

If you are a high school graduate, and have a mature appearance, you can apply at once for the position of salesgirl. If you are not over sixteen, fresh from the grammar school or even a lower grade, you must start as a cash-girl, a wrapper, or a bundle inspector. In all the modern, well-managed stores young girls are started in this way, and are trained for the work, and in a large auditorium theoretical instructions and lectures are given. The beginner generally receives three dollars a week, and is promoted as fast as she displays ability.
{{nop}}

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Trade is extremely dull in retail stores just after schools close in June, but it will pay you to make the rounds and meet the managers or superintendents of employees. These men have regular hours, which you will find posted over the employment-office door. Observe these hours. If the card states that women applicants are received between 8:30 and 11, and you happen to come in during the afternoon, when men applicants are received, go away and return the next morning.

Unless an unusual opening has occurred, this superintendent will tell you that he is hiring no one until the busy season opens, about three or four weeks before Easter; September 1st in the fall. Then ask him to take your name and address or give you an application blank. Tell him that in the meantime you hope to gain some experience in another and perhaps smaller store, but you want an opening with his firm when the busy season begins.

Fill out the application blank with infinite care. By your answers will he judge your accuracy, which is important in the saleswoman who must make out sales-slips. By its general appearance will he judge of your neatness. The average superintendent is on the watch for neat, business-like, intelligent-looking girls, and if you make a good impression on him and furnish satisfactory references, your name will not be

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forgotten. He will put a mysterious little sign somewhere on that application, meaning that you are to be sent for when clerks are needed.

When looking for work of this sort, dress suitably. Do not wear your biggest hat, your fanciest waist, your longest gloves, your shoes with the highest heels. Look at successful business women, and you will find them simply but well dressed in tailored effects, with hats of medium size. Be sure your petticoat does not hang below your dress skirt, that the heels* of your boots are straight, and the finger-tips of your gloves are all mended. The up-to-date superintendent watches his applicants from the tail of a sharp eye, and the girl who is slovenly in her appearance, he argues, will be slovenly in her care of his stock.

Now, we will take it for granted that yau have filled out your application blank correctly and have been told by the superintendent just when to come back to secure an opening for the busy season.

You have slipped in the entering-wedge. Go out and get experience of some sort, at some price. In any large city such openings are advertised daily in bakeries, candy-stores, five-and-ten-cent stores, shops where notions and dressmakers's upplies are sold. Such firms seldom pay over five dollars a week, some pay only three, but take the work and serve here the ap-

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prenticeship which will make you less awkward and "green" when the opening at the big store does come.

Your first difficulty, after securing the position, will be a purely physical one. You will suffer tortures with your feet, and perhaps with your back, as the result of standing.

Have shoes that fit you perfectly, with medium heels, and it will help some if you have an extra pair under the counter and change them during the course of the day. At night bathe the feet in tepid water. Some saleswomen find alum water most helpful. Others use baking soda or even ordinary table salt. Change your stockings frequently, and do not under any circumstances neglect your feet. As a saleswoman you depend upon them, literally and figuratively, for your bread and butter.

Now, supposing that you have served your apprenticeship in the small store, and the time for better business in the more desirable and bigger stores has arrived. Write to the superintendent with whom you left your application a brief, business-like note, recalling the date of your application and the fact that he bade you call later. He will probably answer this note if you enclose a self-addressed and stamped envelope. Or, if you can do so, take an hour off and go to see him again. If you made a

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good impression, he will recall you, and nine chances out of ten he will give you work.

This brings us to the salary question. The superintendent will inquire whether you live at home with your parents. If you do, and there is a position behind the counter for you, six dollars a week will be the salary most probably offered. That may seem absurdly small, because you have planned on buying some pretty clothes and helping mother at home, in addition to paying carfare and buying lunches. But the superintendent is thinking not of what you feel you should have to spend, but what you will earn for the firm. You will not be worth more than six dollars a week at the beginning. Perhaps you will not be worth even that. Perhaps it will cost the firm money to train you for the position you imagine that you can fill without difficulty.

I will tell you just how to estimate your value to the firm. Your salary should never amount to more than five per cent. of your sales. That is, if your salary is six dollars a week, you should sell at least one hundred and twenty dollars worth of goods every week. You will have a record of your sales. Count this every night, and find the tatal at the end of the week. You need not be surprised if at first the firm pays you really more than you earn. If you are paid six dollars a week and your sales are only

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ninety dollars, then the firm will lose money on your services. When your salary is only three per cent. of your sales—that is, when you are paid six dollars a week and your sales amount to two hundred dollars on the week—you may feel that you are a fair saleswoman. When you can reduce that percentage to two per cent., by dint of studying the needs of your customers and your stock, you can approach the superintendent with an easy conscience and ask for a raise. You will get it.

The first engagement in a large store carries the understanding that you will be laid off after the holidays or Easter rush or during hot weather.

It is distinctly up to you to make so good a record as a saleswoman that when the dull season arrives again you will be retained.

In order to accomplish this, study three things—your stock, your trade and your buyer or the head of the department.

Early in the morning, when trade is light, go through your stock, learn what is in every box and drawer, and if it consists of goods with which you are not familiar, such as laces or ribbons, learn the names of the various varieties. Not long ago a shopper asked a very pretty but pert miss at a department store to show her Oriental lace two inches wide.

The girl asked:

"Oriental lace? What's it like?"
{{nop}}

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It was her business to know the name of every sort of lace on her shelves. She belongs in the class of girls who declare there is nothing in clerking.

The superintendent of a great department store told me that the reason he never received applicants until 9:30 in the morning was because he wanted to spend the time between 8:15 and 9:30 o'clock roaming through the store to find out which girls were arranging and becoming familiar with their stock, and which were telling about the play or the party they had attended the night before. Yet there are girls who say that you get no credit for being painstaking in a store!

Study your trade. Take an interest in your customers. Do not act as if the woman who wants to buy a new tie were a nuisance, and had no right to interrupt your conversation with your fellow-clerks.

A friend recently approached the notion counter of a very nice store, and asked for white elastic. The girl addressed was busy adjusting her puffs by the aid of a pocket-mirror.

"Kate," she murmured with her mouth filled with {{hinc|hair-pins}}, "come see to this woman, will you?"

"This woman" did not wait to be "seen to." And there is another girl who says clerking is a drudgery!
{{nop}}

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Study the buyer for your department. He has his little peculiarities and his fads. It is only tactful to respect the first and cater to the last. If he wants a special brand pushed, push it. It is the buyer who will decide, when dull days come, just which girls should be retained. He is the man who stands between you and the superintendent or manager. He can suggest your name for promotion, and when you feel that you deserve a raise of salary, he is the man who can get it for you.

There are women to-day in the retail or department stores earning twenty-five dollars a week as saleswomen. Most of them started at five, six or seven a week—and studied their stocks, their trade and their buyer.

There are women buying for millinery departments at seventy-five dollars a week who never learned to trim a hat, but they did learn what their customers wanted and what they refused to buy.

There are women buying laces and underwear and buttons and trimmings for New York stores at five thousand dollars ayear. They started as clerks. And they did not belong to the class who said that clerking is nothing but drudgery. They looked at their customers and not at their mirrors. They were respectful to the buyer or man in authority.

You expect to be trained for nursing, for

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teaching, for painting. Well, why not for buying goods in a modern store? Remember that when you sell goods at five, six or seven dollars a week you are being trained as a buyer, and at the firm's expense. That training ought to be one reason for gratitude. If you never become a buyer, if you remain in the class of store drudges, it is no one's fault but your own. The firm is ready to do its part, if you do yours.

Many of these suggestions apply also to girls from small cities or even country villages who wish to secure positions in city stores. There is no prejudice against country girls in the big city stores. Several superintendents have told me that, all things being equal, they prefer the out-of-town girl to the city girl, because she proves more earnest in her endeavors, largely because she has more at stake.

The out-of-town girl must expect a rigid cross-examination at the hands of her prospective employer. He will want to know with whom she intends to board, and what she will pay. This, because he knows just what salary he can offer and how she must make that stretch to cover nourishing food, presentable clothing and incidental expenses. If he is more than ordinarily impressed by her appearance, he may add a dollar a week to the salary he would offer the city girl who lives with her parents.
{{nop}}

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If the out-of-town applicant will be entirely frank with the superintendent in the matter of her finances, he will advise her wisely about ways of living. The question of living in a big city on a small salary will be taken up in another chapter. In this chapter I have tried only to advise girls how to go about the diffi cult task of securing a hearing. Once installed in a store, a girl who is really in earnest about her work will find chances for advancement in plenty. Some girls are too indifferent, too lazy, too shiftless, to seize an opportunity thrust upon them. They make up the great army of clerks that remain stationary behind the counters. The girl who moves on and up is the girl who sees or makes opportunities every day and every hour.

Salesmanship, once cultivated and trained into a business asset, need not confine a worker to the city department store. The woman who can sell goods will find many outlets for her energy. Real-estate, especially in suburban properties, offers splendid inducements to the woman with a gift for selling. Life insurance is a fine field of endeavor. Standard piano firms offer good commissions to women agents. The woman who can demonstrate foods and take orders in department stores and grocery stores, can work into a position as traveling sales-

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woman for a manufacturing concern. The thing is to get the training and develop your ability to sell on the right lines. The better and bigger openings will come.

—

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter III}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Trained and Semi-trained Nursing|level=2}}

{{sc|Tue}} profession of nursing is just now in the throes of what might be termed a social upheaval. For ten years, when the training-school for nurses first offered an entrance to a profitable career for women, it passed through the romantic period. Would-be nurses's aw themselves as charming figures in uniform, veritable angels of mercy, particularly to good-looking young men and to elderly persons in search of heiresses. The halo of the ministering angel—always with a becoming fluff of hair under it—held a conspicuous position in their dreams of a hospital career.

To-day nursing, having passed Gaharnod through this romantic era, is reaching a purely scientific basis. The high standard, physical, mental and moral, demanded of probationers and student nurses, and the long period of relentless training, have landed the nurse where's he belongs, close to the physician's elbow. In this day of drugless cures, the intelligence, judg-

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ment and vigilance of the trained nurse mean as much in the sick-room as the prescriptions of the physician; therefore the trained nurse has dropped the halo for the mortar-board. Gradually she is finding her level in the professional world.

Asa result, while fewer girls pass the examinations for entering training-schools, those who do pass find themselves in a goodly company of real students, not emotional enthusiasts.

First: "What girls are suited to do the work, and therefore desired by superintendents of training-schools?"

The young women who are physically and nervously strong, and who are immaculately neat about their persons.

The girl who has weak sight, who is slightly deaf, who suffers from chronic throat trouble or catarrh or sick headaches or backaches should never consider this profession. Even if she manages to squeeze through her physical examination she will never pass muster during her term of probation. Physical defects must be cured, not alleviated, before an applicant—presents herself at any training-school. Canadian and Californian girls pass excellent, physical examinations.

Mentally, you should be equipped with a high school education, or its equivalent. A broader education is an advantage but not an essential.

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The girl who cannot indite a legible, well-spelled, clearly-phrased letter has little or no chance of receiving an application blank. A training-school for nurses is not the place in which to study the rudiments of English and arithmetic.

The girl who is slovenly about her person or her clothes need not waste money on carfare to the city where the hospital-school is located. Untidiness clips the wings of a probationer as quickly as a physical defect. The strong, straight-limbed, full-chested girl who carries herself well, and whose skin is clear and well kept, whose clothes are immaculate, whose every movement is alert, is the girl for whom the superintendent is looking. The girl who is given to violent intimacies, followed by violent quarrels, is not fitted for this work. The trained nurse must be self-contained to the point of being secretive. She must study the art of keeping to herself and her work. Neither is the training-school for nurses the place for the high-strung, emotional girl, who overestimates her importance. The path which leads to a diploma holds for a girl absolute self-effacement. Sheis only a very small part of the great hospital system with which she casts her lot. Her personality is merged into one word—"duty."

Having decided that you are fitted for the

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work, with its hard training and its liberal rewards at the end of the straight and very narrow path, decide where you wish to study. So far as actual training is concerned you will rereceive as up-to-date instruction in any large city near your home as in such great centers as New York or Chicago. Perhaps there is even more chance for individual work and supervision, but on the other hand the hospitals of New York and Chicago present a greater variety of experience, a broader field of work, because the wards and the clinics are much larger. Also, work in a New York or Chicago hospital is much harder, the discipline is more strict, and your ego is even more cruelly suppressed than in the less strenuous life of a smaller institution.

If you should decide to enter a training-school in your own city or the city nearest to your home, go first to your family physician and subject yourself to a thorough physical examination. Armed with a certificate of good health over his signature and a letter of recommendation from your pastor, or from the principal of the school from which you graduated, present yourself to the superintendent of the training-school for nurses. If it is a large institution you had best write for an appointment, as many superintendents have certain hours for interviewing applicants. Your fate is then in her hands. She is an absolute auto-

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crat, and you cannot appeal from her decision to any physician connected with the hospital. Your first lesson in training-school discipline will be the power of the superintendent.

If you wish to go to a city like New York or Chicago make your application by mail. Address it to the superintendent of the training-school, and state in it clearly and unequivocally your age, height, weight, health, strength and any physical defects you may have. Do not try to gloss over any deficiency in training or condition. Be sure the superintendent will find you out. Set forth your educational advantages, your occupation from the time you left school until the hour of writing, the church of which you are a member, your reasons and motives for becoming a trained nurse, also whether you are married, single, widowed or divorced. Be equally frank as to your responsibilities, whether you have others dependent upon you for financial support. Forward with these statements, which you should make as brief as possible, your letter or letters of recommendation, and a certificate of health.

If this informal application makes a good impression on the superintendent, she will send you a regular application blank, which you will fill out with infinite care—and please, dear girls, if you want to make a good impression with this, do not send it forth decorated with tiny

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blots, or, worse still, greasy thumb-marks. It will announce to the trained eye of that superintendent that you are not neat. And untidiness, as I said before, is a heinous offense.

Now, we will take up your career at your moment of acceptance as a probationer. Your name is placed on the waiting-list, and there it stays until a vacancy occurs, when you will be summoned and must report at once. In the meantime get everything in readiness. When you are notified that you have been accepted as a probationer you will receive a list of the clothing to bring with you. This varies in different hospitals, therefore I cannot give explicit directions. All this clothing you must provide and pay for. The training-school provides nothing until you have passed the period of probation and have entered upon your long term of service to the institution, when you will be paid a small salary with which to purchase uniforms, or, the uniform will be furnished. This much I will say: Show good judgment in the selection of your clothing. Have plenty of simple things rather than a few that are ornately trimmed. If you expected to wear a uniform of chambray or gingham or zephyr cloth in the familiar gray-blue and white stripe, have these simple dresses fitted carefully to give you the appearance of trimness, and have the waist and skirt joined by a narrow band to avoid the separation of

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skirt and waist or the use of unsightly safety-pins. Have an ample supply of perfectly plain white petticoats with simple hems or a few tucks but not a scrap of lace upon them. Do not waste your money on fancy neckwear. It is unprofessional. Have plenty of plain linen stocks or collars, and white ties plainly hemmed, with cuffs to match, and quantities of large white nursing aprons. Your shoes should be soft and easy. You will be told what quantity and sort of underwear will be needed. Everything must be clearly marked with your name.

Once more—your success as a probationer will depend largely on your neatness. A probationer is allowed a limited amount of laundry work. Do not depend solely upon this, but take with you enough money to pay for extra laundry. One nurse who made an unusual record as a probationer says she owed her success to a laundry bill of ten dollars a month.

Some girls manage to go through the entire course without receiving any money from home, but this means rigid self-denial, as the salary paid by the school is intended to meet only your expenses in the way of supplies needed for your tuition, books, uniforms, washing, etc. And every probationer should take with her the amount of her railroad fare home. The superintendent of the training-school assumes absolutely no responsibility for your future.

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If you fail, you must pay your own way home. And what is more, you will not be told why you failed!

Now the word comes that you are to report for duty. Pack your trunk carefully, not failing to put in a stout little strong-box with a padlock, for the superintendent assumes no responsibility for your property unless you place money, rings, etc., in the office safe, and you are away from your room or dormitory most of the time.

On reaching the city where the training-school is located do not go to a hotel, and then, with the air of conferring a favor, write to the superintendent that you are in town and ready to come at her call. She has called you. Go directly to the hospital—and drop your individuality on its front stoop. From the moment you enter you are a mere cog in this great machine of alleviation and mercy.

Just here let me tell you an incident in the first day of school of a now successful nurse. She entered the tiny room assigned to her on the top floor of the dormitory building, flung her suitcase, her umbrella, magazine, etc., on the narrow bed and seated herself thereon to remove her hat and veil. She was just tucking the latter into her diminutive locker, when—enter the superintendent of nurses! This per-

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sonage gave a quick glance at the bed and remarked:

"Why, really, it looks as if some one had been sitting on that bed."

"Yes, Miss Blank," replied Miss Innocence, "I have."

"Never do it again. Once a bed is made up, nothing should be laid on it, not even a handkerchief."

Do you begin to understand that the régime is not cruel, but strict? Little blunders might cost a human life. There must be no such word as "forget" in your vocabulary. Neither must you ever say "Why?" Just do as you are told. You are not there to improve the system of the management. It has been all tried out, perhaps before you were born. For the time being you are a nonentity, whose sole duty is to obey implicitly, unquestioningly.

Every one is watching you. You are surrounded by spies who study your every movement. They will notice the lace stock that ought to be plain linen, and the raveling from your petticoat that should never have found its way to a hospital training-school. They will peer into your bureau drawers merely to see in what order you keep your personal belongings, and some one will go into your room every morning to make sure that you tidied it perfectly before going to breakfast or on duty.
{{nop}}

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Many girls ask what is expected of a probationer in the way of actual work. During the period of probation will they be given a fair test of their ability?

The following program of the first eight weeks' work laid out for probationers in a New England hospital will convey some idea of the scope and nature of the work:

"Hospital etiquette and rules, nurses' ethics; washing, nourishment dishes, care of refrigerators, gas-stoves, cupboards, trays, serving meals, nourishment; care of lavatory and utensils in lavatory; bed-making; bed bath; patients' morning and evening toilets; admitting stretcher cases, undressing patients, entrance bath, listing and care of clothing and valuables; filling and applying ice-caps, hot-water bags; care of linen press; washing hair, care of back, mouth, teeth, etc.; feeding helpless patients; taking and recording temperatures, pulse and respiration; mustard plasters, poultices, etc.; giving of medicines; special class instruction in printing, charting and diets."

Once you have proven your worth as a probationer, and are accepted as a student nurse, you virtually turn yourself and your services over to a hospital for a term varying from two to three years. During that time you will be provided with lodging, food and care in case of illness. Hither your uniforms, laundry and

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text-books will be provided or you will receive a small allowance which will cover these expenses. Your hours will be practically twelve a day, with brief respites during each day for outdoor exercise, a half-holiday each week, and generally half of each Sunday. Two weeks' vacation is granted during the summer. You will live at the home for nurses connected with the hospital and will be subject to its rules and regulations, precisely as if you were a hospital patient instead of a nurse.

If you are unwilling to give up this much time, this much strength, this much liberty, to prepare for the profession, do not aim to be a trained nurse. Nothing short of this will prepare you.

It seems hardly necessary to outline the career of a nurse after graduation, but as many girls desire such particulars, I will add that in cities of any size the graduate nurse who has aroused the favorable interest of physicians connected with the hospital seldom lacks work at $25 a week. On the other hand, experienced nurses declare that the work is so exacting and so wearing, physically and nervously, that no graduate nurse should attempt to work more than ten months in a year, which means that her cash income will be a thousand dollars a year. Her board is of course included wherever she nurses, but she generally maintains a resi-

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dence in some registry or good rooming house. Her uniforms and laundry form a heavy item of expense.

Graduate nurses do not always take up general practice, but may secure positions on hospital staffs, perhaps in the very school from which they have just graduated, or in smaller out-of-town hospitals. All large State institutions and private charities employ trained nurses. This list includes houses of correction and refuge, asylums and homes for crippled, blind and mentally defective children, homes for the aged, and large schools where the nurse works under the matron. Factories and department stores also employ nurses to guardthe general health of employees and act in case of accident. In many cities the Board of Education maintains a corps of nurses, health departments also give them employment, and nearly every large city has its visiting nurses. The highest salaried posts are those of superintendents in hospitals and sanitariums, but experienced nurses agree that a period of general practice is desirable as preparation for any salaried position in an institution.

If you cannot take a complete course, and you are still determined to work for the sick, then you must select different lines from those followed by the trained nurse. You may become what is known as a convalescent nurse, or

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a trained nursemaid, or you can specialize on massage or cookery for the sick, or you can make a business of reading aloud to the sick. But do not imagine for one instant that among doctors you will have the same standing as the trained nurse, nor will you command the same income.

Several organizations, notably the Young Women's Christian Association in large cities, offer courses in convalescent nursing. In this course you are prepared to take the place of the trained nurse, when the patient is so close to recovery that scientific vigilance may be relaxed and mere attendance and entertainment substituted. Convalescent nurses are employed to relieve trained nurses while the latter take their daily outdoor exercises; also in some households to wait upon chronic invalids who have become fretful and captious, and who require diversion as well as light attendance. Work of this sort is secured through registries and physicians, and pays from seven to fifteen dollars a week, according to the amount of attendance and work required.

Trained nursemaids are now in great demand in the nurseries of the rich. They step into the shoes of the trained nurse, take complete charge of the new baby in the household and often assume direction of the nursery complete, order-

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ing the meals, and guarding the health of the older children. In such instances there is generally an under-maid who performs the menial nursery duties. The semi-trained nurse wears a uniform and is a sort of upper servant in the household. Her salary varies from twenty to thirty dollars a month, together with board, lodging and laundry, according to her duties and training. Such training is secured in charity hospitals for babies, and the course runs from six to nine months. The responsibilities, however, are very great, as the woman who employs a semi-trained nurse generally has many outside interests and throws all responsibilities upon her employee.

An expert masseuse can build up a good business in this day of nervous womanhood, of high-strung society women and overworked professional and business women. Hither the Swedish system of massage or the Weir Mitchell system, physicians say, should be mastered by the masseuse who expects to succeed. Both require many months of study, superb strength and that peculiar quality of personal magnetism which makes the exhausted patient respond to the efforts of her masseuse. A masseuse is paid by the hour or by the treatment, and secures work through physicians, registries for nurses, sanitariums, Turkish baths and beauty

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parlors, where nervously exhausted women go to recuperate.

General massage is taught in all hospital training-schools, but the specialist should take private instruction from scientific experts.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter IV}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Art for the Girl Who Must Be Self-supporting|level=2}}

{{sc|In}} a work of this sort, when discussing art as a means of livelihood, we must consider it as a practical profession, not as a divine gift or inspiration. This book is written for the girl who must become economically independent within two years at least. For that reason we will not consider the training, environment and work of the girl who aspires to portraiture, miniature-painting, or oil and water-color masterpieces of that moving character which represent the highest type of the fine arts, and which require years of patient work, to say nothing of more or less genius. Such girls must either have enough funds to study for years in the best ateliers of America and Europe or they must be willing to wage an indefinite warfare against poverty and discouragement.

There are comparatively few girls in America possessed of such boundless ambition and persistency, but there are thousands of young women who show decided artistic talent, and

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{{FreedImg
| file = The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909) 3.png
| caption = Class in Applied Design
| width = 600px
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—

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who realize that they must either turn this gift to practical financial account or look to other avenues of money-making. Nor is there any reason why a girl, who can afford a few years of hard work in a good school, should hesitate—to develop her one talent along artistic lines. "The practical worker in any line of artistic endeavor can find a market for her wares or a salaried position, but she must not fail to place due emphasis on that little word "practical." The man who stands ready to pay for artistic products wants his art-workers to be as business-like as his stenographers or salesmen. The day of the lackadaisical maiden with unkempt locks, bedraggled skirts and dreamy eyes staring into the blue heavens for an inspiration, are past, so far as the publishing and manufacturing world is concerned. While such a girl waits for an inspiration, a practical worker with perhaps less artistic ideals, but a keener appreciation of her employer's needs and the importance of punctuality, secures all the orders.

In other words, the girl who imagines that she can put her artistic talent to account must start out aright, with a perfect understanding of the business-like atmosphere in which she will work. She will have to work regularly, not spasmodically. She will have to deliver her product on time—or have the order canceled. And she will have to deliver the sort of work

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her employer orders. She cannot substitute some sudden, inspirational idea. If she is one of those rare creatures, a genius, an iconoclast in art, if she must do things in her own way or not at all, then she must not enter what we may term the field of commercial art.

Broadly speaking, girls who want to earn their living by pencil, pen or brush may be divided into two classes: those who wish to work in their own homes, and those who can and will fare forth in search of work and salaried positions. The resident of a large city, like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago or San Francisco, naturally has the advantage over the girl in a smaller city or village or on a farm. She can do the most practical forms of art work, such as designing for textiles and metals, fashion drawings, book covers and illustrating, and still live at home, while the girl living far from an art, manufacturing or publishing center must leave home to gain practical experience and to make her reputation.

The girl with the brush who cannot make this change in residence must cultivate her talents so as to use them in her environment. Only one girl in a thousand can establish herself as an art-worker through correspondence. This does not apply to high-grade illustrators, many of whom prefer to work far from publishing centers, but to girls who wish to secure regular

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work, perhaps salaried positions as designers along some particular line. Designing of jewelry is generally done in the manufacturing plants, managers of fashion syndicates or fashion magazines want illustrators to work under their direction, even makers of wallpaper or carpet patterns must be near enough to the factory to confer constantly with those who use their designs.

This explanation is made at the very beginning of the chapter because so few girls from farms, small towns and inland cities appreciate the importance of being on the ground to market their wares, or the vital necessity of making their work practical and utilitarian. Many girls imagine that they can take an art course by correspondence and put city girls out of business with the designs they will be turning out in a few months. While I think the correspondence course is a boon to the isolated girl with artistic talent, I want each of these girls to understand that the day will come when she will realize the stern necessity of direct teaching and of being in the market with her wares.

We will discuss first the future of the girl who is about to graduate from the high school, who has displayed considerable talent with her pencil or brush, and who can afford to give at least two years to the study of art.

She may become either an instructor or a

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worker. If teaching appeals to her, if she has the natural pedagogical instinct, she will succeed either in a salaried position or as a private instructor. But if she is the sort of girl who demands practical results of her own hands, if her tastes are mechanical rather than theoretical, if she is happiest when working alone and watching the work come out from under her pencil, then she will secure the best results and find the surest avenue to contentment as a designer, illustrator or worker in arts and crafts. No girl should select a course of art until she has given this problem earnest consideration and has decided on the use to which she will put her knowledge. Much time and money can be saved by settling this question in advance, and selecting the most expeditious or practical course of training. To be sure, a change of mind and heart may come after the student begins to work at an art school, but as a rule a high-school graduate is able to decide whether she will find her greatest happiness and usefulness as a teacher or as a worker. The girl who "hates the schoolroom" and has no natural interest in children or power to attract them, will succeed much better as a worker along the more practical art lines than as an instructor in either public schools or private classes.

As the girl inexperienced in the business world knows little of art work which has a com-

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mercial value in manufacturing plants or publishing houses, we will discuss first these methods of money-making.

Among the courses offered to girls desiring to become practical workers are the following: General art, drawing, painting and illustration, which lead to positions as staff illustrators on newspapers and magazines, or free-lancing as an illustrator; decorative and applied design which leads to practical designing for book covers, pages and illumination; stencils, silks, damasks, rugs, wall-papers and wall coverings of all sorts, lamps, candlesticks, grilles, stained glass windows, mosaics, carvings, furniture, etc.; interior decoration or architecture, either of which lead to positions with architects or interior decorators and eventually to an independent venture; and the course in jewelry, metal chasing, enameling and medal work which leads to salaried positions or good prices for individual designs with jewelry and arts and crafts manufacturers.

The time required for training varies from two to four years, according to the school selected and the work done by the student. At an endowed institution where no specific time is set for the completion of the courses, one pupil will secure a position at the end of two years and prove a satisfactory worker, while the girl who started at her side will work in the school two

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years longer, and then start at a lower salary than her more ambitious and earnest fellow-worker student.

The course in general art work, leading to illustration at the Cooper Institute, New York City, runs four years, yet a girl who had studied only eighteen months, met with financial reverses, entered the offices of a fashion syndicate and under the practical direction of its manager whipped her somewhat crude work into practical shape, with just the dash of originality which is sometimes born of desperation. Within a month she was earning fifteen dollars a week. To-day she is head of the illustrated fashion department of a magazine for women, and is drawing a very comfortable salary.

The girl who can take up the study of art as her sister may be studying stenography, closing her ears to the call of Bohemia, and working as if she were engaged in a trade at which she must serve a stern apprenticeship, need not dawdle away four years of youth, energy and family funds. Her work will be marketable not when the school hands her a diploma, but when it has a practical market value.

From this you must not think that I advise hasty, superficial work. What menaces the success of the average out-of-town girl sent to a city art school by her parents, is misconstruing that famous line: "Art is long and time is

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fleeting." She thinks she must take indefinite time to study and gain inspiration, when steady, regular, concentrated work is far more important than what she terms a "gradual growth."

There was a time when students were urged not to draw fashions or enter the services of any syndicate which supplies cheap magazines with head and tail-pieces, fashions or pattern drawings and illustrations, but there has been a distinct change of sentiment on this question. The practical training received in the art rooms of such a syndicate and the education in the value of lines, light and shade, as seen in actual reproduction, are superior to that which can be secured in an art school where the work is never reproduced on either fast or slow presses. The few bad tricks or habits which a student may develop in the rush work of such a syndicate office are more than balanced by the practical results of seeing her work reproduced in newspaper or magazine.

Girls completing the course of illustration in a publishing or manufacturing center can find positions in publishing houses, as staff illustrators, particularly in fashions or pattern work, or making drawings for the advertising manager of department stores where illustrations are prepared for daily newspapers and periodicals, or in advertising agencies where catchy illustrations for exploiting proprietary

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articles are always in demand; or if the worker has a particularly novel and fetching treatment of feminine foibles, she can secure a salary or space rates doing timely drawings for the daily papers, particularly the afternoon editions.

Another very profitable field for the illustrator who wants quick returns is catalogue work, illustrating the catalogues put out by high-grade manufacturers or wholesalers, Any girl who secures practical training along these cash-return lines will be laying up money and securing experience against the day when she feels artistically strong enough to branch out as an illustrator of stories and books. And furthermore, she may avoid many months spent in treading the valley of humiliation if she will do this more practical and yet artistic work, before storming the portals of big publishing houses.

The girl who selects decorative and applied design seldom secures a salaried position, for by the time she has completed this course she realizes that a design which is worth anything at all will bring a better figure as an individual creation than if she is employed on salary. Still there are manufacturing plants which employ artists on salary, and the girl who prefers a small but sure income will seek such work, ranging from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week.

All the leading manufacturers of hand-made jewelry or specially designed objects of art,

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medals, enameling, etc., employ women and pay good salaries, while women are succeeding not only as assistants, but as independent architects and interior decorators.

It is almost as hard to give a scale of salaries or earnings for art workers as it is to state how much time they must expend in preparation. With both questions the answer depends upon the girl. There are patient, conscientious, but mechanical workers, drawing fashion designs in New York art rooms at twenty dollars a week, while less conscientious workers with more originality and that rare offering to a harried editor, an idea, are drawing fifty, sixty or even seventy-five dollars a week, making near-caricatures of their own sex or drawing charmingly impossible little ladies for metropolitan dailies.

There are girls patiently redrawing plans and specifications for men architects with ideas, for fifteen dollars a week, while right across the street a woman who can conceive, as well as reproduce, ideas earns her ten thousand a year designing depots and business blocks of the most utilitarian sort.

There are girls who studied interior decoration from composition and color to sanitary science and electricity, but, because they lack originality and business or administrative ability, they are working on a salary of fifteen dollars a week, while a fellow-student with ex-

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ecutive ability and push has her own business and is furnishing and decorating clubhouses, hotels and private homes.

Mere training in the best school of America will not turn out financially successful workers. It may develop an artistic, finished workwoman, but it cannot train her to make money. She must prove her business or economic worth by the manner in which she markets her wares.

The cost of such an art training varies. A girl can spend a thousand dollars a year for tuition, studio rent and living expenses while attending a New York art school, or she can study at Cooper Institute for a nominal figure, two hundred dollars a year covering her expenses, light-housekeeping, tuition and incidentals. Or she can work by day and study free at night schools.

The would-be art teacher must outline her course of study with infinite care, as the position she secures will depend not so much upon her ability, however important that may be, as upon her diploma and the name of the institution from which she graduates. Before selecting the course, let her decide upon the sort of position she expects to fill. If she intends to become a teacher in a fashionable private school or to rise to the post of teacher of art in the high school or supervisor of art in the city public schools, then she might as well decide at once

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that she must have a college degree, such as is furnished by Teachers College, Columbia University, or a normal training course of equal standing. This will represent at least two years' work in what is known as a normal art and manual training course, in addition to the regular, high school course of four years. The two years' normal work will cost, including living expenses and tuition, about one thousand dollars. If she intends to become a teacher in the graded schools, a normal course, added to the regulation high school course, with specialization in drawing, will be sufficient.

Special teachers of drawing are paid from seven hundred dollars a year up, the teacher of drawing in a high school never receives less than one thousand dollars per year, and a supervisor is paid from twelve hundred a year up, according to the size of the city and the scale of teachers' salaries.

In conclusion, a few words to the girl who cannot take a comprehensive course, either as a practical art worker or as a teacher, and who must earn money in her home town, perhaps in her own parlor. Only one girl in a thousand can study at home, remain at home and still market her wares in a distant art or manufacturing center. The thousandth girl is a born illustrator, whose work compels the attention of art editors. Even then, eventually, she must

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make frequent trips to publishing centers. Or if she is a worker along the more practical lines, she turns out such original designs in arts and crafts wares, china painting, stenciling, etc., that proprietors of exclusive shops are forced to notice her work, even though she may not be able to confer with them in person. But the thousandth girl is not the average girl, and that is why managers of art stationery stores, women's exchanges, and art shops, and private individuals whose names appear in public print are literally deluged with impossible handwork from trained and untrained art-workers in smaller cities and villages. Their output includes crude hand-painted china, satin cushiontops, pincushions, menus, favors, place cards and postals, not original, but copied from lithographs which sell for a mere song.

These workers cannot find a market in a distant city. They must seek patrons and work up trade in their own towns or adjacent cities, where they can ascertain what women with money wish to purchase. The crude oil painting of a basket of peaches which won first prize at the county fair may sell to one of the judges, but the city art dealer handles only work by a man or woman with reputation. The pretty trinkets made of birchbark or the postals with scenes of the local pleasure resorts or monuments will sell to tourists visiting the artist's

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town, but they will not appeal to the buyer for an art stationery store a thousand or two thousand miles away.

The young woman with mediocre talent—and she will soon find her level if she goes to a large city and competes with original workers—will do best in her own town, organizing classes for young girls who want to paint Christmas and birthday gifts, holding Easter and Christmas sales, making up souvenirs for tourists, and creating a demand among local social leaders for hand-painted prizes and favors. If she can build up a reputation for introducing into her community the latest fads of metropolitan society, she will soon have an established home trade and a certain income which she can never secure by dealing with city merchants or exchanges, through the mails.

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{{sc|Dressmaking}} is a trade of the veriest drudgery at a small weekly wage, or it is a commercial venture which yields very big financial returns. There is no middle ground.

On its altar many a conscientious woman has sacrificed youth, girlish happiness and health. Upon woman's fondness for dress and innate American extravagance, other women have built a competence. Dressmaking will yield large financial returns only to the woman who has the true business or commercial instinct, and who would succeed equally well if she opened a millinery shop, managed a shoe factory, or ran a public typewriting office.

The mere fact that you set dainty stitches will not make you a financial success as a dressmaker. You must have what is known as a "business head." Here is a case in point, rather personal, to be sure, but one for whose truth I can vouch.

During my last year in school manual {{hws|s=train|e=ing}}

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{{hwe|s=train|e=ing}} was just beginning to invade educational circles, and I belonged to what was perhaps the first sewing-class in the high school of a large Eastern city. In September we started setting stitches, sewing seams and making buttonholes. By commencement day, in June, we were expected to be able to cut, fit and make a garment. My dainty stitches and accurate work in the sewing-class helped materially to raise my general average. In fact, my neatly-made percale dress was awarded the highest possible percentage, but later in the summer, when I tried to wear that dress, it looked—well, in a kindly spirit, we will call it queer.

In the same class, almost rubbing elbows with me, was a girl whose sewing nearly drove our dear old teacher distracted. Her stitches wandered over the material at their own sweet will. Her buttonholes were a class scandal. Her garment fell to pieces, unless some of us helped to fasten off the thread-ends. But the little mull dress which she made for her graduation stunt was distractingly dainty, albeit none of us could vouch for the steadfastness of its seams. She was marked very low by the conscientious judges of needlework, but later in the summer, on the boardwalk at Cape May, N. J., that little frock added several scalps to her proposal belt.

A few years later that girl opened a profit-

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able dressmaking establishment, though she had to hire women to set the {{SIC|stiches|stitches}} according to her designs. Later she became buyer for a firm, making semi-annual trips abroad. To-day she is head of a fashion and pattern syndicate,—enjoying a large income, and she is wonderfully happy and satisfied in her work. I might still be making very neat buttonholes in her dressmaking establishment, but if I want an artistic corsage-bow or a smart summer girdle evolved from ribbon, I have to tip a girl at the ribbon counter to make it for me. So you see the girl who received the highest percentage as a mere setter of stitches might have starved, or at least become a tired drudge at dressmaking, while the girl who knew the value of lines, color combinations and effects, although she did make round and ragged buttonholes, has a thriving business, built on the same trade.

There is a small, steady income in ordinary dressmaking. You can make a trifle more than {{hinc|sweat-shop}} wages if you are a neat seamstress and have good health. But the big money in dressmaking is made by the women who know how to profit by the labor of others, who can catch and hold trade by their original designs, and who are sincerely interested in making their wealthy customers look their best. Make a woman better-looking, whether by massage, {{hinc|hair-dressing}}, millinery or dressmaking, and

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the laborer will be considered worthy of her hire.

We will take it for granted that you have fairly good health, strong eyesight, a gift for setting neat stitches and running a machine evenly, and a fair amount of good taste. You think you would like to be a dressmaker, but you have no capital.

You must start as an apprentice or helper, according to your age. If you are a mere slip of a girl, you will start your dressmaking career by running errands, delivering finished work, executing small shopping commissions, and holding a box of pins for the fitter. All of those tasks hold possibilities. Running errands and delivering work will bring you in direct contact with customers and give to you your first training in tactful treatment of patrons. The shopping commissions will prove lessons in values, combinations of color, or of fabrics and trimmings, and the retail markets. By watching the fitter closely, the mere holder of pins gains her first idea of the value of lines and what constitutes failure or success in fitting.

As an errand girl, the apprentice will not re'ceive more than $2 a week. She may have to work several months for nothing. At the end of six months she starts on linings at $4 a week. When promoted to do over-sewing and finishing, she will receive $6 for her week's work.

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Trimmers on skirts or waists receive $12 to $14 per week. In cities, fitters receive from $15 to $18. After a few years in the establishment of a first-class dressmaker, if the employee has a little reserve fund, a list of probable patrons, the gift of winning satisfied customers and plenty of good courage, she is ready to open a shop of her own.

The girl who lacks business push on a the ability to take the initiative and achieve on original lines should not attempt an independent venture. She can always find a position for about nine months out of the year, perhaps more, at $15 a week in a private dressmaking establishment, or she can enter a department store as alteration fitter in the suit and coat department.

So much for the history of the young girl. Now for her older sister or aunt, who is a fine needlewoman, but who has no knowledge of cutting, fitting or designing. She must enter a shop where the best custom work is done and where her fine stitching will be worth at least a dollar a day to her employer. This means hand-tucking, binding, braiding, etc. Then she advances to the work of trimming and finally to fitting. She escapes only the errand-running and shopping, though if she can get a little of the latter to do, it is good training for her.

Replying to the many questions about schools,

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I would say that the girl who has it in her to succeed will do so whether she starts as an apprentice at nothing a week, or spends her father's money at a high-priced school for dressmakers. The teachers in a school are perhaps more considerate of your feelings, at so much per week, than the forewoman of the shop who is intrusting to your inexperienced fingers fabrics purchased by her patrons, but the consideration paid for by your father's money will not lead to any royal road in dressmaking lore. That is either born in you, a God-given talent, or you acquire it by honest effort.

Studying designing during the slack season is entirely different. A practical fitter or would-be designer will find a summer or evening course in a good art school most helpful.

It will depend upon yourself how soon you can learn the trade. Forewomen tell me that it takes so many months to perfect oneself on linings, on sleeves, on skirts, on trimmings, but I know that girls who have the right sort of determination and who concentrate on their work can break every time-rule which forewomen have conceived. But when the demon of discouragement takes possession of you, then your chances of emancipation and independence fades.

In selecting a shop in which to work, choose a small rather than a large establishment. This

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will insure individual attention, or correction, you may call it, and a chance to work on all parts of a gown. In the large shops you are apt to settle down as a maker of sleeves, or vests or panels, some one part of each gown always being turned over to you. Thus your general training is neglected.

Now we will say that you have a fair working knowledge of dressmaking, fitting and designing. You want to be an independent, not a salaried worker. By this I mean that either you wish to establish a house-to-house clientele of your own or a shop with help to execute your orders and carry out your designs. Right here I want to speak of your health. Barring teaching, I doubt if there is another trade or profession which holds so many wrecks, nervous and physical, as dressmaking. This condition exists because the work is confining. In the busy season, dressmakers do not leave their workrooms for weeks at a time, and then they wonder why they have headaches, digestive disorders, neuralgia and nervous prostration. The woman who means to last in this trade must guard her health. A brisk walk night and morning, proper ventilation of the workrooms, regular hours for meals, and relaxation, downright fun after working hours, will save your reason, protect your health, lengthen your period of

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usefulness to your own sex, and increase your bank account.

Do not expect to defy every rule of hygiene—and sanitation, for many workrooms are unsanitary and germ-laden—and then achieve success and prosperity. Mix a little common sense with your ability to build good gowns, if you have no capital with which to open a shop which will appeal to wealthy customers, and you still wish to be your own mistress and paymaster, then you must specialize—and right here I want to picture some incidents from real dressmaking life in which girls have literally wrenched success from apparent failure by specializing, or creating a demand for their services.

In a city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants there works a young woman who calls herself dressmaker to little people. She makes garments of any sort for children over two and under ten. She would not make a shirt-waist for little Tommy's mother, nor a skirt for Baby Bess' grown-up sister, because she frankly admits that she does not know how. But she makes the cutest little brown-linen suits for Tommy in which he can play comfortably and yet look well dressed, because they fit properly; and she makes Baby Bess the cynosure of feminine eyes when she goes calling or to church with her proud mamma. Moreover, she is paid two dol-

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lars a day, and has to fight for a month's vacation during hot weather.

Here was a girl who from childhood could set neat stitches and was accurate. She started to serve an apprenticeship with a dressmaker in her own city. She saw girls break down from close confinement in a poorly-ventilated workroom. She watched her employer's nerves quiver under the trials peculiar to dealing with women customers, and the effort to keep promises which never should have been made. The girl decided that she did not want to be a dressmaker, yet she had to earn her living.

She heard some mothers complaining of how poorly ready-to-wear clothes-for children were put together, and how tiresome it was to do your own sewing. The girl saw her chance and seized it. She offered her services at a dollar a day as a seamstress, working on children's clothes under the direction of the mothers who were glad to have a neat assistant. Then she read up on children's clothes. She bought patterns from various firms until she found one that specialized on raiment for children. She began to design a little frock here, a boy's blouse there. She studied as she sewed, and gradually she could ask a slight advance in her wages. In time mothers found that this girl, whom they had trained and whose faculty for absorbing information had been as rapid as it

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has been unostentatious, was a specialist in juvenile raiment.

Perhaps some day she will be the proud possessor of a large city shop, because men of money, and women, too, for that matter, are often willing to back a specialist of this sort. Perhaps, being a woman of quiet tastes and simple habits, she may continue to live contentedly on twelve dollars a week. But, best of all, she loves her work and has steady nerves, which means something to those of us who are wage-earners.

Some years ago there came to New York from the Far West, from New Mexico, if I remember correctly, a young woman who painted rather well on china. She opened a studio, but met with indifferent sucess. Finally a day came when she could buy no more china to paint and fire, but that mattered very little, as her stock of finished wares was by no means depleted. Still, her hands must have something td do, so she began to make over her clothes and to ultilize some discarded garments given to her by a well-to-do patron. Among the latter was a green crepe de chine frock, which she cleaned, embroidered in self-tones, and made into a most effective blouse. The patron, calling at the studio one day, could hardly believe her eyes when she was shown the blouse. If she could only find some one who could clean, make over

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and utilize out-of-date clothes for her in that very artistic fashion!

The girl hesitated a moment, then frankly asked for a chance to do the work, explaining her financial condition. The one-time buyer of ceramics gladly accepted her services as a renovator, cleaner and general utility sewer.

For one whole year that girl did nothing but make old frocks into new ones. There was nothing about cleaning, turning and pressing that she did not master. But all the time she cherished another ambition. At the end of the year she entered the workroom of a firm noted as makers of women's shirt-waists and blouses. She studied their methods, and finally fared forth a specialist in shirt-waist and lingerie blouses. To-day she has a business so thriving that she never gives a thought to her one-time ambition as a painter of china.

From the West Indies came another young woman with rosy visions of learning dressmaking and opening an establishment of her own. She found herself an apprentice in a huge workroom surrounded by girls who had no ambition beyond half-holidays and Sunday at Coney Island. They told her there was no chance to rise. If a forewoman saw you were clever she purposely kept you back, lest you become her rival.

The girl could not endure this. She needed

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an ambition to sustain her, an objective point toward which she would bend her endeavors. As soon as she felt sufficient confidence, she left the shop and started as house-to-house seamstress at one dollar per day. Sometimes she worked with members of the family who employed her, sometimes with more competent house-to-house dressmakers, but it did not take her long to discover that the problem of the average family was the gowning of the girl who had just reached the awkward age, the age of angles and of hysterical tears over dresses that would not simulate curves.

She began to study the possibilities of the awkward age. What styles of skirts, blouses, girdles and fichus would soften those angles? What fabrics lent themselves best to soft effects, and what trimmings should be avoided? What changes could be made in prevailing style to secure becoming results for unhappy Miss Fifteen? All these problems she studied and worked out with a more than artistic eye—the enthusiasm of the girl with the one idea. To-day that girl commands $2.50 per day. She has all she can do in town during the winter, spring and fall, and her hot-weather days are spent at a resort on the New Jersey coast, where in two wealthy families she makes, early fall finery for growing girls. Thus she has her expenses paid to and from the resort, her daily

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dip in the sea, her moonlight nights on the sand, her afternoon rest, when the machine no longer whirrs and the scissors lie as idle as their mistress. These privileges are hers, not because she knows a trade, for many of us have a trade and no privileges, but because she has found for herself a special service. She is doing something that few, if any, other women have deemed worthy their attention. She has made a niche for herself.

These instances of successful effort have not been recited for your amusement. I hope they have all gone to prove that it is not the trade, but the use to which you put it, that makes for contentment or big financial returns.

Perhaps you think from what I have written that training, or serving an apprenticeship, is not necessary, that somehow you can escape the monotony of preparation; but I did not wish to give you this impression. In each instance the girl served a hard apprenticeship either before or after entering business for herself. The maker of blouses served a long weary year in a waist factory. The builder of garments for children or of raiment for growing girls founded her individual success on a knowledge of cutting and sewing gained in the hard school of experience.

What I do want to set forth in this article is that the girl who thinks she has only to follow

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unthinkingly the orders of her employer or forewoman, and who does not plan definitely and enthusiastically for her future, will remain as long as she lives either a workroom drudge or a most indifferent dressmaker to dissatisfied customers.

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{{sc|Of}} all fields in which to sow her energies, the well-educated but otherwise untrained girl who suddenly faces the problem of self-support will find the modern library the most promising. So far the profession is not overcrowded, and the good worker is in demand.

It is a field open alike to the graduate of college, finishing school or high school, but it is absolutely closed to the girl who barely managed to pull through the graded schools, and who, through either force of circumstances or inclination, stopped when she acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the English branches. It is an ideal field for the woman who is intellectual, yet lacks ability to express this intellectuality in literary form. It often proves a most profitable and pleasant field for the teacher of methodical habits, good education and bookish tastes, who somehow lacks the gift of disciplining and instilling knowledge in the youthful mind.

But it is not the field for that common type

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of girl who likes books, yet is not a student, who imagines that in the library she may familiarize herself with such books as please her fancy, and ignore those which do not appeal, and pictures herself exchanging books during the busy hours and reading the new novels when visitors are few.

In the modern library there are no idle hours, no slack days. There is always something to be done. There is always more to be learned.

The delicate woman who wants "ladylike employment and genteel hours" should avoid library work, but if any girl is earnestly seeking a profession in which she may rise by her own merits and through her own industry, broaden her mental life by constant association with the best in literature, and at the same time do something for her fellow men, she will find such work in the public library.

The circular of information concerning the training-school for children's librarians, conducted in connection with the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, Pa., states:

"The library of to-day does not wait for the people to come to it; it goes to them, carrying books into schools and homes. A large share of this work belongs to the children's librarian, whose function it is to awaken an interest in good reading in as many children as she can reach. Her work lies wherever children are

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gathered together—in the children's room of the library, in the school, the playground, the street and the home. She must also work with organized philanthropies, such as university and social settlements. This work should appeal to the earnest, broad-minded young woman who wishes to devote her efforts to the moral, esthetic, as well as the intellectual, education of children."

And what is true of the children's librarian, to a large extent is true of the reference librarian who comes in contact with the reading public. In stimulating the interest of all her visitors, in directing their reading along broader lines, in feeding the starved minds of those to whom the public opens for the first time the door to literature and literary pleasure, she is doing something more than earning her salary and serving the board which appointed her. She is uplifting humanity. In so doing she finds the fine, if narrow, path to happiness, and she is mastering the first principles of the joy of living.

With this broader view of the librarian's duties and privileges, let us consider the advantages and disadvantages of the work. This summing up of the arguments for and against the profession must not be taken as the opinion of a single worker, but as the result of much investigating, the sifting of many opinions.
{{nop}}

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Its advantages, except in departments where the work is largely mechanical, such as recovering books, pasting labels, running indicators, etc., are that it keeps one in touch, more or less, with the intellectual life and progress of the world; it pays regularly and fairly well; it brings one in contact with agreeable and often gifted people; and, unlike teaching, it is put aside at the day's end.

On the other hand, however, the unthinking, mechanical library worker can very easily lead a most superficial life, because her work lays undue emphasis on the intellectual side of life. Some librarians hold, however, that there really is no great goal in sight for the very able and ambitious girl; that is, she has not the same wide scope for achievement and the development of her creative faculties as the writer, the musician, the artist, the designer. She never really becomes her own mistress, as one successful librarian expressed it. Even when she is head librarian she is ruled by the board of directors. Expressing it broadly, she has less chance to give expression to her individuality than girls in many professions, like the arts, the sciences and the law.

But taking the profession as a whole, it is the ideal one for the girl who is content with routine work, a comfortable salary and the ability

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to serve her fellow-men in a capacity which can never be termed mean, narrow or menial. She must always feel the uplift of the books among which she moves, and the call of those who need the help of her broader intelligence and equipment.

All these things the girl of sufficient education must consider, and then turn to the question of preparation.

The day of haphazard library work is past. The modern library, large or small, is systematized like the modern business establishment. The custom of giving a position to the mayor's niece when she comes back from a year at a city school, because she is the mayor's niece, and dresses well, and has nice white hands, has passed. The librarian, like the teacher, must pass an examination, and for this she must be as familiar with the high school branches and as closely in touch with the current events and literature as the candidate for a position in an up-to-date school.

Librarians throughout the country believe in a training-school. At a recent examination for applicants in connection with the public library system in New York City, only five per cent. of the girls who had been prepared at library schools failed.

There are two ways of preparing for these examinations. One is in the free training{{peh}}

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schools for library workers maintained in many large cities in connection with their public library system. This generally represents giving anywhere from nine to twelve months' service to the library in return for training, after which the apprentice must pass the examination open to all applicants for the post of assistant librarian.

In New York City, for instance, the public library maintains a training-school, with sixty pupils, in connection with the Muhlenberg Branch Library in West Twenty-third Street. Two-fifths of the time the girls spend in studying various branches of library work along theoretical lines, and three-fifths they must give to actual service in the different branches, sometimes pasting labels or recovering books or doing typewriting—any service, in fact, asked of them. Each apprentice gives forty-two and one-half hours a week to library work and has precisely the same hours and routine as the paid assistant. At the end of the library year, in May, she takes her first examinations for the post of assistant librarian. If her first work is substituting, she receives from twenty to thirty dollars a month. With regular employment as a recognized assistant, her salary is raised to forty dollars. At the end of two years she takes another examination, which, if successfully passed, will raise her salary to fifty dollars a

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is month. A year later she takes her third and last examination, which will entitle her to the post of head librarian at a salary ranging from eighty to ninety dollars, according to the library in which she is placed.

Girls who desire to enter this training-school must be between eighteen and thirty-five years of age; they must have a four-year high-school education or its equivalent, and a reading knowledge of both French and German, while greatly to their advantage will be a speaking knowledge of German.

During the time spent in studying and working in this free training-school a girl must have sufficient money for her support.

In many of the smaller cities, and in not a few large ones, no such training-schools exist, simply because the library staff, being none too large and extremely busy, time and energy cannot be spared to train uncertain material. And invariably, when you enter such a training-school, you must agree to give the library first call on your services when your apprenticeship is completed. In other words, a girl from Memphis, Tennessee, could not expect to come to New York, receive training free in connection with a New York public library, and then return to Memphis to take a position. By every moral code she should give the city in which she is trained first opportunity to use her services,

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for strange as this may seem to out-of-town girls, it is in the large cities that the need of the trained librarian is felt most keenly, because of the rapid growth in population and in library patronage.

The girl who wishes to prepare for work in her own town, and who must go away from home to secure such training, should communicate with the endowed training-school for librarians nearest her home town. As a rule these schools are so heavily endowed that the tuition is nominal, ranging from fifty to one hundred dollars for the entire course.

For instance, at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has been heavily endowed by the Drexel family, the tuition for the library course of eight months is only fifty dollars, with incidentals amounting to fifteen or twenty dollars more. At Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, which has graduated a, large number of very successful librarians, the course runs two school years, of nine months each; tuition for the first year, fifty dollars; for the second, twenty-five dollars; while thirty dollars will generally cover all charges for text-books, materials, etc.

In addition to this, a student must pay her own board and living expenses, for which she should allow ten dollars a week.
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These figures are presented merely to give the would-be librarian a general idea of what her training will cost. No school, however heavily endowed, provides board and lodging, and as a rule heads of library schools prefer that students should not attempt to work their way through the course—that is, earn board and lodging while studying. Every particle of energy and every moment of time are required for the work. The hours run from nine to four, five days in the week, with an hour for lunch, and on Saturdays there are trips to other libraries, field work, etc.

There are many library schools, including Pratt and Drexel institutes, the New York State Library School at Albany, New York, Simmons College Library School, Boston, Massachusetts, and the school attached to the University of Illinois.

As a rule a high-school education of four years or its equivalent, with a reading knowledge of German and French, is sufficient preparation for the examination held at any of these training schools, though the New York State Library School demands some college work also.

If you have graduated several years previous to taking the examination, do not trust to your memory, but brush up, "cram" if you will, as

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you did in the old school days, for the examinations for entrance to these training-schools are by no means simple. Here, for instance, is a set of questions gleaned from a sample examination sheet, loaned by the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

1. Mention nationality and century and characterize briefly an important work by ten of the following: Le Sage, Marlowe, Tasso, Ibsen, Maurice, Hewlett, Balzac, Sir Francis Bacon, Montaigne, Sir Thomas Malory, Lessing, Walter Pater, Paine, Swinburne, Landor, James Bryce.

2. State briefly what you know about the literary work of the following: Sainte-Beuve, Turgenieff, Dante, Gabriel, Rosetti, Heine, Thomas De Quincy.

3. Write an account (about two pages) of the poets and poetry of England at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

4, Name five important writers of ancient Greece, and specify in what department each is famous. Of ancient Rome.

5. Describe (only five lines each) the character of the following: "[[The Faerie Queene]]," "[[The Rubaiyat]]," "[[Idylls of the King]]."

6. What do you understand by the following: (a) the minnesingers; (b) the Cid; (c) the

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morality plays; (d) [[Beowulf]]; (e) the humanists.

7. Name five of the greatest American essayists; characterize briefly the literary work of each, and mention the title of their greatest works.

8. Name two famous allegories; three famous histories of the United States; five great world epics; two famous satires; five children's classics.

9. Write a criticism (about two pages) of one of the following: Thomas Carlyle, Victor Hugo, Robert Browning.

10. To what extent has periodical literature been a part of your reading? Mention ten periodicals with which you are most familiar, and characterize briefly one weekly and one monthly periodical.

Nor does this represent the complete examination. There were other tests in English and the languages, and none too much time was allowed for answering them, either.

The examinations for entrance on the opening of the fall term, in September or October, are generally held some time in June, and this gives the applicant time to brush up if she barely passes.

Once in the school, she finds that she has many branches to study, and much to learn besides cataloguing and exchanging books. A

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bare outline of one of the briefest courses is given herewith:

{{c|{{asc|One year}}}}

First Term—Alphabeting; book numbers, cataloguing, dictionary form; classification, decimal; current periodicals; fiction, appraisal of; French, technical; library handwriting; practice in the library; reference work; survey of the library field; typewriting (optional).

Second Term—Accession work; binding and rebinding; book selection and book buying; cataloguing, classed form—maps, government documents; children's department, work of; classification, expansive; current periodicals; fiction, appraisal of; German; technical; loan system; order work; practice in the library; reference work; shelf listing; subject headings; survey of the library field; trade bibliography; typewriting (optional).

Third Term—Bibliography; field work; history of classical learning; history of libraries; indexing; library administration; library buildings; practice in the library; proof-reading; stock-taking; supplies and statistics.

I have asked a number of librarians whether they advised specialization either in preparation for examinations or in taking the librarian course after admission to the school.

For preparation, librarians, male or female,

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advised a broad, general education, a college education if possible, as unquestionably the college graduate or the girl with a degree is given the preference in an up-to-date library.

In regard to the work after graduation, each woman becomes a law unto herself, for she is bound to find her level or the special library work that appeals to her after she has studied and worked a short time. The woman who desires to become head librarian in a small city should not specialize, but interest herself in all branches of library work. On the other hand, the girl who leans toward charity, settlement or sociological work, should specialize on the work of the children's library. The student of languages will find her best field in the reference department.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter VII}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Duties of the Companion, Secretary and Governess|level=2}}

{{sc|Ten}} or twenty years ago, when a woman of family and refinement met with financial reverses, her relatives either arranged a desirable match for her, or secured for her the very genteel post of "companion" to a woman of wealth and generally uncertain temper. The duties of the "companion" were indefinite and her income was uncertain. She was in favor one day and out the next. She was socially superior to the servants in the household, yet she did not share their spirit of independence. She generally drooped until she became a pitiable, dun-colored figure, with a "what's-the-use" expression in her tired eyes.

Even to-day, girls and women of mature years, gentle breeding and good education, but with no special training for the ungentle task of earning their own living, when face to face with the problem of self-support turn, panic stricken, to this old-fashioned profession, in

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which some shadow-like great-aunt ended her days.

"I have all sorts of social connections," such a woman will write. "I have a good English education, some knowledge of French and music, and I paint rather well on china. I think I would do very well as a companion, or social secretary, or governess, or anything of that sort. I am very patient and sympathetic."

This quotation from a real letter shows just what vague ideas inexperienced women hold regarding the posts of companion, social secretary and governess, which are hopelessly confused in the average feminine mind. The old-fashioned "companion" who had no assured position in the household, who was a dependent rather than a useful or desired factor in the family circle, has given place to a figure of energy and well-defined duties. The work of the "companion" is now that of the trained or semi-trained attendant. The social secretary to the woman of fashion is as important a figure in Madam Newly-Rich's household as her imported English butler. The private secretary to the woman of money and affairs has as clearly a defined standing in the household as the private secretary to the woman's husband in a corporation office. The invalid requires not a low-voiced, gentle-mannered girl who can read aloud and take odd stitches for her employer,

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but a semi-trained nurse who is competent to meet any and every emergency. The family traveling abroad or living on a country estate employs a governess who could fill the post of teacher in a fashionable preparatory school and whose position combines the duties of pedagogue and chaperon.

The general, and, alas, often incompetent "companion" has no place in the present-day organization of households. Her refinement, her social connections, her "patience and sympathy," must be backed by special training for the work.

A pathetically large number of women in small inland cities and even towns imagine that they could succeed as social secretaries to newly-rich women or to social leaders who find their correspondence and charities a burden so grievous as to demand an assistant. Because these women know how to write graceful notes of invitation, acknowledgment, congratulation or condolence, how to receive guests, and how to pour tea in their own little parlors, they imagine that they could train the newly-rich woman in the social way she should go, or lift the correspondence burden from the shoulders of Miss Helen Gould or Mrs. Russell Sage.

In reality, only the woman of extraordinary executive ability and experience can fill either position. Social secretaries are born, not

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trained. Those generally chosen for the post are women of family and social position, who have met with financial reverses, and whose chief asset is not their ability to indite a graceful note, but to place at the command of their employer their own social acquaintance, which is invaluable to the newcomer. The employer already established socially has for her secretary a young woman who is one of her household staff, or who calls daily to answer correspondence, send out invitations or perform other clerical duties. But if the employer is newly arrived on the social horizon, she selects as her secretary one of the women reared in luxury and social favor, who has been suddenly deprived of financial revenue.

This sort of secretary must have the names of desirable people at her finger-tips. She must be able to tell her employer who is worth meeting and who should be avoided, and she must bring her own social connections to bear in furthering the interests of her ambitious client. She must know how to arrange entertainments for her employer, and how to bring the right people to Mrs. Newly-Rich's house. She is social sponsor rather than secretary, a human' compendium of smart etiquette and good form, an advisory board in the question of gowns and house furnishings. In fact, she is to the social climber what the campaign manager is to the

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presidential candidate. She keeps her from doing the wrong things.

Can you picture the diplomacy, the social training, the experience necessary to perform these complicated duties? In your heart, do you believe you could perform them? If so, fill your trunk with pretty clothes, your bag with letters of introduction to influential men and women, and be prepared to work like a diplomat for a foothold in the fashionable world. You must gain this before you can apply for a post as social secretary. You will have more things to do than arrange invitation lists. If you do not believe this, read Edith Wharton's wonderful story of fashionable life, "[[The House of Mirth]]."

A young woman who thought that she would like to be private secretary to a club-woman, urged as one of her qualifications the fact that she could write excellent literary papers. She was greatly surprised when she learned that she must have a knowledge of stenography before she could apply for such a position, so heavy is the correspondence of a club-woman of state or national fame.

But she was not dismayed, for she was a girl with "the one idea"—to become a private secretary. She is in New York to-day, almost at the end of her course in shorthand and typewriting. In the meantime she has joined sev-

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eral active clubs, and has lived at an apartment house in whose parlors many women's organizations meet. Moreover, she has learned how to dress in a fashion suitable to the secretary of a woman of affairs. She has laid aside the somewhat gay, if girlish, finery she brought to New York, and has achieved the tailor-made air and the good grooming which stamp her as a successful business girl, even before she has a position. After preparing for the work in so thorough and systematic a way, I believe that her first position will be one that many a more experienced girl might envy.

Incidentally, clothes and bearing count tremendously if you desire to be on the staff of well-to-do employers. The day of the shrinking, shabby, self-effacing companion is past. The capable woman has arrived—even in the rôle of companion.

The girl who desires a position as compan ion or attendant to a semi-invalid must prepare for this work also. At any registry for trained nurses they will tell you that the custom of employing training-school graduates as traveling companions is growing. This does not mean that you must take a full course to secure any such position, but you should have had some experience in nursing, and if you have not had this you can take an abridged course in nursing, such as the Young Women's Christian Associa-

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tion offers in large cities, and which will fit you for any emergencies which may arise during the journey with a delicate employer. Your certificate from such a school, letters of introduction to physicians, good health, cheerfulness, steady nerves and a talent for minimizing discomforts of travel will insure your success in this work.

On board a steamship bound for the Mediter ranean, my table companion was a wealthy New York woman who was really quite well and strong, but who believed that she was traveling for her health. The chair on her right had been vacant during the entire voyage, and just before landing she explained the situation:

"My traveling companion has just gone on deck for the first time since we passed Sandy Hook. I engaged her to wait upon me, and she has not raised her head from her pillow until to-day. When I think of what I shall have to tip our stewardess! But, you see, she never crossed before, and did not understand that the longer she remained in her berth the sicker she would become. In Naples I shall give her a month's salary and a ticket home. I cannot be bothered with her any longer. I shall be turning nurse myself next. And it serves me right for giving the position to a girl who needed money, rather than to an experienced companion, I might have known that a girl with

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those beseeching eyes and a dimple in her chin would be no earthly use to me."

If you want to be a traveling companion you must first learn how to travel, how to handle tickets and baggage, how to lift all responsibilities from your fussy, fretful patron, how to keep yourself and your charge fresh-looking and well groomed on boat or train, how to handle the inevitable laundry problem, how to protect your employer from the extortions of hackmen and porters. In fact, you are troublebearer-in-extraordinary.

The girl who has traveled and thoroughly enjoys it, who has some knowledge of nursing or attendance upon the sick, should try to reach patrons through physicians. If her acquaintance will not warrant this, there are agencies where she may register, and many openings come through the "want ad," columns of city papers.

A beautiful if somewhat trying work is done by a number of young women, trained as described above, in families of the rich, where an unfortunate daughter must be screened from curious eyes. If you are not afraid of epileptic patients or of one suffering from some mild mental derangement, you can find work of this sort which pays well and insures a life of comparative ease. Very often these unhappy daughters of the very rich are kept, with their

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attendants, on country estates. Sometimes, if the mental defect is very slight, they are permitted to travel. With many the attacks are periodic, and during the interim these poor girls are pleasant company.

For the companion who does her duty by such a patient, the reward is generous, and the family shows its appreciation in a most practical manner, while the devotion and appreciation of the patient is in itself a beautiful recompense.

And now for the many teachers who desire positions in families going abroad for a protracted tour. The woman who has only a high-school education has little or no chance to seeure such a post. If the trip is for a year or more, the education of the children goes on precisely as if they were at home with a visiting or resident governess. That is, during certain hours of each day regular lessons are given, and the studies are those offered in fashionable private schools. A knowledge of French and German is almost essential. If there are boys in the party, Latin and Greek must be taught. Drawing and music may be included in the course of instruction, and, more than this, the traveling governess assumes almost entire responsibility for the children during the trip, unless a maid is also carried. She is chaperon to the girls on board ship, and their companion during all sight-seeing trips, for which reason

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she must be well posted on history, art and literature. College girls who have traveled abroad, or governesses who have already had experience in this country, are generally given the preference.

The scale of salaries is a sliding one, governed largely by the personality of the applicant and the liberality and good humor of the employer.

Twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a month with all expenses paid, is considered liberal remuneration for a governess traveling abroad with two or three young charges. Trained nurses receive the regulation wages, twenty to twenty-five dollars a week if traveling with a patient who is really ill and requires much attention. For chronic or light cases, where the duties are almost nominal, some nurses will accept as low as ten dollars per week if a pleasant trip is in prospect. These are graduate nurses, you understand. A trained attendant and companion, such as I described further back in this chapter, may receive anything from ten dollars per month to ten dollars per week, with all expenses, and this payment is measured by the fancy which the captious invalid takes to her few-found protége.

Here is a case in point: A whimsical old lady spent several months at a New York hotel, and there took a fancy to a hard-working stenogra-

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pher employed in the office. She invited the girl to go to Europe with her, and off they started in the most unbusinesslike fashion. There was no understanding about wages, but the girl was to have everything she needed for the trip at the hands of her newly-acquired godmother. It was all very lovely until they struck rough weather half way across the Atlantic, and the girl succumbed to mal de mer. The old lady regarded this unfortunate circumstance as a personal affront, and directly they reached London she informed the young woman that she might have a return ticket and take herself off. And that is precisely what the poor girl did. Terrified to find herself in the metropolis of the world, without friends or influence, she came home on the very next steamer, with just enough money of her own left to pay for her steamer chair and to tip her stewards. She was glad to get back to a typewriter and a small but regular salary.

Social secretaries receive large salaries, but spend a great deal on dress. On the other hand, they receive many beautiful and valuable gifts from clients. Private secretaries to women of affairs receive about the same salary as office girls, but have more pleasant surroundings and often less strenuous work.

Thoughtful and ambitious girls reading this chapter may think that the position of governess or companion or secretary does not open

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up a career or promise any brilliant future. That depends entirely upon the girl herself. The position of governess in a family of wealth and influence, or as a companion to a rich invalid, or as secretary to a woman of affairs, will bring you in contact with men and women who can offer you better positions. If you have the true business instinct, it will develop, even if you are merely a companion or governess. You will meet successful people, and in that atmosphere you will learn how to carve success for yourself with tools vastly different from those which you picked up when you first took the position. At best the post of companion is merely a makeshift, and as one agent remarked, it is more apt to lead to the matrimonial market than to any commercial career.

Akin to the post of chaperon for young girls traveling abroad is that of chaperon in a private school. A few of the fashionable finishing schools located near large cities offer openings of this sort, and women of social standing, charming manners and good judgment are eligible applicants. The salary is just large enough to pay one's bills for gowns and hats, but board and lodging and laundry are included, while all incidental expenses, carfares, tickets, etc., are paid by the pupils chaperoned. The work of the chaperon includes escorting young girls to theaters, concerts, lectures and shopping trips

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to town, also to any private function, such as receptions, dances or musicales to which parties of pupils may be invited. In some schools these tasks are relegated to teachers and no chaperon is employed, but the custom is growing. Such positions appeal particularly to the widow left with a small income and perhaps a daughter whom she desires to educate in such a school.

One widow, with her daughter, is located in a mid-West church school, and in addition to her work as chaperon she makes exquisite lingerie of batiste and handkerchief linen, which she sells to wealthy pupils.

In large cities like New York, Chicago and Washington, women have taken to the work of guiding sight-seers, and a well-balanced, pleasant-mannered and well-posted young woman can do very well at such work. Of course, she acts as escort for parties of women only or parties made up of both sexes, never parties of men. She must arrange sight-seeing tours which occupy various periods of time, register at hotels and agencies, and be able not only to point out points of historical interest, but she must know about all desirable shops, from art to manicuring. A young woman who can plan attractive trips for sight-seers will soon find favor with hotel clerks, who are glad to recommend any one capable of making the city and ifs sights attractive to visitors.

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{{sc|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.
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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

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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 imita-

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tions 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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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.

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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 {{SIC|distate|distaste}} 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

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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. Per-

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haps 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.

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{{FreedImg
| file = The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909) 6.png
| caption = Operators at Work in a Telephone Exchange
| width = 600px
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{{sc|The}} girl with commercial ambition who has no knowledge of stenography, typewriting or bookkeeping, nor the time and funds to acquire it, should consider telephone operating. If she has adaptability, keen powers of observation, persistency, and the wisdom of secrecy concerning her employer's affairs, she will advance to a position of trust as rapidly by way of the telephone switchboard as by the stenographer's desk. Scores of women who have no knowledge of stenography or typewriting now hold positions of responsibility and draw good salaries. Other girls may do the same. The first important means toward this end is to secure a hearing and prove one's worth. The switchboard provides a business door easy to open, and one which may lead eventually to the innermost shrine.

In every city hundreds of girls preside over branch exchanges for the beggarly salary of five dollars a week. They are the same girls

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who, armed with a smattering of stenography or bookkeeping, would be working for a petty lawyer or in a eashier's cage of a small shop for the same sum, five dollars a week. Always it is the girl, and not the work, that determines the wages. And the same girl who would become private secretary if she had a knowledge of stenography may become a department manager or the trusted aide to the senior partner through her cleverness and tact at the switchboard. Capability will manifest itself just as quickly in handling jacks and plugs as in taking dictation. In fact, considering the enormous output of "business colleges," half-trained, almost unlettered stenographers, I honestly believe that the expert telephone operator has the better business opportunities.

Certainly I would urge the girl who has no trade, who suffers sudden financial reverses, and who is naturally intelligent and refined, to turn to telephoning rather than to stenography. If accepted as a learner in a large city exchange, she will not lose a day's time, but from the hour she begins to study she will be earning a small stipend at least.

The out-of-town girl whose knowledge of the work is limited to the system employed at the local exchange should not judge the opportunities offered by what she sees in her home city or village. There positions may be few, and

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obtainable only through influence. In the large cities these conditions do not exist. Good operators are in tremendous demand, and the telephone companies run almost regular advertisements for learners who are paid during their training.

The girl from a village or small city can have no conception of the business done by telephone companies in great commercial centers, nor the number of operators required. A few figures may be illuminating. On January 1, 1907, when the telephone had been in commercial use exactly thirty years, eight million telephone stations, the technical term which includes receiver and transmitter, had been installed all over the world. Of this number the United States could claim 68.5 per cent., or over five million stations. Since then the number of installations has increased at a phenomenal rate, corresponding with the manifold uses to which commerce has been able to put the telephone.

As a result statisticians declare that to-day it is more than probable that the United States could claim six million stations in use. In New York City alone 30,000 girls and women are employed to operate public and private exchanges, of which about 7,000 are in the service of the. New York Telephone Company. The others handle switchboards in business houses, department stores, hotels, apartment houses, any sort

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of an establishment where a switchboard is maintained to connect different departments or branches or employees. Chicago follows New York closely as a Mecca for telephone operators, and in any city of 100,000 population or more a girl is reasonably sure of securing an opening almost immediately.

But the reader must not think that any and every girl is suited to this work. The applicant for a position or for training in a school for operators must have natural intelligence and quickness in thought and action. The dull, slow girl who moves with exaggerated deliberation and who does not grasp an idea quickly will not, succeed. The applicant must speak distinctly and write a legible hand. She must have good health, good eyesight, good hearing and a fair education. In the larger cities, where telephone operating is taught by the local company, no girl who has not completed her grammar school grades will be considered as an applicant, while preference is given to the high school graduate or the girl who has had a year or two of high school training. This is because the additional training is apt to make a girl think more quickly and grasp instructions more readily.

Applicants between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three are given the preference also. The girl under seventeen lacks the physical strength and the mental poise to handle a switchboard,

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while the woman past twenty-three who has never had any sort of business training is not always adaptable. But in exceptional cases, where the applicant betrays alertness and capability during the course of her interview, the age limit does not bar her out.

The girl who thinks she is physically and nervously able to stand the work—for especially to the beginner, handling a switchboard is no easy matter—should ascertain by inquiry at the traffic department of the local company where to apply for work. She will be given the address of the school of instruction or the exchange where applications are received. Here she fills out a blank, giving name, address, education, previous employment if any, condition of her eyesight and hearing, and references.

When the latter have been investigated, the girl is summoned to the school and interviewed by the manager, generally a woman. Her hearing and eyesight are tested, and her enunciation and pronunciation are passed upon critically. Her general appearance of neatness and alertness has much to do with her acceptance or rejection. Only twelve per cent. of the applicants for positions succeed in passing this examination for admission to the operators' school connected with the New York Telephone Company.

Once the girl is accepted she enters the train-

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ing-school for a period of one month, during which she is paid five dollars per week, and must spend in the classroom practically the same hours she will be employed when she becomes a graduated operator, or from nine o'clock to five.

This classroom contains a huge switchboard, accommodating twenty-five operators, at which girls secure practical training and experience. The branches taught theoretically, as well as practically, by lectures, consist of the use of the various parts of the operating equipment, the local telephone geography, the proper method of completing any call and the necessity of being courteous in all relations with the public. The location of the various exchanges all over the city and the general geography of the city are taught by the aid of huge maps. A girl must know the location of fire-alarm stations, engine houses, police stations, and hospitals. She must be prepared to handle every sort of emergency call, for many a burglar has been trapped, many a fire checked, many a panic averted, through the cool head and quick action of a telephone operator.

Every day she is given drills in pronunciation and the correct method of modulating her voice. In a great exchange with scores of girls working at the switchboard, not a single voice is raised above what is commonly known as a

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whisper. The girl with the strident, harsh voice has no place in a telephone exchange, and will not be tolerated.

The student begins to operate a switchboard on the very first day. She dons a metal headpiece, holding the receiver directly ower her ears; while about her shoulders is fastened another metallic harness holding the transmitter into which she speaks. Her hands never touch either transmitter or receiver, but are busy with the plugs of the switchboard. Her first lesson at the board generally lasts an hour. Day by day her time is increased, as her assurance and strength grow. At first, delicate or nervous girls have been known to faint under the strain, but experience proves that this effect is due more to nervous strain and anxiety to succeed than to real physical exhaustion.

At the end of a month or perhaps five or six weeks, the girl moves from this very practical classroom into an exchange, where under a monitor or inspector she continues to receive instructions. These inspectors pace behind the operators, not only to advise and assist newcomers, but to keep the entire force alert and keyed up to its work.

In a city like New York or Chicago, the new operator is paid six dollars a week. At the end of a year, she should be an expert operator, drawing ten dollars per week. Then if she re-

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mains in the employ of the company, she is advanced gradually to the following positions: Senior operator, eleven dollars per week; chief supervisor, fourteen dollars a week; chief oper-, ator, twenty to twenty-five dollars per week.

In a telephone exchange the working day is about eight and a half hours, with two thirty-minute rest periods, morning and afternoon, or for night workers at about the same intervals apart. All over the country the telephone companies are famous for their welfare work, but particularly so in New York City. Here you will find a matron or welfare secretary at every exchange. The building always has its kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, supplied with reading matter, an emergency hospital, and a lockerroom with an individual locker for each operator. Hot tea and coffee are served to the operators free of charge at any hour of the day or night, and girls are permitted to bring their own luncheons to eat with the beverages served in the dining-rooms.

This is the bright side of the exchange picture. Its hard side shows the nervous strain under which girls must work, the ever-present necessity of concentration, and the extreme discourtesy, almost insults, which even good operators meet from a certain portion of the general public. Many operators complain of the small pay and the part which office politics play in

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securing promotion, but go where you will, you will find malcontents who are unworthy of promotion, who are earning all that their services are worth, and who cry "Favoritism" when others are promoted. On the whole, I believe—and scores of telephone operators have expressed the same opinion to me—that the lot of the telephone girl is far more comfortable than that of the average salesgirl or stenographer. Certainly it is more desirable for the girl of natural refinement and reserve who dreads personal contact with all sorts of men and women.

Naturally, the telephone company would like to hold its best operators in its own exchanges, but business diplomacy demands that it furnish private exchanges with experts when the request for such workers is made. Thus the traffic department always has on file a list of skilled operators who are willing to accept positions in private exchanges. Banks, brokerage concerns, publication houses, department stores, wholesale establishments, hotels, apartment houses and almost any frm with big interests, require capable operators and pay from fifteen dollars a week up for the service. The salary depends upon the girl. Unfortunately, there are girls in search of pin-money who accept small wages. There are incompetents willing to work for almost any price in the hopes that even though

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they fail at the switchboard they may meet their matrimonial fate. But there are also scores of openings which demand good work and pay good wages.

The girl who uses her knowledge of Laeohhie, operating as a stepping-stone to broader business experience must consider what line of business appeals to her most strongly. If she has wanted to be connected with a publishing firm, here is her entering-wedge. If she pleases the editor or the manager with her alert, quick service at the switchboard, he will lend willing ear to her application for the position of manuscript reader. If real estate has always held a fascination for her, as operator in a real-estate company's office or in an apartment house, she will be brought in contact with the class of men who are willing to give a good woman agent a hearing.

There is no use to deny the fact that the swichboard is far more apt to lead the way to matrimony than to business careers. The records of all telephone exchanges show that an amazingly large number of operators resign to marry, and this, their employers claim, is not due to the traditional charm of low-voiced mystery which clings to the "hello" girl, but because to be a good operator a girl must possess all those distinctly feminine characteristics which appeal—gentleness, patience and good a ale

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breeding. In many cities I have personally studied telephone operators, standing outside the exchanges as they came to work and departed. Their bearing, dress, conversation, all go to prove that an excellent standard of student-workers is demanded, and that the discipline of the switchboard, as well as the fine welfare work carried on in exchange buildings, has resulted in attracting and creating a singularly nice class of operators.

The girl in a small town who desires a position at the switchboard is less independent in making her application than is the city girl. Here acquaintance counts most heavily, and personal influence must be brought to bear on the superintendent or manager of an exchange which requires but half a dozen operators. Even with influence, however, a girl must possess the same qualifications her city cousin claims—a distinct speaking-voice, keen hearing and good eyesight. As the telephone service in a small place is generally more leisurely than in a big city, her temper will not be so sorely tried at the beginning of her career. As no school is provided for her training, she must start with practical work. Substituting for regular operators will form a large part of her training, and eight dollars per week is the maximum salary in a small exchange. In a New England town of three thousand inhabitants,

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where two operators are employed, the superintendent is a woman who receives but twelve dollars a week.

However, a girl who begins in the exchange of a small town and tires of its limitations, may eventually reach the goal of her ambitions—an exchange in a big city; for if she mention her desire to the superintendent he will recommend her to the manager of some exchange in the city where she would be.

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{{sc|Never}} before in the history of our Federal Government has the obscure American woman, without the influence of any politician, had so fair a chance to secure a departmental position. Each year the power of the Civil Service Commission, which makes the majority of appointments in which women are interested, is strengthened. Hach year the power of the individual politician in the matter of appointments is weakened. The time when appointment to positions in any of the Federal departments at Washington was in the gift of Congressmen and Senators is practically past.

With this fair outlook, let the woman seeking employment ask what positions the Government offers women and which one she is best able to fill.

The average woman has rather hazy ideas as to Government work. She has simply a vision of handling some sort of papers in some sort of a department office.
{{nop}}

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The vast majority enter the service as clerks or copyists at a salary of $720 or $900 a year, and rise gradually to a salary of $1,500 or more, doing purely mechanical or clerical work.

This branch of the Federal service is known as "Clerks' Departmental Service." Examinations are held twice a year—spring and fall—at various points all over the country, selected by the Civil Service Commission. A girl does not have to go to Washington to take this examination. It is given in several cities of her own State. For instance, in Ohio examinations are generally held at Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Ironton, Toledo and Zanesville.

As this is the service in which the majority of women find positions, and as its examinations are the simplest, I am giving exact instructions for the girl who thinks she would like to seek an appointment as a clerk. The Civil Service Commission issues twice a year—in January and July—a manual giving all the information needed at first by would-be appointees. In addition to securing a copy of this manual, which is sent on request, the applicant should write to the Civil Service Commission, Washington, D. C., several weeks before the examination is scheduled, stating simply that she wants to take the Clerk-Copyist examination, and asking at what point nearest her home and on what date said examination will be held, and closing with

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the request that application blanks, printed instructions and sample copies of examinations should be sent to her. If she writes this neatly and concisely on a postal-card, her consideration will be appreciated by the busy clerks.

In return for this postal request she will receive an application blank, which she must fill out carefully, and a card of admission to the examination, which she must not fail to take to the city where the examination is to be held. Without it she will be refused admittance.

For this examination you will need a thorough knowledge of arithmetic (geometry and algebra not necessary), English grammar, spelling, copying from rough draft, and the general information furnished by a graded public-school course or its equivalent in private tuition. You will be expected to know something of the Government under which you are to serve, and of the current events in which the Government is vitally interested; and above all things, accuracy and neatness will help you wonderfully in this examination.

For instance, you will be given a certain selection from some book or paper to copy. Do not improve on that copy. If "dog" is spelled "dawg," write it in that way. If the punctuation is wrong, do not correct it. If your examination instructions advise you to leave a two-inch margin, do not change it to a one-inch mar-

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gin just because you think the latter improves the appearance of your paper or you have always allowed the one-inch margin in school. The Government is looking for fine, accurate human machines to do routine work. Your fitness for the position will be measured largely by your ability to do things just as you are told to do them.

And, lastly, you will be expected to write an intelligent, if brief, essay on some topic of national interest, such as "The Prospect of War With Japan," or "What Has the Pure-Food Law Done for National Health?" So if you are not in touch with current events, acquire some of this most desirable knowledge.

Now we will say that you have taken the examination and are waiting to learn of your fate. Three months will elapse before you hear from the commission. If you rate seventy per cent. or higher you will be placed on the eligible list. How long a time will elapse before your appointment is determined by various factors: Firstly, your rating. The higher the rating, the more prompt the appointment. The girl who scores 96.7 will be given the preference over the girl who scored 78.6, though the latter may have passed the examination at an earlier date than the former. Second, by the number of appointments already made from your State. Appointments are apportioned to the various States by

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the Civil Service Commission. For instance, from July 16, 1883, to December 31, 1907, the State of Pennsylvania was allowed six hundred and thirty appointments, while Oregon was entitled to only forty-one.

Again, we will suppose that you have passed with a high rating and your appointment comes promptly. You may or may not be offered a position in Washington. You may find yourself scheduled for New York City, Philadelphia, Boston or San Francisco; wherever there is a Custom House in which a clerk is needed; or in Omaha, Butte or Fort Worth, wherever a Pension Office or Land Office may be in need of a Federal employee. The Government official who needs a clerk or assistant of any sort notifies the Civil Service Commission in Washington, which looks over the list of eligibles, and selects the name carrying the highest average, whose owner lives within the district entitled to the next appointment.

Now, if you do not wish to accept that position because of some vital reason to yourself, personal health or family responsibility, you can take chances on refusing it. But I am told that it is much safer to take the first appointment offered, show your ability, and later ask for a transfer.

Another supposition: Your appointment orders you to Washington as a clerk in the Treas-

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ury Department at $900 a year—a very fair salary for a beginner. An inexperienced girl would not get as much in a business house of any sort.

If you have a family dependent upon you, mother or younger sister, you must figure on their support; and when the family is small, experienced Government workers all advise that the appointee remove those dependent upon her to Washington, even though living in Washington is high. Many maintain that it is higher than anywhere else in America. Girls old in the service furnish these figures: Very ordinary board, with a small room, $30 a month; washing, $4; carfare, from $2 to $5. Bare living expenses absorb forty of the seventy-five dollars received each month. Out of the remainder a girl clerk must dress herself well, support those dependent upon her, and pay for such pleasures as {{hinc|sightseeing}} or {{SIC|threater|theater}}-going, and entertain relatives, of whom the average clerk sees many during her Washington experience.

If several girls wish to club together, they can secure a desirable flat for $45 a month, a servant for $14, and a decent table can be set for $50 more, making a total of expenses for the month, including gas and incidentals, $115, or a trifle less than thirty dollars apiece for a club of four girls. The advantage of this arrangement lies in the home life and the social

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pleasures possible only in one's own apartment, and the better grade of food furnished.

The new Federal clerk in Washington finds that her hours are easy. As a rule, seven hours constitute a day's work. She reports at nine and works until four-thirty, with half an hour for lunch. When, in the opinion of her chief, an emergency requires overtime, no extra compensation is allowed. Thirty days' annual leave on salary, and in meritorious cases, thirty days' sick leave with pay, are allowed at the discretion of a head of a department.

The conscientious clerk is practically assured of a life position once she is installed by the Government. Office politics, such as one finds in the average business house, cannot affect her tenure of office, though they may prevent her promotion. The Government does not "fail," nor does it install a new chief of a department who ousts old employees in favor of personal friends. The existence of the Civil Service Commission prevents the latter catastrophe.

The advantages of a clerkship in the departmental service may be summarized as follows: A regular income larger than the average salary paid in offices. No work to take home at night. A clerk cannot be dismissed without just cause, and complaints against her must undergo rigid investigation at the hands of the Civil Service Commission.
{{nop}}

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The disadvantages are: A sedentary life, mostly copying, which is bad for the general health. As in teaching or the business field, the woman must do more work than a man to attract the attention of her chief, and men are advanced for less ability and on smaller pretexts than women. The routine deadens ambition in the average woman, who degenerates into a mere machine.

If a girl wants a fair income to spend on herself, it offers a fair prospect. If she is domestic in her tastes and wants a home, a husband and children, she is practically renouncing all those when she enters the Government office.

So much for the average clerkship. Now to girls who have specialized or who wish to do so. Some excellent positions are open to such girls. Examinations, salaries, age limitations and other details vary according to the work. The average limitation as to youth is eighteen years. The average age of appointees is twenty-eight years.

In Washington and other cities there are Federal positions open to expert stenographers and expert typewritists. The commonplace worker in either line should not waste time applying. Preference is given to the male stenographer or typist, and the ambitious girl must make a fine rating to secure the appointment. A few women bookkeepers are employed, but

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preference is given to the men in this work. Girls who have been well trained in drawing sometimes secure excellent positions in the Bureau of Forestry and the Department of Agriculture, where the ability to draw and tint well counts. Also the well-trained girl can secure architectural drafting or drawing in various departments. This work, of course, appeals particularly to the girl who has spent years perfecting herself as an architect, but who lacks the business ability to hold her own against an army of competitors. In the department of Government printing, skilled workers who have had experience in the regulation printing and binding establishments can secure postions as compositors, proof-readers, binders, etc. And the girl who has specialized on botany can sometimes pass a special examination and secure a desirable position in the Department of Agriculture.

Federal positions outside of Washington include kindergarten, teaching and industrial teaching in the Indian schools, matrons in Indian schools, teaching in Hawaiian, Porto Rican and Philippine service, trained nursing in Isthmian or Philippine service, inspection in immigration and custom service.

Positions in the Congressional Library are not secured through the Civil Service Commis-

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sion. The power of appointment is vested in Herbert Putnam, librarian.

The girl who wants a position of any sort under Uncle Sam should write to the Civil Serv—ice Commission for a manual, and study it thoroughly. She may find inspiration in its pages and a definite object toward which she can work.

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| caption = Girls at Work in a School of Manicuring, Hairdressing and Massage
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{{sc|This}} chapter is designed to be a frank warning against the beauty shop and its arts as a means of livelihood for any American girl of intelligence and self-respect. I propose to tell my readers just what it means to work in such an establishment, and to induce them to seek some other means of self-support.

In penning such a warning, I speak from a {{hinc|viewpoint}} verging on actual experience. A member of my household and several personal friends have undertaken the work, only to drop it almost immediately because they found it uncongenial and degrading. This was not because of the scandal which always shadows a beauty-shop, because the self-supporting girl rarely finds any trade or profession over which the slimy trail of gossip does not pass. It was because these girls, possessing a sense of honor, natural reserve and refinement, found themselves placed in a position worse than menial.

You think you could not be a second-maid or

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waitress because you would be one of the servants. You think you could not endure clerking in a store because you would be compelled to serve customers who are personally offensive to you. You think you could not work in a factory because you have heard that foremen and forewomen are domineering and callous. Well, all of these drawbacks and more you will find in the life of the manicurist, hairdresser or masseuse in the so-called beauty shop.

The first time that a customer tells you to "keep the change," you will realize that you are on a plane with the butler, the footman, the public waiter. The first time that you decline to serve a customer who, though elegantly dressed, may be foul of speech or under the influence of liquor, you will be asked to find work elsewhere. And your first lesson from foremen or forewomen in the shop will be that, while there are tricks in all trades, at the beauty shops there are more tricks and more downright dishonesty than you, in your innocence, ever dreamed of. When you have read this chapter, I hope you will have no illusions about the trade and its tricks.

To begin with, if you are the average girl who knows little or nothing of the various trades or lines of business for your sex, you imagine that you can go to a school of manicuring, hairdressing and massage in New York

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City, and within a few months be managing an establishment of your own. But this is what will happen:

You will promise to pay anything from twenty-five to one hundred dollars, according to your gullibility, for the course of training that is to lead to a "diploma" and a guaranteed position. You will find yourself in a shop, not a school, where you will pay for the privilege of being an apprentice. You, who had such lovely visions of gliding over velvet-covered floors in a long black frock with perfectly coiffed hair and tapering white fingers, will be sweeping, dusting, running after {{hinc|hairpins}}, nets and shampoo mixtures, patiently holding the dye for the expert worker, washing brushes and combs and cleaning up the tiny apartments in which the various toilet mysteries are conducted.

If your hair is dressed at all, it will-be done by a fellow-apprentice who, in her inexperience, burns it. If you ask for some of the promised instruction, you will be passed on, from one worker to another, until the best-natured girl on the staff finally condescends to give you some very indifferent instruction. The head of the "school," you will generally find, knows little or nothing about the trades. He merely invests the capital and trusts the actual work to his hirelings. Among your fellow-workers, you

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will meet a few men, mostly foreigners of vicious habits.

Understand that this is all under the surface. Outwardly the shop is as beautiful as enameled paint, gleaming mirrors and suave attendants can make it. The game is well played before customers.

As the days slip by, you will realize that hairdressers deliberately burn the hair so that customers will be compelled to buy false pieces, transformations, switches, puffs, etc. You will discover that so-called experts in facial treatment often introduce poisonous properties into their lotions, and thus the customer who falls into their clutches must either continue to have her face literally plastered with cosmetics or go to some high-priced baths, where, in retirement, her natural complexion may be restored. You will learn of horrible cases of blood-poisoning due to the use of unsterilized knives and scissors in the manicuring and chiropody department. But all the while the white enamel gleams, and the mirrors glitter, and snowy white towels will be plentiful.

Gradually you will realize that you are get ting a smattering of very bad methods and learning no branch of the trade thoroughly, When you reach this point, if you are a sensible, brave girl, you will turn your back on the shop and seek some other sort of work. If,

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however, you become panic-stricken at the thought of the hard-earned money you have invested in your "course," you will begin to work desperately, cajoling and bullying those above you into giving you a little instruction.

Of this sort of girl the shop managers are very anxious to rid themselves, so very soon you will be pronounced fit for a position. This having been guaranteed, you will find yourself working in an opposition shop for perhaps eight or ten dollars a week. Here you will try very hard to do the right thing for your customers; but it will not last. To your amazement you are dismissed without warning and without cause. The proprietor of the shop will merely tell you that he is cutting down his force. Business has fallen off, etc. But in a few days you will learn that your successor is another girl from the shop or "school" where you were trained. When you become acquainted with more girls you will learn that shop managers have a system of interchanging positions that are merely temporary, in order to make good their worthless guarantee.

"You take my pupils off my hands," says one shop manager to another, "and I'll take yours." And so the fluttering moths are caught.

These tactics are followed not only in New York, but in other large cities where "schools"

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are advertised; and the crimes committed against society and especially against the inexperienced woman whose feet stray over their threshold in search of an honest trade are despicable. Manicuring, hairdressing and facial massage are legitimate trades, but they have been dragged into the very mire by unscrupulous workers. Do you want to become one of these?

Certainly not! Then keep away from the "beauty school" and learn your trade, if you think it is the one trade for you, in a more honest and earnest fashion.

In the shop you must serve all who come, sober or otherwise, able-bodied or diseased, and if the customer indulges in immoderate, unjustified fault-finding, which sometimes amounts to insult, a liberal tip is supposed to be the only apology necessary.

Understand I do not say all shops come under this head. There are a few establishments in every city where the bacilli of dishonesty and criminal carelessness have not yet found a nesting-place. But it is the shop such as I have described which, unfortunately, appeals most generally to the out-of-town girl, for whom this book has been written. She knows nothing of city life. She knows nothing of those who manage shops or patronize them. She judges the shop and its trade purely from cleverly-written,

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prettily-illustrated booklets, and she has romantic ideas, gleaned from reading Sunday papers, about the matrimonial opportunities of the fair manicurist.

To such girls—and their mothers—I trust this chapter will be a warning. From such shops girls issue forth only half trained, utterly unfitted to do honest work and utterly unable to carve a future for themselves or to build up the one desirable line of custom—the house-to-house or visiting trade.

The house-to-house worker is not employed in a shop, but calls on customers at their homes or hotels, carrying her implements and supplies in a neat hand-bag, which is made especially for this purpose. Many of her customers prefer to use their own implements, and have their own shampoo mixtures and face lotions, for they are the better and more refined class of women who do not care to patronize the public shop. They pay the same fees that are charged in the shop, or more. The worker who gives satisfaction soon has an established trade among the most desirable people, and is in a position to accept or refuse new clients.

The house-to-house trade has many advantages, not the least of which is the outdoor exercise which the visiting worker secures while making her rounds. She is not subject to the petty politics and favoritism found in every

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shop. She can arrange her appointments, at least in a certain measure, to suit her personal convenience, so as to have time to manage her own household affairs if she happens to be married or have an invalid dependent upon her.

The girl who thinks she would like house-tohouse work must become a first-class manicurist, for she will appeal to the most fastidious trade. If she lives in a large city, she should take private lessons from the best manicurist whose teaching services are available. These lessons will cost her at least two dollars each, and if she practices earnestly between lessons on her own hands and those of her family circle or intimate friends, six lessons will be sufficient. This statement is made on the authority of a thorough and successful manicurist in New York City, who has trained at least a dozen girls for the work. She insists that a girl who cannot master the theory of the trade in six lessons, one a week, and become moderately proficient in the same length of time through honest practice, is not suited to the work and never will succeed.

As soon as the worker feels sure of her own ability, she solicits trade. This may be done by sending out neatly-printed cards or circulars, giving home address and telephone. A telephone is essential to the success of a house-to-house worker. These may be distributed in

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family hotels, or boarding-houses, or through the mail, using the telephone directory for securing addresses. When the influence and help of a hotel manager, clerk or housekeeper is desired, the new candidate for patronage generally keeps in order, free of charge, the hands of the person who will be helpful to her. But the most desirable trade comes through the recommendations of satisfied customers. The stranger in a city will do well to take a room in some small hotel or large boarding-house, where professional and business women stay in large numbers. She will soon build up a good trade among her fellow-roomers.

The girl who lives in a small city may have some difficulty in securing a reliable private teacher, simply because established manicurists do not particularly desire to train competitors in a field which they feel quite able to fill. Such a condition can be met by having the hands done regularly by one manicurist, time and time again, studying every movement of the work keenly and putting what is thus learned through observation into practice at home. In addition to this, several good books on practical methods of beautifying the human form have been written by experts. They can be purchased at any reliable book-shop or ordered through any dealer. The conscientious study of these books and the diligent observa-

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tion of methods employed by a first-class manicurist, together with practice, are perhaps the best substitute for private lessons.

Next to this comes the correspondence school. I fully realize that established workers will criticize this statement severely, but it must be borne in mind that the girl who served an apprenticeship in a beauty shop ten or even five years ago was really trained for the work, while to-day the methods, unfortunately, are those described in the opening pages of this chapter. On the other hand, I have investigated personally the courses offered by two reliable correspondence schools, and found them thorough, accurate, and workmanlike. The girl who cannot master the trade by the aid of such a course and diligent practice will never succeed as a "graduate" from a beauty shop or "school." In fact, in this trade, as in almost any line of work, the girl who really wills to succeed will find a way.

The manicurist who calls on transient customers, such as tourists stopping at hotels, generally receives fifty cents per treatment. Her regular customers, whom she visits two or three times a week, she charges at the rate of thirty-five cents a call. In addition to visiting customers in their homes, many house-to-house workers in large cities have hospital and sanitarium practice, visiting convalescents who,

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though they have hospital attendance, are glad to have the visiting manicurist care for their hands and incidentally keep them in touch with the busy world beyond the sanitarium doors. This sort of work is secured through trained nurses, superintendents of hospitals and sanitariums, physicians and regular customers who have friends recovering from illness.

When a girl has thoroughly mastered manicuring and secured an established trade, she may wish to study another line of similar work, particularly shampooing. This is by no means a complicated branch of the trade to learn. To thoroughly cleanse the scalp without drenching the customer or causing more than a minimum of discomfort; to select the correct shampoo mixture for the different sorts of hair, blonde, brunette, red, oily or dry; to dry the hair properly; to singe it and wave it if the customers so desire, complete the training of the girl who announces herself as ready to do shampooing. The waving is not essential, but it is often the means of holding a customer who does not patronize a professional hairdresser, and who dislikes the task of waving her own locks. But the girl who does waving only should never exploit herself as a hairdresser, nor should she claim ability as a scalp specialist until she has been trained thoroughly and honestly for the work.

Shampooing can be mastered through prac-

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tice and the study of books on the care of the hair or a correspondence course. For such service customers pay from fifty cents to one dollar, according to the size of the city and the scale of prices that prevails.

The girl who has both manicuring and shampooing at her command will have plenty to do among her house-to-house customers. There is absolutely no need of further training, unless she aims in time to open a shop. Then she should save money until she can afford to study with an expert masseuse the art of massaging the face, the scalp and the body. The most successful and reliable workers insist that in this day and age it pays to be a specialist, especially for the house-to-house trade. The girl who is really an expert manicurist will soon have her engagement book full. The girl who masters shampooing should follow this up with scalp massage learned from a recognized specialist.

Hairdressing is a trade quite apart, and the girl wha would learn this should work first in a wig or hair-making shop, learning the composition of hair, the art of dyeing it and making it into pieces, such as puffs, transformations, switches, etc.; and finally the very beautiful art—of dressing the hair to suit the face. This trade cannot be learned superficially in a beauty shop among chattering girls. It is particularly the art or trade of a man, and men are the best

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Marcel wavers. Only about one girl in a thousand succeeds as a hair-worker and dresser, and she cannot really succeed and establish herself without serving an honest, sincere apprenticeship in a wig shop.

But to return to the house-to-house manicuring or shampooing, to which lines of work I hope most of the girls interested in the subject will turn their attention and their efforts, let us consider whether ''you'' are the sort of girl to succeed. You must be healthy, neat and tactful. You must be healthy because you are constantly giving forth vitality. Every woman who employs you leans upon you and asks for help. Yours must be the stronger nature. Particularly in the care of the hair and scalp, and massage, great demands are made upon your strength. A sickly or delicate looking girl does not inspire confidence in her customers. You must radiate strength, capability, confidence in yourself and your powers to remedy physical defects. The anemic girl cannot succeed. Her touch will be uncertain, trembling, and even dangerous in handling manicuring implements. The girl subject to headaches cannot succeed because her ailment deprives her of the nervous force needed to inspire confidence. The girl with catarrh or with an offensive breath cannot hold customers. Therefore, if you would be a beauty specialist start by setting your body in

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perfect order. Become well and strong and magnetic.

The appearance of the manicurist, hairdresser or masseuse counts almost as heavily, for success as that of the probationer at the training-school for nurses referred to in [[The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 4|Chapter IV]]. You must be immaculate. Your skin must look well cared for, well groomed. Your hair must be clean and glossy, and it must be carefully dressed. Your frock, however simple, must be free from dust, spots and fringes, with immaculate linen at throat and wrists. Your hands must be the best advertisement for your trade. Many first-class workers wear a sort of uniform, and at least the shirt-waist should be of washable material. You must give forth an air of trimness, neatness and good grooming.

Tact is a most important qualification. The manicurist, the hairdresser or the masseuse is frequently the confidant of her customer. Your relations during certain hours of each week are intimate. The girl who has not the gift of sealing her lips, but who is a typical gossip, soon finds herself without trade. Customers do not recognize their own folly in making you their confidant. They simply resent your violation of their confidence.

Tact is also required in handling nervous, tired, overworked women, who will make up the majority of your patronesses. The woman who

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tears herself away from the turmoil of the social season or a mass of club work to have you undo the mischief of overwork, late hours, constant nervous effort, is not apt to be patient or easily pleased. You must be, above all things, restful and soothing, and this requires perfect physical strength, steady nerves, mental poise and tact.

In the matter of education, the requirements are not exacting—in truth, they are not as exacting as they should be, considering the fact that women place themselves and their appearance at your mercy. Every member of the human body is a delicate organ which you should handle with infinite care and conscientiousness. A knowledge of English, careful, accurate speech, these you should have, because your choice of language will betray to your customers your standing, and, to a certain extent, affect their confidence in you. Slang, bad grammar, and a high-pitched, unmusical voice will annoy women whom you may hope to count among your customers.

Before taking a practical course in any art of beautifying, study anatomy, and continue to study it so long as you follow the trade. You can never cease to learn about the human body, part of which you have undertaken to treat.

Massage, especially facial massage, is a line of work which makes legitimate appeal to the girl who wishes to learn a profitable trade; but

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it requires a gift which comparatively few women possess—a delicate, soothing touch. In this day of innumerable ailments which can be traced directly to tense or overtaxed nerves, modern medical science is treating more and more by manipulation and less and less by drugs, and a girl who can convince an up-todate doctor that she has soothing, healing qualities in her hands will have no difficulty in securing engagements.

"But," exclaims the girl, "how do I know that I possess this gift?"

Test yourself. Perhaps your mother suffers with nervous or neuralgic headaches. Take her into a cool, not cold, darkened room and gently rub or smooth the forehead, or the base of the brain, wherever the pain may be. Do not talk to her. Merely concentrate your thought on her pain and your desire to ease it. If she gradually becomes quiet, if her nerves stop twitching, and if she feels an inclination to sleep, you have the masseuse's gift in your finger-tips. Or, if your father has twisted his ankle and is suffering pain, rub the affected parts firmly, steadily, never spasmodically. If you bring relief and in time reduce the inflammation you have the soothing hand.

On the other hand, if you make patients irritable and nervous, if they beg you to leave

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them alone, you lack the touch, and only in cases of rare persistency and study can: it be acquired.

Quite generally this soothing touch is ascribed to personal magnetism. It is really a manifestation of a strength in both nerves and will. It indicates a firm, sympathetic nature and admirable self-control. It is never possessed by the self-centered, selfish or hysterical girl. The soothing hand is neither large nor small, never damp or clammy, and always firm.

There is a regular way of cultivating this power known as magnetism. Sit quietly until you are in absolute repose. Relax and drop everything. Then make up your mind what you want. You want to give forth help, to be helpful. Out of your calmness and strength you want to get the quality of giving forth or expressing through your hands your desire to aid others. This is not hypnotism or chicanery, but the influence of mind over matter. If the mind is cross or irritated, you cannot be helpful. You cannot have a soothing effect or stroke of the hand if your thoughts are jumping in a hundred different directions. The soothing hand presupposes mental concentration.

Scalp massage is excellent work for the beginner. It requires only a fair amount of strength, brings quick results and is very generally in demand. The scalp masseuse is really a hair culturist. Her office is to quicken the life

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in the hair, loosen the skin from the scalp, stimulate the little cells in which the hairs grow and prevent baldness. The tight scalp is a common cause of falling hair, and massage alone will cure it. The scalp masseuse generally goes to the homes of patients, charging from seventy-five cents to one dollar and a quarter for each treatment.

If you take up this work, study the constitution of the hair. Familiarize yourself with all sorts and conditions of scalps. Learn what the oily hair needs and what is best for dry, harsh hair. Keep a schedule or history of every case you treat, just as the trained nurse watches every change in her patient's condition and marks it in her report. Learn to make your own tonics.

Scalp massage is particularly desirable when a patient is recovering from fever, and in such cases the treatments should be given three times a week, gradually reducing the number and frequency as the condition of the scalp improves. Scalp masage is also desirable for anemic children, and a most profitable field for the sealp masseuse is the prevention of baldness among men. If you have men patients, always insist upon their coming to your home, and you are quite within your rights if, during the treatment, you have your mother or a friend sit in the room with you. The masseuse who wishes

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to build up a desirable clientele will be very careful in the matter of office etiquette.

Facial massage is more difficult, but also more profitable. When you can make the members of your own sex better-looking, you can command their last dollar. The prices are much the same as for scalp massage. Remember that the woman who comes to you for facial treatment is generally tired in body and nerves. First make her comfortable and quiet. Do not chatter. The secret of preserving your own strength and reviving hers is quiet concentration on the movements of your hands. If your hands are engaged in one direction and your thoughts in another, you must use double the amount of vital energy employed when you keep quiet.

Second, send your patient away looking attractive. It will take a little more time, but it will be casting bread upon the water that is bound to come back. Not long ago a friend of mine changed masseuses. I asked her why she had dismissed Miss Jones, who is considered a skilled worker.

"Oh," was her reply, "I know she had wonderful hands, but she never bothered to take the cream off your face. You have to clean up your face, powder and fix yourself generally. Miss Green, my new girl, leaves you feeling so cumfy. She washes off the cream, powders

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your face, perhaps she touches up your eyebrows, and smooths you down generally, and you go out looking so fit that every one remarks on your appearance."

Whose customers, think you, are the better advertisers for the masseuse's skill? It takes but a few minutes to groom your patient, and you have her bound by your chains. Just such little things as these make for success.

While the primary virtue of massage is giving forth strength and relief from pain, the facial masseuse must make her patients feel "better-looking." She must take a vital interest in the appearance of each patient and must not hesitate to suggest in a tactful way what would improve the customer's appearance.

Another important point for the house-to-house masseuse to observe is orderliness. Unless her customer has plenty of servants, the masseuse heats the water needed for steaming the face and waits upon herself. When the treatment is over, she should put the basins, tea-kettle, towels, etc., in their right places, and straighten up the toilet table. It is the work of only a few moments to stretch the wet towels and cloths to dry in the bathroom, to put the tea-kettle or basin in place, and to cover the cold-cream jar and powder-box, while the customer is enjoying the restful effects of her treatment. When that customer must pick up

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after the departed masseuse, she is very apt to lose some of the soothing effects of the treatment and to set the worker down as careless and disorderly. I have known more than one masseuse to lose good customers just through this little fault of untidiness. I admit that "cleaning up" is not nominated in the bond, but it is one of the little things that hold custom.

Body massage is the most complicated of all, and must be studied faithfully on scientific lines. It is employed for the relief of rheumatism, bad circulation, sciatica, nervousness and all diseases arising from congestion. It is invaluable, particularly in the case of children, for liver and bowel trouble, and it is employed to reduce inflammation and swellings from strains, bruises and abcesses, where there is no skin abrasion. Engagements are secured through physicians in private homes and in sanitariums, particularly those patronized by nervous patients or chronic invalids. An expert masseuse recommended by a physician of standing, receives as high as five dollars an hour, but she can take only two or three cases in a day at the most. Training for this high-grade work must be secured through private lessons or in a hospital training-school, in connection with special work in anatomy.

In the preceding pages I have tried to show to girls who have never given the trade of the

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"beauty specialist" more than a superficial—study the grave importance of really being a specialist, not a general worker. There is neither large salary nor dignity in the general work of the "beauty shop," and there is much danger for the American girl's standard of right living and honest working.

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{{sc|In}} the vocabulary of those who write and lecture on the self-supporting woman, there is no more misleading phrase than "the poor factory girl." The self-respecting, alert factory-worker—and there are thousands upon thousands of such workers in the United States—neither asks nor merits pity. Many of them make more money in a week than the average mediocre stenographer makes in a month. Thousands of them perform less exhausting work than the girl who stands behind a counter. The vast majority of them have union hours, and each year officials get closer and closer to the heart of factory life, enforcing laws of sanitation and human safety.

When the factory girls have a grievance or are threatened with a reduction of wages, they do not ask rich and charitably-inclined women to open "homes" where they can live on a semicharity basis. They appoint committees, confer with committees from unions for men, and arbi-

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trate the case with their employers. If times are "panicky," they may have to work on part time, or mills may be closed for weeks or months; but saleswomen and stenographers suffer the same financial reverses in hard times.

The girl who learns any trade in a factory soon finds that this knowledge is like a certain amount of capital on which she can always draw for an income. If she is an expert worker and she does not like the methods of her employers, she can seek other work among competitive firms. If she requires a change of climate or feels the spirit of wanderlust stirring within her, she can cross the continent if need be, and feel reasonably certain that wherever she finds a similar factory, there will be an opening for her skilled hands.

Among my self-supporting correspondents during the past ten years, hundreds have been factory-workers who have used their knowledge of trades, their powers of observation and the acquaintance gained in the despised factory life to accomplish certain long-cherished ambitions. One of the best traveling saleswomen in the country to-day represents a great corsetmaking firm in whose employ she started as an apprentice. Five girls who started together in a stocking factory now have a plant of their own, and are making a comfortable, independent living therefrom. The head of the Young

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Women's Christian Association factory work in an Eastern city was herself an operator in a shirt-waist factory, saw the need of welfare work among foreign-born girls, studied practical philanthropy, and became a successful social worker. A woman who designed trimming for a New York manufacturer of tailored suits for women is now the head of an importing firm which deals in laces, trimmings and buttons.

True, girls toil year after year for mere stipends, in factories which require large numbers of purely mechanical workers to feed machines or perform the simplest of hand tasks. But these girls, if placed in offices, would address envelopes or do filing or telephone operating at four, five or six dollars a week to the end of their business careers.

As an instance, take the case of a young Hungarian girl who, on her arrival in America, found work in a box factory at four dollars a week. She was extremely deft, and became one of the best piece-workers in the shop, her earnings varying from nine to twelve dollars a week. Foreign girls worked all around her, the factory's manager kept within the law but no more, and the environment was not pleasant. The girl had to wear washable clothes to work, because of the glue.

She watched clerks and stenographers whom

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she met going to and from work, in lunch hours and at the settlement house where she spent her evenings. She grew to hate the factory and determined to become a stenographer. By day she worked at her old task of making boxes; by night she studied English. And always she saved every penny, until she could leave the factory and enter a business college, where she studied like the personification of concentration. It was a laudable ambition, but no one told her what the poor girl did not realize—that stenography cannot be built on a faulty education, and this girl had not been educated in either her own language or in English. She mastered stenography, but her knowledge of English remained defective. She could secure no position.

She went back to the school for more instruction in English. Her funds ran low. Her relatives, whose daughters were doing well in the factories, felt no sympathy for her and refused financial aid. Charitable women helped her in the matter of clothes and incidental expenses, but no one asked her how she was living. The truth was that she was very nearly starving. And when at last she mastered English and was eligible for a position as stenographer at seven or eight dollars a week, she was so broken in health and nerves that she was mentally unfit to cope with the petty annoyances of office life.

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Employer after employer had to dismiss her, and eventually a charitably inclined woman sent her to the country to recuperate. After eight years of this precarious existence, she has a position where she earns ten dollars a week, but her ambition is broken, her economic future is most uncertain.

Had she given to her factory work the same enthusiasm and concentration that she devoted to the mistaken vocation of stenography, she would have become forewoman or perhaps a partner in a small factory.

Gradually the American girl is leaving the factory and its trade to her foreign cousin. And for what? For less money and equally hard work in a store or office. The girl who cannot advance in a factory will not advance in a store or office, where she is paid less money for her time and indifferent services. The girl who is purely a working machine, without executive ability, without the alertness and ambition that make for success in any line of work, will earn more money in a factory than in a store, because in salesmanship, above almost any line of work, personality and enthusiasm must be exerted.

Owners and managers of factories speak with great bitterness of the American girls who could earn twelve or fifteen dollars a week at their looms or machines, who are standing be-

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hind counters for five and six dollars a week. Said one employer whose factory occupies a great loft far above the heat and roar of the city streets, and whose girls, mostly foreigners, earn from ten to fourteen dollars a week:

"Five years ago the names on our payroll were largely Irish, German or English. To-day they are almost exclusively Slav. And in that department store on the next corner you will find girls standing on their feet from 8:15 to 6 every day for seven dollars a week. The—air in that store is foul, the heat in summer maddening. The rest-rooms for the girls are a mockery, located in a dingy basement with electric light and foul air. Up here our girls earn a minimum of ten dollars a week, they sit at machines run by electricity. The air is pure, our lunchroom is a model one, and we are thinking of putting our factory on a profit-sharing basis.

"The root of the trouble is that oft-quoted phrase, the poor factory girl, and the subsequent feeling of caste which is fatal to the earning capacity of the American girl who must be wholly or partly self-supporting. She would rather be a cheap clerk or stenographer than lose what she considers social standing by working in a factory. With this false standard of pride she ekes out a miserable existence. She cannot save because she has nothing to lay

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aside. She lives from hand to mouth and becomes a creature of expedients, in nowise fitted for the wife of an American man of moderate means.

"Our girls have bank accounts, they live with their parents, not at 'homes,' and before they are twenty-five most of them marry, with habits of thrift instilled in them. No girl can be thrifty when she has no meal insured beyond what her current week's salary can pay for."

This interview is offered for the particular help of the girl who, having completed her elementary or grammar grades in the public schools, is hesitating between what is known as "business career," i.e., cheap office work or cheaper salesmanship, and entering a factory to learn some form of skilled labor. It is quite true that foreign girls have almost monopolized factory work, but this is because the American girl has permitted the condition to arise. It is also true that many of the surroundings of factory life are distasteful to the American girl; but what of impudent customers, overbearing, unjust floor-walkers in stores, and fault-finding superiors in big offices? For every factory that defies the laws of sanitation and decency, there is a department store which does the same thing. For every manufacturer who maintains a system of fines and unjust withholding of wages, there is a superintendent of employees

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in a dry-goods or a department store who is past-master of the same tricks. And most certainly I should urge the young woman who lives in a factory community to investigate the conditions and openings for work in the local concerns before she puts her last penny into a "business training" built upon an elementary knowledge of English.

To the girl seeking factory work in sanitary surroundings the up-to-date plants of pure-food packers offer many attractions. To be sure, it is claimed that the model plants maintained by many of these manufacturers are part of the advertising methods of the firm, but this does not alter the fact that the workers participate in the benefits of pure food, cleanly environment and self-respect which result. At one of the factories maintained by a cracker and biscuit trust, I found girls working at wages from five to twelve dollars a week in almost ideal surroundings, and let me add that most of these girls were American-born. Every room in which I found girls employed was spotless, with dust absorbers, pure air and plenty of it. At various points of the building were splendid lavatories with enameled basins, tubs and shower-baths, a matron in attendance, cots for girls taken ill at their work, an emergency closet with simple remedies aplenty, and an attractive lunchroom. These girls wear-

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forms, purchased by themselves and laundered by the company. Their work is monotonous. Most of them perform some portion of the packing process, feeding pasteboard to machines that turn out boxes, closing the boxes, labeling them, etc.

In another Pennsylvania food plant, I found girls in immaculate uniforms sorting and preparing fruits and vegetables, sealing and labeling cans, packing, etc. These girls often earn no more than five dollars a week, but they would earn no more in stores. If they are capable of earning higher wages, they are paid them right there in that factory.

These girls have model rest-rooms and lavatories, and are furnished with clubrooms, a gymnasium and an auditorium where dances and other entertainments are given after working hours.

In a mid-West city I found a soap factory with as fine a body of women employees as you will see anywhere in America, because they work on the profit-sharing plan, and have a civil service system of advancement. In a New York City shirt-waist factory I found Irish and American girls working under most comfortable conditions, and apparently content with their surroundings and their earnings. Just two blocks on the other side of Broadway I found a typical {{hinc|sweatshop}}, the workers strained, in-

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tent, plainly underpaid, underfed Polish girls, all of them sewing on the type of shirt-waist that makes the Monday morning bargain sales possible.

There are factories ''and'' factories. In New England, there are cotton mills where 500 girls work in one room, where dust and vapor are so thick that they form a peculiar haze. In California, fruit packers work under ideal conditions. On the lower end of Manhattan Island I visited a candy factory which a few days later was raided by the municipal food inspectors and whose owner was heavily fined. Here the girls worked in a fire-trap of a building, with halls dark as midnight and smells foul enough to outweigh that of the sickeningly-sweet chocolate. A fifteen-minute ride on the elevated road brought me to a huge loft, where a hundred girls and a few men made candy in rooms that would have put the average fussy housewife to shame.

Very often factories are what employees make them. Many firms who have tried to improve the environment of their employees have been discouraged by the abuse of their property by the very employees they were trying to help.

It is impossible in this space to discuss the economic position of the woman factory-worker. Investigators have proven that her presence in

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the factory world has reduced wages and driven expert male workers out of the trades. On the other hand, she has also reduced hours and bettered conditions in factories. But after all, the most important fact is that she has arrived and is monopolizing many lines of work, blazing the way for the rising generation of girls who, with little education, must become self-supporting.

It is impossible, also, within this limited space, to particularize about even a fair proportion of the trades in which girls find employment and quick advancement, but a few general figures furnished by employers and confirmed by workers may be of interest.

Many of the candy manufacturers have schools for girls with a system of civil service promotion. Girls armed with board of health, department of education or child labor law certificates, according to the municipal government, are taken as apprentices while quite young. They start at three or four dollars a week, and if deft are soon advanced to five dollars a week. Experts in the factory seldom earn more than eight dollars a week, but manufacturers who also manage retail stores promote their most intelligent girls to the position of saleswoman in the retail store, which may lead to the post of head of stock. The girl who

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has worked in the factory is given the preference in the store.

In all large cities where millinery centers may be found, artificial flower factories also exist. Italian girls crowd many of these factories and much {{hinc|sweatshop}} work is done, but factories are also found in fine lofts, with good light, exhaust fans and plenty of elbow-room for the workers, and American workers to boot. Here the maximum earnings are ten dollars a week, unless a girl becomes forewoman, when her salary is determined by her value to the concern. An apprentice can always secure a chance at one of these factories at the opening of the rush season.

The bonnaz machines for which operators are always in demand are features of every factory which turns out upholstery supplies, scarfs, draperies, portières, table-covers, etc. This machine does braiding, outlining and various forms of fancy stitchery, employees generally doing piece-work and earning, when expert, fifteen dollars a week. Young girls start here knotting fringe and doing other finishing work. The girl who shows adaptability and eagerness to learn is soon given a chance at a machine, and these apprentices make about seven dollars a week, their earnings increasing with their dexterity.

In the hosiery factories for which Philadel-

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phia is noted, the girls start at three dollars a week in what is known as the finishing department, stamping and packing the stockings. The knitters are the highest-priced workers, their minimum earnings being ten dollars a week. The piece-worker is always a law unto herself, but often the rapid workers pay the price of their big records with nervous prostration or other ailments peculiar to abnormal concentration.

In Pittsburgh, the center of the cheap cigar or stogy industry, girls work by the thousands at this trade alone, earning six dollars per week. In the cotton mills of New England you will find as many thousand more weavers working for an average of a dollar and a half a day or nine dollars per week. Yet there have been cases in all these factories where girls have doubled the average wages.

Operators in suit and waist factories do piece-work principally, and as a rule make twelve dollars per week. In underwear factories the inexperienced worker is first employed at sewing on buttons, running ribbon through beading, pressing, etc., and makes not more than two or three dollars per week. Tucking, joining tucking to insertion, sewing on lace, etc., are all done by machine and paid for by the yard. At first a girl earns no more at this than by sewing on buttons, but very soon she works up to six dol-

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lars per week. From this work she passes on to joining garments and adjusting trimming by machine, and at this an experienced hand makes from twelve to fourteen dollars per week. The girl who can embroidery neatly can secure work in shirt factories embroidering initials and monograms on custom-made shirts.

The girl in search of this work must watch the "want ad," columns of the daily papers and haunt the neighborhood where such factories are to be found. Here she will find signs "Experienced Operators Wanted," or "Apprentices or Learners Wanted." She is always safe in applying where she sees the latter sign. Best of all is the acquaintance of some one already employed in the factory, who will not only let her know when an opening occurs, but will help her during the first weeks of her apprenticeship.

In suit, shirt-waist and skirt factories girls are employed as sorters. That is, they take the various pieces of cloth from the cutters, assorting sleeve-pieces and various parts of the waist according to size, 34, 36, 38, etc. This develops the bump of accuracy. The minimum salary is generally three dollars, the maximum eight dollars. There is little chance for advancement. In factories handling cloth suits, men are employed largely as operators, but girls are employed to sew on trimming, run buttonhole ma-

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chines and do much of the lighter operating. Wages are about the same as at white-goods factories, and all this is piece-work, depending, therefore, on the energy and concentration of the operator. Machinery is now run by electricity.

Box factories give employment to many girls, but the rooms are, as a rule, badly arranged and illy ventilated. Girls may start at this work as pasters, ''i.e.,'' binding corners and edges of boxes with pasteboard strips. They generally work two weeks for nothing, then earn about three dollars per week, and even an expert cannot make more than nine dollars. The glue workers, who cover boxes with fancy paper, make as high as ten dollars per week, but must work in very hot rooms with hot glue. These are merely sample lines of work and indicate salary paid.

Feather making and curling form an excellent trade for deft-fingered girls. The operator starts at three dollars per week, scraping marabout or French turkey down. Next she sews on the down and earns six dollars per week. From this she advances to ostrich feather-making, at which she earns as high as eighteen dollars per week. An expert curler commands the best salary of all, about twenty dollars per week.

These fragmentary figures from payrolls go

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to prove that while there is no great future in factory work, save for the exceptional girl who would carve for herself a successful business career wherever she started, factory work promises a fair wage during the seven years which is the average period of work for girls and women the country over. And for the woman who works no longer than that, it provides equally good pay in equally sanitary surroundings as does stenography or salesmanship, the usual alternative with the average girl.

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{{sc|Modern}} philanthropy presents a congenial method of self-support for educated, ambitious, earnest women. The organized uplift movement, generally known as social work, which is found in every industrial center, offers a field in which the intelligent, tactful woman may reap the double harvest of a fair livelihood and the knowledge that the world will be the better for her having worked in it. It is not work for the very young girl.

During recent years philanthropy has been reduced to a science. Charity is dispensed by methods as business-like as those employed by any great corporation. Time was when women who had failed at almost everything else were sent out as missionaries to foreign lands, to the poor whites of the South, to the neglected Indians of the West, and to the slum dwellers of the great cities. "Genteel" women with social backing and family name were given the preference as managers of homes for the dependent or

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refuges for girls; while the wealthy employed as their almoners perfectly ladylike relatives who had to be supported, anyhow, and might as well be paid a salary.

The untrained, tactless missionaries accomplished little beyond making trouble for ambassadors and consuls in the foreign countries to which they were sent. The "genteel" superintendents of homes and refuges failed because they did not know how to organize and manage affairs.

Then a few men and women brave enough to face the storm of public outcry against salaried positions in charity work began their struggle to put philanthropy on a business basis. Rich men and women were asked to help the poor and needy only through these charity associations, whose members had the courage and the time and the working force to investigate claims.

Such was the quiet, unostentatious beginning of the associated charity work which is now found in every city of any size in the United States. So immediate were the results from this movement, so quick were business men and women to grasp the municipal or civic possibilities of such an association, that not only is organized charity receiving general support from the masses who can give small sums, but men and women of great wealth are organizing

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their benefactions on similar lines. The Russell Sage Foundation is as well organized as any life-insurance office or great department store. The Carnegie benefactions are handled by directors, committees and paid investigators; so are most of the charities in which John D. Rockefeller is interested. The churches have fallen into line, establishing schools where missionaries, deaconesses, neighborhood workers, etc., are trained.

Just as it takes capable men and women to conduct great enterprises, so does it require high-grade workers, men and women of executive ability and special training, to manage the great charity movements of the hour, to dispense the magnificent philanthropies of the American multi-millionaire. There must be stenographers to handle correspondence, investigators to relieve the poor and encourage the wretched, studious workers to dig below the surface indications of squalor and filth and reach the cause, and head workers of peculiar executive ability to sift the reports brought in by investigators, and outline a more vigorous campaign as the world's needs are indicated by the reports.

I have emphasized the need for trained workers, not untrained enthusiasts, at the very beginning of this chapter, because I do not want to deceive any girl who feels that she must have

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something to do to-morrow or next day which will bring in immediate returns. This chapter on philanthropy as a profession is written especially for the girl of education who has time and money to specialize for social service work. To this explanation I want to add something more, the statement that not every woman, however ambitious, is suited to social service work.

She must have reasonably good health—at least no organic trouble. I use the word "reasonably" advisedly, for often the girl who is breaking down under the routine of office work or confinement of desk, counter or schoolroom, practically renews her youth and regains her strength in social work, which generally includes much outdoor life.

She must have tact. She will need this in securing funds from the rich, co-operation from the influential, and results from the poor to whom she dispenses charity.

She must be open-minded enough to suspend judgment in a case until she has learned every side of it, and yet she must be resourceful enough to act on her own responsibility when emergency demands. She must not be swayed by personalities—judging the need, not the individual—and she must not expect gratitude.

She must be willing to start for a mere pittance and prove her worth to those above her in authority.
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She must be willing, nay, anxious, to study continually, for nearly every case will present a different sociological problem springing from a different sociological evil, and it is her work not to relieve the single case alone, but to do her part in reducing the evil which lies behind the case.

The work itself is varied. Here are some of the positions open to those who desire to engage in it:

Expert visitors for charity organization societies or other charitable institutions. Investigators of social conditions or institutions. Matrons or administrators in institutional work. Financial secretaries for private individuals or societies. Inspectors (tenement houses, factories, etc.). Executive secretaries of educational or philanthropic societies. Probation officers. Head workers and assistants in social settlements, institutional churches, welfare departments of manufacturing and mercantile establishments. The public service, State and municipal, especially those branches which deal with public welfare, such as health, charities and corrections. Members of boards of managers and committees of philanthropic institutions. Friendly visitors and volunteer workers in any field of service requiring an acquaintance with existing conditions and a knowledge of modern methods of social work.
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In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the girls' branch of the house of refuge has been placed in charge of a woman trained for social work in Chicago, Martha P. Falconer, who has employed as teachers about eight Wellesley and Vassar graduates who specialized on sociology during their college course and later took postgraduate training for social work. In glancing over the bulletin of the Thirty-fifth National Conference of Charities and Corrections, held at Richmond, Virginia, in May, 1908, I find that among hundreds of offices held by women are these: Secretary charity organization society; clerk of juvenile court; assistant superintendent of industrial school for girls; truant officers; investigating clerk board of children's guardians; secretary of the same board; circulation manager of Charities and Commons; supervisor of playgrounds; superintendent State training-school for girls; district superintendent bureau of charities; superintendent nurses' association; matron of home for working-girls; matron of farm school and home for nervous and backward children; probation officer; superintendent I. O. O. F. home; agent soldiers' orphan home industrial school for girls; head resident neighborhood house; superintendent of probationers State industrial school; registrar tenement-house department; superintendent visiting nurses.

There are openings for trained workers in

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settlement or neighborhood houses, in consumers' leagues, in district nursing, in the child-labor movement, in public playgrounds, in summer schools for the poor, in free clinics for mothers who need to be taught how to care for their children, in country homes for convalescents and children, and in the anti-tuberculosis movement. The Russell Sage Foundation and similar benefactions give the preference to trained workers, and especially to investigators.

The charity organizations in large cities experience great difficulty in retaining the services of their trained workers, because from smaller cities just organizing charity associations, or from some private institutions being reorganized on practical, up-to-date lines, come better offers for the trained worker of city experience.

A man who stands close to the head of his profession, philanthropy, told me recently that he knew of not less than six societies or organizations ready to pay from eighteen hundred to three thousand dollars a year that were searching for the right men and women. And the right man or woman is not the untrained, however earnest, one.

The salaries paid in philanthropy or social service are about the same as those which prevail in schools and colleges, though for executive ability, especially among men, a little more

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is paid by the charity organization than by a college or school. A minimum salary for the beginner is six dollars a week, or three hundred and twelve dollars a year, but it is seldom that a worker draws so low a salary for any length of time. If she is worth training, she is quickly worth more money. From three hundred and twelve a year the salary usually jumps to five hundred dollars, and increases with the usefulness and executive ability of the worker, seven thousand dollars being the maximum salary.

The preparation consists of high-school education, or, better, special attention to sociology and anthropology and political economy, followed by a year's practical training in a school of philanthropy. The entrance requirements of the New York School of Philanthropy, which is conducted by the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York and affiliated with Columbia University, are as follows:

"Men and women are enrolled as regular students, without further examination, who present satisfactory credentials as to character, good health and earnestness of purpose, and belong to one of the following classes: First, graduates of a recognized college or university who have taken some courses in the social sciences—sociology, economics, etc. Second, persons of good general education—at least equivalent to a high school or normal school training{{upe}}

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—who have had considerable experience as volunteer managers, visitors or directors of charitable societies, or of social, educational, philanthropic or religious activities. Third, professional workers with at least one year's successful practice of the profession of social work who desire to improve their knowledge of the methods of social service."

In one or two other schools the entrance requirements are a trifle less rigid.

The plan of instruction employed in the New York School of Philanthropy, and practically in all similar schools, is as follows:

The one-year course offers supervised work to occupy the entire time of the student for eight months (October to May), six days in the week from nine o'clock to five. It comprises formal lectures by experts, classroom exercises and discussions, assigned readings and library work, field work in visiting institutions and carrying on investigations, practice work in the visitation of needy families and the practical administration of office work in the various special lines of the individual interest of each separate student. New York City offers doubtless the richest opportunities in the country for such practice work.

The tuition fee for such training averages fifty dollars a year, to which board and incidental expenses must be added—about five hun-

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dred dollars in all for the year. Sometimes the latter are reduced by a student living at a settlement or neighborhood house and earning part of her expenses as a helper, but the taking of outside employment during the training is not encouraged. Also several scholarships are granted annually to promising workers.

As I said before, graduates do not have to seek positions. The positions seek them. There is absolutely no period of uncertainty or waiting for the well-equipped and trained worker to face.

In conclusion, here is a word of suggestion to nurses, teachers and stenographers who have spent years preparing for their work, only to find it uncongenial and wearing. If you believe that you would enjoy social work, apply to the nearest charity organization and ascertain just what your experience would count for. If a teacher in graded schools change to a position in a State or private charity institution. If a private nurse, try visiting nursing among the poor. If a stenographer in a law office, try for a clerical position in a charity organization. If the call is meant for you, it will come to you, no matter what the position, and the means to answer will come with the call.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter XIV}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Proof-reading and Work in Publishing Houses|level=2}}

{{sc|Women}} have hazy ideas, often grave misconceptions, concerning proof-reading and all work for their sex offered by publishing concerns. For some inexplicable reason, the average out-of-town woman imagines that every branch of work connected with the publication of books or magazines is extremely {{hinc|lady-like}} and elegant. They cannot appreciate the close connection existing between the literary and the mechanical ends of the business. They picture women employees at home, turning out in leisurely fashion the "work" which is finally shipped by messenger, mail or express to the few poor unfortunates who must remain at the "shop" and keep the wheels spinning round.

Occasionally correspondents who hold such views come to see me at the great noisy building where we, who have served some sort of apprenticeship in the art of making books and periodicals, are turning out pages for other folk to read. They listen to the clack of half

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a hundred typewriters. They peer into editorial dens, separated only by thin half-partitions from the rush of many feet, the issuing of many orders, all the turmoil common to any great business concern. And they murmur: "Nobody could write in an atmosphere like this and remain sane."

But we do—and we learn to love the atmosphere.

Then these women climb winding stairways to where intent, silent girls click out columns of copy on linotype machines, and they enter small, electrically-lighted rooms, where other intent girls sit beside coatless men, reading proof.

"Why, I never dreamed it was like this! I thought proof-sheets were sent to women to read at home. I could not think clearly in this dirt and noise."

Much of this misconception of publishing house work is due to the misleading advertising matter issued by certain unscrupulous managers of correspondence schools in proof-reading. They flood the country, and especially the rural districts, with circulars stating that the girls who master their system of proof-reading by correspondence will have work in plenty sent to their homes. These promises are so cleverly worded that the guarantee of work or a position on completion of the course is quite within the

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law, and the student, perhaps unable to leave home in search of work, has no redress, and nothing to show for the fee paid for the course.

The course of study may be entirely sincere and reliable in theory, but the man behind it cannot furnish home work, and he has no right to guarantee it. I have the backing of employers in many cities and practical foremen and printers when I say that ninety-nine out of every one hundred students who take a course of home-study proof-reading will never make use of it. The hundredth boy or girl will be a worker born, and will go out into the printing world to seek practical instruction and training, but not one out of the hundred will ever receive a galley of proof to read on the farm or in the little village.

Personally, I am a firm believer in any reliable correspondence course, and particularly a university extension course, for the young man or woman who is far from educational and business centers, and who yet desires to keep in touch with the world's progress. It has spurred many a girl and boy on to efforts which have brought rich rewards, when without this impetus they would have vegetated or stagnated in the village or on the farm where they were born. It is also a boon to the man or woman whose early education has been neglected, but, like the college or university diploma, it is not

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the key to business success and an assured income. It cannot give the essential and practical experience obtained in an office, composing-room or factory; but it can make first experiences in the workaday world much easier. The college-bred lad who decides to become a proof-reader must serve his apprenticeship, his diploma notwithstanding. Why should a student expect a diploma or certificate from a correspondence school to do away with this apprenticeship or nullify the rules and regulations of one of the strongest unions in the labor world?

The home-student may take her correspondence course if she lacks the courage to enter upon an apprenticeship without theoretical training, but she must not expect the course to open the door to easy work, short hours and big pay. These are the reward of an apprenticeship covering four years or more.

Neither is proof-reading a trade for the girl or woman who wants home work. It is bound to take her into the "shop," as the composing-room is commonly called. Why should publishers send work to the home of refined or delicate or sensitive women who need the wages, when hundreds of strong, skilled and willing women are knocking at the doors of their composing-rooms for work on the premises?

The foreman of the shop connected with a publishing house of national fame told me that

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last year he received five hundred written applications from women who desired to do proof-reading at home and expected to follow the trade without leaving home, having work sent to them and called for, drawing the regular union wages, thus working in what some of them termed a "quiet, ladylike, confidential way."

I want to impress on the mind of all home-staying girls that the time for this sort of nonsense has passed. Business men are not conducting {{SIC|socities|societies}} for the amelioration of the condition of distressed gentlewomen. They are demanding that every one of us women who compete with men in the field of labor work under the same conditions and give the same results as the men with whom we toil shoulder to shoulder.

As a union proof-reader, a woman will be paid precisely the same salary given to the male worker, but she must do the work just as well, and reach her position by precisely the same method of training, the same apprenticeship required of a man.

And now, having learned what proof-reading is not, and how girls cannot attain a position in this trade, let those who really mean to "make good" take counsel together.

Proof-reading is one of the best-paid trades for women. The minimum salary is twenty-one dollars per week, and the expert worker names

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her own price if she specializes. In union shops she will work eight hours a day, and her employers must live up to all union regulations covering holidays, half holidays, overtime, etc. The conditions under which a proof-reader works are better than those in the average department stores, and not less sanitary than in the average office building. Neither is proof-reading a crowded trade, and the woman who has mastered it can make a place for herself. There are about six thousand union printers and proof-readers in New York, and it is said that not more than two hundred and fifty of these are women.

The girl who decides to take up proof-reading should have good health, or the nervous energy which, with women, is often a substitute for perfect health. She must have a thoroughly grounded education in English, though a college education is not essential. She should be what is termed a born speller and a mistress of punctuation. She must have a well-developed bump of accuracy, for inaccuracy is the unpardonable sin in a composing-room. While she must be accurate to the point of being mechanical, she must learn to recognize a mistake intuitively, rather than to follow copy slavishly. She should be a student of current events and keep in touch with all the movements and prominent people of the day. She must have the patience and grit

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to endure a long and tiresome apprenticeship and the tact to secure the most rapid advancement consistent with union rules at the hands of the powers above her.

Having looked over the field and decided that she is not only suited to the work, but deeply interested in the mechanical making of books and magazines, she must find her opening. This is not easy to secure, for printers are, above all other union men, the most clannish.

A sincere friendship or a ripening acquaintance with a working typesetter or proof-reader, man or woman, is worth a dozen letters of introduction to the man who owns the shop. The foreman of the composing-room or the superintendent of the shop, if it be a large establishment, is an autocrat before whom even the proprietor bows. No girl wants to enter a shop to be tolerated, rather than advanced. Therefore let her make friends with practical printers.

The most successful, the best-paid women proof-readers are those who started at the printing-case, that is, set type. There is nothing about the trade they do not know, and their knowledge of proof-reading is built on the firm foundation of typesetting and all its correlative work. Perhaps the girl in the smaller city has the better chance to start at the case, where, by the way, she draws the munificent salary of

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three dollars per week, or five dollars at the most, with a dollar raise from time to time as she becomes more adept. This is true because in the smaller cities linotype machines are not so common as in the great trade centers.

After many years of investigation of avenues open to working-women, I have reached the decision that in no other trade does the {{SIC|indidivuality|individuality}} of the woman, her very ego, count with such force as in securing an opening as proof-reader. She must make her presence felt among her associates. Only one woman in a thousand can step from the printing-case or the linotype machine to the proof-reader's table, and she must show a peculiar adaptability for the work. Her personality must triumph over obstacles peculiar to her trade.

On the other hand, for the woman who looks forward to a long career in the business or trade world, who finds a great and abiding happiness in surmounting obstacles, to whom success, hardly earned, is intoxicating (and there are many women of this sort to-day), proof-reading presents a most attractive field.

Perhaps the reader lives in a city of ten or fifteen thousand inhabitants, with its weekly or daily paper and a job printing shop or two. Let her go straight to the job printer himself or the foreman of the composing-room attached to the paper and ask for work. Nine chances out of ten

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she will find no opening, but she must go again and again, until the foreman is convinced of her sincerity. If she cannot get a place on the composing force at first, let her see the editor of the paper, and ask him if she may not contribute news items, accounts of social affairs, school or college or church notes. Probably he will say that he cannot afford to pay her. Let her write for him anyhow, and get a foothold on that paper. If he has never had a "social department," she can build one up for him. To all appearances she will be working on the editorial end of the paper. In reality she will be keeping her eye on the foreman of the composing-room, and when he realizes that she works with enthusiasm, that she does the small thing well, that she is using the items of news as a stepping-stone to his department, he will make room for her just as soon as he can.

This does not sound encouraging, I admit, but a woman who now reads proof in an establishment which publishes many high-grade text-books in various languages, and receives a salary of forty dollars a week, started in precisely this way less than ten years ago. For the weekly edition of the paper she condensed the women's news for the entire week, and went up to the composing-room to watch the foreman "make up" her special department. She won over that individual, a crusty, old-fashioned

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printer, by her enthusiasm, and finally he gave her a chance on his force. His staff was not large, though there was a job plant in connection, and he had time to give the girl individual attention. He had always read his own proof, assisted by the editor, but when this girl manifested a determination to master proof-reading it was gradually turned over to her. She worked in this shop for four years, the regulation length of apprenticeship, and when she received her union card she was drawing the munificent wages of eight dollars per week. But there was nothing about the trade she did not know thoroughly. More than that, she had learned the importance of cramming her brain with accurate general information. Ata glance she could tell whether the name of a prominent man was correctly spelled, whether the right initials or Christian name had been given also. If a political measure was brought into prominence, she read everything about it that she could find. If a small nation had come before the public, she studied up its history, geography and politics; in other words, she did what all successful proof-readers must do—she became a practical student with singular powers of concentration.

With her union card she went straight from her native city to New York, and in a short time secured an opening at the minimum union

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wages in the publishing house where she is employed to-day. She soon realized that if she specialized in some way she would command a larger salary. She took a course in German, then one in French, and now she can read proof in either of these two languages. She says she means to take up Latin and Greek next—and this is a woman who started on a district-school education!

I asked her whether she thought proof-reading was really worth the consideration of women workers. She answered:

"Unless you take joy in wresting hard-earned success from what seems like a barren field, no. But if you want a career which will forever broaden and lead you into new avenues of thought and study, yes. With most women, unfortunately, proof-reading is purely mechanical, and becomes trying on the nerves, almost maddening in its monotony. It is only when you study with an aim of increasing your value to your firm that you are happy in your work."

Another successful woman in this line of work never set type, but started in a clerical position. She had a letter of introduction to the foreman of a large printing and binding establishment. He said there was no opening for her as a copy-holder, the position at which she wished to start. The girl asked desperately if there was not something she could do, no matter how small.

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He said that if she had a head for detail she could keep track of proofs and other matters connected with his peculiarly responsible position—for a salary of five dollars a week. She jumped at the chance, and for nearly a year she worked thus, sorting proofs for him, keeping a record of everything that came to his desk or left it. And she did the work as if her life depended upon it. Never had his files been kept so well. When there was a chance for her to hold copy for an hour or two, he gave her the opportunity. This means that she held the original manuscript while the proof-reader held the proofs and read them aloud, the girl watching for mistakes.

When the copy-holder left to take a position as proof-reader with another firm, this girl took his place at eight dollars per week. She held the copy and attended to her clerical duties for four years, received her union card, and, as the firm's business had grown until more proof-readers were needed, she received the first position open. A simple tale of drudgery and persistency is hers, but the woman does not look at it that way. Every day she was learning. It was not a mere mechanical performance of duties, for she was constantly storing her mind with information on a wide range of subjects.

The girl who really wants to learn proof-reading can find a way—and she must find it

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for herself. Let her cultivate men and women in the printing trade. Let her take anything she can get to do in a printing or binding shop, and work, everlastingly work; and then study as if she were back in school.

If she cannot afford to work for a small salary she must not think of this trade. She cannot secure full union wages for at least four years. But bear in mind that during all this drudgery on a small salary she is being educated. Her parents must pay for her tuition in art, in music, in stenography—and then she must fight for a living. In the hard training that leads to the position of proof-reader she pays out nothing, she is paid something, and when she receives her "card" her position comes with it. There is no uncertainty.

Many women ask me what books they should study to prepare for this work. A thorough grounding in English—grammar, spelling and rhetoric—is essential. An excellent book on the art is "[[Correct Composition|Composition]]," by [[Author:Theodore Low De Vinne|Theodore Low De Vinne]], the dean of American printers. This book is recognized as the one authority by all printers.

Another branch of work in publication centers for which girls yearn is manuscript reading, or acting as assistant to the editor. Fully half the girls who have led a life of leisure, after leaving boarding-school or a fashionable

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finishing-school, and who meet with sudden financial reverses, think they would succeed best as assistant editors.

"I have always read the best literature, and kept up in current magazines. I write a good hand, and I never grow tired of books. I understand that all editors have assistants who read things for them."

This is a sample letter, and a representative sample. Generally the writer adds that she "understands that editorial hours are short and editorial offices elegant and refined."

Who, oh, who is responsible for any such "understanding"? True, editors and publishers have large staffs of assistants, but each is a worker, and each must have some preparation for the work. The girl who has never seen the inside of a publishing house and who has never written a line for publication must have remarkable ideas regarding the needs of the editor who will pay her salary. And she, too, must serve an apprenticeship.

She will need a letter of introduction to some one well up in the firm, and this must be backed by a willingness to begin at the bottom. If she is very fortunate, she will be given an humble elerical position, that of manuscript clerk. This means, in a large concern, that all incoming manuscripts will be brought to her table or office. Perhaps a boy will open them; perhaps

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she may be expected to do this herself; and they will pour in, hundreds in each mail delivery.

These manuscripts she will glance over, enter the name of the article, the title of the story, the date of its receipt and its disposition in a large book, not unlike a ledger. Then she will take a fresh envelope bearing the firm's name, place the manuscript in this, address it to the writer, and in the upper right-hand corner where the stamp should go she will write the amount of postage enclosed with the article by the sender. Then this manuscript and all its fellows she will toss into a big receptacle to be sent to the first manuscript reader. The stamps she turns in to the cashier. By and by, each manuscript or a report upon it will come back to her desk, and she must complete her record, writing in the record book whether the script was accepted or returned, and if returned on what date.

This is purely clerical, mechanical work, and it must be done accurately and regularly, for every time a writer reports a manuscript as lost, this girl must prove that the loss occurred after the article was turned over to Uncle Sam for its homeward journey to the writer.

How long the girl must do this purely mechanical work depends upon herself. In a large and important office, she serves a stern apprenticeship. Gradually, however, the first manu-

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script reader, who may have been watching her work, will suggest that she take time to look over the scripts. Her instructions will be something like this:

"Do not send me any stories of more than 7,000 words or less than 1,700. We do not use them in this magazine. Do not send me any poetry or articles on cookery or the care of children. Do not send me any serials."

Here is her first opportunity to demonstrate her literary ability, her power of selection. From that day she takes special pains not to burden the manuscript reader with unavailable scripts. By and by she reads most of the articles and attaches to them little comments which save the first reader time and trouble. The latter goes on his or her vacation and suggests to the editor that Miss Blank, who keeps the manuscript record, is perfectly capable of doing the first reading. During that memorable fortnight Miss Blank works as she never worked before and probably never wili again. She must read the scripts and pass them on to the various editors, who, in turn, must pass upon their availability. And she must not send manuscripts to the wrong editors. She must display literary judgment and discretion.

If she makes a good record as a substitute, in time, when the first reader becomes an assistant editor, Miss Blank is promoted to the

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vacant place. Later she, too, becomes an assistant editor and is admitted to the councils of the great. But, you see, she serves her apprenticeship here, as in any line of work that leads to real success. It does not represent hard manual work, but it represents concentration on the small things before she may be entrusted with the larger duties.

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{{sc|The}} girl who must become a wage earner "at once" should not look to kindergartening as her field of school work. It is perhaps the most subtle branch of pedagogies. Its principles must be absorbed slowly. They cannot be swallowed at a gulp, as the average American girl tries to acquire her preparation in many fields of {{hinc|moneymaking}}.

Kindergartening is a philosophy. Its founder, Froebel, built his methods upon the philosophy of right living and individuality in childlife. The girl who hopes to become a successful kindergartner must first build her own character according to that philosophy. It is not enough to love children, though this love is an important stone in your foundation for the work. You must be versed in the psychology of childhood. You cannot "cram" during kindergarten preparation. Neither can you make up deficiencies in your early education. You will require all your physical and mental powers to

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master the new ideas presented in the training-school for kindergartners. You may enter a shop as a clerk and tread the pathway to financial success by way of experience and your early mistakes, but you cannot correct mistakes in the kindergarten.

A business college may grant you a diploma and send you out to plague future employers because you learned to form the pot-hooks of stenography before you had thoroughly mastered your spelling-book, but you cannot enter a training-school for kindergartners without passing preliminary examinations which will test severely your qualifications in high-school branches.

This introductory preachment is offered because I want to play fair at the beginning. The high-school girl who must make money immediately on graduation is wasting her time in building kindergarten plans and air-castles. The woman who has been a home maker and out of the school atmosphere for years cannot read a few books on kindergartening, buy a few games and open a kindergarten in a few weeks. But to the girl who is considering the matter seriously, who has time and money to take a thorough course in the work, kindergartening opens a field of self-support worth cultivating. The ambitious, business-like kindergartner does

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not to have to remain on salary—she can have a school of her own.

First, what are the requirements for admission to a recognized training-school for kindergartners?

A high-school education or its equivalent at a private institution.

Second, what is required of an applicant for a position in the public kindergartens of large cities?

A two-year course at some representative training-school for kindergartners.

The would-be kindergartner must have a knowledge of music; both instrumental and vocal are desirable. She must have at her finger-tips a practical knowledge of botany, art, geography, mathematics and general literature. She must be of good character, even-tempered and self-controlled, neat in appearance, amendable to the red tape and the regulations of public-school systems, and she must possess above all things that indescribable gift, the power to attract, often called personal magnetism, and to inspire confidence in children.

The hysterical girl will never succeed as a kindergartner. The untidy girl has no place in this wonderful garden of children. The girl who looks beyond the month's work to salary day, and this to the exclusion of everything else, will not last in the kindergarten field.
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Many girls have written to me that they understand that a college degree is necessary to secure a position in a first-class school. This depends entirely upon your interpretation of the term "first class." If you mean the public kindergartens (and there are no better fields of effort, no schools that pay better salaries in the long run), then the statement is incorrect. Principals of fashionable private schools demand a college degree from every applicant for a position, and in the public schools, if you desire to rise to the rank of supervisor or teacher in a training-school for teachers, the degree is essential. On the other hand, a girl is entirely safe in taking merely her two years of work at a representative training-school for kindergartners; and then, after she has established herself successfully as a teacher and has saved funds from her salary, she may take the special college course which will fit her for the post of training-school teacher or supervisor.

Now for the girl in a large city who is ambitious to become a kindergartner.

Investigate first the possibilities of the public-school system in your own town. There may be attached to your own normal school a kindergarten course. At the training-schgol for teachers in New York City, and in connection with the Girls' Normal School in Philadelphia, for instance there are kindergarten classes.

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Here a girl may quickly discover whether she is fitted for the work. If there is no kindergarten training-school in your town, you can at least secure your preliminary high-school training there. Do not imagine that you can take a home-study course in the high-school branches, "cram" relentlessly, and then pass your preliminaries. In rare cases a girl might accomplish this feat, but it is safer to complete your high-school course in the usual way.

If the local board of education offers you nothing in kindergarten training, thenstudy the various fields carefully before you decide upon a training-school away from home. If possible, select a school which is heavily endowed or connected with some established university or college. The small, private training-school holds certain dangers for you. In the first place, its work may not fit you for the examination for positions in the public-school kindergartens, and in the second the small kindergarten training-school needs your money more than does the endowed institution, and its principal may not be entirely honest with you regarding your suitability for the work. By this I mean that at certain established institutions or training-schools your work from the very start is watched very carefully, and if you show that you are eminently unsuited to the work and the money which you would spend upon your tui-

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tion would be wasted, you will be told so frankly, and advised to give it up, and even the fees you have paid in advance will be refunded to you. On the other hand, a training-school which is not endowed needs every cent it can secure from pupils, and the principal will often permit a girl to continue the work, knowing that her diploma will not insure her a position, and that the first supervisor under whom she works will mark her deficiencies.

Many girls from small towns write to me after this fashion:

"I have met a lady who runs a kindergarten here. She has a nice little school of her own, and she thinks I would make a fine teacher. She has offered to teach me the work very reasonably. Do you think I could secure a city position after taking such a trianing?"

It would be impossible to advise any girl to take such a course of training without knowing the kindergartner who has offered her the course at reduced rates. She may be a kindergarten enthusiast who has faith in her would-be pupil, sufficient faith to give her the training for practically nothing. Perhaps she wishes to train the girl as her assistant. In either case she will see that her pupil is trained as thoroughly as she was herself. But it is a matter of regret that many such offers are founded on the need of earning extra money; and the girl

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who accepts them secures only a smattering of kindergarten methods and never gets to the root of Froebel philosophy.

"What will the training at a representative school cost me?" inquire many girls.

At one of the endowed institutions in the East, of whose graduates ninety-seven per cent. have secured positions, the charges are twenty-five dollars per term, three terms in the year, which means an outlay of seventy-five dollars per year for tuition. As the course runs two years, one hundred and fifty dollars, plus a small sum for personal supplies, will cover the actual expenses of tuition. Pupils at this school are furnished with lists of boarding-houses, where they can secure room and board as low as four dollars and fifty cents a week. At this rate a girl's living expenses, including laundry, will run about three hundred and fifty dollars for two years. A very strong girl can reduce expenses by working in a family night and morning for her board, but it is better to concentrate strength and interest on your training. The average training-school has a daily session, except Saturdays and Sundays, from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, with much field work, visiting kindergartens and teaching or substituting in charity kindergartens.

The girl who has no money for her training

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must simply find some way of earning it. She can become a mother's helper and test her patience with children. Perhaps this experience may cure her of any desire to teach even in a kindergarten. If she lives in a college town she can become a caterer in a small wey and prepare college "spreads," or have a pretty tearoom in her own home, where the college girls may drop in for tea, sweets and chat every afternoon. She can do fine laundry work for college girls, mending, anything which will allow her to lay aside each week a small sum toward the expenses of the coveted training.

Other girls inquire: "If I do take a course of training, how do I know that I can secure a position?"

By the time you have spent two years in a training-school you will know where and how to secure a position. That is one fruit of the training. Furthermore, promising teachers from good schools are in demand. Authorities in the work say that for the next twenty-five years kindergartening will be a profitable field, because it will not be overcrowded.

"What salaries are paid kindergartners?" ask other girls.

In Greater New York the minimum salary paid kindergartners in the public schools is six hundred dollars. The maximum salary is twelve hundred and forty dollars. Salaries in-

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crease with the term of service. Supervisors and teachers for training-schools command higher salaries, and the offices often go begging for lack of competent applicants.

It is impossible to name salaries in private institutions, as these vary according to the standing and prosperity of the school and the experience and capabilities of the applicant. In addition to private and public schools, free kindergarten associations and private charities afford openings. These relieve the congested condition in the public schools and aim to help the child who must be clothed and fed as well as taught. The summer vacation schools in large cities offer opportunities for special work to ambitious teachers, and a bright girl at a fashionable summer resort can easily form her own vacation classes among juvenile guests, and by working in the morning earn enough to pay her entire summer's expenses at the hotel.

Kindergartening is a profession, but mere knowledge of its philosophy, theory and practice will not make for success. Often the girl who might be described as a born kindergartner is outstripped by a girl who has less grounding in the philosophy but a better developed business instinct. Of all branches of pedagogy, probably kindergartening offers the surest avenue to economic independence, for it takes less capital to start a kindergarten than a full{{peh}}

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fledged private school with many departments. The girl who wants to be her own mistress can become so through kindergartening—if she combines thorough training with good business management.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter XVI}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Domestic Science for Teachers and Social Workers|level=2}}

{{sc|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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{{FreedImg
| file = The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909) 10.png
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—

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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 {{hinc|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

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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

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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.
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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

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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

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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

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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 cata-

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logue 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.
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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

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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.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter XVII}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Physical Culture Plus Dancing and Elocution|level=2}}

{{sc|Physical culture,}} like domestic science, is one of the teaching branches which any girl who desires to specialize should consider for the good of both her purse and her health. It presents a field as yet uncrowded. As a special study it has its place not only in public and private schools, but it is right in line with all the new social and charitable movements, recreation parks and centers and public playgrounds, as well as the institutional church. It is particularly in demand at schools for deficient children, where teachers are paid exceptionally good salaries. It is ideal work for the girl whose health will endure neither long hours of confinement nor great nervous strain, and will, if combined with outdoor life, check incipient tuberculosis. Especially does it appeal as a source of income to the girl who does not want to leave her home city to face the overwhelming competition of the larger centers of population. The girl with a large circle of friends, the charm

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of personality and a reasonable amount of training in a good system of physical culture can always make a moderate living in her home town.

Just at present there is also a very brisk demand for the teacher who combines with a knowledge of physical culture ability to teach dancing. In all the larger cities dancing, especially folk-dances, is being introduced into the public schools, recreation centers and playgrounds. This requires special training, but to the girl who has already mastered physical culture it will come quite easny.

Girls who think they would like to teach physi cal culture must first consider in what way they will utilize the specialty. The girl who hopes to teach in public or private schools will have to take a complete normal course, and a college degree will be most helpful in her advance to the post of supervisor. In many cities it will be essential. On the other hand, if she proposes to organize small private classes, combining dancing with physical culture, an abbreviated but earnest and thorough course, preferably with a good private teacher, will suffice, providing always that the girl continues to read and study every good work obtainable that deals with her specialty. Especially her studies of anatomy must be persevering and unceasing.

In New York City to-day sixty teachers are

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employed to train the children of the public schools in physical culture. In the primary schools these teachers draw from eight hundred dollars to fifteen hundred dollars, and in the high-school grades from fifteen hundred dollars to three thousand dollars a year. In New York City the private schools were pioneers in this work, until what was considered as the privilege of the rich child was recognized as a necessity for the masses of children who had to be taught the use and care of the body as well as the mind.

Private teaching in New York is also lucrative. It is estimated that there are twenty-one hundred classes all told under the direction of fifteen hundred teachers, men as well as women. These classes are conducted at private schools and in gymnasiums, including the Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A. rooms and the settlements and parish houses of institutional churches. Presumably each of these fifteen hundred teachers makes a comfortable living, whether by teaching physical culture alone or by combining other special branches with it. Also the same teacher conducts classes in different schools, clubs or settlements, arranging a schedule of hours.

In order to teach physical culture in the public schools of New York City you must have had three years' experience as a teacher before you can take the entrance examinations. The ob-

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ject of this rule is to maintain as high a standard for the teacher of physical culture as for any other branch of study. To secure positions in many of the private schools you must have a college education, precisely as would be required of a teacher of Latin, Greek or algebra. In other words, your education must be broad and liberal enough to entitle you to consideration for any branch of high-school or private school teaching. You cannot gloss over the defects of a grade-school education by an expensive course in physical culture. If you live in a community where your certificate must be renewed at stated intervals for general teaching, the certificate will be demanded if you try to teach physical culture. This explanation is offered for the benefit of the many girls who think that an abbreviated and defective education will be overlooked because they have taken a special course in physical culture.

In Philadelphia physical training is part of the normal course for girls, and is taught in all the public schools. In that city preference is given to graduates from the normal college. Chicago, Boston, in fact all the leading cities, have made physical training part of their public-school system, and all progressive small cities are following suit. A prominent teacher of physical culture states that he has requests from small cities the country over for teachers

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and supervisors, and that the girl who is willing to go to one of these smaller cities and lead the movement in favor of physical culture can eventually become supervisor of the entire work in the public schools.

Naturally the teacher of physical culture who accepts a position in a public or private school at a stated salary enjoys a certain sense of financial security, and this step is generally taken by women qualified to hold positions in either public or private schools. On the other hand, some girls who have completed only a desultory course at a so-called finishing school but who are bright and well educated, through reading and observation, have taken up the study of physical culture thoroughly and have succeeded as private teachers.

The teacher who "free-lances," or organizes her own classes, must summon personality to her aid. She must make a strong appeal for her work, interest editors of local papers in physical training, and establish herself largely through the pleasing impression she creates. Later her methods of teaching may be commended. Her training of young people may show results. But at first she will win out on purely personal grounds.

I recall a young woman who made just such a struggle in a small Ohio city. She started out

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with four pupils, two of those being children of a local physician, who recommended her class to patients with growing children in the family. Skillfully she mixed pleasure with physical culture, took her pupils on walking trips, with nature talks on the side, arranged games to be played after the lessons, and in fact scored a social success among young people.

Gradually her class grew, because children wanted to share the good times. Then she offered to supervise an entertainment for local charity, and for this purpose drilled a number of the elder brothers and sisters of her pupils. The drill was a success, and while the entertainment did not net her enough money to pay for the many rehearsals, it introduced her work to the general public and started an advance class. She worked in this fashion, barely making a living, for nearly two years, and then public sentiment demanded that she be given a chance to introduce physical training in the public schools. I cite this instance particularly to show that physical culture opens up possibilities in almost any city for the woman with sufficient force of character and personality to make her influence felt.

The teacher of physical culture who is a recognized authority in her community has no financial problems to solve. If an appointee in the

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public schools, she has many opportunities to form evening classes among adults or teachers who desire to perfect themselves in this branch of teaching. She is invited to lecture for a fee during the winter in her own and neighboring towns, and she can accept engagements, if she so desires, for summer schools, etc.

A complete normal course in physical culture or elocution occupies two years. Special courses are given in both branches, but in physical-culture training particularly, a class course with regular practice is almost essential. A typical two-year course includes the following branches, and costs three hundred dollars:

{{c|{{asc|Theory}}}}
{{div col|colwidth=30em}}
Anatomy.

Apparatus.

Athletics.

Anthropometry.

Child Study.

Chemistry.

Eduction.

Histology.

Kinesiology.

Methods.

Physics.

Physiology.

History of Gymnastics and Physical Training.

Psychology.

First Aid.

Physical Diagnosis.

Gymnasium Administration.

Public-school Methods.

Personal and School Hygiene.
{{div col end}}

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{{c|{{asc|Practice}}}}

{{div col|colwidth=30em}}
Apparatus (light and heavy).

Athletics.

Delsarte.

Calisthenics.

Swedish Gymnastics.

Anthropometry.

Voice Culture.

Fencing.

Esthetic Gymnastics.

Games.
{{div col end}}

The average pupil allows ten dollars a week for board, laundry and incidental expenses, in addition to the three hundred dollars tuition. Girls often ask whether they can earn at least part of their training, and the head of one of the most successful training-schools tells me that a number of girls have paid their way by teaching outside classhours, the compensation being two dollars an hour. Naturally, it takes a bright, tactful, pleasing girl to secure this work.

Now as to securing positions after taking the course. The incidents related in preceding pages tell part of the tale, particularly for the girl who intends to form private classes. A position usually awaits the graduate of a normal course or school of high standing, as the number of cities introducing physical training in the public schools increases each year, and it will be some years before the supply equals the demand.

The girl who wishes to teach in private schools usually secures work through a teach-

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ers' agency. Positions in institutional churches, settlements and among wealthy children or women who will join classes in light physical culture are secured entirely through acquaintance and influence.

The teacher who drops general work for physical culture, with a view to teaching in the public schools, particularly of a large city, confines her efforts to this one branch. The girl who expects to organize private classes or conduct classes in different private schools, settlements or institutional churches generally combines some other branch with physical culture, such as cooking, sewing or elocution. The latter is peculiarly suited for combination with physical culture, as the physical training gives grace to gestures, and a correct method of breathing is invaluable to the pupil in elocution; in fact, nearly every successful teacher of elocution includes in her class or private work simple gymnmastics, and Delsarte exercises. Just now dancing movements and steps play a large part in physical culture and elocution.

If, in addition to teaching the conventional elocution, she has the gift of story-telling, a girl can often secure engagements to entertain at parties.

Another line of work in which up-to-date elocution and physical culture teachers are scoring rather heavily this year is known as the general

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culture class—teaching young girls how to enter and leave a room, how to carry themselves, how to sit correctly, how to meet strangers, how to cultivate a pleasing speaking voice, how to converse on general topics. This appeals to many girls who would turn a deaf ear to the appeal of physical culture or elocution alone.

The girl from a small city or town who goes to a larger center to secure her training in physical culture and who has a year's time and the funds to spare, should study dancing or elocution also. Armed with two specialties, she can appeal to a larger proportion of the young people in her home town and its environs than if she were limited to one sort of class work. With good instructors and her own concentration on the task to be accomplished, she can return home at the end of a year entirely capable of making her own way. As I have said so often in the course of this work, success lies in the girl as much as in the amount of her training. The head of a normal training-school of physical culture has pointed out to me student-workers in their third year who were not yet capable of leading a class, yet his course is supposed to occupy only two school years. Again, when a student has met with reverses after the first year, with a few additional private lessons she has been able to leave the school and teach with success.
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The same is true of elocution and dancing. Some girls go to a dancing-class year after year and never acquire knowledge of the principles on which the art is founded. They may be graceful dancers but utterly unable to give instruction. Another girl with less natural ability but more genuine desire to succeed will be teaching children's classes while the others are still working. A girl who must teach elocution within a given time will walk straight past the girl whose father has the funds to give her an indefinite course of study and who likes to go back to the school, season after season.

In a small city, dancing-lessons can sometimes be organized more easily than those in physical culture. The latter classes are often less attractive to young people, but the teacher must never give up her aim, ''i.e.,'' to introduce physical culture into her community and create a demand for it in the public schools.

The young woman starting her first dancing-class should select a hall with discretion, always giving her class a certain social standing. A large private parlor, with waxed floor or canvased carpet is preferable to a cheap hall in a questionable neighborhood. The girl without great influence will do well to secure social leaders as her patronesses and give a series of dances during the season which will have a little

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air of exclusiveness. Some teachers call these cotillon clubs, dances de luxe, etc.

In starting her classes, the newcomer should teach adults the round and square dances, with an occasional special event, like a cotillon with inexpensive favors. The children—and their mothers—will want to have fancy dancing included in the afternoon's work. A girl who has not enough classes to keep her busy in her own town may be able to go to smaller towns within commuting distance for weekly or semi-weekly lessons.

The girl who combines elocution with physical culture must be resourceful and able to arrange amateur entertainments that give pupils a chance to appear with credit, and parents and friends an opportunity to admire and applaud. The girl who can stage-manage or produce small plays and allow other local talent to shine therein is very much more apt to succeed than the girl who casts herself for the star rele. Upon such little evidences of tact and good will does the teacher of physical culture and dancing or elocution build up remunerative classes. They are to be found in nearly all small cities, especially in the mid-West, West and Southwest.

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{{sc|The}} girl with literary ambitions belongs to one of two classes. Hither she thinks she could earn her living at home, by writing for magazines, or she wants to become a "journalist."

The profession of letters is broad and liberal. It presupposes a college education—yet I have known girls to graduate from the eighth grade into the short-stery field, because they found inspiration and help in the English masterpieces which they read after working hours. It presupposes leisure, elegant surroundings, and a restful environment, and yet one of the daintiest fairy-tales I ever read was penned by a woman between the time that she sent five growing girls off to school, and the washing of the breakfast dishes. I know of no work in which patient, persistent, unfailing effort and study bring such rich rewards, because the joy of giving birth to a new thought is equaled only by the joy of the mother in her first born. The writer extracts something more than mere dollars from

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the profession of letters—the happiness peculiar to congenial work, intensified by steady, mental growth, and the development of resources within herself which rescue her from morbidness, loneliness and selfishness.

The successful writer must draw information and inspiration from her contact with human nature. She must know people in order to write of them, consequently she is never self-centered. She may become egotistical, spoiled by flattery when success is achieved, but during her probation she is dependent upon her fellow-men, therefore interested in them, and so is herself interesting.

Against this argument must be arraigned the stern fact that the woman who is entirely dependent upon her own efforts should not turn to writing, even though she may have the gift, as a profession in which she can secure immediate returns. She must combine writing with more practical work, something that will pay her board and keep a roof over her head until she wields the pen with such dexterity that financial returns are sure and regular. This period varies. Some women suddenly develop a gift for humorous versification, epigrammatic little essays, or a new field of fiction, and score phenomenal success; but as a rule the history of the writer who builds a substantial success reads far differently. My first story was writ-

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ten—and promptly rejected—when I was fifteen. I drew my first weekly salary as a writer (and this on a small country paper) when I was twenty-seven, yet during that interval there was never a day, whether I was teaching school or cooking for hired men or catering to summer boarders, that I did not renew my determination, ofttimes buried deep beneath piles of unwashed dishes and unironed clothes, that one day I would be financially independent through my writings.

I make this question of financial independence the goal toward which most writers work because it is their real object, and because most of the women who write to me mention financial burdens which they hope to lighten by the aid of their pens. This introduction has been made strongly personal because I know that many of my readers will say that I paint too disheartening a picture for the girl with the pen. I want each one of these critics to know that I understand not only just how she feels in her ambitious, hopeful moments, but just how she will feel when manuscript after manuscript comes back—"Returned with thanks."

If the wolf is very close to your door, do not try to fight him with your pen. Better select for your weapon the needle, the frying-pan or the iron. He recognizes the power of the pen only when it is wielded by an experienced hand.

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If you are willing to wait and work patiently and to live frugally, then find some regular occupation that will occupy half or three-fourths of the day, and devote the other half or fourth to writing, giving the early part of the day to your pen-work if possible. Depend upon serving or teaching or nursing, or whatever you can do well, to keep body and soul together, and do not expect your pen to yield returns for many weeks or months, perhaps years. But, on the other hand, if you keep the steadfast faith within yourself that some day you will reach your goal, your more practical work will be made lighter by your hours of writing, and life will be worth while.

First, cultivate your powers of observation. Keep your eyes open at home and abroad. Note what people around you are doing, their peculiarities of speech and their mannerisms. Study changes in nature's panorama. Open your mind to outside influences, to the happiness and the sorrow of those with whom you come in contact, so that in time you may express these emotions in such clear fashion that the world of readers will say: "Yes, I know a woman who acts just that way when she is frightened," or "Why, I have felt just like that ever so many times." You cannot picture human nature until you know it. The painter transfers to his canvas the thrush tilting on the swaying branch;

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the writer must transfer to his sheet of paper the soul swaying under emotions.

Two home-going stenographers from a newspaper office passed a forlorn little figure sitting on the edge of the curbing of a city fountain. The girl's thin shoulders were shaken by silent sobs Her mouse-like teeth were set hard in her thin, colorless lips. The first stenographer who passed did not notice that the child was crying. In fact, she was thinking what a hot day it had been, and how hard it was to work in a great office amid the clickety-click of typewriters. The second girl, her eyes open to all that went on around her, despite the heat, spied the heaving shoulders, unlocked the hard-set lips and heard a story which led to the exposure of a great wrong, which placed the girl on the staff of a big paper, and which lifted her protége above want and misery.

Which one of those two girls hurrying away from the same office was the born writer? Fine phrases alone will not make a writer. You must cultivate the knowledge of human nature, the power of observation and the ability to put this combination of knowledge and observation into a word form which will reach the hearts of your readers.

Write every day. Write of everything you see. Cultivate the letter habit. If your friends enjoy your letters and beg for more, you are

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making headway. Put into those letters your impressions of events and people. Divide your hours of reading between the works of standard English writers, like Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Scott and Washington Irving, the books which are making the success of the moment, and the best current magazines. This last is important because you must know the trend of literary taste, the sort of fiction, special article or poetry that editors are buying.

If you seriously contemplate writing for a living, you must make a business of reading regularly at your public library or subscribing for the current magazines. If you have written a tale to entertain children, buy or borrow at the library every magazine you can find for juvenile readers, and decide which editor is using stories such as you have to offer. If you are offering practical suggestions for the housewife, make a list of magazines published especially for women, and send your script to each one, until many rejections have proven that it is not salable. A woman told me the other day that she had sent one story to twenty-nine magazines before she sold it.

If you have a love-story, study the magazines which publish fiction before sending forth the tale. Do not send it to ''[[The Review of Reviews]]'' or ''[[The Scientific American]]'' simply because your

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brother happens to be a subscriber to one of these excellent but fictionless magazines.

The mechanical preparation of a manuscript is the simplest part of your work. Unless you write an extremely legible and uniform hand, have your script typewritten. The usual charge is ten cents per page, folio size. In the upper left-hand corner of the first page write your name and address in full. In the upper right-hand corner, write: "Submitted at your regular rates." Every publication has its rate for unknown authors. Only the established author names his own price. In the center of the sheet, below these corner inscriptions, write the title of your story.

Tell the typist who copies your story to double-space it. This leaves room for editorial corrections if your story is accepted. On the last page, four or five spaces below the last line, have your address and name written again. If you send out two or a dozen poems in the same envelope, put your name and address on each and every one. Do not trust that the typewriting or the long hand or the general style will identify them. If you send out a novel, mark each chapter with the full title and your name and address. If you could see the mail unloaded on the desk of a sorting clerk in a magazine office some morning you would understand this caution.
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Do not ask for an immediate decision, nor acknowledgment by return mail. Simply enclose a self-addressed and stamped envelope for the return of your story if not available, and do not write a letter detailing the story of your own life and the reasons why you need the money this story is worth. The busy editor has no time to read this letter, neither is he conducting a charity bureau. His readers demand good, readable stories, not a poorly-written story, bought because you needed the money. Be sure to pay postage on your script in full, and fold it as few times as possible, using a large envelope for this mailing. Never roll a script.

When your story reaches the editorial offices in some far-away city, it will be sorted with dozens of others and recorded in a great book, then passed on to the young man or woman who is known as the first reader. If hopeless in style or unsuited to this particular magazine, it will be returned to you at once, with a printed slip of rejection. If it seems promising, it is passed, on to the second reader, or the editor for whose department it seems best fitted. He reads it, and, if favorably inclined, holds it for an editorial council, provided the magazine staff is large, or he sends it on the editor-in-chief. With hundreds of manuscripts pouring in every morning, you must understand that this process will take time. If you hear nothing after your

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manuscript has been in the office a month, write a polite note of inquiry.

To the average woman who wants to write at home I would say: "Start with what are known as 'fillers,' little stories which are sandwiched in between the big features of a magazine for women readers." Perhaps you have found some method of lightening your housework, some new way of correcting a fault common to childhood; perhaps you have been to a lunch or tea and seen some novel decorations or enjoyed a novel game; perhaps your church society has given a new entertainment. Write of any of these matters, briefly and clearly, so that some other woman could lighten her housework, correct her child, give a pretty luncheon or plan a profitable church entertainment. Then look over the magazines for women and send this "story" to the one who seems to give considerable space to such matters. If the matter is used, you will be paid for it. Reputable editors never stoop to filching ideas, as some outof-town writers think.

Now for the would-be newspaper girl, "the journalist," as she would call herself.

The way to become a newspaper reporter is to report. Begin right where you are, where you will have friends to help you to gather news, and parents to provide you with a home until you learn whether newspaper work is all

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that you have pictured it, and until the editor has learned that you have the true newspaper instinct. This will not take long. Here is one of the joys of newspaper work. You are not kept in suspense.

Remember the newspaper world wants facts, not phrases, and plan your interview accordingly. Do not take the editor an essay on "Architects of Fate." Tell him rather that Mrs. Brown had a tea-party the other night and his paper ought to publish the news about it; that the Smithson domicile is harboring brandnew twins, and that Jennie Piper is entertaining two pretty girls from St. Joe. He will ask you the girls' names, and if you do not know, he will say then and there that you are not so much of a newspaper woman as he thought you were. Tell him you know everybody and go everywhere and hear many, many things that somehow never get into his weekly paper, or, if you are fortunate enough to live in a town which supports a daily, that you think you could run a daily column or half column of society and personal news. That is the opening wedge for you girls with the pen—personalities, gossip, if you will. You cannot start by reporting murders or conducting household departments. You must begin by giving the editor something his older, more blase reporters have failed to give

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him, the small trifling items that make a paper gossipy and readable.

If you are a newspaper woman born, you will succeed in your home town, I do not care what the size of the paper. You will create a demand for your services. If you cannot please the editor there, if you cannot induce your neighbors to give you news, what do you expect to do in a strange city with women to interview who place implacable butlers between you and the news you would learn?

By all means beg the editor of your home paper to try you out; and then make yourself invaluable to him before you try your wings in the great city.

You may have influential letters, you may have diplomas and pretty frocks and a prettier smile, but in a great city where you think there must be hundreds of openings you will find other girls with the same influential letters, good frocks, and pleasing smiles already on the ground, a hundred to every opening. And when you tell the city editor that you have had no experience but are willing to learn, he will inform you that he does not run a kindergarten for reporters.

Get your training near home, if you have to work months for nothing. I did this, and I have never regretted it, and just to clinch my argu-

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ment I beg leave to drop into personalities once more.

Years ago in a mid-West city of 20,000 inhabitants and one daily paper, I found that I had to put my ability as a writer to more regular and better financial account. I called to see the editor of the one daily paper. He said his staff was complete, but I insisted on having something to do—just to show him that I could write. He said: "Go write up the squirrels in the park."

Now, natural history was so much Greek to me, but I had to convince him. I spent a morning in the park, watched the squirrels and talked with the watchman. The next Sunday that paper printed a column about the habits and tricks of the park squirrels—for which I never received a cent.

The staff was still full. If I had any new department or idea to suggest, "perhaps," said the editor vaguely.

The women's clubs were just then coming into prominence. I begged space for a department devoted to club meetings—and got it, with a salary of five dollars a week, providing the department made good. Can you imagine, you girls who want to write up sensational murders, the mad excitement of reporting a dozen or more literary meetings a week, and trying to make the matter readable?
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My next assignment consisted of going from pastor to pastor each Sunday afternoon and finding church news for Monday morning's paper, sorting out routine announcements and digging relentlessly for some bit of real religious news. Next I was sent down on what was known as Implement Row, where agricultural machinery was handled, there to climb for one whole long day in each week over platforms and trucks and under freight-cars, often to be rewarded with less than a column of personal items about traveling men or out-of-town visitors. I worked so hard I scarcely had time to eat. And all the while that staff remained full! Men had the police run, the postoffice, the federal courthouse and the theaters—all of which I felt I could do, oh, so very well!

Those were shoe-destroying, soul-wearing days, but when I finally came to New York and was told by the city editor on a large paper to go down to the Battery and get a certain emigrant story, I thanked the good old mid-West paper and its patient staff of editors who had trained me to start for the Battery without asking the irritable city editor where the Battery was, how much copy he wanted, what I should ask the emigrant, etc. Those early days when I had had to squeeze news from the mere leavings of news-sources had taught me how to get a

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story—and that is what makes a newspaper woman.

Now supposing that you have served your apprenticeship on a daily paper in a small inland city, how shall you approach the city editor in a large city, perhaps in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York?

First, you must have funds on which to live while seeking work in the city. It may be weeks or months before you secure a salaried position, and while you are doing space work at four or five dollars per column you must have money for board, room and earfare, to say nothing of the shoe-leather, on which reporting is merciless. Unless you have strong letters of personal introduction to city editors and have made a record for clever, not mediocre, work in your home town, never start for a strange city and a new, as yet unassured position, without at least enough money to meet your current expenses for two months.

Second, take with you every letter of introduction or recommendation that you can muster. Also carry a number of newspaper clippings, as evidence of the good work you have done on the home paper.

Third, be wise in selecting the season of your flight. Do not seek work in a large city during mid-summer. The reportorial force is generally cut down during the summer season, and

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much of the space given during the rest of the year to articles on the various phases of city life is filled with correspondence from summer resorts. September is perhaps the best month in which to seek work in a city newspaper office, for at that time editors look kindly on new blood for their staffs.

Fourth, do not rush from the depot to the editorial sanctum. Study the city a bit and get your bearings. Incidentally, you may pick up some idea for a story which you can present to the editor during your first call. The girl who comes to the editor with an idea has ten chances where the girl who merely asks for work, for an assignment suggested by the editor, has one. The girl with ideas or suggestions for good stories is in demand.

A few words about the income of the young writer. Put out of your mind the fabulous earnings credited to novelists and playwrights. Remember that you are serving a literary apprenticeship, not writing the one "best seller."

If you are writing "fillers" for ten-cent magazines, you will be paid from a half to one cent per word. If you are writing little love stories, from 1,200 to 1,500 words, for the syndicates which supply fiction to the daily papers, you will receive about ten dollars per story. If you receive twenty-five or thirty dollars for your first 3,000-word fiction tale, you will be doing well.

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Later, when you acquire style and reputation, you will be paid from seventy-five to two hundred dollars for a strong, telling story of action or psychological analysis. The income of the magazine writer is as uncertain as her moods. A period of great mental activity, which yields large financial returns, is generally followed by a mental reaction and a falling off of cash returns.

The income of the newspaper woman is more certain. In large cities the editor of the Sunday magazine section, first hope of the newly-arrived writer, pays five dollars a column for general material, more for special stories along exclusive lines with good illustrations. What is known as an exclusive special, not a news story, for a Sunday paper, the sort that will fill a page with text and illustrations, is sure to bring from thirty to fifty dollars.

A woman reporter without city experience may be asked to start at fifteen dollars a week. If she has good letters, or shows marked ability, or if her work in her home paper has attracted the attention of the city editor, she may be offered twenty dollars a week. From this point her salary is raised, according to her usefulness and efficiency, to thirty-five dollars a week. When she is worth this to the city editor, she generally asks to be put on space instead of salary, and then she earns, according to her

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physical strength, working capacity and keenness of observation, from fifty dollars a week up.

In large cities the field of the newspaper woman is unlimited, for she soon finds openings in magazines for her keen stories of city life. But her daily life is not easy. It is strenuous, nerve-straining and harsh. Her hours are irregular, her work will not wait for a more propitious day or better weather, and the excuse has not yet been invented which will soften the heart or lighten the criticism of the editor when she scores failure.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter XIX}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|The Girl the Business World Wants|level=2}}

{{sc|No matter}} what occupation a girl may choose as a means of self-support, certain—personal qualifications and business-like attributes are essential to her success. Mere training for a trade or profession, or mere education along technical or theoretical lines, will count for little if the girl does not possess the ability to employ her knowledge in the practical, business-like way.

The industrial, commercial or professional world needs the well-trained girl; yes, but more it needs the girl who has good common sense, the girl who is sincere, loyal and capable of concentrating on the work at hand.

And the greatest of these gifts is sincerity Avhich is built upon common sense and which ade to loyalty and concentration.

When you first enter the business world you will meet many fellow-workers who pretend to do big things, to work hard and to have their employers' interest at heart, when, in reality,

—

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| caption = Applicants for General Office Work Crowd the Business Marts
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they are simply making a superficial showing, and they are not working, not putting heart and soul into their work.

Be not deceived by their methods. Be sincere. Do your work so that each night as you pass the timekeeper or the cage in which sits the ule you can say in your heart: "To-day I have earned all that Mr. Blank pays me—and more."

These words are a satisfying chant, but if you simply make a pretense at working, there will be no song on your lips; rather a shaky feeling in your knees and a sinking in your heart not pleasant to feel. Whenever a girl tells me that she has an "easy" position, I mark her for a girl doomed for early dismissal. It is never really easy to earn your salary and incidentally work toward promotion.

Perhaps you do not understand just what I mean by sincerity in work, so let me give youa few concrete examples.

When you were in school you had to make a certain average in order to secure promotion. If you were not sincere in your work, when taking an examination you carefully selected the questions you could answer, and, once sure of making the average, you did not worry about the ones you had to leave unanswered.

Now that you are going into business, you think that here you can employ the same meth-

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ods. You will start at five or six dollars a week doing simple, humble tasks; and you will do them just well enough so that your employer or the head of your department will not find fault with you. You will do what you are paid for—and not one jot more. You will not arrive at the store one minute ahead of time, and your eye will be on the clock-dial when the afternoon shadows begin to fall.

Not how much you can do in a day, but how little and still hold your position! Is this to be your gospel? You are not lazy, but soon you will belong to the great army of workers who are afraid of being imposed upon by their employers. You are getting ready to join the legions of underpaid girls and women.

Make no mistake about your abilities when first you are paid wages. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred you will not begin to earn what your employer pays you, I do not care how small the salary. Your blunders will cost him money or customers. Your inexperience and the necessity for showing you how to do things in the firm's way will cost the time and the energy of some well-paid employee placed over you in authority. Your employer will not receive any returns for what he pays you for many, many weeks.

Late one afternoon I receive a letter from an out-of-town friend.
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"Send me by return mail, please, five yards of percaline to line this silk."

"This silk" was an exqusite shade of pale green.

I rushed to the nearest store—the green silk was for a bridesmaid's frock, and the wedding day at hand—and I offered the bit of shimmery silk to a clerk.

"Five yards of percaline to match that, please."

"We ain't got any percaline like that," she said, listlessly dropping my sample. My glance traveled up and down the shelving, and lighted on a piece of palest green lining.

"What is that third bolt from the top?"

"That ain't percaline—it's shimmer satin."

"Well, I'd like to see it."

"It costs two cents more a yard than percaline," replied the clerk, not offering to take down the bolt, "and it ain't so heavy."

"I want to see it," I replied firmly, and I got it, not because of the clerk, but in spite of her.

Now, if she had been sincere in her work, if she had wanted to pay her employer for training her to earn her own living, she would have said to me:

"We have no percaline that shade, but I can give you a much better and softer lining at only a few cents more a yard."

But she was just hoping that I would not buy.

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She wanted to make up her book and be ready to reach for her gloves and purse the instant the first bell rang.

Another instance:

"I can't understand why Jennie does not get along," murmured the mother of three girls, all wage-earners. "She was the brightest of my girls in school, always just slid from class to class without any apparent effort, while both Elizabeth and Helen had to work like Trojans, but now both of the tortoises are outstripping the hare. Jennie has been at Leyland's two years, and has had her salary raised just once, and that only a dollar a week."

This mother did not realize that the question which she propounded in one breath she answered with the next.

"She always slid from class to class without apparent effort."

That is the answer!

Jennie tried to introduce into the business world the same methods she had pursued at school. She was one of the clever girls who can skim through a lesson just before recitation hour, snatch at important points, and promptly forget all about them within an hour after school. She had a quick memory, but not a dependable, reliable one.

She never did anything thoroughly. What she did study failed to remain with her as per-

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manent knowledge. She was distinctly superficial, and yet she always made a good appearance in her class. Teachers shook their heads and said it was a pity to see good gray matter wasted, but fellow-pupils envied her the faculty for securing results without real work.

For a time these tactics will make a good impression in business, but the time will be short. The girl who remembers orders for two or three days, but has to be reminded of them thereafter at regular intervals never scores a permanent success. The girl who writes instructions on a dependable memory, with an indelible pencil, lasts.

The girl who listens to about half the suggestions offered by her chief and then interrupts him: "Oh, yes, I understand perfectly. You want it done so-and-so," makes a very good first impression. The chief says to himself: "There's the sort of girl I like to have around. You don't have to furnish a diagram with your explanations."

But by and by he finds that this girl has only half grasped his instructions, while another girl who asked for fuller explanations was reinforcing her memory and had fully grasped the meaning.

The girl who "just slides through" never knows her stock if she is clerking; never has her employer's business terms at her finger-tips if

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she is a stenographer; never takes the pains to find out why she is asked to do certain things in a certain way if she is employed in a factory.

She gives merely a superficial effect of being tremendously interested in her work. In reality she is thinking of something else. In the end it is the something else, not the work, that wins out.

Loyalty is a splendid business asset. It wins the respect and appreciation of your employer, while disloyalty causes dismissal and loss of self-respect.

It is not always easy to be loyal to your employer, especially if you are an inexperienced girl or woman.

Somehow, in the average man there exists an inborn sense of business honor. He rather prides himself on being silent about the affairs of the man or the firm for whom he works. He can accept reprimands without feeling a mad desire to retaliate by "knocking" his employers the first time their backs are turned.

On the other hand, women must acquire this sense of honor. Some do. Others talk too much, especally when smarting under a rebuke more or less deserved. Without meaning to be disloyal to employers, they steer close to the shoals of petty, dishonorable gossip, not realizing that the employee who is worth good money to her firm is the one who feels that the firm's interests are hers, and who, therefore, is close-mouthed.

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Two girls, in ankle-length skirts, rode in an elevator with me not long ago, talking rather loudly, as inexperienced girls will. Said the blonde:

"How'd you like your new place?"

"Fine! Nothing to do hardly," replied the brunette. "I'm going to bring down a book from the library to-morrow. Say, you'd just die if you'd see him trying to find something for me to do. I don't see why he wants a stenographer, anyhow. Honest, it nearly gives me heartfailure when he dictates a letter. Wouldn't you hate to be married to a young lawyer?"

Then they both giggled, and several men in the car smiled.

That girl did not realize that in thus chattering of her employer's affairs in a public place she was disloyal to the man who paid her salary, but she was, just the same—disloyal, silly and unwomanly. Perhaps that struggling young lawyer kept a stenographer as part of the little business drama of keeping up appearances. Perhaps he hoped to secure business from the very men in the building who were riding in the ear with his foolish stenographer.

If you feel that you must laugh at your chief, wait until you are alone with your mirror or safely buried in the bosom of your family. I admit that some employers are more or less of

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a joke, but don't jest about them in public or where eavesdroppers may hear your careless words and carry them further, to do harm to your employer and eventually to yourself. Your employer is straining every nerve to make his business succeed. Perhaps he is not working in just the right way, but it is not your place to shout this fact from the house-tops. Perhaps in time he may see the error of his methods and work out his business salvation on different lines. In the meantime if the you mean to accept a salary at his hands, be loyal to his interests, and do not criticize him to his friends or his rivals.

When you feel inclined to be disloyal, stop and figure on what you owe your employer.

Start your business career by honestly appreciating the privilege of being paid a salary during your training. The modern boy or girl knows little enough about being trained for work. In the old days of apprentices for trades, boys and girls worked from two to seven years for nothing or for board and lodging, in order to be prepared properly for wage-earning. To-day many girls with absolutely no equipment seem to think that employers ought to be glad to secure their inexperienced services.

Just get that idea out of your head. Bear in mind that the debt is all on your side. Be sincerely grateful to the man who gives you a

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chance to prove your worth. You have then taken the first step on the pathway of success. In fact, your entire business future depends upon your understanding perfectly the relation between employer and employee.

Why are you going to work?

Because you need money! Otherwise do not go to work, because you will be a drone and a discredit to your sex in the wage-earning field. Moreover, you will be occupying a place that belongs to some girl who must work.

Why is your employer paying you wages?

Because he has work to be done. If you cannot do that work, he has a perfect right to find some one who can do it. Remember, he is not conducting a charity bureau.

Many a girl thinks that the world, as personified in her prospective employer, owes her a living. That is all wrong. The world owes you just what you are capable of earning. And when you have passed through the various stages of inexperience and incompetency to successful effort and a position of authority, you will look at the girls who come to you in search of work precisely as some one is looking at you to-day.

Be business-like even in applying for work.

Your possible employer wants to know if you can read, write, cipher, keep his stock in order and yourself presentable. If you can do these

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things, and have an ordinary amount of intelligence, he knows that in time you will earn your salary.

He does not want to know that you need a new hat, or that your invalid brother needs a rolling-chair, or that your mother is ill and ought to hire a maid with your salary, or that your father has met with reverses. If any of these afflictions have befallen your family, you are welcome to spend your salary alleviating them; but the one important factor in this man's calculations is: "Will she do the work and do it well?"

Tell him what you can do or what you mean to do when you are trained for the work, and never mind how you expect to spend your salary. Talk of your talents, not of your troubles. Stand on your merit as a worker, and not on your needs. Then your employer will say: "Here is a business-like, self-reliant girl, and I need her."

Girls, earning your living is work—and if you are not very careful it degenerates into the most monotonous, deadening, slavish form of work. Your one salvation will be your sincerity, your enthusiasm. Start out by believing in your employer, in yourself, and in your ability to rise. If you do this you will be the sort of girl the business world needs, the sort of girl who has

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her salary raised, the sort of girl who "makes good."

Here are two quotations which will prove immensely helpful to you. The first is from a poem by Dr. [[Author:Henry Van Dyke|Henry Van Dyke]]:

{{ppoem|class=poem|
{{fqm}}This is my work, my blessing, not my doom;
Of all who live, I am the one by whom
This work can best be done, in my own way."
}}

The second is from [[Author:Elbert Hubbard|Elbert Hubbard]]'s little magazine, ''[[The Philistine]].''

{{bc|
"Get your happiness out of your work, or you'll never know what happiness is."
}}

When you have mastered their philosophy, and can go to your work each morning with a song in your heart, you will be the sort of girl the business world needs—and pays well.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter XX}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|Living Expenses of the Self-supporting Girl in Big Cities|level=2}}

{{sc|No girl}} who has read the preceding chapters with any degree of earnestness can fail to realize that between the day of leaving school and the day of actual economic independence there is bound to be a period of financial stringency. This may be represented by an underpaid or even unpaid apprenticeship, or by a dreary search for work on the part of the untrained girl who must secure some sort of livelihood and her training through experience at one and the same time. Even the girl from out-of-town who has a trade or who has had office or store experience must prove her worth to the city employer, and this represents a period of living on very small wages.

A social worker who has given much earnest thought and investigation to the problem states that the average wage paid to the out-of-town girl during her first three months in a large city like New York, Chicago or Denver is five {{hws|s=dol|e=lars}}

-i

{{FreedImg
| file = The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909) 12.png
| caption = Dining-room in Trowmart Inn, New York City, Said to Be the Best Managed Hotel for Self-supporting Women in America
| width = 600px
}}

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{{hwe|s=dol|e=lars}} per week. Her list includes stenographers, bookkeepers, cashiers, salesgirls, factory workers, telephone operators, and even fairly good helpers in dressmaking shops. The exceptions are girls who have influence or an introduction through an employee standing high with the firm.

"What experience have you had in this city?" is the question hurled at the newcomer, until she begins to dread it, knowing that the preference will be given to applicants having local references.

It is not to be denied that often the girl from a smaller city or even a village develops into the better clerk or office worker for a Chicago or New York employer than dees the city-born girl; but until she has proven her worth, the newcomer must work at the salary of a local apprentice, no matter what her experience in her home town.

The inexperienced city girl must also start at the smallest wages which the superintendent of the establishment dares to offer, simply because, as I have explained in other chapters, the employer feels that her mistakes will be many and costly, and she will not earn the sum he pays her, no matter how small that may be.

Both the city and the country girl are forced to accept three, four or five dollars per week, quieting their fears by repeating the superin-

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tendent's consoling words: "But we will increase your salary as fast as you prove your worth."

But even when a girl tries her level best to prove her worth, and when she gives her undivided attention and efforts to the firm's business, it takes weeks and months to master details and to avoid mistakes. And all that time she must live somehow on what the firm pays her. If out-of-town mothers realized just what this period of probation represented in privation, loneliness, perhaps actual physical discomfort, suffering and hunger, they would do all in their power to keep ambitious but untrained daughters at home. But, unfortunately, mothers who have never worked for their living have false ideas of business life. They see only the well-clad, smiling girls behind counters or in offices, and they do not stop to inquire what price these girls paid for their business training, their present economic independence.

And so, every week of the year, and every day of the week, even including Sunday, the railway trains bring to every large city hundreds of girls utterly unprepared to offer skilled labor in return for living wages, girls who must somehow live while being trained to become real wage-earners.

Only women engaged in social work, representatives of the Travelers' Aid Society and

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matrons of homes or temporary shelters for working-girls, have any conception of the number of unskilled, untrained girls who plunge into cities without sufficient funds to tide them over a fortnight. These girls honestly believe that within a week they will be working somewhere, somehow, on a salary which will not only permit them to live in city comfort, but to send something home to "the folks." The pathos of their ignorance is not a matter for consideration here. Their relief, their social salvation, is a matter of moment.

No mother should permit her daughter to go to a strange city unless she can provide the girl with funds to pay board and room for a month, which will amount to not less than twenty dollars, and the price of her return ticket in case she fails to find work in that time. The mother who recklessly allows her unskilled daughter to enter a strange city armed only with a week's board and high hopes, is guilty of criminal neglect as the guardian of her child's future.

I wish I could drive this lesson into the heart of every mother who feels that her daughter must go to some large city in order to succeed. If the two are convinced that the home town offers no future for the daughter, then let them prove the sincerity of their conviction by earning enough money at home, even if it means taking in washing and ironing, to insure all or

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part of the daughter's living expenses for at least three months after she goes to the city.

Earnest women in every large city are trying to cope with the social problem of the underpaid girl in store and factory. They are building homes and investigating boarding and rooming-houses, but where there are dozens of self-supporting hotels for men who must live for a song, in only a few cities have hotels for working-women been placed on a business basis. As yet they are semi-charitable institutions, so managed that they appeal neither to the girls who must seek them as a refuge nor to the citizens who are asked to support them. And when I add that $3.50 per week is the minimum charge for board and lodging at these "homes," excepting a few in New York City which are conducted by the Roman Catholic and Episcopal sisterhoods, the country girl and her mother should have a very fair idea of how hard it will be to make the five-dollar-a-week salary meet current expenses.

Fortunate is the out-of-town girl who has relatives located in the city where she goes to seek work. She should communicate with them, and, if possible, make some business-like arrangement for boarding in their home. This is an important step for two reasons. First, when the out-of-town applicant announces to a superintendent of employees that she is living with

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relatives, this is a social guarantee which always appeals to the city employer. Second, in the home of relatives the price paid for board includes privileges, such as doing one's own laundry work, pressing tailored suits, using a sewing machine, etc., which are often impracticable in a boarding-house or "home," or for which an extra charge is made.

Many girls deliberately avoid relatives on the plea that they prefer "to stand on their own feet." This independence is charming in theory, especially when enunciated in a quiet village, several hundred miles from the turmoil and loneliness of city life. But when the first wave of homesickness sweeps over the country girl in a dreary hall bedroom, she will wish that she had sought the shelter which the home of the despised relatives might have offered. We all know that relatives, on occasion, may be unnecessarily frank in their expression of advice and opinion, but to the girl who finds herself alone in the great city any sort of bloodties affords comforting protection.

The girl who has no relatives or friends in the city should secure all the information obtainable about boarding-places, "homes," etc., before leaving her home town. Such information can generally be secured through the Young Women's Christian Association. In Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston this as-

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sociation maintains "homes" or boarding-houses, where room and board can be secured at a very low figure. Good employment bureaus also will be found in connection with these boarding-houses. The Harlem Branch of the same association in New York City, and the Brooklyn rooms carry reliable lists of "homes" and boarding-houses. The bureau of information at the downtown branch of the Y. W. C. A. in New York City, generally known as the Margaret Louise Home, recommends boarding and rooming-houses that are beyond the means of the average girl seeking work in New York. This branch of the association, despite the misleading title, "The Margaret Louise Home," appeals to the successful business woman or tourist, rather than to the girl seeking work. No out-of-town girl should make the common mistake of going unannounced from a New York depot to the Margaret Louise Home. She must write in advance for a room. This is purely a hotel for women, with reasonable charges, and it is always crowded. It is in no sense a shelter or "home" for the girl in search of work.

Pittsburg is building new headquarters for the Y. W. C. A.; Omaha, Neb., has just opened a fine new building; Minneapolis and Los Angeles have inviting headquarters; but not all of these have rooming-houses or dormitories attached.

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It is always much safer for the out-of-town girl to write well in advance for information, addressing her letter "Secretary, Young Women's Christian Association," and the name of the city where she plans to seek work. She should ask whether this particular branch of the association maintains dormitories and a restaurant, what rates are charged, or, if the rooms are all occupied, what rooming-houses and boarding-places the association recommends; also whether a representative of the Travelers' Aid Society will be found at the depot where she expects to arrive. With this request for information she should enclose a stamped and self-addressed envelope. The very manner in which she approaches this, her first city problem, will betray her thoroughness and her business instinct, incidentally making a good impression on the secretary who receives her letter.

The girl who for any reason is obliged to leave home suddenly and who arrives in a strange city unarmed with advance information, should ask for the representative of the Travelers' Aid Association or the matron in the depot. She should not consult the advertising columns of the daily papers for a boarding-house, as she is ignorant of neighborhoods and their dangers. Any woman connected with the

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depot staff wil be able to guide the stranger to a "home" or temporary shelter.

The "home" or temporary shelter for working-girls has its disadvantages, I admit. Very often the girls living in such places complain that they feel like inmates of an institution. This is due to the attitude of the matron or superintendent, who is not always a tactful person. But the stranger in a big city will make no mistake in seeking such a refuge. Not only will the low board help her to stretch her small savings to the limit, but she will meet at these "homes" practical working-girls whose knowledge of city life and methods of securing positions will be worth more to her than columns of advertising for work. The proprietor of a second or third-grade boarding-house knows little or nothing of industrial conditions or of openings in the mercantile field. Other boarders at such establishments are either undesirable acquaintances without influence, or they are absorbed in their own affairs. But the bond of fellowship between self-supporting girls at "homes" is strong and vital.

For instance, I know of a college girl from Maine who for weeks tried unavailingly to secure a position in a publishing house. As her means dwindled and her pride rebelled against returning to her native town, she sought refuge in a "home," where she met a little woman who

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addressed envelopes in a publishing office at six dollars per week. In exactly three days there was an opening in this same office for a filing clerk at five dollars per week, and on the advice of her new-found friend the college girl took it. To-day she is manuscript reader with the same firm and lives in her own little flat. Her employer, talking for the first time with this girl of evident refinement and good social connections, would never have thought to offer her the humble position of filing clerk, which she secured only through her acquaintance with a fellow-worker.

Board at these homes can be secured as low as three dollars per week, if the newcomer is willing to share a dormitory with from three to five other girls. For four dollars and fifty cents or five dollars she can secure a small hall-room that will be hers exclusively. Girls in dormitories have no separate dressing-rooms, and usually two girls must share a locker or closet for clothes. Baths are provided, and the halls and sitting-rooms are heated in winter. The dormitories are not heated. Boarders are governed by somewhat strict rules as to hours of rising and retiring, meals, etc., and no one may stay out later than 10:30 {{asc|p.m.}}, save by special permission.

The Trowmart Inn, Abingdon Square, New York City, Franklin Square House, Boston,

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Mass., and the Eleanor Homes in Chicago, are managed on a more liberal scale. They are really self-supporting hotels for women at moderate prices, where the girls may and do feel entirely independent. These hotels appeal particularly to the girl who earns between six and ten dollars per week. Single rooms, with breakfast and dinner on week-days, and three meals on Sunday, cost from four dollars and fifty cents a week up. Girls who share rooms with one or more girls secure proportionately lower rates. The price of board and room carries with it many privileges, such as use of a sewing-room supplied with machines, cutting tables, etc., a well-equipped laundry, a gymnasium, parlors, library, etc. Both the sewing and laundry privileges are invaluable, for the out-of-town girl is fairly staggered by the prices charged in cities for both sewing and washing.

The girl who seeks cheap board in a private household, rather than a "home," generally finds herself in wretched quarters, unventilated rooms, mere closets, with no toilet facilities, and a diet of bread, tea, coffee and cheap meats. At three dollars a week she must board in a tenement district, or share a furnished room with several other girls at a cost varying from seventy-five cents to a dollar a week, and make the remaining two dollars cover a week's food.

In the larger cities like New York or Chicago,

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such landladies as offer board and room for five dollars a week expect two girls to share one room, and one bath is considered sufficient for an entire household of ten, fifteen or twenty. The food is plentiful, but illy prepared. Meats of the cheaper sorts form the important dishes, and bakery stuff of all sorts is served. The bedrooms are not tidy, and the supply of gas is cut to a point so low that a girl must supply herself with a lamp for reading purposes. At some of the better class boarding-houses, neat hall bedrooms can be secured with board for one dollar a day, and for ten dollars per week comfortable quarters with good, wholesome food may be had. The girl who comes from a good family in a small city must count on allowing at least a dollar a day for board and room, if she would live as she is accustomed to at home. In addition to this she must buy her lunch downtown.

I know of several cases where young women have secured board and room, or a portion of it, for domestic services, but to do this one's business hours must be out of the ordinary, and the girl herself must have exceptional strength and endurance. The average working-woman needs every atom of her strength for store, office or factory, and should rest when the day's work is over.

One of the young women referred to is a

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saleswoman in a millinery establishment, whose manager permits her to leave the store every night at 5:30, and she does not report in the morning until 9. She waits on table at the place where she boards at breakfast and dinner, and pays room rent only. Another girl, who is employed as secretary to an editorial writer, works only from 9:30 to 5, and she keeps house for another business-woman whose hours are much longer. She prepares both breakfast and dinner, does all the dishwashing and marketing, and has a woman come in once a week to do washing and cleaning.

Many girls who desire to avoid both "homes" and boarding-houses write to inquire whether it is not possible to club with other working-girls and rent furnished rooms or a flat for light housekeeping purposes. Such an arrangement can be made, but not when the girl first goes to a strange city. Danger lurks in her ignorance of neighborhoods and in the too sudden intimacy with girls of whom she knows nothing. She should wait until she becomes acquainted with the city and has tested the girls who offer her such a partnership. Girls who have lived in this way say that the household should not include more than four girls, and the ideal arrangement is for two.

To show the out-of-town girl that the task of finding desirable housekeeping rooms in New

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York or any other large city is anything but easy, I offer here the actual report of two girls who made some investigations at my request. Their first step was to insert an advertisement in a Sunday paper, as follows:

"Wanted, by two young women, one or two furnished rooms, with privilege of light housekeeping."

Their report runs thus:

"Being employed near Madison Square, we wanted rooms within walking distance of that point.

"Mrs. G{{bar|2}}, on East Twenty-eighth Street, off Lexington Avenue, had written that she had one furnished room big enough for two at one dollar and seventy-five cents per week. She was not in. I was relieved. One glance down the dirty, dark hall of a cheap tenement was quite enough for me without the interview.

"Mrs. G{{bar|2}}, No. 2, on Twenty-fifth Street, between Second and Third Avenues, paused in the act of lighting a fire in a cook stove, which promised to smoke out every occupant of the tenement house, to tell me that she had the cleanest rooms on the block. She then showed me the rooms. The front apartment contained only a bed, with linen furnished to the last lodger, unwashed and piled upon it. The back room, a regulation tenement kitchen, contained a filthy dish closet and a few broken dishes, also

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an egg-crate on the window-ledge filled with damp and odorous rags. She would provide a cook stove if we provided the coal. If we wanted to use gas, we must hire our stove from the company and pay her fifty cents per week for gas drawn from her meter. Rate, four dollars per week. Greatly offended when I asked her for references, as we were strangers in New York.

"Mrs. J{{bar|2}}, West Thirty-fourth Street. Stuffy old house; furniture reminded me of second-hand shop. Landlady talked much and nervously, but was singularly ladylike; one room, five dollars per week, and you supply gas stove and cooking utensils. Separate gas meter for each tenant. No closet, and clothes must be hung behind dirty plush curtains. After displaying the good points of this fairly large room, Mrs. J{{bar|2}} explained that it was already rented. Going out I met its future occupant, a sadly bleached blonde, still more in need of a bath and clean raiment. On steps met a veteran 'bum' carrying a pitcher of beer.

"Mrs. G{{bar|2}}, Sixty-eighth Street, near Central Park West, wrote that she had no other roomers and her husband was never home, as he worked in a hotel. An airshaft room at three dollars per week was her offering. Cooking could be done in her kitchen. Room could hardly hold one person comfortably, let alone two.

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While we talked another roomer (in spite of the fact that she had no other), appeared on the scene and offered her larger room, saying she wished to economize during the summer. Apologized for her appearance by saying that she had had a short vacation and had taken 'a drop too much.' Landlady talkative and anxious to show me the kitchen, to reach which we passed through a mere cubby-hole, in which the husband, who was never home, was comfortably sleeping off a jag.

"Took train for Harlem. Found large, comfortably-furnished front room for five dollars per week. Furniture old-fashioned, but clean, not stuffy. Little washroom off this room, nice wardrobe for clothes. Lots of closet room. We must buy our own cooking utensils, and only breakfasts could be cooked in washroom.

"Mrs. C{{bar|2}} furnishes references and asks for them. So clean it smelled good. As a result of investigations I would add: If you are a stranger in New York do not go into a house that neither gives nor asks references. Keep away from the business section and make up your mind to pay carfare."

As soon as a girl becomes established in her work and is reasonably assured of the permanency of her position and income, she is justified in seeking some sort of home-life with a congenial fellow-worker. In every large city

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will be found groups of two or three girls, who through economy and natural feminine adaptability solved the living problem in a perfectly satisfactory way. Two such girls I found living in a small model apartment on the extreme northern end of Manhattan Island, within walking distance of the subway, which whisks them to their work in a little more than half an hour. They are on the top floor, which means five flights of stairs to climb, but they have splendid ventilation, sanitary plumbing, steam heat in winter, and a good breeze in summer. In their wee parlor are an upright piano, a bookcase filled with good reading, an artistic and powerful lamp, which bespeak pleasant and profitable evenings after the day's work is done.

Here is the story of their housekeeping progress:

"We started in an attic," explained one of the girls. "We were working for seven dollars a week in an underwear factory and living in a 'home.'

"We waited until spring, when the question of steam would not enter into our arrangements, and then we struck out to keep house. We found a forlorn attic, whose one redeeming feature was its wealth of sunlight and fresh air. It was atop an old-fashioned house with three steep flights to climb, rent five dollars a month. When we had cleaned and let in the air and sun-

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light, it was sweet and wholesome. Our furniture consisted of an iron bed and springs, which we bought second-hand for four dollars (cleaned and fumigated thoroughly), a new mattress for which we paid five dollars, three sheets at forty-nine cents each, two plates, cups and saucers, knives, forks, spoons and cooking utensils, which, bought at the five and ten-cent store, amounted to one dollar and ten cents; six towels, two chairs (second-hand), one lightweight comfortable, a washbowl and pitcher, a lamp and a one-hole oilstove, broom, scrubbing-brush and soap. There was running water; also we found two good-sized packing-boxes, which we utilized for cupboards. One hand-glass we had between us for a mirror.

"Of one thing I want to warn girls—the wee expenses that will arise. For instance, we next had to buy five cents' worth of nails, a hammer and an oilcan. When we took possession of the room we had spent every cent of our savings—sixteen dollars and twenty-five cents. We had no shades at our windows, so we pinned up newspapers. We ate on the packing-box which held our dishes and food, but from that moment we could speak of our home, and felt that we were working toward some given point. The first week we lived on bread and milk, making milk toast for variety.

"The next week we added fresh fruit, pre-

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pared cereals and eggs. During that entire summer our table cost us five dollars or less for two, and our room rent was one dollar and twenty-five cents, which represents individual living expenses of a trifle over three dollars. We had paid four dollars and fifty-cents per week at the 'home,' and enjoyed life less.

"With the first of September we realized that there was absolutely no way of heating the attic adequately. We spent four entire Sundays in flat-hunting. By this time our salaries had been raised to ten dollars per week, and we had saved quite a neat sum during the summer. We decided that our new home should be a permanent one.

"We moved here October 1st, two years ago. We pay twenty dollars per month, or less than five dollars a week, house rent; our gas bills average one dollar and sixty cents per month; we do our own washing, and almost the first important piece of furniture we bought was a sewing-machine, which we got, second-hand, for eight dollars.

"Next I remembered mother's attic in the Berkshire village, and wrote, stating that if she could spare us anything from the old boxes and chests we would be glad to have them for our new home. Carrie's aunt received a similar letter, making it very clear that we did not ask for new things—we were both too proud of our

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ability to make our way in New York. By freight, at our expense, came two boxes that were equal to a 'bride's shower'—bedding, quaint dishes, silver pieces, etc., only everything was second-hand.

"Barring the piano and lamp, there is hardly a new thing in the house, and yet you never would dream it. Together we make thirty dollars a week, and we live for twelve or fourteen, simply and happily; so if a girl is domestic in her tastes, by all means let her try housekeeping in an attic."

The figures presented in this chapter should prove to the girl who has had a comfortable home in a small city or town that she cannot duplicate home comforts in the larger city on a salary of five dollars a week. Hither she must bring with her funds to deposit in bank and draw upon for almost daily needs, or resign herself to a period of stern deprivation. For if she is fortunate enough to secure board and lodging in a working-girl's home for three dollars and fifty cents a week, the remaining dollar and a half must cover a multitude of small expenses.

Unless she is working very near the "home," she must buy her lunch, which represents at the least ten cents per day. In many cities, the "homes" are located at some distance from business centers. This means carfare, at least

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one way each day, often both trips. Some laundry work she must have done, even if she is permitted to wash gauze underwear, stockings, handkerchiefs, neckwear and other small pieces at her boarding-place. Her shoes will wear out with painful celerity, and her entire wardrobe may have to be renewed, piece by piece, before the promised raise in salary is forthcoming. If she comes to the city unprovided with a black dress, and works in a store, her first expenditure will be for a black skirt and waist. In nearly all city stores the wearing of black and white is obligatory.

Figure this out, item by item, and you will see that the life of the inexperienced and untrained girl in a great city is drab-colored indeed. It will be months before her income will permit her to purchase the pretty clothes of which she dreamed before leaving home, or to indulge in the small pleasures which she pictured as part of every city girl's life.

On the other hand, if a girl has the right sort of business ability behind her ambition, if she can deny herself many little luxuries and for a time devote herself exclusively to mastering the line of work she has chosen, the city holds wonderful possibilities for her. There is always room for the girl with an idea, for the girl who does one thing well, for the girl who is willing, nay, anxious, to learn and to work. But a girl

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of this sort must hold herself above the cheaper, tinseled life of the big city. She must learn to decline invitations which represent late hours, broken rest, associations that are anything but uplifting. She must find her recreation in the free lectures, the free concerts and the free art exhibits to be found in all progressive cities, and seek her companions at classes for self-advancement, gymnasiums and clubs conducted by institutional churches or organizations like the Young Women's Christian Association./last/

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User:SnowyCinema/P/The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living

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