Job Lady is a generic term that includes Miss Anne Davis, director of the Bureau of Vocational Supervision, and her four assistants.  The Bureau—­which is the newest department of Chicago’s school system—­is really an employment agency, but one that is different from any other employment agency in the United States.  It is concerned solely with a much-neglected class of wage-earners—­children from fourteen to sixteen years of age; and its chief purpose is, not to find positions for its “patrons,” but to keep them in school.

It was founded as a result of the discovery that there were not nearly enough jobs in Chicago to go around among the twelve or fifteen thousand children under sixteen years of age who left school each year to go to work; also that, though a statute of the State required a child either to work or to go to school, there were about twenty-three thousand youngsters in the city who were doing neither.  The law had made no provision for keeping track of the children once they had left school.  No one knew what had become of them.  So Miss Davis, acting as special investigator for the School of Civics and Philanthropy and the Chicago Women’s Club, set to work to find out.

She discovered—­and she can show you statistics to prove it—­that “bummin’” around, looking aimlessly for work, brought many a boy and girl, unable to withstand the temptations of the street, into the Juvenile Court.  And she found, as other statistics bear witness, that the fate of the children who found jobs was scarcely better than that of their idle brothers and sisters.  Undirected, they took the first positions that offered, with the result that most of them were engaged in “blind-alley” occupations, unskilled industries that offered little, if any, chance for advancement and that gave no training for the future.  The pay was poor; it averaged two dollars a week.  Working conditions were frequently unhealthful.  Moral influences of shop and factory and office were often bad.  For the most part, the industries that employed children were seasonal; and many boys and girls were forced into long periods of inactivity between positions.  This state of affairs, combined with a natural tendency to vary the monotony of life by shifting, on the slightest pretext, from one job to another, was making of many children that bane of modern industry, the “casual” laborer.

The Bureau—­started informally in the course of initial investigations and kept alive through the grace of the Women’s Club, until the Board of Education was ready to adopt it—­has been able to do much in amelioration of the lot of the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old worker.  But no statistics it can produce are as telling as the sight of the Bureau in operation.  Sit with your eyes and ears open, in a corner of the office in the Jones School and you will make the acquaintance of one of the humanest employment agencies in the world; also you will learn more about such grave subjects as the needs of our educational system and the underlying causes of poverty than you can learn out of fat treatises in a year.