ISocial Service* is rapidly reaching the level of a standardized profession, with definite re quirements, though as yet it has not legislative standing as have the professions of law, teach ing and medicine, including trained nursing.* There are evidences that social service and business activities are making heavy inroads on the teaching profession and holding out alluring prospects to women in the better grades of clerical positions.
The foregoing discussion and Table III state in substance the facts concerning the entrance of women into industry and the professions, and throw some light on the causes of the con centration of women in industries of a certain general character.
Influences Determining the Direction of Women into Industry.—Although the annihila Second.— This fluctuation in the numbers of women in various industries will in all prob ability continue because there will continue to be changes in the character of mechanical equip ment. Nevertheless, the fact that preference is given to inventions which make it possible to employ cheap labor with profit will tend to keep women in demand in manufacturing and mechancial pursuits.
Third.— Unskilled male labor from foreign countries, physically more able to operate heavy running machines, offered before the World War effective competition to female labor in a number of industries once dominated by women.
Fourth.— The possibilities of mechanical in vention as affecting human labor are more limited in the trade and transportation group Lion of home industries by mechanical inven tion, the application of power to machines and the development of the factory system are not questions of dispute, and although there is as little chance for argument that this annihilation of home industries is responsible for the influx of women into industrial fields where their skill in home industry could count, yet the influences at work before the recent war in distributing women over the industrial domain are not so easily determined. A few salient facts, however, can be pointed out.
First.— Successive mechanical inventions, which stimulate the growth of factories and preclude any reasonable probability of the re turn to home manufactures, have checked the increase in the numbers of women in some in dustries and accelerated the rate of increase in others, and have had both effects upon the same industry at different periods. The effect de pends, of course, upon the adaptability of the new mechanism to the physical abilities of women operators.
of industries into which women have entered in such large numbers. The influence of inven tion has been felt most in more or less moder ately skilled clerical work, which has been enormously facilitated by the typewriter, the various adding and computing machines, letter presses, filing systems, etc. It has not had, and reasonably cannot have, any effect upon sales women and women in secretarial positions.
Fifth.— The lighter demands for muscular exertion and, physical endurance made by mer cantile pursuits render the physical weaknesses of women less of a handicap in these occupa tions than in manufacturing and mechanical industries.
Sixth.— Occupations of the mercantile and clerical order do not require the women to handle materials or work in surroundings which soil the hands or the clothes. The workers can do their work in their ((good clothes?' This is not a negligible factor by any means with men in their choice of occupations but it is unquestionably a telling factor in determining the choice of an occupation by a woman, when any choice is open to her.
Seventh.—This group of occupations re quires more academic training than the manu facturing and mechanical industries. Even the sales girl must be able to express herself fairly well, must write her sales checks legibly and compute her sales correctly. The clerk and stenographer must do better than the sales girl. The services of newly arrived immi grants or of the illiterate native born are, therefore, not available. The labor supply is confined to the graduates who are coming in rapidly increasing numbers from the common schools, the high schools, the business colleges and other schools of higher education.
Eighth.— This fundamental requirement of academic and technical training has resulted in confining the source of labor supply for the mercantile and clerical occupations to the families sufficiently ambitious and well circum stanced to afford their daughters the needed education. In other words, the demand for training has raised the pursuit in the asocial scale.' Ninth.— N%'hat is true of the allurements of the mercantile and clerical pursuits as compared with the manufacturing and mechanical occupa tions applies even more closely but to a more limited number of women who have it in their power to enter professional pursuits.