[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  A flower-making class for girls of various ages.  There is no reason why vocational work should not begin in the grammar school]

Lines between obtainable work for the trained and the untrained girl are fairly sharply drawn, and the possibilities for each type must be clearly understood by the guide.  If it is evident that training cannot be obtained before the girl must begin to earn, the choice is necessarily a narrow one.  The factories in the neighborhood should be thoroughly studied, and, under the guidance of the teacher, girls should prepare detailed reports with respect to their working conditions.  The “blind-alley” job should be plainly labeled, that it may not catch the girl unaware.  Girls who must take up factory work should at least be enabled to choose among factories intelligently, and if possible should be fortified with an avocation that will supply them with the interest their daily task fails to inspire and that will provide an anchor against the instability toward which the factory girl tends.

[Illustration:  Millinery class in a trade school.  Where trade schools do not offer such training, there are opportunities for apprentice work for girls]

The possibilities for apprentice work with dressmakers or milliners or in other handwork should also be made known.  Girls begin here, as in the factory, at simple and monotonous tasks, but the possibilities of advancement are far greater and mental development is unquestionably more likely.  The ability acquired by such workers, as they progress, to undertake and carry through a complete piece of work is not only satisfying to the workers themselves, but of value in later years.  They learn to analyze their constructive problems and to work out the various steps of the work to its ultimate conclusion—­a knowledge which the factory girl never attains.

Some few girls will need to be shown the possibilities which lie in independent productive work.  For the girl who has talent or even merely deftness in manual work, coupled with initiative and some degree of originality, such work may bring a better return than working for others.  Most girls, however, lack courage to start upon independent work, especially if they are in immediate need of earning and are untrained.  It often happens, however, that they do not appraise at its true value the training they have received.  The grammar-school girl, under present methods of teaching, is often fully qualified to do either plain cooking or plain sewing, but since she does not desire to enter domestic service, she considers these accomplishments very little or not at all in counting her assets for earning.  Some girls have found ready employment and good returns in home baking, in canning fruit and vegetables, or in mending, making simple clothes for little children, or in making buttonholes and doing other “finishing work” for busy housewives.  Work of these sorts, undertaken in a small way, has often assumed the proportions of a business, requiring all of a young woman’s time and paying her quite as well as and often better than less interesting work in shop or factory.  A girl of my acquaintance earns a comfortable living at home with her crochet needle.  Another has paid her way through high school and college by raising sweet peas.