The increase in the proportion of girls engaged in non-domestic pursuits means that industrial vocations for women are becoming more dissociated from the arts of home-making,—­a fact which is doubtless the cause of many an inner struggle.

In the present lack of industrial education young girls who must work to support themselves or their families drift about from place to place with no definite vocational aims.  Frequently they come to the offices of child labor commissions wanting work, but not knowing what they can do, or even what they would like to do.  If they do find work, it is rarely of a sort that offers incentives for a career.  Lack of skill, of interests, and of ambitions result in industrial inefficiency.  They are also the usual accompaniments of moral delinquency.

Even where opportunities for industrial training are offered, they may not lessen the disparity between industrial opportunities that exist for girls and womanly tastes.  A recent report on the need for a trade school for girls in Worcester, Massachusetts, advocates a school that will train for skill in the machine-operating trades, because there is most demand for workers in these trades.[5] One might think in reading the report that machines for stitching corsets and underwear provided the ideal vocation for women.  Biological considerations, if no others, would favor distribution of wage-earning women away from the mechanical pursuits into those which are more or less associated with the domestic arts.

A further significance for social hygiene of the entrance of women into industry is that it places a strain upon the spirit of chivalry which is a basis of right relations between the sexes.  Chivalry in men has accompanied the comparative seclusion of women from the world, and is due to those instincts which lead men to protect those who are weaker than themselves.  The term “the weaker sex” has a sound physiological basis.  With the passing of the domestic system of industry, however, the seclusion of women becomes more and more a thing of the past.  In factory and shop they mingle promiscuously with men.  Crowds of young working-girls in every large city at the noon hour throng the streets.  If they walk to and from work they sometimes have to pass unprotected through parts of the city given over to vice.[6] They thus become familiar with vice conditions and are often subject to ungentlemanly, if not insulting, conduct.  There are in every community a number of men who are decent only under restraint, and the economic position of wage-earning girls weakens that restraint.

Moreover, the phrase “the weaker sex” has lost some of its significance.  Many occupations, such as clerking, stenographing, laundering, and certain kinds of unskilled factory work are almost entirely taken over by women, who labor throughout the same working-day as men, and usually at a lesser wage than men would receive for the same kind of work.  Under these conditions, to talk of the physical weakness of women is to accuse our civilization of cruelty.