That women should take such an inferior position in the trades they are in today is regrettable enough.  But far more important is it to make sure that they obtain their fair share of whatever improved facilities are provided for “the generation knocking at the door” of life.  Working-women or women intimately acquainted with working-women’s needs, should have seats on all commissions, boards and committees, so that when schemes of state industrial training are being planned, when schools are built, courses outlined, the interests of girls may be remembered, and especially so that they be borne in mind, when budgets are made up and appropriations asked for.

If not, it will only be one other instance of an added advantage to the man proving a positive disadvantage to the woman.  You cannot benefit one class and leave another just as it was.  Every boon given to the bettered class increases the disproportion and actually helps to push yet further down the one left out.

Among the many influences that make or mar the total content of life for any class, be that class a nation, a race, an industrial or economic group, there is one, the importance of which has been all too little realized.  That influence we may call expectance.  It is impossible for anyone to say how far a low standard of industrial or professional attainment held out before the girl at her most impressionable age, a standard that to some degree, therefore, develops within her, as it exists without her, ends in producing the very inefficiency it begins by assuming.  But psychology has shown us that suggestion or expectance forms one element in the developing of faculty, and this whether it be manual dexterity, quickness of memory or exercise of judgment and initiative.

In all probability, too, this element of expectance has indirect as well as direct effects, and the indirect are not the least fruitful in results.  To illustrate:  it is certain that if we start out by assuming that girls are poor at accounts, that they cannot understand machinery, that they are so generally inefficient as to be worth less wages than boys, any such widespread assumption will go a long way to produce the ignorant and incompetent and inefficient creatures it presupposes girls to be.  But it will do more than this.  Such poor standards alike of performance and of wages will not end with the unfortunate girls themselves.  They will react upon parents, teachers, and the community which so largely consists of the parents and which employs the teachers.  Those preessentials and antecedents of the competent worker, training, trainers, and the means and instruments of training, will not be forthcoming.  What is the use of providing at great expense industrial training for girls, when the same money, spent upon boys, would produce more efficient workers?  What is the use of giving girls such training, when they are presumably by nature unfitted to benefit by it?

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