Womens Wild Oats | Page 7

be too few adolescent laborers, but that there may be too many, and that as a result there may in the future be too few healthy and well trained adult workers and intelligent citizens.
The profit-seeking employer, the patriotic maker of munitions, considers output: he does not think of the girls' or the boys' future, of the adult employment for which they are being prepared, or not prepared, or if the occupation leads, as so often is the case, to a blank wall. No kind of concern is shown of the degree in which the occupation enlarges the interests of the growing minds, or fritters them away and leaves for a later use nothing but a dead machine, capable only of spasmodic excitement; does not think of the effect of long hours or of large wages and their consequent premature freedom from home restraints on character.
The last mentioned evil has been greatly accentuated by the absence of soldier fathers. The indictable offenses committed by the young have increased markedly during the war, and surely we are responsible for this lapse of children into crime.
We have permitted heavy and nerve-exhausting work to be done in just the years when the adolescent was making the always difficult passage of the boy to the man, of the girl to the woman. And for this reason their suppressed, not-understood, thwarted instincts have broken out in unpleasing and often dangerous ways. Is it any wonder if in such circumstances boys turn to petty robberies and other unsocial acts, while girls display some of the less estimable characteristics of the prostitute?
Our ideal is to ignore sex in industry; to deny the strong and necessary separations that nature's wisdom places as barriers between boy and girl, between man and woman. We make our sons and daughters compete in education and in industry. No doubt education and industry are ill-fitted for males, but at any rate they were intended for males. Intellectually inferior to the boy or the man, the girl or woman is not. She is exasperatingly observant, often understands character with unconsidered quickness, feels spontaneously; but it does not follow that there is any value for her in the collection of dead facts, stored by abstract-minded professors--all the futile things we call education, which show in every direction the most coarse lack of understanding of the needs of the child and of life. And the girl suffers more than the boy, for the girl-student does as she is told much more conscientiously than boys. Similarly in industry: tapping or pushing at a machine until she taps or pushes on in her dreams; all the more monotonous kinds of machine-tending will wear feminine nerves, naturally more irritable than those of men, more than the same work will wear the male nerves. Not that I believe in subordinating the worker of either sex to the machine. What I want to prevent is the same stupid sacrifice of girls and women in industry as has been permitted in the case of boys and men. There has been in our commercialized society no kind of effective tradition for the care and guidance of adolescent workers, and, there is no escaping from the condemning proofs of our neglect: there has been, and, indeed, is still going on, in many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in the way we have shirked our duties to the young. As the writer, from whose Report I have quoted, says, with a rather grim irony: "a strain has been put on the character of young persons which might have corrupted the integrity of a Washington and have undermined the energy of Samuel Smiles."
VI
The war is over, and with it the special and pressing need for women's and girls' work, but the consequences of the war period are far, indeed, from nearing their end. Following all the industrial confusion of the war, we are now facing the certainty of wide-spread unemployment among women and girls. We have condemned thousands of them to unemployment with the same thoughtlessness with which they were called into industry; and in the less skilled ranges of employment, the always existing competition between men and women and boys and girls is certain to be fiercely accentuated.
It is officially stated that the number of women and girls who took out-of-work donation policies during the period between the Armistice and February 14th was 633,318. Of these the large majority 630,874 were civilians, while 2444 belonged to the forces. Thousands of women and girls who during the war proved themselves most capable at engineering and wood-work are now ruled out of those occupations. There was a girl of twenty, for instance, at Loughborough who showed real genius at gauge-making, work that required accuracy to the ten thousandth part of an inch. Although she took