The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Science
The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Sex instruction
One important aspect of this influx of women into industry is that the
proportion of those in domestic and personal service, which has always
been women's work, has decreased; whereas the proportion of those in
manufacturing, trade, and transportation, which are new employments for
women, has increased.[3] This means that not only are working-girls and
women leaving the homes, but they are also abandoning in increasing
numbers those occupations to which in times past their sex has been most
accustomed. It is impossible that this prodigious change in the sphere and
work of women should not be accompanied by some change in the social and
moral standards that were nourished in the seclusion of the home. Miss
Jane Addams has made the suggestion that perhaps the superior reputation
of women for virtue is due to the fact that, generally speaking, women
have been secluded from the influences of the world.[4]
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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