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{9ip Pern oa roa) e 2 = a wn mae ee a Le a aL TT TN TTGIRLS WHO DIDP — PLATE ' BRE Pe are ha teens amr, ; tt tt get tpg et ab: 0 D eeeGIRLS WHO DID

Stories of real girls and their careers

BY

HELEN FERRIS
and
VIRGINIA MOORE

Illustrated by

Harriet MoNncurRE

 

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.GIRLS WHO DID, COPYRIGHT 1926
BY GIRL SCOUTS, INC.; COPYRIGHT 1927
oY £ PP DUTTON & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRINTED IN U.S.A.

First Printing July, 1927
Second Printing October, 1927
Third Printing December, 1927

Fourth Printing July, 1928
Fifth Printing May, 1929
Sixth Printing May, 1930
Seventh Printing August, 1931
Eighth Printing August, 1933
Ninth Printing August, 1935
Tenth Printing August. 193‘
Eleventh Printing December, 1937
Twelfth Printing December, 1937
Thirteenth Printing July, 1940
Fourteenth Printing April, 1941
Fifteenth Printing August, 1943
Sixteenth Printing March, 1947sx Soda Saari ea baee aes nase

THE GIRLS WHOSE STORIES ARE

TOLD IN THIS BOOK

And what they are doing now

PAGE

I. GERTRUDE HAWLEY

A GIRL WHO LIKED SPORTS AND WHO HAS BECOME
Director or PuysicaL EpucaTion in NoRTHWESTERN
University, Evanston, ILLINOIS ....-..+--+++++>

II. MARION DURELL

A GIRL WHO DIDN’T KNOW SHE WISHED TO BE A
NURSE AND WHO HAS BECOME
Director or Nurses 1n THE Crty Hospitat, New
VORE cvs kccude veins sk ee ee ee

III. ANNE CARROLL MOORE

A GIRL WHO LOVED BOOKS AND CHILDREN AND
WHO HAS BECOME
Heap oF THE CHILDREN’s DEPARTMENT OF THE NEw
York Crry Pusuic LIBRARY .....--eee eee eeeeee

IV. ETHEL BARRYMORE

A GIRL WHO WAS ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY THE ATMOS-
PHERE OF THE STAGE AND WHO HAS BECOME
An Eminent AMERICAN ACTRESS ..---+eeeerereres

V

 

21

35vi Contents

 

PAGE

V. MABEL E. STEWART

A GIRL WHO HAD NO SPECIAL TALENT BUT WHO HAD

TO GO TO WORK AND WHO HAS BECOME
Private SECRETARY TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BoarpD
or Directors AMERICAN Excuance Irvine Trust
CRP ANG a a ss Be ee a vv

VI. INEZ HAYNES IRWIN

A GIRL WHO ALWAYS LIKED TO WRITE AND WHO
HAS BECOME
An EMINENT AMERICAN AUTHOR....+.eeeceesecece

VII. MINNA HALL CAROTHERS

A GIRL WHO ONLY GRADUALLY DISCOVERED WHAT

SHE MOST WISHED TO DO AND WHO HAS BECOME
PresIpDENT OF THE FEDERATION OF ADVERTISING
Wate 6 CLE RE a a ow ee hb tec wees

VIII. NEYSA McMEIN

A GIRL WHO LIKED TO DRAW AND PAINT AND
WHO HAS BECOME
A Famovs Maaazine IxuitustratoR AND PorTRAIT
er ew a es at ee

IX. CHARLOTTE COWDREY BROWN

A GIRL WHO LOVED GROWING THINGS AND
WHO HAS BECOME
A GarDENER AND A LECTURER ON GARDENS.....e00-

X. EDNA WATSON BAILEY

A GIRL WHO CHOSE TEACHING FIRST OF ALL
AND WHO HAS BECOME
Tur Heap or THE DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCES IN THE
Universiry Hien ScuHoot, UNIverRsITy OF
ss a a ga ok tein gs wes ;

63

77

93

107

119Contents vii

PAGE
XI. MARION SPRAGUE GILMORE
A GIRL WHO STARTED TO BE A SINGER AND
WHO HAS BECOME
Executive Dietitian IN THE PENNSYLVANIA Hote.
in New Yorn City. «s o06ecds tach + 6050 15s cos OO

XII. PEGGY HOYT
A GIRL WHO HAD A KNACK WITH CLOTHES AND
WHO HAS BECOME
A DistTiInauisHED AMERICAN DESIGNER ......-20--+ 167

XIII. MAY LAMBERTON BECKER
A GIRL WHO LIKED PUBLIC SPEAKING AND
WHO BECAME
An INTERNATIONALLY NoTED LECTURER ..........+- 181

XIV. CLARA SIPPRELL

A GIRL WHOSE BROTHER WAS A PHOTOGRAPHER AND
WHO LIKED TO TAKE PICTURES HERSELF AND
WHO HAS BECOME
A DistinauIsHED AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER........ 199

XV. MARGARET E. MALTBY

A GIRL WHO ALWAYS ASKED, ‘WHY?’ AND
WHO HAS BECOME
An Associate Prorrssor or Puysics aT BarNarRD
Cottege, ConumBiIA UNIVERSITY ....eeeeeeeeee 218

XVI. BRENDA PUTNAM

A GIRL WHO DECLARED, AT TWELVE, THAT SHE
WANTED TO BE A SCULPTOR AND WHO HAS BECOME
An Eminent AMERICAN SCULPTOR .....-.ee0++-++ 229Vill Contents

PAGE
XVII. ALICE FOOTE MacDOUGALL

A GIRL WHO WAS A DEBUTANTE AND WHO NEVER

EXPECTED TO ENTER BUSINESS AND WHO HAS BECOME

A Deater In Wuo.esate RoasTED CorrEE AND
Owner oF Four RESTAURANTS...-.-++eeeeeeeerees 2389

XVIII. MARY KINGSBURY SIMKHOVITCH

A GIRL WHO LIKES FOLKS—AND MUSIC—AND BOOKS
AND WHO HAS BECOME
Dieecror or Greenwicn Hovuss, New York Ciry.. 253

XIX. MARIA JERITZA

A GIRL WHO COULD SING BUT WHO WAS VERY SHY
AND WHO HAS BECOME
A DisrinauisHED INTERNATIONAL MUSICIAN.....-- 273

XxX. YOU

A GIRL WHO IS WONDERING ABOUT HERSELF. .e oe 289ag ipeieanpe sapere panes aa ne eee ae oe ee pe BGI GS LGN yA GAG
SB Gg NS ag gag nig ep ag CELE

GERTRUDE HAWLEY

A girl
who liked
sportsz ee, = he *
—_ ee R 2 Sar
rE Penne a= aman v3 3. 5s : =5 _ |
jin BR ee ree - . os Fon tea eee as aeGERTRUDE HAWLEY

T was on the college tennis

courts.

The deciding match for the
championship was about to be
played and all the college was
out to see. Seniors and Sopho-
' mores, Juniors and Freshmen
— Odds and Evens — were
massed on opposite sides of
the court according to the age-
old custom of Vassar. Cheers,
songs, laughter, rivalry flung,
gaily defiant, across white
lines and smooth surfaces—
then, silence. For two girls in
white appeared upon the
court, one of whom would
that night be tennis champion
of the college, privileged to wear the coveted
gray sweater with its rose V.

The umpire tossed for courts. The girls shook
hands across the net.

“Ready?”

“Serve!”4 Girls Who Did

 

The match was on. Swift, clean-cut strokes
sent the ball whizzing over the net. Fiercely the
umpire concentrated upon each play, for these
points were being decided not by feet but by inch-
es. It was an evenly-drawn battle, well worth the
absorbed attention of the entire college, including
the faculty.

But slowly the slim, lithe girl with the straight
dark hair parted in the middle began to gain
against her taller opponent on the other side of
the net. Her playing was not spectacular but it
was very sure. She made few sudden dashes
across the court. Indeed, there were times when
she seemed scarcely to move. Yet, when a ball
was shot to the farthest corner, she was there to
return it. Back of her keen dark eyes seemed to
lurk an uncanny knowledge of where her oppo-
nent would place the next shot. And when she
made her return, it was with a finished stroke
which told of many hours on the tennis court be-
fore she came to Vassar. For such tennis is not
learned over-night.

“Game — set — match,” called the Umpire.
“Gertrude Hawley a

But what she intended to announce about Ger-
trude Hawley was lost in sudden tumultuous
cheering. The college tennis champion and the
runner-up shook hands. Crowding friends pulled
a gray sweater with bright rose V over Gertrude
Hawley’s head. Her class burst into triumphantGertrude Hawley §

 

cheers, followed by a song. The college took up
the refrain zestfully—for what is mere class ri-
valry when such tennis has been played?

“Oh, Gertrude Hawley
She plays tennis .. .’

Back of the tennis banner, Gertrude and her
class led off the procession. The other classes
fell into line. Singing, they marched across cam-
pus to the class tree, there to wind the newly-won
banner around the sturdy trunk, reminder to all
passers-by that

 

“Gertrude Hawley
She plays tennis .. .”

It was another day, years later. I, who had been
among that excited college crowd, was now on my
way to meet Gertrude Hawley, to talk with her
of the years since we both had left Vassar. As I
walked, I thought of that tennis match. Gertrude
Hawley of Vassar days—and now she was head
of the physical education department of a great
university—N orthwestern in Evanston, Illinois.
How simple deciding what she would do after
college must have been for her. She had loved
sports—what else had there been for her but to
go where she could direct other girls in their
swimming, their basket-ball, their hockey and
their gymnasium?

“Why, I could write about Gertrude and how6 Girls Who Did

 

she came to be doing what she is, without asking
her one question!” I thought.

She met me in the candle-lighted room where
we were to have tea, coming toward me with the
same quiet sureness of movement which I had
known so well in our college days together. Her
dark eyes glowed with the same strength. She
took my hand with a grasp that was firm.

And she had a tennis racquet under her arm.

“Of course!” I cried. “You would have that.
But you are sailing for Europe early tomorrow
morning. And it’s late afternoon now. When—?”

“We'll be stopping in lots of places where
there will be tennis courts,” she explained, “so I
had my racquet restrung. There is nothing like
a good game of tennis to set you up for mountain
climbing.”

For a few moments our talk wandered over the
years during which we had not seen each other.
Where was Margaret? Barbara? The others!
What were they doing? Were they coming to
next reunion?

And then—“Of course I am not in the least
surprised that you are in Northwestern in charge
of the girls’ athletics,” I said. “You were plan-
ning to do something of the kind all the time you
were in Vassar, weren’t you?”

Gertrude Hawley smiled and shook her head.
“My, no. I was far more aimless than that. Oh,
of course I took it for granted that I would doGertrude Hawley 28

 

something after I graduated. But that time al-
ways seemed ages away. As for sitting down sol-
emnly and deciding on a career for myself—no,
I must be honest. I didn’t even think of it. Why,
it wasn’t until my junior year that I specialized
in any of my courses. The faculty must have
thought me a veritable drifter!

“But you are right that I have always loved
sports,’ she continued, reminiscently. “As far
back as I can remember my family spent sum-
mers at Chautauqua. And when I was quite
young we decided to remain there the year
round. Then for four glorious years I had real
winter as well as summer, right outside our door.”

And she told me the story of a joyous girlhood.
This little girl—she frankly admitted it—was a
tomboy. The child was no sooner in the front door
than she was out the back, running like a little
wild rabbit where little wild rabbits go. She
wasn’t content with ordinary games like “Piggle”
or “Run, sheep, run” or “Follow the leader.” In
summer she rode her “bike,” boy fashion. In
winter she strapped on her skates and fastened
to her shoulder-blades an impromptu sail rigged
out of barb-wire and an old piece of canvas. But
tobogganing—that was the most desperate and
the most glorious! Again and again, on starry
nights, she shot down a snow hill, a streak in
the moonlight. And when she reached the bot-
tom, she “hitched.” And always, with the first8 Girls Who Did

 

 

thawing and drying days of spring, there was
Gertrude Hawley out on the tennis court, raking
the ground smooth, rolling it hard, and chalking
off the straight white lines.

As she told me of it, my shoulders squared
themselves there in the candle-lighted room. I
took a deep, exhilarated breath. For I felt the
emanation of strength which issued, somehow,
from her fully-alive body. And I knew that her
days with the girls of Northwestern are giving
her as much as those days on snow-white hills
gave little Gertrude Hawley—as much, indeed,
as she herself is giving to her girls. Her clear
complexion said so and her glowing eyes.

“But don’t think an outdoor girl can’t love to
read, too,” continued Gertrude Hawley. “I did.
As a child I wanted to read everything and to
play everything. And I still do.

“Tt was the same way at Vassar. I enjoyed
my studies. But at the same time I was too inter-
ested in what was going on around me to settle
down, to specialize, as they say. Yes, books were
an adventure to me. But knowing all kinds of
girls was an adventure, too, as well as the college
athletics. So it wasn’t until my third year that I
decided the sciences appealed to me just a little
more than any of my other courses and I began
to specialize in chemistry. By the end of my
senior year I was deep in test-tubes and ex-
periments. So when I graduated, I just naturallyFGF LGR GAG GGL GL GAS LG GALI GIG GAF GAG GIG AGO IG GAG GN GIGS LAG AG GY GGA GONG NGL GN GGG NGG LGA, cee

Gertrude Hawley 9

 

went into something where my chemistry would
be useful to me.

“For four years, then, I worked in the research
department of the General Electric Company
in Cleveland, analyzing tungsten lamps.”

Her brown eyes were bright with the memory
of it.

“You liked it, didn’t you?” I commented.

“Indeed I did. Those days in that laboratory
were really quite thrilling. You see, the consult-
ing chemist of the company, who was in charge,
was working to find a platinum substitute. And
he did! If you don’t enjoy experimenting in a
laboratory -

“I don’t,’ I murmured emphatically — un-
noticed.

“You won't understand the excitement of
working day after day to find an unknown some-
thing you feel sure exists, and discovering it, in
the end. Yes, I enjoyed those four years. And
then there were my vacations in the White Moun-
tains, up Mount Washington—out in the Yosem-
ite, in California and up more mountains.
But”

“Yes, but?” I ventured.

_ “There came a time when I realized that I
had gone as far as I could in that line of work,
without taking more training. I looked around
me and saw that the young women who were
occupying the more important and more inter-10 Girls Who Did

 

esting positions of the laboratory were those who
had had more scientific training than I, training
which it was impossible to get while I was con-
centrating day after day on experiments. I knew
then that it would be necessary for me to spend
a year studying—or more, if I wished to go
ahead in that field. Fortunately, I had saved
enough money to do this if I wished. And
yet s

She paused.

“T wasn’t quite sure that I did wish it. Labor-
atory work is confining. I had not been entirely
well since I had undertaken it. Was it sensible,
I asked myself, to take training for work which
I might be forced to drop in a short while? But
if I didn’t go on in this, what would I do?

“Just then, K. Forbes came through Cleveland.
You remember K., don’t you?’

Did I? Does one forget the captain of the
hockey team in the class just ahead of hers? Does
one forget a president of the athletic association $

“Well, K. had gone on to the physical educa-
tion course at Wellesley after leaving Vassar,
and she was full of enthusiasm for that work.
She had always insisted that my natural bent
was physical education. I had as regularly re-
plied that sports were my recreation and I didn’t
intend spoiling them for myself by making them
my job.

“This time she found me in an uncertain frameGertrude Hawley 11

 

of mind. I admitted my doubts about laboratory
work for me. Yet I was by no means as sure as
she about the physical education idea which she
again urged upon me. In many ways it appealed
to me tremendously. And yet—and yet

“In the end, I compromised about what to do
next. You see, I told you I have always been the
kind of person who comes to her decisions grad-
ually.”

“Except on the tennis court,” I said.

She ignored my interruption. “So I went to
Wellesley the next year, taking some courses in
the chemistry department and some in the phys-
ical education department, much to Katherine’s
delight. I was trying myself out in both fields.
And at the end of the first year I had decided
in favor of physical education—chiefly, I think,
because I had discovered that you need not draw
a hard and fast line between your work and your
play. A momentous discovery which almost any-
one would have made long before.

“So I completed the course in physical educa-
tion at Wellesley and accepted a position at
Northwestern University where I have been ever
since.”

And she told me of her work as head of the
department of physical education. “Not only
is the gymnasium and the class work under our
direction,” she explained, “but the sports and the
individual physical examinations, as well. Ouriz Girls Who Did

aim is a game for every girl, something she en-
joys so much that she forgets it is ‘required’ and
plays it for the sheer fun of it. Whatever the
game, we encourage each girl who enters it to
play her level best, not to strain herself to do
more than that best, nor to content herself with
less. If she has it in her to become a champion,
she may do so. But we don’t want our girls to
miss the fun of sports because they can’t all be
champions. A. game for every girl—that is what
counts, to my mind.”

The result is a full athletic schedule for the
girls of Northwestern University. “Take your
choice,” says Gertrude Hawley to them. “Bas-
ketball, tennis, swimming, Indian clubs, pyra-
mid building, indoor baseball, outdoor baseball,
archery, track, deck shuffle, dart throwing, quoits,
javelin throwing, hockey, clogging, barefoot
dancing, folk dancing, aesthetic dancing.”

Can’t you see the girls of Northwestern, run-
ning pellmell down the hockey field, dancing
with green grass under the soles of their feet,
floating in their swimming pool, speeding an
arrow into the bull’s eye? The body rejoices to
give itself over, entire, to water, wind and sky.
Eagerly it throws off the lethargy of study hall
and class room for the freer existence of the
athletic field and the gymnasium. A girl who
has never run until she’s breathless has never
lived to the utmost.Gertrude Hawley 13

 

Gertrude Hawley does not speak second-hand
about the pleasures of sports and exercise. She
knows them herself, has always known them.
And her work to her means giving girls an oppor-
tunity to share her delight and to develop bodies
that are strong.

“But to me there is more in athletics—in all
physical education—than the joy of it,’ she
went on. “There is more even than health, im-
portant as that is. There are sportsmanship, fair
play and cooperation. The girl who has learned
these in her sports is better prepared for what-
ever she wishes to do. I like to think that our
girls go from the basketball court with something
very real to help them in their other college
activities and in their life after college, too.

“This is one further reason for my interest in
the field of physical education. If I make the
most of my opportunity, I can do more than give
our girls games which they will enjoy. I can
do even more than study each girl, developing
her by means of diet and exercise to her highest
physical capacity. I can link up her sports with
all her living.”

“Just what do you do at the university?” I
asked her.

“Since I have been there, I have done work
similar to that which most gymnasium teachers
do, later becoming an executive with assistants.
At first, I was the only one in the department.14 Girls Who Did

 

 

I not only planned the gymnasium classes, the
sports and the individual examinations and ex-
ercises, I did the teaching, coaching and examin-
ing. Later, as the interest of the girls grew, it
was necessary to add others to the staff.

“Today, an appreciable part of my time is
given to supervising the work, although I still
have some classes and coaching. The head of a
physical education department is not only re-
sponsible for creating new plans, she must see
that the work already undertaken is effectively
carried out. All classes and games must be well
conducted. Each individual girl must be watched
so that her sports and her exercises and her diet
may be suited to her needs. This takes many
hours of careful examining and record-keeping.
The head of the physical education department
must see that nothing essential is neglected.

“You will be interested to know that many of
the girls who have specialized in our department
have gone out into the work themselves. For
there are splendid opportunities in this field.
In fact, it has been my experience that girls who
take training for a physical education certifi-
cate in a school of recognized merit rarely lack
a position. The openings are many because people
are recognizing as never before the importance
of physical health and development.”

“Where are these openings?” I asked Gertrude
Hawley.FFE GAGA AG ITS a a le es a ls a a a a a a a ea ee a oe ee oe oe

Gertrude Hawley 15

 

“Everywhere! In large public schools, in pri-
vate schools, in normal schools, colleges and uni-
versities, on playgrounds, in Y. W. C. A.’s and
other organizations and in summer camps.
Specialists in folk dancing or gymnastics or
swimming often conduct their own private classes.
But most of the positions—in fact, all positions
of importance—are open only to those who have
had training in a recognized school of physical
education.

“So the girl who is strong, who loves sports and
to whom the idea of directing others in them
appeals, will do weil to consider this matter of
training. Colleges and universities in various
parts of the country offer these courses in phys-
ical education, as do some teachers’ colleges,
normal schools and special schools. Any girl who
is interested can write to her state university
for information or talk with her own gymnasium
teacher about it.

“If a girl can afford to attend college, possibly
combining her general college course with her
training in physical education, I would advise
her to do so. Perhaps this is because I am so
constantly grateful for my own years at Vassar.
Life is more interesting and significant to me
because of those years. And even though my
studies there did not apparently lead to what
I am now doing, they are of more use to me than
is at first evident. I feel there is nothing I studied16 Girls Who Did

 

at college, nothing I lived at college which is not
in some way helping me today.

“Ryven my chemistry courses and my later ex-
perience in that field were part of my training.
T learned to work for facts, to study until I had
ascertained them. And now, when I am working
with a girl who has some special physical handi-
cap, I apply that same scientific method in my
examinations before I make recommendations
for her.

“But I wouldn’t have you think,” concluded
Gertrude Hawley, “that work in the field of
physical education is all sport and good times.
There is another side to the story. It is true that
there are openings in physical education for the
girl who is strong, who enjoys sports and games
and gymnasium. work and who can take the
necessary training. But it is also true that it is
often very strenuous work. In the school where
she teaches, too much may be expected of the
young woman in charge of the gymnasium. Her
schedule may be crowded to the limit and even
the strongest, under such circumstances, becomes
fatigued. The equipment given her with which to
carry on her class work may be inadequate—yet
the finest of results are expected of her. I could
name difficulty after difficulty that will over-
take her, at some time or other! When T tell
you of what we have been doing in our depart-
ment at Northwestern University, I would notGertrude Hawley 17

 

be giving you an adequate picture of it if I did
not admit the difficult days, the discouragements
and the mistakes. They have all been there! Noth-
ing is ever as easy as it sounds.”

She looked at me steadily with her brown eyes
and I had a sense of difficulties squarely faced,
courageously met.

“But what of that if you like your work, as I
do?” she went on with a smile. “There are diffi-
culties in everything. If you can find something
which you enjoy, the compensations will out-
weigh the discouragements for you. And to me,
the real fun that I have among my girls, the
feeling which I have that it is truly worthwhile
to help develop strong bodies, more than out-
weighs whatever difficulties I do meet.”

From the top of a Fifth Avenue bus I waved
goodbye to her, then watched her disappear into
the hurrying crowd, her tennis racquet lightly
swinging from her hand. Gertrude Hawley—
director of physical education.ee oe OE AE Pree
ees i Smet nee = eens - ee
a ees : : Saaee = Sega:Marion DuRELL

A girl
who didn’t know
she wanted to be
a nursene ee seomeeeeepegs ee kre
" aS : = am ower : = pta a ed Se I ie Bia aa eae aor ia eae Din base ion eee nine ora era FETS GIy gg

MARION DURELL

N 1856, through the rough
barracks of the Crimea,
walked a Lady with a Lamp.
There was compassion on her
face and compassion in her
hands. But the compassion
was not a sterile thing; it
expressed itself, quietly, in
blanketing a soldier who
slept, in cooling a fevered
forehead, in comforting, in re-dressing a wound.
Through her ministrations, this “charnel-house of
misery” had been converted into a well-managed
hospital. 'Through her leadership, the death rate
of those Crimean soldiers had been reduced from
fifty per cent to two percent. The Lady with
the Lamp was Florence Nightingale, the
founder of trained nursing.

 

In 1926, a Woman in White took the temper-
ature of a patient who had lain, for many desper-
ate days, in the New York City Hospital on Wel-
fare Island, and prepared to go off duty for the
night. All day the sick old woman had said noth-
ing to her nurse. In her wretchedness, she had

21ae Girls Who Did

 

submitted to the warm bath, the alcohol rub, the
hypodermics, the brushing of her hair, and the
kind words. But now she looked after the nurse
in consternation.

“You ain’t goin’?”’

“Yes’—very gently.

“But you’s comin’ back tomorrow, ain’t y’?”

“Yes.”

The old woman sank to her pillow.

“Praises be for that!’ she murmured, and
resigned herself to the pain.

The Woman in White was Marion Durell.

Florence Nightingale is gloriously dead.
Marion Durell, one of her multitudinous suc-
cessors in the nursing profession, is gloriously
alive. She is, in fact, at the present time director
of nurses in the City Hospital of New York.
Two factors, she tells me, were active in turning
her to this particular form of public service—first,
the great need for trained nurses accentuated, in
1918, by the World War; second, something
Florence Nightingale once said:

“Of all the women I know, nurses are the
happiest.”

I asked Marion Durell if from her long ex-
perience in nursing she agreed with this world-
famous leader.

“Yes,” said Miss Durell decisively. “Nursing
seems to me the most satisfying of all occupa-SDE SE Sank s amc ne nn ene

Marion Durell 23

 

tions. It demands the best in a woman. Brain,
‘heart, body, are pressed into service. I hadn’t
been in the profession a month before I knew it
was the only work for me. You see, it was like
this. After my graduation from Wellesley in
1908, I tried doing nothing; and then for five
years I tried teaching mathematics at Lawrence-
ville with my father; and then for five years I
tried raising cranberries with my brother on a
farm in southern New Jersey.”

“And you weren’t happy?”

“I realize now that I wasn’t really happy until
I entered nursing. I went through two and a half
years of training in a hospital; then I was staff
nurse at the Henry Street Settlement for four
months; then I returned to private case nursing
for six months; then I was assistant director
of nurses at City Hospital for three years; now
I am director. And all along the way I’ve been
happy!”

She didn’t have to protest it. The confession
was in her blue eyes and around her generous
mouth. But there was something else too. Her
white uniform, neatly starched, spoke of com-
petency; her white cap, striped with a band of
black velvet and sitting perkily on her corn-silk-
colored hair, had an unmistakable look of pre-
cision. She had thrown her blue cape over the
back of the chair. Its gay lining made a yellow
pool all about her.24 Girls Who Did

 

Commenting upon her late entry into nursing,
I asked:

“Don’t most girls get an idea they wish to be
nurses when they are still in high school?’

“Often earlier than that,” said Miss Durell.
“A recent questionnaire in New York hospitals
showed that the great majority of nurses become
interested in nursing while they are still in
grammar school.”

I remembered a schoolmate of mine who in-
sisted, at the age of ten, on playing “hospital.”
Every automobile she saw was an “ambulance.”
Her dolls were constantly ill. The cat was forever
being bandaged and put on an unappreciated
diet. By the time she was thirteen years old, she
had definitely decided to be a nurse. Eventually
she was. And is.

Not so Marion Durell. Mathematics and cran-
berries got between her and the profession of
nursing. Yet all her life she had been a nurse by
instinct, and hadn’t known it. Even when she
entered upon her training she did not realize how
much to her taste the work would be. But her
days of actual nursing soon showed her that at
last she had found her place.

“Every day it is a joy,” said Miss Durell, “to
be with my patients. I wish I had come to this
work sooner.”

It seems strange that she didn’t gravitate to
nursing when she was a girl. Because she wasMarion Durell a

 

always trying to ease suffering when she saw it.
As a high school girl she was able to dispel the
violent headaches of her mother by massaging
just the right nerve centers and rubbing her
temples with cologne. As a college girl, while
vacationing in New Hampshire, she didn’t lose
her equilibrium in the presence of two drowned
people. I'wo young people were thrown out of
a boat and unable to swim. Marion was sitting
on the porch when the cry came. “Help!”
“Drowning!” The victims were brought in. The
other women on the porch were helpless. Marion
alone remembered the principles of resuscitation
taught her in high school. She it was who drained
the water from the lungs. She it was who admin-
istered a hypodermic although her effort was
hopeless from the start.

“You were ready,” I said, “and adequate in
the emergency.”

She was modest. She declared that she hadn’t
done anything unusual at all, that on this oc-
casion—as today, in the operating room—the
needs of another merely overcame her own
squeamishness. When a life hangs in the balance,
she told me, no nurse can hesitate, absorbed in
her own feelings. She has something important
to do. Much depends upon the steadiness of her
hand, and she must answer the challenge valiantly
if she is to be adequate to the need.

“Have you ever known a nurse to faint in the26 Girls Who Did

 

operating room?” I am afraid this was plain
curiosity on my part.

“Never,” said Miss Durell. There was a rec-
ognizable pride in her voice.

And then she told me, briefly, about training.
The period varies in different hospitals. At the
City Hospital it is two and a half years in length.
In many places it is three years. Kivery phase
of nursing is both studied and practiced. The
apprentice (for that is what she is) divides her
time between the classroom and the sickroom.
She is taught such subjects as physiology, sanita-
tion, dietetics, and care of infants, in addition
to the care of the sick. To her lot falls much rou-
tine work—enough to test even the stoutest
hearted, although such work as scrubbing up is
now done in most hospitals by ward maids, not by
student nurses. Yet if she is firm in her purpose
she endures.

The girl who is interested in nursing should
know that although some schools require as little
as one year of high school for entrance, most hos-
pitals are asking more. Many require a four-
year high school course or even college training
as a preliminary. Directors of nurses recognize
the fact that the more general education a girl
can secure before she starts upon her special
nurse’s course, the better equipped she will be
to meet the inevitable crises with which every
nurse is confronted.Marion Durell ZT

 

Young women with college training plus their
trained nurse’s certificate are prepared for the
more important positions in the nursing world.
The Yale School of Nursing requires that all
young women who enter for training shall have
had twenty-eight months of college work.

When one stops to consider that a human life
may depend upon what a nurse does in fifteen
minutes, one realizes how important it is that
every nurse have thorough knowledge of her pro-
fession. It is this which is leading hospitals every-
where to ask more and more preliminary educa-
tion of the young women who enter there for
nurses’ training. It is this which is making the
training course itself more and more thorough.

It was Florence Nightingale who said, “Nurs-
ing requires as hard a preparation as any painter’s
or sculptor’s apprenticeship; for what is having
to do with dead canvas and cold marble compared
with having to do with the living body? There
is no such thing as amateur art; there is no such
thing as amateur nursing.”

When the hospital training is completed and
a young woman has secured her nurse’s certificate,
she may choose from a variety of possibilities.
At most times there are more opportunities for
nurses than nurses themselves.

She may remain in the hospital, doing what is
called “hospital nursing.” Here she may become
especially interested in the work of the operating28 Girls Who Did

 

room or of the surgical wards. She may wish to
work chiefly with babies and their mothers, with
crippled children, or other special cases—a wide
range of work.

If she remains in the hospital and shows that
she has the ability to direct the work of others,
she may in time become a director of nurses,
as Marion Durell has become. Every hospital
has its director of nurses, all of them women
who have reached their present positions because
they have proved themselves to be not only
nurses of skill, but administrators.

If she has genuine teaching ability, she may
become an instructor of student nurses in a hos-
pital nurses’ school, and there is a real demand
for them.

If, however, a nurse prefers it, she may under-
take private cases or accept a position in connec-
tion with a school or other organization. Most
of us have met nurses of private cases who have
assumed charge of the care of one sick person,
at home or in a private room of a hospital or
sanitarium.

And we know that private schools and colleges
employ their own nurses. So, too, do many
hotels, stores and factories. The nurses in them
are on duty at certain hours to care for any
emergencies that may arise as well as assisting
in any general health work, such as physical ex-
aminations, which the establishment has under-Marion Durell 29

 

taken. Young women who enjoy traveling have
even served as nurses on ocean liners, although
such positions are limited in number.

And there are today increasing opportunities
in what is known as public health nursing. Visit-
ing nurses’ associations employ nurses to go into
the homes of those whom they wish to help, not
only to care for those who are actually ill, but to
teach the ways by which each family can be kept
well. More and more, doctors are engaged in
preventing illness, as well as in curing it. The
work of visiting nurses is as often concerned with
proper diet for children, with methods of per-
sonal and home cleanliness, as it is in caring for
a sick person. This work is that of health educa-
tion and is offering to nurses today a widening
field.

Visiting nurses are employed by charitable or-
ganizations, schools and civic organizations as
well as by some states, counties, cities and towns.
Public clinics not only give needed treatment to
the sick. They carry on health education through
physical examinations and suggestions for the
forming of desirable health habits. Doctors and
nurses work together in these public health
clinics in their work of prevention as well as of
curing.

It is this conception of the work of doctors
and nurses which has brought to both new oppor-
tunities. A trained nurse need no longer remain30 Girls Who Did

 

in a hospital or with private cases. Public health
nursing is constantly opening new doors to her.

“There are several things about nursing that
I especially like,” said Miss Durell as she leaned
across her desk toward me. “One is that hospital
experience is what I call a negotiable security.
There are few places where a nurse cannot find
an opening, which means that she can travel and
work where she wishes, if she feels so inclined.
And she can change from one branch of nursing
to another, if she desires.”

“But the difficulties of nursing?’ I asked.
“What are they?”

“The difficulties? They exist, as well as the
advantages.”

And Marion Durell urges every girl who is
attracted to nursing to face them honestly. Nurs-
ing drains the strength. Only the girl who has
splendid health should attempt it. There is con-
stant need for patience. A nurse must quietly
adapt herself to many kinds of dispositions, often
those made irritable by illness. There is much
to be done that is far from romantic. The hours
are long. Very few hospitals have adopted the
eight-hour day, and practically none of them
has less than a twelve-hour night.

There is, however, a national organization of
nurses which is working to better these condi-
tions. This organization is endeavoring to shorten
the too-long hours, to give more adequate pay,Marion Durell 31

 

to create more comfortable living conditions for
nurses on hospital staffs, as well as to establish
the highest standards for the work itself.

And contrary to the general conception, Miss
Durell says that contact with suffering and death
does not overwhelm nurses. If one patient dies
in a ward there are thirty patients who counter-
act the gloomy effect of the nearby death by
thriving on their treatment. Even death is not
always depressing. Miss Durell assured me that
a, nurse learns to see it philosophically, especially
if the patient is old. Sympathy and detachment—
she must preserve an even balance between the
two. The constant sight of suffering, then, may
in Miss Durell’s opinion be stricken off the list
of disadvantages.

But the advantages. They, too, are to be con-
sidered. As Miss Durell said, the training re-
quires no large financial outlay since, usually,
the student’s services cover her tuition in the hos-
pital as well as her living expenses. Salaries
begin early. Immediately upon graduation the
nurse may begin her work, since every hospital
has need for nurses. There is no expensive outfit
to keep up and, as long as her health is good,
she has an assured income. Nor need she remain
prosaically in one vicinity, unless she wishes.

I looked at Marion Durell, a woman giving
herself unstintingly to the profession which she32 Girls Who Did

 

has chosen—and I glanced from the window at
the quiet waters which surround Welfare Island.
White-breasted gulls were clinging far out to a
rock. A little boat went tranquilly down to the
bay. Who could believe that this gray quietude
hemmed in the suffering? It was a place for gulls,
nothing but gulls! Suddenly the white-breasted
birds rose in a great company.

“Tell me,” I said, “what is the happiest thing
in your work?’

“The happiest thing,” said Marion Durell, “is
this. A poor broken piece of humanity singles
you out from the other nurses in the ward and
boasts to the next cot, very proudly, ‘T'hat’s my

2 33

Nurse .ANNE CARROLL Moore

A girl
who loved
books and childrenANNE CARROLL
MOORE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HILDREN read books
and leave little smudge-
marks on the fly leaves and Tl ESA ONE
are enchanted. Pity, then, the \ Gee
children who pass through
childhood, get to be middle-aged, become grand-
parents and die without ever taking a book’s
magic and making it their own. Anne Carroll
Moore pitied them and did something about it.
“T have always loved children,” she confided,
“and books. I’m very lucky to combine the two.”
Very lucky. Anne Carroll Moore is head of
the children’s department in the Public Library
of New York City. The marble corridors are her
front yard; the library lions which guard the
Fifth Avenue entrance know her as well as they
know the pigeons that come looking for adven-
ture—or is it crumbs? Long before the present
library was built, Anne Carroll Moore “lived”
there, in imagination and in the dreams which
she helped to make come true. Faithfully and
3536 Girls Who Did

 

light-heartedly, she has persevered in the work
which, back in 1896, she chose as her life profes-
sion.

The children’s room in a public library! Four-
year-olds and five-year-olds, all the way up to
fifteen and sixteen-year-olds. Boys. Girls. Books.
Picture books and story books and _things-
to-make books. And every five-year-old, every
nine-year-old, every fifteen-year-old wanting a
book that’s just right, not too young, not too
old—just right. Sometimes wishing to discover
that book for themselves, other times wishing to
draw on the knowledge and experience of the
librarian.

There is a special corner for the more grown-up
boys and the taller girls, of course. There they
may go without being called “children.” There
they find books gathered together especially for
them by their friend, the understanding librarian.

And, always, there is that other corner. The
one where the chairs are low and the tables are
low and the shelves are low. To step into this
corner is like stepping into Lilliput. The only
thing disproportionately big is the librarian who
moves about, putting back a book, stamping a
card with red ink, collecting a penny for a late
return, buttoning up a small overcoat. Books of
adventure, fairy tales, nonsense stories, wood-
craft instructions, sea yarns line the walls. What
would the world be without children’s books?Anne Carroll Moore 37

 

Anne Carroll Moore has always maintained,
inside her, the heart of a child. The heart of a
child. . . . Is there anything more lovely?
There are willows, of course, and red haws, and
streams that go in and out, in and out. But com-
pared to children, these lack glamour. For wil-
lows are willows, and red haws are red haws,
but every child is different from every other child,
being full of wonder and—whether from Amer-
ica, or Chili, or the Gobi Desert—unstandardized.

“Children have distinct and different personal-
ities,’ Miss Moore told me. “Socially they seem
to me much more interesting than most grown
people.”

She is a brown-burr of a woman, although much
slimmer than any brown-burr discovered under
a tree. Years ago, as the youngest in the Moore
family, she must have been a little witch.

That was in Maine.

She had a triple education: the companionship
of her father as they jogged over New England
roads; an old village academy; and Bradford
Academy in Massachusetts. Then, as she _her-
self delightfully puts it, she “inherited some
children.” They were nieces—one four years old,
one seven years old—and she had long hours
in which to play games with them, and read books
with them, and grow wise with them.

“We set up,” said Miss Moore, “a very in-
timate relationship.”38 Girls Who Did

Later she went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn
to study the science of library work. Is it strange
that, loving children and loving books, she grav-
‘tated to the headship of the children’s room
which Pratt opened that very year? It was a
new project. Up to that time, the reading public
between the ages of four and fourteen had never
been taken very seriously. But those deeply in-
terested in children were soon to change this,
Anne Carroll Moore among them.

She spent ten years in the children’s room of
the Pratt Institute Free Library, working to
discover just the kind of library children would
like best. She watched to see which books natu-
rally interested them, which stories, told aloud,
most absorbingly held their attention. She placed
books where small hands could reach them. And
she invited to the children’s room grown-up
friends of children to help her in her work. For
it was never her plan to work alone. Wherever
she found someone who could bring delight to
the children, that person was brought to share
in the new project—those who could tell stories,
those who could arrange fascinating little ex-
hibits, those who could make dashing posters,
those who could do any one of a numbe: of other
things. The children’s room of the Pratt Li-
brary quickly became a center not only for chil-
dren but for those who loved them and wished
better to understand them.Anne Carroll Moore 39

 

“It was great fun to have nothing to go by,”
said Miss Moore when I saw her in her office.
“The Pratt Library was eager for us to try any
plan which seemed good—and we did. Today
there is a great deal of literature about children’s
rooms. In those days, we had only our own ex-
periences and those of others who were experi-
menting in other places. But we did our best to
share it all through letters and visits.”

The children of Brooklyn responded ta Anne
Carroll Moore’s love of them, to her love of books
and her understanding of which books they would
most enjoy. They responded to the friendliness
they never failed to find in those whom they met
in the children’s room. They were not preached
to about this book or that. When they declared
they didn’t like a book, they were not told that
“every boy and girl ought to like it. It is one of
the great books of the world.” Their opinions
were respected. Their right to personal likes and
dislikes was respected. And every effort was made
that there might be in that children’s room books
of all kinds, for all kinds of boys and girls.

They came to regard the room as theirs. And
Miss Moore and her associates had their impor-
tant part in the great work of convincing grown-
ups that the reading public between the ages of
four and fourteen is an important public, worthy
of every thoughtful consideration.

When she became head of the children’s de-40 Girls Who Did

 

partment of the New York Public Library, she
undertook the task of planning libraries for all
the children of Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten
Island. But Anne Carroll Moore did not think
of the children’s department as a number of
library rooms. She thought of it as belonging to
children wherever they were in New York. And
she knew that she and her assistants must go out
to the children as well as bringing the children
to the libraries.

To help her in this work, here, too, she gathered
about her those who were especially gifted in work
with children. Young women who were interested
in becoming children’s librarians came from
many parts of the country to work in the de-
partment. Today, in each of the forty-seven
branch libraries of New York City, there is a
children’s room which is part of the children’s
department. Members of Miss Moore’s depart-
ment go out to the schools, talking with teachers
and parents, arranging that desired books be
sent to them. Story-tellers go out to the branch
libraries, to playgrounds, and to children’s club
rooms in settlements and schools. The work
is wide and varied—even to seeing that children’s
books are not forgotten on the book wagon which
goes about Staten Island taking books to those
in remote districts, far from any library build-
ing.

So it has came about that the children’s roomAnne Carroll Moore 4]

 

of the Fifth Avenue Library building is a center
not only for children but for those who are in-
terested in children. If you were to happen in
during children’s book week, you would find
yourself in a distinguished gathering of publish-
ers and editors and writers of children’s books
and magazines, not forgetting fathers and
mothers and teachers. Lining the walls of the
room you would see new books and old books,
including the famous collection of children’s
books of other centuries. You would hear talk
of children and their reading. And before you
left, you might be listening to an attractive young
woman, a member of Anne Carroll Moore’s staff,
tell a story. For Anne Carroll Moore never for-
gets that everyone loves a story. Small children.
And grown-up children.

Today, the interest in children’s reading ex-
tends around the world. Librarians from other
countries visit the United States to see what our
children’s rooms are like, always bringing us,
Miss Moore says, new ideas for our own libraries.
Letters from all parts of the world crowd her
mail. And books from all parts of the world have
been sent to her until her office has become a
colorful corner, a place to browse with delight.

For twenty years Anne Carroll Moore has held
her present position in the New York Public Li-
brary. She isn’t nineteen any more. But I’ll wager
that at nineteen she was less exuberant than she is42 Girls Who Did

today. She has never agreed to stop growing or
exploring. She has never narrowed her vision by
reading only children’s books, or only books for
older people. That is why her reviews of children’s
books, which appear in The Bookman, are
authoritative. That is why “The Three Owls,”
her weekly page in Books of the New York Her-
ald-Tribune is as wise as—three owls. That is
why her own books, Roads to Childhood and
Crossroads to Childhood, make the books she
mentions real to you, if you have never read them,
or bring back vividly to you your own favorites.
No better list of books has been assembled for
girls than the one in Crossroads to Childhood
called “In the Teens.”

“A children’s room,” says Anne Carroll
Moore, “should express the best traditions of a
home, for it is a home for all children. The sur-
roundings should be attractive and artistic. The
librarian should look upon herself as hostess, the
children as her distinguished guests. If a little
Russian wanders in, he shouldn’t be made to feel
like a stranger in a strange land. Nor a little
Italian. Nor a little French child.”

When she speaks of French children, Miss
Moore wears a very special glow. After her trip
to France in 1921, she wrote, “Children are as
vital to the landscape of France as the birds, the
trees, the flowers of the gardens and spring
forests, the light of her sky.”Anne Carroll Moore 43

“What girls do you think should become chil-
dren’s librarians?” I asked her.

Anne Carroll Moore smiled in her brown-burr
fashion. And I knew that there among books
and children she has discovered a richness and
variety of experience which some women miss.

“What girls?” she repeated. “Those whom
children love spontaneously. Those who love
children and who love books continuously. Those
who know books well enough to satisfy children
and to inspire confidence in their fathers and
mothers and teachers.”

Just then Paul arrived. He had two apple
cheeks, knee breeches, and a grin. All boy. Evi-
dently he and Miss Moore were old friends. They
shook hands gravely. And stood together, talk-
ing. Something about poetry. . . . I remem-
bered a stray remark of Miss Moore’s, “If chil-
dren are given a natural exposure to poetry, they
like it.”

Paul did. Paul discussed poetry with Miss
Moore, frankly, without embarrassment, without
a momentary shuffling of the feet. She looked him
in the eyes. She grasped his hand. She showed on
her face unmistakable pleasure and no condescen-
sion. She was sorry when the apple cheeks and
the grin backed through the library door.

 

Do you love books? Does library work attract
you? There is opportunity for you to enter it,

arta en toarananstene Seti44 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

 

if you wish. A recent census shows that ninety-
two per cent of the librarians of this country are
mot men.

High school graduates may become assistant
librarians without further school training, if they
will take special training such as is given in con-
nection with many libraries in our large cities.
But if you can afford it, enter one of the special
schools for librarians which fit you for the more
important positions in the library world.

These library schools are to be found in many
parts of this country. And if you wish to combine
your library training with your college work,
it is possible to do that, too. ‘The state universi-
ties of California, Wisconsin, Llinois, Michigan
and Western Reserve are among those which en-
able a young woman to do this. So, too, do Car:
negie Institute in Pittsburgh, Columbia Uni-
versity in New York City, Simmons College in
Boston and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Miss
Moore’s alma mater. Your own librarian will
tell you about these library courses and what
they teach.

Such library training will prepare you for the
special kind of library work which attracts you.
You may wish to become a children’s librarian as
did Anne Carroll Moore. It is an important work
and a merry work. But if you do not care for chil-
dren, you may choose one of various other kinds
of librar positions. The general circulating roomAnne Carroll Moore 45

 

may be to your taste. The reference department
of some library will give you an opportunity to
be of service to those who wish to secure books
and information along special lines. In the hun-
dreds of public libraries which are today estab-
lished in this country, there are many departments
and many kinds of library work.

There are, too, special libraries. Business
houses, banks, life insurance companies and news-
papers have their own libraries. If you are inter-
ested in any one of these fields, you may be able
to find an opening there. The library commis-
sions of our state capitals offer still further
choice, one of the most interesting being the
traveling libraries through which books are
packed and sent out to remote parts of the state.
There are libraries in high schools and grammar
schools where many a librarian is today showing
boys and girls that books are not “lessons” alone.
Young women with library training are putting
it to good use in book shops—some, even, are
establishing such shops of their own.

“But the difficulties?” I asked Anne Carroll
Moore.

“Difficulties?” she repeated. “Of course there
are difficulties. The hours are long. A librarian
often has night work. Librarians’ salaries are not
what they should be, although they are getting
better. And there are the difficulties which always
seem to exist whenever you set out to do work46 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

 

of any kind—you may not be given enough
money to carry out your plans; you may not have
sufficient help; those who should support you
with their interest may be indifferent.

“But what of that? The work without diffi-
culties doesn’t exist. And the true librarian finds
her work itself so full of possibilities and com-
pensations that, although she continues to face
the difficulties and work to overcome them, never-
theless they are of less significance to her than
her opportunity. For the four walls of a library
do not limit you. As librarian you can go with
your books to the people in any part of the com-
munity where you live. And you may go out to
other communities to share your experience and
to gain fresh inspiration. Through the years, my
own work has taken me to Maine and to Iowa, to
North Carolina, to Virginia, to Utah and to
France.

“Ves, to me library work is full of significance
for the girl who loves books—and people.”ErHet Barrymore

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66 OME in!”

It was a deep
Voice, a resonant voice,
an unforgettable voice. It had belonged, an hour
earlier, to an imperious Portia on the stage of
the Walter Hampden Theater, a Portia as flam-
ingly conceived as the picture which hangs in the
Metropolitan. It belonged now to Ethel Barry-
more.

I went in.

I had come to interview the great actress in
her dressing room. She was handsomer, in this
red Renaissance bodice, than the press notices
had ever intimated. Through the mascharo and
the paint, her boldly beautiful features stood out,
uncompromising. Now I knew why John Singer
Sargent wanted to paint her; why Henry James
told her when she was in London that she re-
minded him of a “Gothie cornice on a Gothic
building.”

But this admiration of mine wasn’t interview-
ing.

\
Of

 

4950 Girls Who Did

 

I must get down to the questions-and-answers
of the day. Didn’t she ever tire of the stage?
Never—although she has been acting since she
was fourteen. Did she consider practical experi-
ence behind the footlights or a course in a school
of dramatic art the best training for a beginner?

Experience. Experience, she explained, seemed
to her the legitimate way to learn posture, and
enunciation and pantomime and handplay. One
by one, Miss Barrymore’s theories came to light;
one by one, the facts of her adventurous life. She
was most gracious in the telling.

Ethel Barrymore comes from histrionic stock.
Her grandmother was Mrs. John Drew, of Mrs.
Malaprop fame, whose actor-husband died
young. Her father was Maurice Barrymore, an
English actor; her mother, Georgie Drew Barry-
more; her uncles, John Drew, the younger, and
Sidney Drew; her brothers, John Barrymore
and Lionel Barrymore. Without an exception,
they were actors. Is it strange, then, that Ethel
early turned to the stage‘ Yet Miss Barrymore,
when confronted by the question, insists that she
originally took to acting, not because she loved
it, but because she had to earn a living.

“The truth is,” she said, “I was never partic-
ularly interested in child-plays, although I took
part in them, just as all children do. When I
was at the Convent of Notre Dame, I thought
I’d be a musician, probably because at nine I wonEthel Barrymore 51

 

a medal for playing Beethoven. My great love
for the theater came later.”

When Ethel was fourteen, her mother died
in California, the mother whom she has since
called “the gayest and most gallant person I
ever knew.” Matured by the sorrow, Ethel, alone
and as gallant as the dead, brought the body
across the continent to New York. That year
she twisted up her hair and wore a black dress,
The next year, joining her grandmother in Mon-
treal, she was given her first small part, Julie,
the maid in The Rivals. The winter in Canada
was ill-starred. It was followed by many vigils
in the outer offices of New York theatrical
agencies—many vigils and no success.

For two years she played only small parts with
any company that would take her on. Then she
went to London with William Gillette in Secret
Service. London was, to her, the fabulous city.
She remained there with Ellen Terry and Sir
Henry Irving after the Secret Service company
had dispersed. When she returned to America,
Charles Frohman became her manager and her
valued friend. Under his guidance she played
Madame Trentoni, her first rea] part, in Captain
Jinks of the Horse Marines, the play which made
her a star, Cousin Kate, The Country Mouse,
Carrots, Sunday, The Doll’s House, The Silver
Box by Galsworthy, Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire, Mid-
Channel by Pinero, The Twelve Pound Look,52 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

 

 

her first vaudeville vehicle, T'ante, and Our Mrs.
McChesney. When he went down on the Lusi-
tania, Miss Barrymore summed up her whole im-
pression of the great producer by saying, “He
had a golden heart.”

By this time, Ethel Barrymore, as well as her
brilliant brothers, was established in the heart
of the theater-going public. The réles which she
has since played have been various, but to them
all she has brought a keen intelligence, penctra-
tion and appreciation, as well as a willingness
to work and to admit her mistakes. These roles
include The Lady of the Camellias, Miss Barry-
more’s favorite, and Déclassée, the public’s favor-
ite.

“An actor’s salvation,” says Miss Barrymore,
‘Gs the assuming of many parts.

“No, I have never done Lady Macbeth,” she
adds regretfully. “But I shall!”

It is her genuine love for the theater which has
carried her through much hard work, some priva-
tions, and the complications of marriage and
motherhood. Her three children, Sammie, Sis-
ter, and Jackie, were born in short breathing
spaces between engagements. She tells gleefully
of telephoning Mr. Frohman two hours after the
birth of Jackie to announce that she had “an
awfully nice baby” and expected to be at re-
hearsal very soon. Ten days later she was acting

in the play called Tante. When asked how she‘ "4
y

GF eGagesy

Ethel Barrymore 53

 

can be a mother and an actress at the same time,
she invariably replies:

“I was born, and so, I have always understood,
was my mother. Neither my mother nor my
grandmother forsook the theater because of
motherhood. Why should I? It is natural for me
to be an actress and it is natural for me to
ye a mother. If an actress has an average
amount of common sense, she can organize her
life as a regular human being.”

I wanted to ask if her profession had made her
a stranger to her children. I hesitated. She an-
ticipated the question.

“And I don’t neglect my children, either. Un-
til they went off to school, I saw them as much as
most mothers see theirs. When I am compelled to
be absent, I write them every day and they write
me every day. They are always in reliable hands.
Our summers at Mamaroneck have been glori-
ous.” a oe

The children, itSeenas, are too young to know
whether they, too, like their illustrious forebears,
will learn first-hand the ways of wigs and make-
up, cues and curtain-calls, footlights and stage-
props, and the palpitations of a “first night.”
Yet Sammie has already distinguished himself
in school plays. Sister says her ambition is to
act “like mother.” And little Jackie, the young-
est, when asked recently if he would grow up to
be an actor, made this statement:54 Girls Who Did

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I might be a
comedy.”

Ethel Barrymore is mellowed by her memories.
She remembers how as a child at her grand-
mother’s house in Philadelphia she was initiated
into the drama by stage quotations from The
Tomb of the Capulets. When she ordered Ethel
to bed, this tender and terrifying woman, owner
of the Arch Street Theater, would say, “Stand
not upon the order of your going, but go at once ie
One cannot overestimate the part which this early
initiation into stage ways has played in Miss
Barrymore’s attainments.

Today she remembers how, the first time she
played in Philadelphia, the audience shouted,
“Ethel, you’re all right. We remember your
grandmother. We love you!”

Her life has been rich in friends, in England
and America—Mark Twain, William Vaughn
Moody, Maxfield Parrish, - Richard Harding
Davis, Anthony Hope, William Allen White,
and many more. She remembers “all the shine,
all the rain” of a varied and colorful career. And
with her Gothic head held high, she vows that
there is much to be appended.

For her place is in the theater. She was born in
its tradition. She grew up under its influence.
Her elations and her discouragements are tightly
bound up with it. Ethel Barrymore would not
be Ethel Barrymore if she forsook the stage.Ethel Barrymore 55

 

But what of the girl who has not had the ad-
vantage of early acquaintance with the stage, yet
who is interested in it? She may be a girl who,
in the cast of her high school play, listens to the
admiring applause of her friends, to their ex-
clamations of delight over her performance and
their remarks that, “You ought to go on the
stage, my dear!”’

What must such a girl do if she is serious in
her plan? Much. To Ethel Barrymore was given
an unusual inheritance. Her home surroundings
brought her into intimate association with the
stage from her earliest childhood. She grew up
hearing about it, absorbing its atmosphere from
the members of her family and her friends. To
this experience was added the advantage of her
unusual personality and appearance. Neverthe-
less, even Ethel Barrymore’s place in our theater
has not been achieved without effort.

Real dramatic ability, great determination,
great love of dramatic art, physical strength to
endure strenuous work—these a girl must have
who would win distinction in the profession of
acting or even opportunity to enter it.

Taking part in high school plays, college plays,
Little Theater plays, in any plays that are at
hand will be somewhat of a guide to her, although
a less important one than the amateur is prone to
believe. But if through them a girl discovers a
real taste for the work, it will be necessary for56 Girls Who Did

 

her to make the same choice which confronts
many girls in other lines of work—that of attend-
ing a school and taking training there or of ac-
quiring needed experience in the profession itself.
Those on the professional stage who never at-
tended such a school are apt to discount its advan-
tages, just as those in other fields of work who
never attended special training courses often dis-
count them. Yet today, with the wider recog-
nition of the importance and the possibilities of
the stage, has come a deepening realization of
what excellent courses in this work may mean,
courses in such subjects as voice culture, phon-
etics, English diction, physical training, stage
mechanics, stage business, costuming, make-up
and the study of dramatic literature. ‘These
courses may save a beginner much time and effort
in her struggle.

If a school, then choose one which is recognized
as excellent. In it a girl can test her own ability
and. preferences. Certain of our best schools to-
day frankly state that one purpose of their work
is to discover for their students whether or not
they have sufficient ability to warrant continuing
their work upon the stage. The Theater Guild
regards this weeding out as second to nothing in
importance.

“A girl must be willing to face the facts about
herself,” they say.

But whether a young woman starts directlyEthel Barrymore 57

 

upon the professional stage or from special train-
ing in a school of dramatic art, she eventually
comes to the long road over which Ethel Barry-
more and all other actresses without exception
have traveled—the road of actual stage experi-
ence; of assuming many parts to learn flexibility ;
of taking parts that are uncongenial in order to
appear at all; of rehearsing in a play only to find
that the public does not like it; of haunting man-
agers’ offices in the hope of securing a part and
meeting in those offices often hundreds of other
aspirants for the same réle (for there are always
more young women eager to go upon the stage
than there are openings for them) ; of making a
little money go a long way; of never being certain
of employment.

These are the difficulties which the young stage
aspirant is certain to meet, and they are great.
Even those who have attained distinction in the
drama are never certain of an engagement, from
one year to the next. Those who are associated
with the theater have many stories to tell of actors
who have served a long and strenuous appren-
ticeship in minor réles, some never to emerge
from them, others to emerge but for a short time.

Nevertheless, to those who feel the appeal of
the theater strongly, these difficulties are not
insuperable. Young women are today winning
their way upon the stage. Some, like Ethel Barry-
more, have had years of association with it. Others58 Girls Who Did

 

are newcomers. All have had varying degrees of
education.

But what of the girl who discovers that her
love for stage work and her determination to enter
it are not matched by her acting ability and who
honestly admits the fact to herself? She may still
be associated, in other capacities, with this field
which so attracts her. It is possible that she may
discover in herself the characteristics of leader-
ship, the quick appreciation and appraisement of
the details of production and the discriminating
taste which will qualify her for work in the pro-
duction of plays. Women are becoming produc-
ers of plays in the professional theater as well
as in the Little Theater playhouses throughout
the country.

Ability to direct the production of plays is
also in demand in college and normal schools,
high schools and boarding schools. Here the work
is combined with teaching, in most instances, but
a young woman nevertheless has opportunity to
employ her producing talent. All the experience
which a young producer is able to secure through
actual contact with the professional stage is of
use to her. Experience in pantomime, in voice
placement, in lighting, in planning stage sets, in
make-up—no detail is too small to be unimpor-
tant to the general effect of a play. One young
woman whose work includes the directing of plays
as well as teaching in the English departmentEthel Barrymore 59

~

in a girls’ school recently spent her vacation in
acting minor parts with a stock company, return-
ing to her directing with an intimate knowledge
of the actual requirements and methods of pro-
fessional stage work.

A girl’s interest in plays in high school may
lead her to specialize in dramatic literature in
college and so to the teaching of it when she grad-
uates. Girls of literary ability may turn to the
writing of plays, with a period of apprenticeship
as inevitable for them as for those who aspire to
acting itself. Courses in an increasing number of
colleges are offering students not only the oppor-
tunity of writing their own plays, but of actually
producing them, of designing and executing the
costumes, of painting the scenery, even of manip-
ulating the lighting.

Of such things Ethel Barrymore and I talked,
that day in her dressing room, until it was time
for her to go. As I rose, she began to brush a
vellow something which she had gingerly removed
from her head. Against the velvet of her Italian
Zown, it looked more yellow than ever.

She held it up. “A back wig,” she explained,
in her dark and enthralling voice.Maser KE. Srewarr

A girl who had
no special talent
but had to go to workMABEL E. STEWART

 

HE shivered as she took
dictation from the Distin-
guished Gentleman. For the
Distinguished Gentleman was
Chairman of the Board of Di-
rectors, Irving Bank and
Trust Company; and she was
only a small person with a big
ambition. She shivered so hard
that the dashes in her short-
hand turned out to be wiggles.
But the Distinguished Gentle-
man was never allowed to see her fright; never
allowed to see that a little scared rabbit, not a
private secretary at all, was manufacturing dots
and scratches on a thick pad of paper.

That was six years ago. Now Mabel Stewart
has a poise which befits her position as secretary
to the chairman of the board. When she takes
dictation, her hand is firm. When she answers
the telephone, she speaks with quiet authority.
More than the typewriting which she studied in

6364 Girls Who Did

 

high school, more than the shorthand, more than
the commercial law, six years of actual experience
in an office have polished her into a first-class
secretary. The magic of six years! And yet the
career of private secretary to the head of a great
bank requires more than magic. And it requires
more than ambition. And more than a neat little
figure in a black satin dress, tailored. It requires
what Mabel Stewart has in a delightful degree:
the manners of a mouse and the heart of a lion.

“There’s really nothing to tell about what I
did,” announced Mabel Stewart just as every
nice person announces before the telling of a
special story. “It was luck.”

Luck! The private secretary to a big official
is never a private secretary on luck. Perhaps, in
the beginning, luck is a factor but later on some-
thing with more iron in it is demanded. Getting
a job and keeping it are not the same. Are you
quick? Are you accurate? Are you tactful? Are
you gracious? Are you sensible? Have you a good
memory for names and faces and facts? These
questions, and a hundred more, a business man
asks about his secretary, if not in actual words,
at least in his harassed mind. The answer, as
revealed by her actions from nine o’clock in the
morning to five o’clock in the afternoon, decides
whether she be praised or peremptorily dismissed.

“Well, at least partly luck,” amended MissMabel E. Stewart 65

 

Stewart. “In high school I planned to teach. Not
that I had any special talent for teaching. Not
that I even wanted to teach. But getting to be
a teacher seemed to be the best solution—and the
easiest—to the problem of earning a few nickels.
My mother and father were dead, so the nickels
were rather necessary. I had studied shorthand
and typing only because they gave me ‘points’
for graduating and required no home-study! I]
am being honest, you see. And I had taken com-
mercial law for the same superficial reason—
points. Wasn’t that luck? I never dreamed that
some day I’d want them desperately.”

I tried to imagine Mabel Stewart presiding
over a roomful of rambunctious youngsters. I
couldn’t. Here she was in an office, here she
belonged.

~ But when it came right down to stepping out
into teaching, as some of my friends were doing,
I didn’t want to. I decided that stenographic
work in an office appealed to me more and besides
I was already trained for it. So I took a position
with a corrective eating concern. You’d be sur-
prised how much, on a small scale, I learned in
that funny little office. But the corrective eat-
ing concern failed. And that was luck for me
again—lI see it clearly now. Otherwise, I might
at this very moment, be writing letters to sell
books on when and how and what to eat!’66 Girls Who Did

 

Curious, the ways of fortune. Sometimes they
seem to take you by the nose and lead you, forci-
bly, in the direction they want you to go.

“And then ” said I, eagerly.

“ And then, some way, I thought of banks. The
atmosphere of banks appealed to me. I thought I
should enjoy working in one. So one bright after:
noon I made a pilgrimage down Broadway.
Clearly, if I wished to work in a bank, the thing
to do was to apply at them. I stopped at eight
different banks, inquired for work and filled out
application eards. The first place where I
stopped, oddly, was the American Exchange
Irving Trust Company. It was in September,
and a few days later I was notified to report for
duty on the first of October. Imagine my jubila-
tion!”

“Jubilation—of course,” said I.

“And my fear,” added Miss Stewart quickly.
“T was in terror, those first few months, lest
I move too slowly or mis-spell an important word
or show the wrong person out the door. I was
‘n the offices of the chairman of the board of
directors, but I started with sub-secretarial work.
I did all the filing, all the keeping of routine
records, all the uninteresting stenographie work
which the head secretary, the private secretary to
our chief, scorned. I was more or less of a worm!
But a few months later my opportunity unMabel E. Stewart 67

 

expectedly arrived. The private secretary, a man,
was taken ill and forced to leave the city. He
did not return. Our chief decided to try me out,
so I shivered at the prospect of this increased
responsibility and shook myself into the secre-
tary’s place.”

Was it possible that this calm little person ever
shivered?

“Of course I did. Goodness—the chairman of
the board of directors! But looking back on how
much I didn’t know those days, I am sure he
must have had a few trepidations himself!”

Mabel Stewart twinkled.

“Anyway, I learned in the harness. That is
one advantage of secretarial work. Given your
Stenography and typing, you can and must get
the rest right in your job. For every secretarial
position is different, depending upon what your
employer does and upon his temperament. The
secretary to a publisher, the secretary to a college
president, the secretary to a department store
head—every one has special duties which go with
her particular position. I learned my job in the
only way I could learn it by doing, conscien-
ticusly, what I was told to do. And by keeping
my eyes open. As soon as I saw that any way
of doing a certain piece of work disturbed my
chief, I did it another way, and another until
I discovered the way in which things went most68 Girls Who Did

 

 

smoothly. Then I continued with that. I wanted
to hold my job. To do so, I had to please him.
So I studied his ways.”

“But these different secretarial jobs,” I inter-
rupted. “They have something in common,
haven’t they?”

“Oh, yes. All secretaries open their employer’s
mail and arrange it for his inspection, in order
of importance; answer the telephone; keep a
record of every engagement, and remind their
employer when an engagement is imminent; re-
ceive and dismiss callers of every color, sex and
caste; take dictation and transcribe it; file cor-
respondence; keep check-books so that a bank-
balance can be rendered at five minutes’ notice;
make it a point to be in the office when their em-
ployer is out; “tidy” his desk, and lock his desk
at the end of a day. And every secretary that ever
was, must regard as absolutely confidential the
matters which pass through her hands.”

Miss Stewart was out of breath from talking,
and I was out of breath from listening. So much
detail!

“Detail and more detail. That’s what secre-
tarial work means. But to me it is never monot-
onous. No two days are alike. The routine is al-
ways being broken. New people come to the office,
prominent business men, charity solicitors, news-
paper reporters, politicians, and riff-raff. It is
part of my job to size them up and decide whetherMabel E. Stewart 69

 

or not their business is worth the time of my
employer. If it isn’t I say ‘Begone!’ or diplomatic
words to that effect. It isn’t easy to make them tell
their business. Some of them close up like clams
when they see me. But that’s where tact comeg
m

 

“And personality,” I added under my breath.

She would not concede the personality. But
her brown eyes conceded something else.

I get more than I give. Why, it’s a most
liberal education. I often think business affords
& woman as much training as travel. It certainly
shows you the back-side and the front-side and
the rough selvage of human nature. And in an
office such as this, one picks up a wide knowledge
of present-day affairs, quite different from that
which can be learned from books.”

“Are you going to enter banking, itself?” I
asked.

Mabel Stewart shook her head. “No. I have
found what I like to do and I am going to keep
on doing it. But if I were attracted to banking,
I would go into it. Banking has been a field not
usually entered by women. But every year their
number increases. So if you wish to do that kind
of work—why not?”

Why not, indeed!

“Yes,” continued Mabel Stewart, “if a girl
is interested in any special field, and if she has
no money to take training in it, I can think of70 Girls Who Did

 

 

no better way to serve her apprenticeship than
to study stenography and typing and start as
secretary to someone who is doing work in that
field. You would think, with all the girls who are
stenographers, that such an opening would be
difficult to find. It really isn’t—for no matter how
many stenographers there are, there are always
more poor ones than excellent ones. And it is
the excellent ones for whom employers are
looking.”

Just then one of the three telephones on Miss
Stewart’s desk jangled. Mabel Stewart said,
“Hello,” in a voice cool and efficient.

“T have learned to discriminate,” she said, as
she hung up the receiver, “between important
calls and non-important calls. My chief is an ex-
tremely busy man. His time is enormously valu-
able. I interrupt him only when the call 1s very
urgent. Otherwise, I hear that most dreadful of
sentences: ‘Miss Stewart, this shouldn’t happen
again.’ Luckily, I can ward off a great number
of incoming calls by making appointments if
appointments are to be made, writing down brief
messages that are sent over the telephone—in
fact, wherever I can, I save his time.”

“What can’t you do?” I exclaimed.

Again she twinkled. “Much!” she sighed.

“And when your employer is out of town?”

“IT work just the same. Naturally, a little more
devolves upon me when he is away, for that isMabel E. Stewart it

 

7."

the time when I have to exercise most careful
judgment. The office goes right on. Mail comes
in regularly, callers come in just the same, and
the telephones are seldom quiet. Of course, need-
less to say, employers, when they go away
whether on business or vacation, dislike being
bothered too much with office matters. On the
other hand, they like to feel that things are re-
ceiving proper attention during their absence.
I always keep my chief’s itinerary on hand, for
there are times when it is necessary for me to send
telegrams on matters of importance. And the
return telegram usually contains instructions
that have to be acted upon. There are few idle
minutes in this busy office.”

So much to do, and yet so bright-eyed! No
doubt the duties which seemed so intricate to me
had become through long familiarity, simple to
her. She plucked a piece of lint from her trim
black satin dress.

“I don’t lament these odd jobs,” she continued.
“After all, my work becomes less mechanical
each year. I no longer do the filing, or the typing,
or the bulk of the dictation. They fall to the
stenographer in the outer office, who sits where
I did when I began six years ago.”

Evidently Mabel Stewart has found, through
a little luck and a great deal of pluck, the work
which best suits her particular self. As a girl in
high school, she liked responsibility, and she likedfs ad

72 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

precision, and she liked to figure out thus-and-
so about the people she met. Today she combines
all these girl likings in her woman’s job.

“But the disadvantages?” I said. “There must
be disadvantages.”

Mabel Stewart made three wrinkles between
her eyebrows. “For me? Or for girls in general
who are secretaries?”

“Both.”

“Well, I would say the disadvantage of irreg-
ular hours. I am here every morning at eight-
forty-five to get the office in complete readiness
for my chief. But that does not mean I may not
have to stay until seven or eight to get some im-
portant work out. Every big executive has times
of unusually strenuous work and that means
equally strenuous days and often evenings for his
secretary. I know a woman whom many girls
envy. She is secretary to one of the best known
Americans. What those girls do not know is how
completely her time is at the call of that man.
Often, she is summoned to his house on Sundays
to do an emergency job for him.

“T am fortunate. While I work late sometimes,
at other times I get off early. I understand the
man I work for and he—after six years— under-
stands me. If he were an ogre, now, I would have
a different story to tell.”

She would. 1 know an employer who is an ogre,Mabel E. Stewart 73

 

 

another who is a green dragon, and still another
who is a wild-cat and a donkey all in one.

“Many girls find themselves in uncongenial
surroundings,” she concluded. “In such a sit-
uation, I think a girl can do one of two things—
Save up enough money so that she may resign
and take enough time to find what she wants.
Or perfect herself in her work so that she may
find another position at once. Or both at the same
time! A secretary will never be happy unless she
and her employer understand each other and
work harmoniously together. How could I be
confidential assistant to a man who refused to
have confidence in me? How could I? One or
the other of us, probably both, would come to
grief.”

Great grief, I admitted. While the private sec-
retary was fearing her employer, or hating him,
she would surely forget that her job was to save
his time in every way possible, anticipating his
wants, vanishing like a marionette, when need be,
only to reappear like a marionette, upon request.

Great grief, indeed.aInez Haynes IRWIN

A girl
who always liked
to write~sTHERE

 

 

 

INEZ HAYNES IRWIN
&6 HEN I was seven, I wrote a poem,”
said Inez Haynes Irwin. “At least,
I wrote something that rhymed and the grown-
ups around me called it a poem.”

We were sitting in the long, softly-lighted liv-
ing room of her New York home. All about us
was the welcoming atmosphere of friendliness. I
felt it in the flickering logs of the fireplace, in
the old chairs and davenports and tables that
seemed to have settled comfortably down, each
in its own place. But most of all I felt it in Mrs.
Irwin herself.

Years before I had read her Phoebe and Ernest
stories and had delighted in them. Phoebe and

7778 Girls Who Did

 

Ernest were such real folks. I considered them my
friends at once and ever since have regarded them
as such. Now, sitting beside Mrs. Irwin on a
deep-sinking blue davenport, I felt myself re-
sponding to her in the same way. And smiling
over her reminiscences just as I had smiled with
Phoebe and Ernest.

As she spoke of her first poem, Mrs. Irwin
laughed merrily. But underneath was the high
seriousness of a woman who can honestly say that
she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t
want to write.

‘My mother was dumbfounded when I brought
that poem to her. It ran something like this:

“The sky is blue,
“And I am true.

“The sun is bright,
“Tt is all right.”

‘And that,” said Inez Haynes Irwin, “was my
start.

“I was late in beginning my literary career,”
she continued. “TI liked to write. I was constantly
scribbling in my journal or at some idea. But
it did not occur to me to become a professional
writer until some time after college. I think this
was due to the fact that, although I was brought
up in a book-loving family, none of them was a
creative writer. Contrasted with this, my niece,Inez Haynes Irwin 79

 

Phyllis Duganne, grew up in a house where at
least two people were at their writing every day,
Will Irwin, my husband, and myself, with Wal-
lace Irwin and other writers as frequent visitors.
It is not surprising that while she was still in her
teens, she started on her own literary career.

“But there was not a time when I did not love
writing. I remember how disturbed the other girls
were when I announced to our high school teacher
that I wished more frequent compositions would
be required. At Radcliffe, my favorite course
was the one in which we wrote a daily theme.
After college, I wrote a twenty-thousand word
novelette and a sixty-thousand word novel before
anything of mine was published.

“Just as I was finishing the novel, Gelett Bur-
gess came to Scituate where I was living. And
to him I owe that debt of gratitude which many
a young writer owes to some older friend who
from a wider experience gives him wise sug-
gestions about his own work and his future. Mr.
Burgess heard that I had written a novel and
asked if he might read it. Only too gladly, I
gave it to him. He was most kind about it. To-
day I wonder what he could have seen in it. But
looking back I realize that although none of its
crudities and inaccuracies escaped comment, he
did it with so many excellent suggestions for the
novel’s improvement that I was filled with hope
and confidence.80 Girls Who Did

 

——

“* ‘Why don’t you write short stories?’ he asked
me at the end of an afternoon during which we
had discussed my novel and many other things.
‘You have told me a dozen short stories, right
here, only you have not recognized them. Try
writing one, now. And—by the way—if I were
you, I would learn to use a typewriter!’

“Because I so greatly admired him, I at once
carried out his suggestions. Simultaneously, I
started upon a short story and the typewriter!
The short story grew to be fifteen thousand words
long and I at once took it to Mr. Burgess. He
read it, then summoned me for the verdict.

“ “You have an interesting story here—some-
where!’ he told me. “Yes, I think that after you
have taken out two or three dozen descriptions of
the heroine’s hair, you may be able to sell it to
a magazine.’

“T knew what he meant—that I had just begun
my work on that story, that I must revise and re-
write it until it took form as a smooth-running
narrative. I did revise and re-write it, many
times, just as I still revise and re-write all my
stories today. And when I at last returned it to
him, he took it to New York and marketed it for
me. From that time on I felt myself definitely
committed to a writer’s career. I knew that I had
as yet no self-criticism of my work, and that I
did not know how to produce a finished piece of
writing. But I resolved to learn. My journalSG 8G LGLS AGL LPL SELF SILO EFS LT OLIGO G IT OFC TOT OGL DNA

Inez Haynes Irwin 81

 

 

 

was filled with studies of life. Yet they were not
stories. For just as tubes of paint are a painter’s
medium only, so studies of life are far from being
stories.

“My writing became focused. I concentrated
on short stories, thinking short stories, dreaming
short stories, writing short stories. Ideas bubbled,
It seemed to me I could not work fast enough
to get them down on paper. One week, I remem-
ber I wrote six short stories in succession. They
were merely first rough drafts. It was later neces-
sary for me to spend a good deal of time on each
one in order to whip it into final shape. But the
story germs were there.

“At this time, I was not financially dependent
upon the money which I received for my stories.
I was free to experiment as much as I wished.
Nevertheless, having committed myself to the
work of a writer, having assured myself that
despite all possible failures I would keep on until
I was forty, I was not satisfied unless what I wrote
met with acceptance in some magazine. When
the time did come that the income from my
writing was necessary, I had gone through my
writer-apprenticeship.

“As I worked on my short stories, another
dream soon came to me, the dream of doing a
novel. But a novel takes time to write. A writer
must have a sufficient amount of money on which
to live while he is devoting himself to it. As82 Girls Who Did

 

rapidly as I could, I put aside money for this
purpose and as soon as the savings were sutli-
ciently large, I wrote my novel, which was even-
tually published. From that time to this, my work
has consisted of writing short stories, and novels,
as well.”

To her writing, Inez Haynes Irwin brings the
experiences of a varied life. She was born on the
Tropic of Capricorn, in the crater of an extinct
voleano. Since her parents, who were Americans,
lingered only seven months in the vicinity of Rio
de Janiero, Brazil, Mrs. Irwin says she will never
write the reminiscences of her return. Boston
was her next stopping place. She stayed there
so long, in the process of growing up and going
to school, that she began to wonder whether her
life would not be lived in one state. The three
years preceding her work at Radcliffe she taught
school in the winter and told stories to children
during the summer.

Then came her short stories and first novels
and years which put an end to her fear lest her
life be lived within restricted borders. For she
has traveled widely. Accompanying her husband,
Will Irwin, on his important newspaper assign-
ments, she has visited every country of Europe,
in addition to crossing our own continent many
times. She has lived in San Francisco and Paris
and New York and has enjoyed her stay in each.
For wherever Inez Haynes Irwin goes, she enters1 hd
ty

Inez Haynes Irwin 83

 

 

with zest into the life around her, never failing
to find yet further material for her own writing.

She is now dividing her year between Scituate
summers and New York winters. The Irwin
house on Eleventh Street is a buzz of literary
activity. The husband writes; the wife writes; the
niece writes. A honeycomb in the swarming
season is no busier.

“If a girl were to ask you how to start out on
a literary career today,” I asked, “what would
you tell her? Would you advise her to go to
college and take courses in how to write, or
what?”

Mrs. Irwin shook her head. “T don’t know,”
she replied. “Actually I don’t know. For there
isn’t any rule which can be applied to everyone.
I would want to know a great deal about the
girl herself before I could answer, I went to col-
lege and am glad that I did. That course in daily
theme writing is still helping me. On the other
hand, my niece, Phyllis Duganne, did not attend
college. Before she was twenty, Phyllis had pub-
lished her first novel. N othing could keep her
from writing. And she is not sorry she spent
chiefly in writing the years when she might have
been in college instead.

“Do you see? Everything depends upon the
girl herself, what she is like, where she lives, what
she can afford to do. Every girl who writes must
study her own situation.reed!

 

84 Girls Who Did

 

“T can, however, tell you how some of my
young friends are working it out for themselves.
What other young women are doing is always
suggestive in one way or another. The girl of
whom I am now thinking went to college. She
loved to write, had been editor of her high school
paper, and so gravitated to the English courses
in college, taking every writing course offered
and being especially grateful, so she now says,
for the course in description which gave her a
new sense of the delicate distinctions in words.
While in college, she earned a considerable
amount of money as a member of the press board,
sending college news out to the newspapers.

‘When she was graduated, it was natural for
her to turn to work in which her writing would
be of use to her. She had registered with the
vocational bureau of the college and through
them obtained an opening with the advertising
department of a publishing house. Her special
work was to assist in the preparing of the catalog
of books which is periodically issued by the con-
cern and in writing the brief descriptions of the
books (often called ‘blurbs’) which appear on the
paper jackets.

“She is still with this publishing house. She
enjoys her work and the atmosphere of books
about her. She enjoys the people whom she meets.
But she now has another plan. For some time,
in the hours outside her office, she has been writ-Inez Haynes Irwin 85

ing short stories. Some have been accepted. More
have not. But she has received enough encour-
agement to make her wish to experiment still
more in her short story writing and she is saving
her money so that she may take a year’s leave of
absence from her position, during which she plans
to write.

“I shall be interested in seeing what happens
then. Perhaps she will be able to support herself
by her ‘free lance’ writing. A free lance writer
is one who has no salaried position but who gives
her entire time to her own writing, marketing it
with the magazines and newspapers when she
can and so trying to support herself. I have
known young women who have dreamed of be-
coming novelists, biographers, short story writ-
ers or playwrights who have saved their money
just as my friend is doing and who have then
stepped out into their free lance work,

“Some have been able to support themselves.
Others have not, returning to their paid positions.
Rent and board bills are prompt. Checks from
magazines are sometimes slow in coming. Every
young woman who wishes to experiment contin-
uously in her own creative writing has the prob-
lem of support to solve—unless, of course, money
is available for her. But such instances are rare.

“Another young friend of mine is a high school
graduate. She, too, has writing ability. As soon
as she was through high school, it was necessary. Mt

 

86 Girls Who Did

 

for her to earn her own living. So she went to
work on a newspaper. She worked as sub-assist-
ant on the woman’s page, going out to secure
items of interest and special stories about prom-
inent women. In time she, too, decided to try her
hand at her own writing. But because she then
had her mother to support as well as herself, she
was forced to write her stories during such few
free moments as she had during the day or night.

“She did sell a limited number of her stories
and is still doing so. But the market for the kind
of stories which she does is restricted. So, to
supplement the income from her writing, she is
handling the publicity work of a charitable or-
ganization. This publicity work consists of keep-
ing in touch with the activities of the organiza-
tion, gathering items of general interest and see-
ing that they are released to the newspapers.
In the time which remains to her (for the pub-
licity work does not occupy her entire day) she
is continuing with her writing of stories.

“T think these two girls are typical of many
who like to write and who have writing ability.
Their ability makes possible for them positions
in advertising agencies or in the advertising de-
partments of commercial concerns of all kinds;
they enter newspapers, publishing houses, mag-
azine work or trade journals—anywhere where
there is demand for what they can do. Some ulti-eee Lees oom ae eee ee ae ein sin Deal dia alae

Inez Haynes Irwin 87

 

mately decide to leave their positions and enter
the field of free lance writing. Others prefer to
continue in their newspapers, advertising, mag-
azine or publishing house work.

“On newspapers, the positions today open to
women are no longer so limited as formerly.
Women are not only engaged in writing fashions
or society notes or cooking articles. They are
working side by side with men in reporting and
even in the executive positions. On one of the
leading newspapers of New J ersey, 2 woman is
city editor, a position many have often declared
could not be successfully held by a woman. On
the staffs of magazines, women are finding con-
genial work. The apprentice positions usually
consist of assisting the editor of some department
with the many details of magazine management;
of proof reading or of manuscript reading. If a
girl decides to remain with a magazine, she may
in time be placed in charge of one of the depart-
ments, or oven attain an editorship.

“I think most of our editors became editors
in some such way as this. They liked to write.
They associated themselves with a magazine be-
cause of its congeniality and discovered that edi-
torial work appealed to them as a career. T once
looked in Who’s Who for all the editors with
whom I am personally acquainted. You would be
surprised to know the number who have written add

 

88 Girls Who Did

 

book or two. Pick up the magazines today and
you will often find a story or an article by an
editor. They still enjoy writing, you see.

“Perhaps that is what makes most of them
understanding and sympathetic. I have rarely
found editors critical without being construct-
ively so. And I know that they are always on
the watch for young writers who give evidence
of real talent.

“But to return to the openings for beginners.
I wouldn’t have you think that they are to be
found on every hand. In most of the fields which
I have mentioned, available positions are limited
in number. Newspaper and magazine opportun-
ities are sometimes lacking, as are those in pub:
lishing houses, advertising agencies or trade
papers. But they do exist. They can be found in
time and with persistence.

“Once having gained her start, every girl must
determine her own plan of future action. Shall
she continue in a salaried position? Shall she save
money for experimenting in writing? Shall she
try to find one of the rare part-time paid positions
which will enable her to do her own writing part
of the time? Shall she continue with her writing
if she marries, as so many women writers are
doing? These are but few of the questions which
will present themselves for an answer.

“But to every girl who likes to write I would
say, above all things, keep on writing and writ-sree

Inez Haynes Irwin 89

 

ing and writing—anything you wish—and living
and living and living. And reading and reading
and reading. Form the habit of writing every day.
Keep at what you start, even though the first
enthusiasm for your idea cools. This is apt to
be the experience of every writer before he has
completed a piece of work. Develop persistence.”

“Suppose you were starting out today, what
would you do, Mrs. Irwin?” I asked. “Just what
you did?”

“By no means! Whichever road you take, you
wish sooner or later that you had taken another.
Today, I think I would enter a school of jour-
nalism, preparatory to doing work on a news-
paper. I should like the friendly rivalry and
stimulus of the classroom work. I should like the
varied assignments. The professor works out
many contrasting experiments in newspaper writ-
ing. As a novice on a newspaper, you might not
for a long time have opportunity for so wide
a variety of journalistic writing. Yes, I should
like to attend a school of journalism, I think.

“And then I would go onto a newspaper. I
wish I had been a reporter, running around the
city on assignments, seeing life as it is lived in
every nook and cranny, meeting people such as
I have never known, will never know, rushing
back to get it all written ahead of the ‘dead line,’
that last moment before the presses start on the
next edition.ve

 

90 Girls Who Did

 

“To me, that is experience which I wish I had
had. On the other hand, only the other day a
friend of mine was bemoaning the fact that her
newspaper writing is proving a handicap to her
in her writing of short stories. She has now re-
signed from her newspaper work and is giving
her entire time to fiction. She feels that during
her years as a newspaper writer, she formed cer-
tain habits of style which she must now break.

“And there you are! There isn’t any rule. The
only answer is that if you like to write, you must
write and write and write. And if your ambition
is definite enough,” Mrs. Irwin concluded—and
after twenty-five years of writing, she is qualified
to speak—“you will find that everything is grist
to the literary mill. If you must take some posi-
tion far removed from writing, while you are
scribbling in your notebooks and upon your
stories after hours, you may surely know that
every bit of life which is humming around you
is providing future backgrounds and atmospheres
and incidents and characters for you. Above all,
if you believe in yourself and if as you go on you
have reason for continued faith in your ability,
persist. It is a struggle. And yet——”

“And yet?”

“It is worth while,” said Mrs. Irwin, earnestly.Minna Hatt Caroruers

A girl who only gradually
discovered what she
most wished to do

5 i a nN 8 Nyi@4MINNA HALL CAROTHERS

PAT SIXTEEN, I put my two pigtails
on top of my head, lengthened my skirts,
and joined the teaching staff of my business
school, instructing night classes and day classes
in the mysteries of Sir Isaac Pitman’s steno-
graphic hieroglyphics. Most of my pupils were
older than I.”
Minna Hall Carothers was telling me, because
I had just asked her, about her work. I had come
to her because she is one of the best known ad-
vertising women in this country. Because she has
been president of the New York League of Ad-
vertising Women, and is now president of the
Federation of Advertising Women’s Clubs of
the World. But most of all, because I knew she
938: fa i.

 

94 Girls Who Did

 

 

could tell me of opportunities for girls in adver-
tising.

I had opened the door of her office hesitantly,
thinking of her achievements. The first minute
of our conversation I thought, “Why, this brown
little person is a home body.” The next minute
I thought, “Maybe she was born a home body,
but somehow she has evolved in another direc-
tion.” The third minute I thought, “She is right
where she should be—born and bred in the briar
patch!”

The briar patch, she explained, was New York
City. Like her mother and her grandmother, she
is a New Yorker. Her father was an Englishman.
The education which she managed to extract from
the metropolis was short and to the point—over,
as far as going to school was concerned, when she
put up her hair and started teaching at the Mer-
chants’ and Bankers’ Business School.

“It was the only thing to do, you see. We
needed more money in the family. I was old
enough to earn money. So I did.”

Minna Hall Carothers smiled through the
definite brown of her eyes, thinking, I knew, of
those days when at sixteen she confidently
stepped up in front of her classes. But even then
those steady brown eyes were looking beyond
the business school. For “Peggy” was never 4
girl to be satisfied with merely a good start.
At the end of one year, she took a stenographicFS be ees co cir paca aca cs ba he Bball Jain Js lai i Heda lla Sab Si Enh saaoeaannehe ie aia aaa te nat ip ep eee IDE a eae

Minna Hall Carothers 95

position with a large printing firm whose work
was largely among advertisers. It was there that
she came in contact, for the first time, with her
future profession.

The stenographer budded into secretary for
one of the firm’s executives. Taking his dictation,
answering his telephone calls, making his ap-
pointments gave her daily opportunity to see
what the field of advertising really was. If he was
working with a business man who wished to have
a catalog printed, she saw the “copy” come in,
pages of description of this article and that. She
saw the illustrations for the catalog arrive—
photographs or pen and ink pictures. Often she
looked over the shoulders of the “lay-out” man,
watching him as he decided upon the size of the
illustration on the printed page, and just where
it should be placed. Minna Hall Carothers—her
name was Minna Hall Simmons then—was a
secretary and she was using her secretaryship to
learn everything possible about what passed
through her hands.

She learned to good purpose. From secretary,
she was promoted to the position of estimator
and purchaser of the paper for the catalogs which
her printing firm got out. And she came to know,
as every advertising woman must know, just
what kinds of paper may best be used for this
purpose or that—paper that was strong, not
easily to be torn; fine paper which by its very96 Girls Who Did

 

finish gave distinction to the catalog; dull, rough
paper that was sometimes preferable to smooth
and glossy paper.

Having scrutinized costs and paper so thor-
oughly, once more she began to look about her
for something new to learn. And she saw adver-
tising agencies, where all kinds of advertisements
for magazines, billboards, and newspapers were
prepared. The idea of doing this work attracted
her. So Minna Hall Carothers entered such an
agency, there to learn every branch, and they are
many, of advertising work. She bought space—
that is, she decided in which magazines and which
papers certain advertisements should appear—
and having decided, negotiated with the mag-
azines and papers, sending them the advertise-
ments in question. Later she wrote copy, describ-
ing in colorful words the articles to be advertised.
She became head of a department which took the
illustrations prepared by the artists, which took
the copy as prepared by the copy-writers and de-
cided the size of the type, the size of the illustra-
tions and, in short, saw the whole advertisement
through to its published end. Then the war came
along and changed everything. It changed Mrs.
Carothers’ work. She became advertising man-
ager for a concern engaged in the manufacture
of analine dye-stuffs.

“How exciting!” said T.

“Very!” said she. “About that time GermarMinna Hall Carothers 97

 

dyes were excluded from this country. American
dyes had to be developed. Imagine being adver-
tising manager in such a place—waiting for the
chemists to perfect some new process, learning
just what that process was and why it was of
use in the new dye and hurrying back to my
office to describe it all for the mills who were to
use it!”

But dye-stuffs could not hold her indefinitely.
For an interval she ran the Minna Hall Carothers
Service Agency. Then she turned to selling. And
today she is associated with the Powers Repro-
duction Corporation, where she sells to adver-
tisers themselves the photo-engraving services
of her company.

“When I was holding down my first job,” she
told me, “the firm used to say, “I'oo bad you
aren't a man, so that we could send you out to
sell.” It never dawned on me at that time that
selling was possible for a young woman. I? Sell?
The idea was preposterous! But now I am able
to say, with confidence, that it is a knowledge
of my field which counts and my ability to sell.
And I am not handicapped because I happen to
be a woman instead of a man.”

I was eager to know why she, who has had
so much experience, prefers selling to managing
an advertising agency, or to copywriting, or buy-
ing space.

“Because it is never monotonous. Because it98 Girls Who Did

 

ny

takes me out-of-doors. Because I go out to all
kinds of people in all kinds of businesses. Be-
cause there is a thrill in not knowing what you
are going to come up against. Because there is
a thrill in overcoming difficult situations, in get-
ting a customer’s name on the stern dotted line.
And because—should I mention it—selling pays
most generously. Yes, at last I have come through
to the work that I prefer.

“But don’t think that all my advertising ex-
perience is not useful to me now. My work to-
day is intimately concerned with advertising. I
go to advertisers of many kinds and endeavor to
sell them the engraving services of my concern.
In order to prove to them that we can produce
their work satisfactorily, I must know what they
wish to accomplish. If I can give them helpful
suggestions, so much the better. They then real-
ize that we will do more for them than handle
the mechanical process of getting out their en-
graving. We will give them personal interest
and service which will be useful to them in secur-
ing better business results. In order to do this,
I must constantly study my prospective custom-
ers’ advertising problems. And this is another
reason why I like what I am doing—I am always
learning something new and interesting.”

The typewriters clicked. Sunlight poured
through a large window. Copies of colored ad-
vertisements, for which photo-engravings hadMinna Hall Carothers 99

 

been made by the Powers Reproduction Corpo-
ration, looked at us from four walls.

“You are a woman,” I said, “and you are in
advertising. Tell me what you think of the field
for girls.”

“Girls and advertising? Women have as
definite a place in advertising as men. You find
them buying space, buying art work, writing
copy, laying out advertisements, selling space or
buying and selling engravings. It all depends on
each girl and what she is fitted to do. In adver-
tising, just as in everything else, a girl must
discover herself. And she can discover herself
in advertising by getting a job in advertising and
trying herself out.

“Young women, as well as men, can study
products and plan advertisements which will tell
others about those products in an interesting and
compelling way. In fact with some products. I
think many young women have a natural advan-
tage. I am thinking of advertisements which de-
scribe foods or clothing. A young woman is apt
to know what other women will wish to hear about
food and clothes. Tf it’s a new cake flour, whether
it saves time in mixing or gives an especially de-
licious taste to the finished cake. If it’s a dress,
what the distinctive points are of its style or its
material. For products such as this, young women
have the advantage of a background of experi-
ence.”100 Girls Who Did

 

“Do young women, then, succeed everywhere
in the advertising world?” I asked.

Mrs. Carothers hesitated. “They could succeed
everywhere,” she said after a moment, “depend-
ing upon each one’s own ability. Men, at least
the men higher up, are fair in giving you a chance
to show what you can do. Of course, if you are
inexperienced and obstinate, you deserve a little
prejudice.”

I wanted to talk with her about women in
business and men in business and both in business
together. I wanted to talk with her about women
executives who are fair and big and splendid,
about men executives who are fair and big and
splendid—and about women executives who are
not and men executives who are not.

But looking at her, I knew what she would
reply: “Everything depends upon the person.”
And in any case, she had judiciously summed up
the whole situation. Women in business are not
there for favors. If they demand the same busi-
ness advantages as men, they must accept the
same disadvantages. The finest advertising
women know this—or most of them. They accept
the hazards gallantly. They want to get on. They
work long hours when long hours are necessary.
They stick to it like Trojans. They tackle big
jobs.

“Girls who think advertising means an easy
life should stay out of it.” Mrs. Carothers wasul
‘|

Minna Hall Carothers 101

 

not mincing her words. “There is a prevalent idea
that advertising is copy-writing and nothing else.
It's a wrong idea. Copy-writing is only a small
part of this highly diversified work. I asked a
hundred advertising women, once, about the work
which each was doing. Fewer than twenty-five
of them wrote copy.”

She talked on with quiet authority. How would
she go about it if she were today starting on her
advertising career? She would go to college if
she could possibly afford it, choosing one of those
colleges where courses in advertising are offered
—and there are now over one hundred and fifty
such colleges in this country. But she would not
limit her studies to advertising—no, indeed! She
would enter the English department, especially
the writing courses. She would study psychology,
to add to her knowledge of people. And, in be-
tween, she would sandwich as many other courses
as she was able.

“Because a wide range of information is in-
valuable to work in advertising.

“But if I couldn’t go to college,” she continued,
“I would get any possible position in an adver-
tising agency or in the advertising department of
a store or other concern that has an advertising
office. Any possible job I could get—file clerk,
stenographer, anything so that papers would pass
through my hands and I could see what was going
on. Preferably, I think, stenographer. In my own102 Girls Who Did

 

experience, stenography was the opening wedge.
They would not have taken me in that office if
T had not had it. On the other hand, it was neces-
sary for me to pull myself away from it after I
had gained sufficient experience and had some
idea of what I wished to do. Being a good stenog-
rapher or secretary can in time become a handi-
cap as well as having been. an opening wedge.
Your employer may wish to keep you right where
you are indefinitely, because you are so useful
to him.

“And there is another point to be remembered.
Stenographic or filing positions are, in certain
circumstances, no opening wedge at all. A girl
must determine for herself whether she is ac-
quiring experience which is actually leading her
into the field of advertising, or wherever she
wishes to go, or whether she is in a blind alley. My
stenographic position happened to give me great
opportunity to learn the mechanics of advertis-
ing. Some stenographic positions are blind alleys,
nothing more.”

I asked Mrs. Carothers about the actual writ-
ing of advertisements.

“Suppose,” she replied, “that I was working
in an advertising agency, where all kinds of ad-
vertisements are prepared, and was given a tooth
paste advertisement. Suppose it was a new prod-
uct on the market. In all probability, the art
department, the research department and theMinna Hall Carothers 103

 

 

copy writer would hold an august conference.
The art department would make suggestions for
the pictures of the product—of the package or
of the tube or of a presentation of the paste in
actual use. The research department would sub-
mit data as to the other tooth pastes on the
market, the needs and desires of the public in
the matter of tooth paste and a list of the facts
concerning this particular tooth paste which the
manufacturer wished to emphasize in his advertis-
ing campaign.

“With all this in mind, I would then go off by
myself and puzzle over that tooth paste. I would
think of the people who would use it and just
what it is in a tooth paste that most appeals to
them—its taste, its possibilities for cleanliness,
its container. You know what you think of when
you change from the tooth paste you have been
using to a new one. I would not depend upon
my own experience alone. I would talk with my
friends about their tooth pastes, and different
kinds of friends, to get all points of view. In
planning the kind of advertisement to use, it
would also be necessary for me to remember how
much money the tooth paste concern wished to
spend, and whether the advertisement itself was
to appear in magazines or in street cars or on bill-
boards. What is effective in one is often not effec-
tive in another. And at last, after my pondering,
an original idea for that tooth paste advertise-a.

104 Girls Who Did

 

“Tw

ment would break into being. The slogan Four
out of Five was conceived by a copy writer who
looked at tooth paste and pondered.”

I thought of the advertisements I read every
day, in magazines and newspapers, on billboards
and in trolley cars. And suddenly I saw, back of
each one, the copy-writers, the artists, the layout
workers, the printers, the managers and the
secretaries.

“But advertising is never,” said this astute
business woman, “easy.”

I knew she spoke the unvarnished truth.

“Then, Mrs. Carothers, your advice is

“Advertise!”

?”?a
ish
{+8

|
i

Nrysa McMeErn

A girl
who liked to
draw and paintNEYSA McMEIN

ERMILION, and violet, and cobalt blue.
- Ochre and a dab of shiny black.

- . Every color known to painters was in
vivid evidence all over Neysa McMein’s studio—
labelled neatly in tubes, smeared in oily profusion
on her palette, and taking human form in a half-
finished portrait of Beatrice Lillie, the actress,
which stood full length on an upright canvas. I
was almost certain that Neysa in her blue smock
had, in a moment of deviltry, broken up the rain-
bow into its component hues and spilled them
lavishly over the room. I was almost certain. ...
Anyway, there was the room, and there was the
color, and there was Neysa McMein.

“Come in,” said the blue smock. Of course it
may have been the artist who spoke, but it
sounded like her blue smock. Voices can have
color, as well as palettes, and this voice was un-
deniably a cerulian blue.

107108 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

I advanced into the big studio, liked it immedi-
ately, liked its owner, and sat down in one of its
chairs. That was a feat of dexterity, for the room
was a delicious jumble of everything comfortable
and everything colorful. It was like a curio shop,
though much nicer. There were brushes—big fel-
lows, built for use. There was a tall skylight,
built for sun. There were the innumerable origin-
als of magazine covers which Neysa McMein has
painted. There were vases, bric-a-brac, photo-
graphs, and a table on which reposed a bitten-
into piece of toast. There was the top of Joan
Whitney’s head, visible above two canvasses.
There was the half-finished Beatrice Lillie. And
as a surprise, for this was a painter’s studio, there
were two pianos and a collection of musical in-
struments!

“Before we begin,” I said, “I want to get your
name straight. Is the ‘McMein’ pronounced with
an a sound or an i sound?”

Neysa McMein laughed heartily. “A,” she said.
“My name was never known to be pronounced
correctly or spelled correctly. The worst blunder
though, was made by a man, once who called me
in an interview, ‘Mr. Neuter McNeil! ”

It was my turn to laugh now. It was singularly
easy to laugh in this room. A gain my eyes went
on an adventure. Raw sienna, lemon yellow,
Chinese red . . . and over in the corner, #
gorgeous green... - My eyes came back toNeysa McMein 109

 

 

Neysa McMein, well-known artist and illustrator,

And because she was human and very much
herself, Miss McMein was the most vivid thing
in a vivid room. She is a woman not difficult to
100k upon, a paintable woman. Two things im-
pressed me: her low-in-the-back hair which tries
to be gold and then decides, rather reluctantly,
to be plain brown with a sprinkling of gray; and
her long slim legs which end, charmingly, in high-
heeled slippers. Did I say two things? Three! Big
gray eyes.

“Did you study art at an art school?” I asked.

“Yes. At the Chicago Art Institute. Not for
long—I couldn’t afford more. But long enough
to get the beginnings.”

And she told me the story. Neysa McMein,
though at the time she had not adopted her pres-
ent name, left the Chicago Art Institute to take
a position in a millinery house. She needed money.
It was “hack work,” but it taught the novice her
trade. Drawing hats for a millinery house is not
art. But it is a type of commercial illustration
which may lead somewhere else. And Neysa drew
hat shapes. She learned perspective, line, propor-
tion. She learned accuracy. Crowns, brims, trim-
ming—from morning till night she made them
into pictures.

“When I drew a hat wrong,” said Miss Mc-
Mein, “I had to draw it over again. That’s the
only way you can learn to draw good hats. That’s110 Girls Who Did

 

the only way you can learn to draw anything.
Just as later when I started to paint women’s
faces and put crossed-eyes into their heads, I had
to do the eyes over and over until they got
straight. What could have been finer training!
Hats, hats, hats! In the end, I could draw them
with my eyes shut.”

A large Persian cat leaped into her lap, snug-
gled its head under Miss McMein’s chin and
purred so boisterously that I could hear the rum-
ble six feet away. She patted the shaggy fur and
went on talking:

“And then I took to the stage. It was stock.
I came to New York, played awhile and got out.”

“But why did you get out? You liked the stage,
didn’t you?”

The answer was in the true McMein manner.
It was short, colloquial and to the point. “I was
no good,” she said.

And that, incidentally, is a strong piece in
Neysa McMein’s armor. She is honest in her self-
criticism. She hasn’t a single illusion about Neysa
McMein. When she is experimenting in her
work and finds that she cannot do a thing well,
she admits it. And either gives it up or sets to
work to improve her technique.

“But get this straight,” she said, and smiled a
little at her prominence as a magazine-cover artist
and a painter of portraits. “I’m not in any senseBesant nies s s

Neysa McMein ak

 

contributing to contemporary art. I didn’t study
long enough. I don’t know the fundamentals.
That’s why I’m stumped every now and then
and have to work my fingers off in getting a good
likeness. Why, I’m stumped right now on
Beatrice Lillie!’

I looked at the half-finished actress and pro-
tested. As far as my amateur eyes could make
out, this was the very Beatrice Lillie who con-
vulses an audience—and me—with her antics.
But Neysa McMein was working for something
I didn’t see.

The rest of her story came quickly. When she
left the stock company, she resumed her com-
mercial art. She painted pastels for magazine
covers, in New York City because more mag-
azines are published there than in any other city
in our country. And she went from art editor to
art editor selling her wares.

“It took a lot of shoe leather and a lot of time.
But I must say I like editors! Why shouldn’t I?
They bought my pictures then, they buy my pic-
tures now. Of course, perhaps I was so persistent
that they became exhausted and took my stuff
to get rid of me!’

Perhaps. But I was not convinced. I knew
that, despite her joking, Neysa McMein has not
got to her present place through casual chance.
Things don’t happen that way. Eventually the112 Girls Who Did

 

talented win recognition and the half-talented
drop back. But she has studied hard and she has
worked. hard.

And she will continue to study hard and to
work hard as long as she paints. Because she
has had special talent, she has been recognized.
But the talent has not done away with the
necessity for study and work. Neysa McMein
believes that an artist has no right to a temper-
ament, nor to coddling, that she should learn
to work anywhere, any time. She herself has,
furthermore, excellent health and a willingness
to take infinite pains with her work.

“But IL am not areal artist,” she declared again.
“T belong to those whose artistic ability is turned
to the producing of something which is wanted
by the public and so is immediately salable.”

I knew what she meant. She was thinking of
such artists as Cecilia Beaux, an eminent con-
temporary painter, who has already had an ex-
hibition of her work in the Metropolitan Museum.
She was thinking of those artists whose pictures
will live for generations, who have painted the
great pictures of the world. Such artists wish to
express a spiritual thing, an ideal through their
work, painting solely for the purpose of catching
on their canvas some intangible beauty.

“T didn’t study long enough even to try to paint
in that way,” went on Miss McMein. “ThereNeysa McMein 113

 

 

is nothing to take the place of study—study—
study if you wish to be an artist.”

I spoke of girls who like to draw and paint
and who wish to become artists. She was inter-
ested at once. “The best thing you can do is to
enter a good art school,” she said. “A good art
school. A place like the Chicago Art Institute
is always glad to tell you which schools are good
and where they are. Such a school takes money
but it’s worth it. It does two things for you. It
trains what ability you have, and you may have
a great deal, and it helps you to find out just
where in the field of art you will fit in.

“If, when you get out, you want to go on with
real painting,’—and once more I knew what
Neysa McMein meant by that—‘“you must make
up your mind that you have years and years and
years of work ahead of you, painting and paint-
ing and painting. You may get recognition
quickly. You probably won’t. Most artists don’t.
And while you are working, you will have to
eat. So, to support yourself, you may take on a
certain amount of commercial work such as illus-
trating magazine stories or books or drawing for
advertisements. A good many artists do this.

“If, on the other hand, you clecide to be a com-
mercial artist, there are any number of places
that use commercial art. Beside magazine and
book illustration, there are the fashion concerns114 Girls Who Did

that must have artists to draw their style designs.
Wall-paper manufacturers who want to have
wall-paper designs made. Textile manufacturers
and many others.

“Sometimes artists are on the regular paid
staffs of these concerns. Sometimes they work as
what are called ‘free lance’ artists, which means
they don’t get a salary and don’t have a steady
position. They go from concern to concern, ob-
taining what commissions they can. It is uncer-
tain, but many artists prefer it because of its
variety.”

Copyists, draftsmen, commercial etchers,
poster painters—their name is legion. “Yes, if

> a girl likes to draw or paint and if she has learned
A. how to do it well, she can find an opening in com-
y mercial work in our cities,” declared Neysa Mc-
| Mein. “And if commercial work in a manufac-
at? turing plant or a publishing house or a store
doesn’t appeal to her, she can teach art in the
public schools. A good many normal schools
have art courses and courses in how io teach art,
too.” And always, there is the possibility for the

few, of becoming great artists.
“But don’t forget,” she concluded with a
laugh, “to be a good saleswoman. The time I
have spent studying out just what would fit into
this magazine or that—and then going and tell-
ing them so! I believe it’s what teachers of sales-
manship call attracting the attention, arousingNeysa McMein 115

 

 

the interest, creating the desire and closing the
sale. Well, whatever it is, I like to do it. I like
to sell my own work. I would like to sell other
things, too.

“Yes, I went into illustrating to support my-
self and I have. But remember this:—I enjoy il-
lustrating. I have never been sorry I started do-
ing it. And it hasn’t all been easy, either.”

She told me of her own struggles and of those
of her artist friends, of the disappointment when
a picture is rejected after many weeks, even years,
of work upon it, of the blow it is when an artist
has counted upon the sale of that picture for her
livelihood. She told me of the frequent difficulty
of obtaining the kind of work you, as an artist,
really wish to do even in the commercial field.

“But it’s better now than it ever has been. All
the advertising that is being done means more
commercial art work. And more commercial art
means that artists can earn a living with their
particular ability. And certainly that’s better
than having to drop it altogether.”

“There are other things that I’d like to ny,”
she went on, after a pause. “Music, for instance.”

So that was the explanation of two pianos and
many musical instruments in her studio!

“But since I can’t earn my living by it, I make
it my hobby.”

She is a happy person. She delights in her
studio, her Persian angora, her orgy of brilliant116 Girls Who Did

 

paints, her two pianos—and in her baby and her
husband. When I put the question to her, she
assured me that the husband and the very young
daughter in no way interfere with her painting.

But—“Oh, she’s lovely!” said the mother, and
I knew that Neysa McMein would unhesitatingly
put away her profession if it interfered with that
baby.

“TI am going to buy her a new doll this after-
noon,” she told me.CHARLOTTE CowpREY Brown

A girl
who loved
growing thingsCHARLOTTE
COWDREY BROWN

66 ANY girls,”

said Charlotte
Cowdrey Brown, “have
an innate love of grow-
ing things.”

We were sitting in her rarely appointed draw-
ing room. Gray velvet, a paisley shawl, a vase
full of blush roses, exotic candlesticks—but the
sky was shut out and the March wind. Through
a subtle communication, I knew that Mrs. Brown
was sorry. I could imagine her puttering around
hollyhocks and blue larkspur. I could imagine a
spade in her capable hands.

Charlotte Cowdrey Brown’s grandfather was
English-born and that, she thinks, explains her
love of flowers. She has always loved them. As a
little girl, she was fascinated with the family
gardens, begging for one of her own until at
last it was given to her. She took her garden very
seriously. She asked innumerable questions of
those who had planted in their gardens what she

was planning for hers.
119

ye120 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

Nor did her enthusiasm wane with the appear-
ance of the first green shoots. All through the
summer, she tended her flowers. And the flowers
responded. Charlotte’s first garden was a lovely
one, even though it was not uniformly what the
young gardener had hoped.

By the time she was thirty her flower gardens
were many. On the coast of New Jersey, she
developed a blue garden, a yellow garden, a pink
garden and, most beautiful of all, a snow-white
garden. Flowers grew and thrived under her care.
Each plant was an individual to her, a living
thing unlike any other. And flower colors were
her specialty.

It is not surprising, then, that other women
wished to know of her methods. She became a
lecturer on flowers. She wrote a book called
Color in the Garden. For twenty years she has
been an active member of the Farm and Garden
Association.

“Tt’s horrid to have to live in the city,” said
Charlotte Cowdrey Brown. “I miss my gardens
SO.

“But I enjoy my lecturing,” she continued. “It
is a real delight to me to exchange gardening
experiences with other flower lovers. I never re-
turn from a lecture trip without having learned
something new. And I like, too, to tell young
women what I know of agriculture as a field for
them. For the girl who loves to make things

9Charlotte Cowdrey Brown 12]

 

grow, who has plenty of patience and who is
strong, agriculture has its great appeal.”

“Then women are at work in it?” I asked.

“Yes, especially in such forms of it as truck
gardening, keeping bees, dairying, poultry farm-
ing or growing flowers. Contrary to what many
still think, farm work is not too difficult for the
young woman who has excellent health. Dr.
Dudley Sargent declared, after employing twen-
ty-five women on his farm, that if a girl is robust
she can do every farm chore without injury to
her health. Mrs. Edward Parker Davis, who
owns and runs a stock farm of one hundred and
thirty-two acres, says she find that young women
make the best farm hands. Girls are refusing
to be delicate. Heavy manual labor no longer
appalls the strong young woman who wishes to
work out-of-doors. And I often come across one
who is engaged in a surprising occupation. An
Oregon woman, a timber cruiser, once told me
that her long trips on foot and on horseback were
positively pleasant and that she recommended
forestry as a possibility for women.

“I know women who have bought farms for
themselves and who have proceeded to run them.
I know women who have inherited farms and who
have decided to go on with them. The ones who
have succeeded are those who have had thorough
knowledge of the work, enough money to employ
help, to buy necessary equipment, to tide their4

122 Girls Who Did

 

own living expenses over poor seasons and who,
as I said, have had good health, patience and
persistence. For it does take patience and it does
take persistence. So much is out of your control,
you see—frost and rain and drought. The cour-
age of even the staunchest-hearted is often sorely
tried. Edna Ferber’s interesting story, So Big,
gives a most understanding picture of what it
means to a woman to run a farm.

“It is important for every farmer to know
scientific methods of farming. Some of the women
whom I know have been able to take a course in
one of the excellent agricultural schools of the
country. Others, unable to spend the time or the
money in this, have added to their own farming
experience by studying such reliable publications
as those issued by the Department of Agriculture
in Washington and by attending farm institutes
where authorities on various phases of farming
lecture and demonstrate.

“No,” continued Mrs. Brown earnestly, “it is
never easy. Beside the’ difficulties of contending
with the soil and uncertain weather, there are
those of marketing your produce, once you have
grown it. There are the difficulties of obtaining
not only sufficient help but help of the right kind.

“But because the work itself appeals to them,
because they can live in the country and spend
most of their time out-of-doors, women are per-
sisting in it.”Charlotte Cowdrey Brown 123

 

And I listened to the stories of two girls who
have persisted. The first was that of a girl whose
father was a professor in the agricultural school
of a college. While she was still in high school,
she said to her father one day, “I want a cow of
my own.”

Her father looked at her curiously and replied,
“A cow is a great deal of work.”

“I know,” said the girl, “but I want one. If
you will let me have one of yours, I will pay
you for it with the profits on the milk.”

Because his daughter was so deeply in earnest
and because the professor realized that she al-
ready knew a great deal about the care of a cow,
he fell in with her plan. The girl went about her
self-appointed work in a thorough way. She gave
time and thought to her cow. She read all she
could find on the subject of her feeding. She con-
sulted with her father and other owners of cows
on the various problems that arose. And she en-
joyed it all so much, it was not long before she
was announcing that as soon as she completed her
schooling she meant to have a dairy of her own.

Today she has that dairy—with her husband,
who is a graduate of the agricultural school in
which her father is a professor. She herself over-
sees her share of all work that is done and declares
that it is no less interesting, even though more
strenuous, than the care of her first cow.

The other story was one of great courage. In124 Girls Who Did

 

an agricultural school just before the war, a
young man and a young woman studied side by
side. They were specializing in poultry farming,
both having already had some experience in it.|
And as they talked together of what they would
do when they completed their study, they came to
realize that the happiest future which could await
them would be one which they should live to-
gether. And they became engaged.

Then the war came and the young man went
away. When he returned, he was blind. The
young woman loved him—and formulated a plan.
When she suggested it to him, he was reluctant.
But there was in her a great courage and a belief
in their own powers.

“Why not have a chicken farm?” she asked.
“You know as much as you ever did about the
work. And I am strong. We'll be partners!”

In time, she persuaded him and they were mar-
ried. The story of their steady struggle to estab-
lish their chicken business is a long one. It was
necessary for them to borrow money. The first
farm which they bought proved an unwise pur-
chase. But today they have their .chicken farm on
a main automobile thoroughfare. A sign which
hundreds of people pass daily heralds the fact
of their fresh eggs and chickens for sale. Their
scientific training and their real skill in conduct-
ing their poultry raising have brought a deservedCharlotte Cowdrey Brown 125

 

reputation for excellence to their eggs and
chickens.

By the roadside itself, the two have built a
small shop where they sell sandwiches and soft
drinks, with chicken sandwiches their specialty.
The young woman’s mother is in charge of the
shop, which not only adds to the family’s income
but is also a means for marketing the eggs and
chickens.

The mortgage on the little farm is gradually
being paid off. And the enterprise is establishing
itself as a successful venture. To be sure, the two
have been helped by people’s special interest in
them. Nevertheless, the chief factor in their work
has been their intelligence and their skill.

“The growing of flowers appeals to many
women,” went on Mrs. Brown. “Some have their
own greenhouses. Others act as assistants. Flower
farms ship their tea roses or their yellow prim-
roses or their peonies or their double violets to
wholesale and individual florists.

“Drug-growing has much in common with
flower-growing and may be made profitable un-
der intelligent direction. You may specialize in
a wide variety, in ginseng or digitalis (a heart
stimulant), in golden seal, in spigelia or others.
A. woman in Delaware has a sassafras farm. A
woman in the South cultivates Oriental poppies.

“Women who have no money for launching126 Girls Who Did

 

a more ambitious enterprise or who must work in
the vicinity of their own homes are developing
special outdoor projects. Some are excellent
seedsmen. They are specializing in many kinds—
in sweet William (Newport pink), Colorado
columbine, zinnia seeds or something equally
sought after.

“T know one woman who has turned her front

yard into rare white petunias and is selling the
seeds wholesale. There is great demand for se-
lected colors. Seed growers who cultivate one
color—say, lavender—weeding out every other
color, are finding that these selected seeds bring
a higher price.
‘ “There is no reason why girls cannot under-
take work with seeds. A group of Girl Scouts
in Oregon were interested in the preservation
of wild flowers. They became acquainted with the
spots near their home town where these flowers
grew. And then a plan occurred to them. Why
not gather and sell wildflower seeds?

“They marked the places, returning to gather
the seeds with the help of a local gardener. Care-
fully labelling each packet, they sold them widely.
Today they proudly tell their friends of a Scotch
garden in which their wildflower seeds have been
planted.

“Some very clever selling ideas have been
evolved by women who are conducting special
enterprises. Often to these ideas no less thanCharlotte Cowdrey Brown 127

 

to their abilty as gardeners or poultry raisers, is
due their financial success. A Kentucky woman
who advertises “True Heavenly Blue Morning
Glory Seeds” sells them for five cents a seed. A
woman in New Jersey specializes in cranberries
—“as big as cherries.” She wraps them attract-
ively, ties them with red ribbon and sells them as
Christmas presents.

“A woman in Vermont uses the picturesque

_ Story of her vegetable dyes to good advantage in

her selling. This woman grows her own flax and
makes her own dyes. Her vegetable dyes are
made from goldenrod and seaweed and the juice
of black walnuts. She pours the dye into clear
glass bottles, leaves the bottles on a snow-bank
all winter and calls the color permanent if it has
retained its original intensity until the spring
thaw. Then she weaves her dyed flax into a beau-
tiful design and finds that women enjoy possess-
ing the colorful article made in so unusual a way.”

I asked Mrs. Brown what suggestion she would
give a girl who, like herself, is interested in grow-
ing things.

She smiled. “Look around, first of all,’ she said.
“I haven’t even mentioned all the possibilities.
Architects are employing young women as land-
scape architects who have made a special study of
the work of effectively laying out trees and bushes
and gardens for the grounds surrounding homes.128 Girls Who Did

 

Here and there a tree nursery is run by a woman
—and there are schools of forestry in various of
our universities where the ways of trees are to
be learned.

“Agricultural experiment stations employ
young women who are grounded in science in
general and in biology in particular to study
such problems as soil care, animal breeding, crop
rotation, plant diseases and insect pests, and to
help prepare bulletins giving their findings to
those interested. Public schools where garden
work is carried on employ a supervisor for this
department.

“Yes, look around. But—have a garden! Plant
flowers or vegetables. Or raise chickens. Or a
pig. Or a cow. Know the fun and the interest of
it while you are young and it may even point the
way to what you will wish to have as your ulti-
mate vocation.

“Girls today have many opportunities to ex-
periment in this out-of-door work in school or in
camp, or through such organizations as the boys’
clubs and girls’ clubs of the Department of Agri-
culture in Washington. Any girl who is interested
in planning her garden scientifically can obtain a
wealth of information in the pamphlets of the
Department of Agriculture, a list of which will
be sent her upon request. It is surprising what
girls have accomplished through these tomatoCharlotte Cowdrey Brown 129

 

clubs and corn clubs and pig clubs and canning
clubs. Exhibits of their work at county fairs are
of highest excellence.

“If, later, a girl decides that she is interested
in entering professionally some phase of this out-
of-door work, I would suggest that she inform
herself concerning the courses given in agricul-
tural schools, as well as the requirements for
entrance into these schools. She should also in-
quire into the kinds of opportunity which will in
all probability be open to her when she is gradu-
ated from the agricultural school.

“To grow anything well,” said Mrs. Brown,
gazing reflectively at the blush roses on the table,
“you must know so much about it. With my
flower gardens, I must know flower habits and
flower requirements. I need a thorough under-
standing, based on experience and reading, of
the kind of soil, the amount of sun and the length
of exposure or shelter which each flower needs.

“Each must be tended as carefully as a child.
Although—” and Mrs. Brown laughed glee-
fully, “flowers certainly have this advantage. If a
child proves a disappointment, care and responsi-
bility are still your lot. But if a flower proves
fractious, you can pull it up and throw it over the
fence!”

I mingled my laughter with hers. Sitting there
in her lovely drawing room, it was far easier for
me to think of her puttering around that white130 Girls Who Did

 

garden down in New Jersey than as a city woman.
It was easier to think of her among banks of
bridal wreath, and top-heavy snowballs, and pale
sweet peas, and white petunias, and _ love-in-a-
mist, and luxurious laurel, and candytuft, and
sweet alyssum, and delicate mignonette, and lilies
of the valley hiding in their leaves, and white
orchises and saxifrage and sweet white trillium...Epna Watson BaILteEy

A girl
who chose teaching
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EDNA WATSON BAILEY

CROWD of girls and boys rushed by, into
the next room. But Eloise sat in her little
chair.

The sunshine, streaming through the wide-
open window behind her, alighted upon her yel-
low hair and made dancing gold of it. Quietly,
Eloise listened to the noisy fun in the other room.
Her deep blue eyes did not stir from the door-
way, as though she were wishing for nothing
more than to be in there with the girls and the
boys.

Yet she did not move. Her small hands folded
upon the lap of her blue smocked dress, she sat
where she was all morning. She sat there when
the teacher called, “Lunch time,” and the boys
and the girls scurried away. She was sitting there
when her mother came for her at three o’clock.

Rather, ten minutes after three. For Eloise’s
mother was stopped by the teacher, in the hall.

133134 Girls Who Did

 

And for ten minutes the two talked earnestly to-
gether.

“Come, dear,” said Eloise’s mother, kissing her
gently. “Time to go home.” Obediently, Eloise
got up from the little chair and walked to the
cloak room where she found her coat and hat
hanging on the low peg above which was pasted
the picture of the girl in the pony cart. Eloise
had noticed that picture when she hung up her
coat—so, now, she knew right where her coat
and hat were to be found.

At home, Grandmother fluttered to the door.
“And what did my darling do, her first day at
school?” she asked.

Eloise looked up from out the deep-blue eyes.
“I sat in a chair,” she said.

“She did,” admitted Eloise’s mother when
later she and Grandmother were alone. “She just
sat, every blessed minute of the day.”

“Do you mean to tell me that that Miss Dun-
bar we’ve been hearing so much about let her
stay there, like that?”

Eloise’s mother nodded.

“What will she do tomorow, then?”

“Let her sit,” smiled Eloise’s mother. “I am
afraid you don’t get the idea, mother. You know
that Eloise is the least assertive of the three girls,
don’t you? And you must realize how rarely she
has any suggestions of her own about what they
shall do. She follows the lead of the other two,Edna Watson Bailey 135

 

even though they are younger. This is her chance
to be herself—to have plans of her own, and to
follow those plans. If Miss Dunbar takes her by
the hand and leads her about now, Eloise will not
become—well, Eloise.”’

Grandmother sniffed.

She sniffed again when, the next afternoon,
Eloise’s reply to her fluttery question was the
same. “I sat,” said Eloise succinctly.

“And she had no lunch,’ added Grandmother,
accusingly, to Eloise’s father when he was given
the story of it after the children’s bedtime.

“If she doesn’t know enough to go where the
lunch is, when she has been told, I give up,”
replied Eloise’s father.

For three days, Eloise sat in the little chair.
For three days, her blue eyes burned deep, as she
watched the doorway through which came tumul-
tuous sounds of busy enjoyment.

On the morning of the fourth day, when the
children were at work on a fire-house, Eloise
quietly slid from the little chair and crossed the
room. I’rom the doorway, she peered onto the
floor where the children were so absorbingly oc-
cupied. The teacher, at a far window, was read-
ing a book. No one paid the slightest attention to
Kloise. She took one step into the room and stood
there, a long while, deep blue eyes on the rising
fire-house. Then she walked over and picked up
a pointed block.136 Girls Who Did

 

“Here,” she said, holding it out to the Boy
nearest.

“Put it on yourself,” replied the Boy.

That afternoon, as she and her mother ap-
proached home, Eloise dropped her mother’s
hand and ran up the steps of the porch.

“Oh, Grandmother!” she cried, the blue eyes
glinting sparks of excitement. “I helped build a
fire-house.”

Grandmother kissed her. “And did you have
lunch?” asked she. But Eloise was hurrying up-
stairs to the play-room.

“For the girl who knows and loves children,
teaching is a wonderful work,” said Dr. Edna
Bailey. “Think of the interest of it! A roomful of
children, every one different from every other
one. You are to be with them every school day.
Teaching them? The word ‘teaching’ falls far
short of what you really do. Rather, you are their
guide, pointing out to them fascinating trails
which they themselves may take. And along those
trails, you are helping them to discover a world of
interesting things.

“And how children do like to learn! Sometimes
I think it is their chief characteristic. It is as
natural for them as flying is natural for young
robins. Physics? Teach a boy physics with his own
radio and he is so excited that he will forget to
grudge the time spent in study—because he 1sEdna Watson Bailey 137

 

learning something that he wants to know. Zo-
dlogy? As a catalog of long names, it frightens a
child away. But zodlogy meaning a child’s pets,
and the animals in the nearby zoo—how enthral-
ling!”

I had come to Dr. Edna Bailey because a man
who knows many of the eighty-five thousand
women teachers in this country today had told
me of her splendid work as head of the depart-
ment of sciences in the University High School,
University of California. He had said the boys
and girls in Dr. Bailey’s classes eagerly look for-
ward to them, actually sorry when the bell rings
for the close of each session.

I found a woman glad that she is a teacher,
preferring teaching to any other profession. It
was not surprising. You cannot do work as she
has done it without enjoying it. Immediately, I
responded to the gleam of comradeship in her
eyes—comradeship not for me alone, but for all
the world, great enough, I knew, to give each boy,
each girl, no matter how cantankerous, a special
welcoming. Dr. Bailey, tall, prepossessing, looks
like a mother, acts like a mother, and turns out to
be the teacher-mother of two young daughters.
A very wise mother.

“My life,” she said, in answer to my question,
“has not been startling. I was born in West Vir-
ginia; I grew up in Tennessee and Missouri; and
I went, eventually, through eight years of train-138 Girls Who: Did

 

ing at the University of California, leading to the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1910.

“Every girl’s early years give her something
distinctive because she lives them just as she
does. My moving from one part of the country to
another gave me adaptability. I came to know
many kinds of people and the various ways in
which they liked to live. I always enjoyed meeting
new people. Perhaps it was this interest in people,
especially in those younger than I, which led me
to teaching. At any rate, teaching was the only
thing which I considered doing. And, today, I
never tire of the young folks in our High School.
If only I had time to tell you about some of them
and what they are doing: now that they have been
graduated!”

Boys and girls—growing up—remembering
Dr. Edna Bailey, her friendliness, what she
taught them from books, from life—grateful to
her for it. “Surely,” I thought, “a teacher’s re-
ward is far, far more than the salary she receives.”

‘Time was,” went on Dr. Bailey, “when teach-
ing was almost the only occupation which wel-
comed young women. The result was that many
girls entered it because they were forced to earn
their own living, not because they wished to be-
come teachers. Today, this is changing. I wel-
come the opportunities girls have to go into many
kinds of work, for it means—besides the fact that
they may now find work suited to their taste—Edna Watson Bailey 139

 

that, more and more, only those will become
teachers to whom children or young people and
the teaching of a congenial subject have a real ap-
peal. This gives us happier teachers and happier
children. No longer, when a girl happens to be
bookish, do we invariably exclaim ‘She was made
to be a teacher.’ Isn’t that significant?”

Another point occurred to me. “I had never
before thought of it in just this way,” I said.
“But is there any other profession in which a
young woman may choose to be associated with
those of the age which most appeals to her?”

Dr. Bailey smiled. “Almost none! The girl who
enjoys small children may become a kindergarten
teacher, or go into one of the nursery schools for
those still younger. There are not many nursery
schools as yet, but they are coming. If she enjoys
children of elementary school age, she may enter
there.

“Of course,” she added, with great good-humor,
“T think my job is, of all teaching jobs, the nicest.
I do enjoy boys and girls of high school age.
They are old enough to show real intelligence,
but not so old that they are ‘set’ in their ways.
It is remarkable how wisely they manage their
own affairs when the school authorities give them
half a chance. And I enjoy the sciences, oh! so
much.”

I remembered a teacher of my own who en-
joyed the sciences “oh, so much!” The quieta

140 Girls Who Did

 

woods, today, teem with fascinating life for me
because of that teacher.

“And that is another thing for the girl to con-
sider who is thinking of teaching. She may teach
the subject which has greatest appeal to her—
provided, of course, she goes on to secure adequate
training in it. If she enjoys books and her work
in high school English, she may wish to specialize
in English in college, later teaching it. So, too,
with history. With any subject. If she enjoys
home tasks, if she likes to cook, she may wish to
become a domestic science teacher. If she likes
to make things, manual training is a possibility,
or music, if she is musical. Or the other arts.

“Tf she has special aptitude for it—and a great
deal of patience—she may assume teaching re-
sponsibility in those classes for backward chil-
dren which so many communities are fortunately
organizing today. Some children are born slow.
These special classes for them are a godsend in
three ways—the children themselves are no longer
pushed, they no longer hold back the brighter
children, and the teacher’s load is substantially
lightened. There are special classes, too, for
gifted children.

“The choice is unlimited. And what pleasant
associations a teacher has!” Dr. Bailey’s eyes were
glowing. “The other teachers in her school, the
educators from all parts of the country whom sheEdna Watson Bailey 141

 

meets at various conventions, the parents of her
children—and the books with which she is sur-
rounded. Since teachers are needed everywhere,
a young woman may secure a position in some
new part of the country. traveling there and dur-
ing her vacations gaining still more fresh and
enjoyable experiences at every hand.

“Nor would I forget the respect which
a teacher is accorded. There is a new and ever-
growing appreciation of teachers in this coun-
try. And it is good to be appreciated!

“‘All the while a teacher is at work, she is ex-
pressing what is deepest in her nature. She enters
into the lives of children or young people—and
from time immemorial this has appealed to
women. And she is working out her creative ideas
through her effort to make the subject which she
teaches vital to her children.”

“But the disadvantages?” I asked. I had heard
so much about the disadvantages of teaching.

“They are not greater in teaching than in other
professions,” declared Dr. Bailey. “Every pro-
fession has them. Every occupation has them.
They are part of living. I believe the reason we
hear so much about them in connection with
teaching is that there are so many teachers! But
if you enjoy your work in anything, the disadvan-
tages become relatively unimportant.”

I mentioned those of which I had most fre-142 Girls Who Did

 

quently heard—long hours, heavy work, small
pay, monotony. Dr. Bailey considered them, one
by one.

“Long hours? From nine to three or four in
the afternoon is much shorter than customary
office hours. To be sure, much depends on the
special situation of the teacher. Teachers in pri-
vate schools usually live in the school and are often
called upon for duties outside their classrooms.
But sometimes those duties consist of attending
a beautiful concert or a fine play! Whenever a
teacher mentions to me the necessity for prepara-
tion of the next day’s work, after she has finished
her classes for the day, I think of the young law-
yer who lives down my street and the bulging
brief case he brings home with him each night.

“But Saturdays and Sundays are, ordinarily,
whole holidays to the teacher. And the summer!
No other profession, certainly, gives a young
woman the entire summer as a vacation, with its
opportunity for travel, for further study, for leis-
urely reading.

“Tnordinately heavy work? Yes, in many com-
munities too much is required of the teachers. On
the other hand, I do feel that we have not been
as clever as we might in devising ways for saving
ourselves. In the matter of test papers, for in-
stance, the pupils themselves may correct their
own or each other’s. This helps the pupils as wellEdna Watson Bailey 143

ea

 

as saving yourself long hours of labor. After all,
14 is the pupil, not the teacher, who needs the edu-
cation of correcting his mistakes.

“Monotonous? If a teacher’s work is monoto-
nous, I honestly feel it is largely her own fault.
Monotonous when you are working with children
or young people, every one different? Monoto-
nous when new waysof teaching are being tried on
every side today—and a teacher has only to look
about her and read or study in one of the many
summer school courses to have those ideas for her
own and to try them in her own classroom? I re-
fuse to admit the monotony!

“Underpaid? Yes, too often. But teachers’ sal.
aries are being increased. And will be increased
still further, I feel, when we teachers work to
improve the quality of our teaching and to make
our communities realize the value of what we are
doing.”

It was difficult to hold Dr. Bailey to herself,
to her own work. But I persisted. The University
High School, I learned, is an adjunct of the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley. It includes the
seventh grade through the twelfth, a six year
course. Any boy or girl in California is eligible
to attend this school. Besides the regular teachers,
each semester there are a number of student
teachers, graduates of the University of Cali-
fornia, who are given an opportunity, as part of144 Girls Who Did

 

the course which leads them to a teaching diplo-
ma, to teach in this school, thus putting their
theory into practice.

“Training to be a teacher?” continued Dr.
Bailey—irresistibly! “It is almost as varied as
the kinds of teaching, it would seem. No girl who
wishes to be a teacher is shut off from the oppor-
tunity of a normal school, for they are to be
found everywhere. The length of the course
varies from one, two, three to four years, with a
lengthening of the shorter ones, year after year.
In twenty-six states there are to be found today
teachers’ colleges, requiring a high school diploma
for admission, and giving a course four years in
length.

“Most secondary schools ask a college degree
of their teachers. And a young woman who wishes
to teach in a college or university will, of course,
attend college, specializing there in the subject
which she most desires to teach, and going on to
graduate work and degrees.

“Which brings me to something that I should
like to shout from the housetops! Let every girl
who wishes to be a teacher obtain as much educa-
tion as she possibly can, broad, general education
which will enrich life for her as well as train her to
teach something. And let her live, along the way,
welcoming every opportunity she has to become
intimately acquainted with children. The girl
who has younger brothers and sisters is storingEdna Watson Bailey 145

 

up for herself valuable knowledge should she be-
come a teacher. The girl who borrows her small
cousin or her neighbors’ children for playtime is
learning much that will be of later use to her.
What matter if she in time becomes a teacher of
high school young people, or college students?
They were children once, and our psychologists
are showing us how inextricably related are their
childhood days to the quirks and the twists of
their mature dispositions. Specialize in children!”

“You had your own, Dr. Bailey,” I said.

“Yes, I married a physician the year after I
finished my college course.”

“And you kept on teaching?”

“For the first two years only. Then I left the
profession for a few years, returning to it in 1916,
in the University High School. My husband died
in 1919.”

Here, I thought, was a brave woman. For
seven years she has been shouldering the weight
of a small family which looks to her for support.
But Dr. Bailey did not talk of courage. Teaching,
to her, is a challenge, not a burden. Nor does she,
for a moment, feel sorry for herself.

“You can imagine how thankful I was that I
was trained for a profession and could step into
it, at once, when the need arose. Too often, mar-
riage itself is a goal to girls. They do not realize
that they must go on developing, if they and their
families would be happy. And what an asset in146 Girls Who Did

 

asneaac Bo

their marriage—even though they do not continue
with work outside the home—is the realization
that they are equipped to combat whatever cir-
cumstances may arise of financial necessity.
“Formerly, very few young women continued
teaching after marriage. In some places married
women, and especially married mothers, are still
debarred from the public schools. But this is pass-
ing. Detroit is a notable exception. There the
experiment is now being tried of urging all its
teachers who marry to stay in the profession.
School officials there say the plan works very

well.”
4 “What a world of good a teacher can do!” I
cried.
Pal “Please,” protested this mother of two young
La “a daughters, “don’t put it that way. Children hate

‘being done good to’ and I sympathize with them.
Surely a child has a right to self-respect. Who am
I to do good to a child? But codperation is an-
other thing. Offered wisely, it transforms the
school for the children. It transforms the school-
room for the teacher. Codperation. It is a new
day.

“Teachers are coming to realize that they need
not be policemen to the young—should not be, in
fact. How much more fun just to be friends and,
as friends, to grow together! The children will
help the teacher. The teacher will help the
children.

metaEdna Watson Bailey 147

 

“Have you been in the new kind of: school?
The school that does not say, ‘We are preparing
children for life,’ but, “This zs life?? The school
that uses everything around it, as well as what is
in the class room—the parks, the streets, the
stores? If schools are cut off from life, they be-
come an artificial thing. But if they are not—!
I could tell you of a class of girls who are learn-
ing child hygiene by assisting in a day nursery.
I could tell you of manual training classes who
have made bird houses for parks. I could tell you
of high school students whose editing of their high
school paper counts in their English work.
Schools—living things.”

Here was vision. Small wonder that Dr.
Bailey’s pupils think of her with gratitude.
Teaching, to her, is not a plodding means of earn-
ing a necessary living. It is a noble, human task.
When all teachers know children as she knows
them, and love children as she loves them, and
trust children as she trusts them, schoolrooms
will attract children, and teachers, as never before.

“But a teacher is not always free!’ I ex-
claimed.

“No,” she replied, “too frequently communi-
ties clamp down, hostilely, upon their teachers.
Very often they say in effect, ‘These youngsters
are bothering us. Take ’em off our hands for
three-quarters of the day. Teach ’em to read and
write and spell—oh, teach ’em anything!’ And148 Girls Who Did

they begrudge money spent for equipment which
would help make interesting days of tread-mill
ones.

“What can teachers do then? They can teach
their communities as well as the children. Help
the parents—who vote—to realize what they, the
teachers, are trying to accomplish. A school is
part of the community. It does its best work
when it uses the community, and the community
uses it. It remains for the teacher to make the
community understand.”

“And when it does?”

“When it does—listen! There is a school where
the younger children keep pets in the back yard,
learning physiology, foods and many other
things by caring for them. Slightly older children
there learn their arithmetic by running the school
store, selling notebooks, pads, pencils and other
necessary school supplies. Being in a large city,
they use that city, going to the docks, the ferries,
the factories, the stores, the art galleries, the
museums, returning to write poems about what
they have seen, or with new understanding for the
clothes that they wear and the food that they eat.
The children in this school are not mere numbers.
Each child is an individual, a person, more inter-
ested in some things than in others, perhaps
selfish, or shy or bold. But a person and treated
as such. Think of the teachers in this school.
Lessons? No, children—and adventures withiy
4 7

Edna Watson Bailey 149

 

them. Patience? Yes, the teachers there need
plenty of it. Failures? They know those, too. But
just as the children are experimenting with this
and that and learning as they go, so the teachers
in this school are experimenting with this and that
way of teaching and learning as they go.

“It is the dawn of a new day.”

The same week in which Dr. Bailey talked
with me of teaching, Eloise, the self-reliant, was
overheard by her mother to say to her younger
sister—and her mother told me—“Now, Gene-
vieve, there is no reason at all why you can’t build
your own house, if you put your blocks this way.
See—Miss Dunbar showed me. Now yow do it.”SRE LIE

Spt
eat Eat

bmn

Siac

a

q

Marion SPRAGUE GILMORE

A girl who started
to be a singer and became
a dietitianSHYBAS)  bwup rose

 

 

 

 

 

 

=I ee MARION SPRAGUE
=\\Ml es Bee GILMORE

 

 

 

ig HAT a_back-
“aS ground: A ton of
“a ripe olives, pies in profu-
sion, breasts and breasts
and breasts of chicken, a carload of little fat
Brussels sprouts, raspberry sherbet in vats, and
cake, cake, cake! But Marion Gilmore was unbe-
wildered. This huge aluminum kitchen was her
natural habitat. She is executive dietitian at the
Pennsylvania Hotel in New York, one of the
Statler chain of hotels, and the largest single
hotel in the world.

But she wasn’t always executive dietitian.
Once she was a little girl in Swanton, Vermont,
who loved to smell food, and eat food, and pre-
pare food. Others, however, were less cordial to
her enthusiasm. The cook, for instance. Somehow
Mary objected to having a six-year-old under
her feet in the kitchen, dabbling in the bread
dough.

“Go away,” said Mary. “You're bothering

93

me.
153154 Girls Vho Did

 

“Apologize,” said Charles Gilmore, the usually
indulgent father. Marion said nothing at all.

She said nothing because she was thinking
deeply. How could she get on the good side of
Mary, and thereby win the privilege of stirring
up bread, and cake, and pies? By flattering her,
of course. By saying that her biscuits were simply
galuptious—and then Marion knew what she was
going to do! She rushed into the kitchen, inter-
cepted Mary just as she drew a pan of red-hot
biscuits from the oven, stood on her tip-toes, and
kissed them! The next day there was a blister on
her mouth. But there was something else in her
heart. Forgiveness from Mary. And the promise
oe that soon, very soon, she could play with pie-crust
4 , in the pantry.

Miss Gilmore didn’t laugh as she told me this
story. Perhaps the memory of her delightful
childhood was upon her. There was the time she
called on the wife of a Methodist preacher who
lived next door and sniffed the air like a young
colt. “I'll bet that sage-dressing doesn’t taste as
good as it smells,” said she, significantly, to Mrs.
Tupper. There was the time she first watched
Grandmother Gilmore pickling peaches and pre-
serving quinces. . . . There was the time Grand-
mother Sprague taught her, patiently, to make
pie-crust. . . . There was the Sunday she slid
down the nearby gully, not once but many

Rae?
ee

Ae.

—- eb esMarion Sprague Gilmore 155

 

times, as the only appropriate climax to rice pud-
ding at a friend’s house. There was the time she
asserted her small ego by calmly sitting down, in
the midst of a Maypole dance, to lace up the
ribbons of her ballet slippers. . . . There were
the innumerable times she tried to run away to
Troy—Troy, New York.

“And all through your childhood you were
interested in food?’ I asked Miss Gilmore.

“Always! I even kept a scrap-book for special
recipes. I had, as a mere child, a great ambition to
serve a meal beautifully.”

Most children love their mother’s kitchen, but
if they cook anything, it is to boil a watery fudge
which declines to harden. Not so Marion Gilmore.
Her first culinary achievement was pop-overs
which popped! So light they were, so golden-
brown, so just right, that presently the little girl
was parading around the neighborhood demon-
strating pop-overs.

Miss Gilmore must have read the surprise on
my face.

“It isn’t so amazing,” she declared, in her mat-
ter-of-fact manner. “It was merely that my
mother let me share in the work of our home and
taught me how to do it well. She was most par-
ticular about the house. Everything had to be
thus and so, immaculate.”

I looked at the shining pans. She was her
mother’s daughter. .. .eee
oa.

Petes,

156 Girls Who Did

 

“So,” said I, “even then you wanted to grow
up and be a dietitian?”

“No,” she replied slowly. “Music appealed to
me more. I remember listening to Nellie, my little
chum, play The Doll’s Dream and wishing, pas-
sionately, that I could play it. I asked my father
to buy me a piano. And he did. Whereupon I
learned, proudly, to play. Later, I began to sing.
At that time to become a singer was my great
ambition. After I was graduated from high
school, I studied music at the New England Con-
servatory and later under Madame Munger.
Then my father had financial reverses, and well,
you know the rest.”

Yes, I knew the rest. But, strangely, I couldn’t
bring myself to be sorry. The world had lost a
singer and gained a dietitian. Was that a matter
for sorrow?

From music to domestic science was a consid-
erable wrench. Marion Gilmore went to Simmons
College in Boston for some special subjects. Then
she completed a course at Miss Farmer’s School
of Cookery in the same city and she became
director of domestic science at the Malden high
school. One position led to another. She was die-
titian in the St. Luke’s hospital in Chicago. She
was manager of the Swift Industrial Cafeteria in
Omaha. She managed the tea room in the Sheri-
dan-Plaza Hotel in Chicago. A friend then per-
suaded her to return to hospital work, and forMarion Sprague Gilmore 157

 

three years she was buyer and dietitian at the
Chicago Henrotian Hospital. And now she is
back in the “hotel game,” this time in the Penn-
sylvania Hotel of New York City.

“Which do you like better,” I asked, “the hos-
pital field or the commercial field?” I knew that
dietetics are divided roughly, into two classes:
dietetics for sick people and dietetics for well
people.

She didn’t hesitate for the fraction of an in-
stant. “The commercial,” she said. ““T'o me, hos-
pitals are tiresome because of the routine,
although I have friends who prefer hospital work
to any other.”

She didn’t look as if she had ever, from the
time she was born, found anything tiresome,
anything depressing. There was an open-air qual-
ity about the woman. For the moment, I got no
hint of pop-overs or The Doll’s Dream or a dieti~
tian’s office. She looked like green hills and a long
stride. Was her bobbed hair responsible for the
illusion, or her heather-colored tweed suit, or her
substantial oxfords?

“What, exactly, are your duties here at the
Pennsylvania?’ I asked.

“TI supervise the serving of five meals a day to
twenty-three hundred employees. Since hotel
guests order a la carte, there is no dietary kitchen
for the main guests’ dining room, although it is
true a few resort hotels do maintain such a158 Girls Who Did

 

kitchen. I have my own kitchen, my own crew.
I serve three full-sized meals a day, a nine-in-the-
evening lunch, and a midnight supper for the
night cleaners. By giving them a good square
meal, I manage to keep them well and happy and
eager to cooperate.

“T plan the menus for all these meals. I order
the supplies. I supervise the preparing and serv-
ing of the food. I employ the staff. And see that
adequate records are kept. And I enjoy it all,”
she said. “I enjoy it because of what I do. And I
enjoy it because I realize that every day of my
experience is giving me something of value in
the field of dietetics. Nota year goes by but I have
opportunity to enter this or that other interesting
position. Yet I am distinctly not a genius in this
work. It is merely that the demand for trained
and experienced dietitians exceeds the supply.

“More and more people are coming to realize
the importance of right food. For every dietitian
who goes out from her training course, I would
say that six are in demand. Hospitals need them,
colleges, schools, cafeterias, hotels, tea rooms,
social centers, medical centers, all kinds of insti-
tutions. Summer camps need them. High schools
need them as teachers in the domestic science
classes.

“It is a promising field for the girl who enjoys
going into the kitchen, who doesn’t mind beingMarion Sprague Gilmore 159

 

cook at house parties or on camp trips, with the
important consideration, I would say, that of
securing good training. If a girl can afford it, I
would recommend that she plan, to attend college,
taking her courses in home economics as part of
her college education. The most important and
interesting positions in the field of dietetics are
increasingly being filled by young women who
are college graduates.

“But a college degree is not necessary. A two-
year intensive course in dietetics will fit a girl to
occupy a good position in this field. And if she
later finds that more training is desirable, she can
arrange to take it. State universities and colleges
offer this training. And there are special schools
of home economics. The girl who is interested
should inquire about them.”

“But what if a girl cannot afford any train-
ing?” I asked.

“It is the same in this field as in many others,”
replied Miss Gilmore. “It is possible to learn by
experience. Many young women who have not
had special dietetic training have successfully
managed tea rooms or lunch rooms. And some
have had their own enterprises and have made
them a financial success.

“I could take you to a woman, not far from
here, who has never studied in any such course,
yet who is in charge of a large restaurant. She160 Girls Who Did

 

has worked in restaurants for many years and
during that time has gained a valuable knowl-
edge of what the general public likes to eat, away
from home. Her restaurant is especially popular
with men. It is thronged with them during the
lunch period.”

“And I know a woman who was always a
splendid housekeeper,” I added. “She and her
husband bought a little place near a large girls’
camp. One summer she decided to open a tea

v room, specializing in chicken and waffles. It has
i been a great success. And when I talked with her
about it not long ago, she said that planning
and cooking her own meals at home and also the
i innumerable church suppers of which she used to
4 + be chairman gave her just the experience she
| needed for her tea room.”

“Exactly,” said Miss Gilmore. “If, however, a
uf girl wishes to get into such special work as hos-
| ( , pital dietetics, I would say that training is essen-
i tial. There are certain phases of scientific feeding
which only the scientist is qualified to teach. 'The
results of the latest research work along nutri-
tional lines are given in the class room. A study
is made of those special diets needed to remedy
bad bodily conditions. Courses in chemistry of

foods are included in the curriculum.

“In short, I would say that if a young woman
is interested in this field and has opportunity toeae a ee ee ee ae ee

Marion Sprague Gilmore 161

take training in it, she should consider carefully
before she chooses the longer road of learning by
experience. Training first, experience afterward
is what I believe to be wisest in the end.

“Another advantage which I would mention
in connection with the field of dietetics is the
variety of openings. A girl is not limited in her
choice. She can choose the surroundings that most
appeal to her in almost any part of the country,
for people eat everywhere! She wil] perhaps
become an assistant in the dietetic work of a large
organization. Or she may be put in charge of it
in a smaller enterprise. If she proves that she has
executive ability and can direct the work of
others, as well as accomplish her own dietetic
work effectively, she will almost certainly be able
to step into a more important administrative
position.

“There are draw-backs, of course. Most dieti-
tians have to stand constantly on their feet. Often
the hours are long. There are crises when the
very sight of food is distasteful. And there are
the inevitable difficulties that daily arise in any
work that involves numbers of people. But to
me the thing-in-itself is sufficiently interesting to
carry me over these difficulties. And I believe it
will be for any girl who finds this work decidedly
to her taste.

“But even this is not all. I like to think of what

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iH162 Girls Who Did

 

dietitians everywhere are doing for the health
of this country. The importance of a wholesome
diet cannot be underestimated. Some dietitians
are engaged in directly educating people what to
eat. But I believe that all of us are having a very
real share in this important health education.
Wherever an excellently balanced and well-
cooked meal is served, I am certain that not only
are those served benefiting by it when they eat it;
I believe that they carry away with them a mem-
ory of it which will help to guide them in future
choices of food. I know that much of what I
learned at home was not consciously taught me
by my mother. I absorbed it simply by being
where certain things were done well. It is the
same way with well chosen food.”

We were standing now in the pastry room of
the hotel guests’ dining room, among the devil’s
food cake stuffed with thick marshmallow, little
tea cakes, French pastry, hazel-nut wafers, and
crusty peach pies. What a fabulous setting for
the little girl, grown tall, who had a double
dream: to play the piano and to concoct a cocoa
nut cake. Half the dream, at least, has come true.
Did her father, when he told Marion, laughingly,
that she would have to “move the piano into the
kitchen or the stove into the parlor,’ ever suspect
that Marion would some day, figuratively, mov¢
the piano into the kitchen? For Mr. Statler’sMarion Sprague Gilmore 163

gigantic kitchen is, today, her business; music is
her recreation.
“Won’t you have a cake?” said Miss Gilmore
in her hostess voice, not her executive voice.
“Thanks,” said I, and sank my unreluctant
teeth into a rich chocolate eclair,

   
  
     

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=4Prcey Hoyt

A girl who
had a knack
with clothesPEGGY HOYT

T was fitting that I should talk to Peggy
Hoyt in the presence of strawberries and
tulips. Especially when the regal red of the straw-
berries matched both the gown she wore and the
mouth into which the strawberries disappeared so
daintily. Especially when the tulips were Febru-
ary tulips, and lavender-flowered, green-leafed,
black-seeded. The green blended with the wall
just behind it. The lavender, dyed a delicate blue
at center, added just the right touch of
“Tenderness,” said Peggy Hoyt. “To me,
always, mauve and lavender say tenderness.”
She spoke simply, unaffectedly. This was no
color dictum, no professional statement. It was
as if a child had looked upon color, and delighted.
No wonder Aubrey Eads, her very adequate hus-
band, calls her on occasion “my child.” After all,
167aoa nsec:

Senet GR EES

168 Girls Who Did

 

didn’t the Earl of Surrey in the sixteenth century
say and with insight, that most people “are child-
like in the best things, till they be cradled in their
grave’?

Yet this particular “child” is the main prop of
Peggy Hoyt, Incorporated. She it is who creates
the hats and cloaks and gowns which have made
her famous, who arbitrates among her customers
and her employees with a monumental tact, who
has forced the great French dressmakers to mur-
mur “genius.” With her unerring fashion-sense,
she is able to anticipate almost every style. Very
often she innovates. She was the first, for in-
stance, since Madame Pompadour, to imitate the
ancient turban of the Rajahs with the modern
draped crown; the first to trim hats with embroid-
ery; the first to use the rhinestone ornaments
which were the “rage” in 1925.

The story of these rhinestone ornaments illus-
trates, very well, one of the Peggy Hoyt methods
of designing. Method, here, is half accident. In
doing the original costumes for The Merry
Widow, she fastened little rhinestone wings on
the heels of the dancing slippers. But, owing to
their interference with stepping, they were
straightway discarded. A week or so later, while
experimenting with the black satin of a turban
of a society woman who is more beautiful in a
black-and-white way than any other society
woman is supposed to be, Peggy Hoyt stuck twoPeggy Hoyt 169

 

of the rhinestone wings into her hat. Charming!
The very cap of Mercury. ... And the style
was set.

But she has other more definitely planned
methods of creation. Sometimes Peggy Hoyt
starts with a color combination, sometimes with
a textile combination, sometimes with a novel
decoration, sometimes with a re-adaptation of an
age-old style. This re-adaptation of historical
costumes is perhaps the richest source of present-
day fashions. From time to time the Empire
influence is in the ascendancy, or the Greek, or
the Russian peasant, or the early Egyptian.
Often two periods are picturesquely combined.
But more often, I think, Peggy Hoyt gets an
idea seemingly out of the blue void and waits for
the inspiration—for it is an inspiration—which
will incorporate it, enchantingly, into an original
costume.

“Suppose, for instance,” she confided over her
strawberries, “that I wanted to use these tulips
in a gown. At first it might appear impossible.
Tulips! And then, suddenly, a means of getting
their color or their shape would present itself.
Perhaps they would turn out to be a bold tulip-
border around the bottom of a dress and up the
skirt.”

I looked at the tulips in question. Without
being at all sentimental, I saw Peggy Hoyt as
a flower. The colorof tulips, I mused, but not these

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170 Girls Who Did

 

tulips. . . . They were such sturdy little fellows.
_. . What flower, then? Not snapdragons,
though they were mighty near it... . Wild
Columbiné! That was it! They are a deeper lav-
ender, more delicate on their stems, and very gay
in the wind. Yes—wild columbine!

But I was wandering from the practical. De-
signing is a serious profession with hazards,
handicaps, spurs, and set-backs. It requires a
great talent for clothes and, if the designer runs
her own shop, a talent for dealing with people.
Women are prone to be inordinately fussy when
it comes to purchasing their wardrobe. They
want this concession; they want that price; they
demand special consideration; they declare that
the gown was not delivered as promised; they
fume about the alterations; they long, so, to be
flattered.

“But we won’t flatter them,” said Mr. Eads,
who is the business partner of his wife, “even
though we realize that flattery will make a woman
buy anything. A frock is, or it is not, becoming.
A hat is, or it is not, chic.”

Peggy’s creations are chic. It is this essential
smartness upon which the high reputation of
her establishment rests. Women are proud to be
seen sitting in her salon.

Peggy Hoyt was born (in Saginaw, Michigan)
with a feeling for fashion. She used to sit up in
her high-chair and draw circles with tails attachedPeggy Hoyt 171

 

and insist upon calling these tad-poles “ladies.”
Later, as a child in New York, she made exquisite
eight-inch paper dolls which were the envy of
every little girl in the neighborhood. She put
hats on them, and dresses, and coats that weren’t
ordinary coats. At twelve, ambitious to be a
sketcher, she drew little place-cards which caused
at least one man to say: “Lovely! Go to it,
Peggy!”

An only child, she was sent to a finishing school
in New Jersey, and rebelled. Pratt Institute in
Brooklyn, where she studied design after her
father’s death, was more to her liking. Even then,
in spite of her mother’s decision that she, and
not her daughter, should go into the commercial
world, Peggy plotted to go into business. She
came home one day to announce, “I’ve gone into
millinery.”

Peggy was indispensable in that millinery shop.
She had a decided knack with hats. When the
proprietor brought in a shipment of French hats,
she it was who tried them on at just the correct
angle. In the actual making of millinery, she
was adroit. Both her fingers and her imagination
could travel fast.

At the end of a year’s apprenticeship, she went
into the hat business for herself. Everyone said
she was a little mad. But they admired her pluck.
Her boarding school friends were ardent custom-
ers and ardent press-agents. They, in turn, but-ipa cage ek

gente Sele aa ateeatctepme tot
Fenny,

172 Girls Who Did

 

tonholed their friends with a, “You've got to buy
a hat from Peggy!” But the real reason for the
success of Peggy Hoyt’s shop near Forty-second
Street on the Avenue was the brave originality,
the sheer beauty, of her hat models.

When Forty-second Street became hopelessly
congested, Peggy moved her shop to the old
Philip Rhinelander house on Fifty-Fifth. There
is a delicacy about the finishing there, a dignity
about the marble staircase, which reflects admir-
ably the spirit of the woman. She started at her
new place of business to make dresses which were
as stunning as her hats. There was youth in their
lines, youth in their colors. It is as if Peggy
Hoyt could repeat, in her frocks, that motto on
King Edward’s sundial which long ago she took
as her own:

“Let others tell of rains and showers,
“TI only record the sunny hours.”

Something of that joyous spirit was in the cos-
tume she wore the first day I saw her—a rich red
leather coat relieved with beige fur, a red close-
draped hat, and a red purse touched, audaciously,
with purple. “The best dressed woman?” Yes, in
the artist’s sense.

“Color,” said Miss Hoyt. “So much can be ex-
pressed through it. Once, perhaps because 1 was
dressed in red as a child, or because red was as-
sociated in my mind with wickedness, I had aPeggy Hoyt 173

 

prejudice against all reds. The Moscow Art
Theater converted me. Now I use red without
hesitation.”

“You love color,” I said. “Have you any other
special enthusiasms in clothes?”

She nodded. “Soft fronts,” said she. “Women
love them, you know. A bit of chiffon or lace
at the throat.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Long lines. They seem to me so much more
artistic than short, choppy lines.”

“Artistic!” She approaches her medium of ex-
pression from the same angle that artists in paint,
or clay, or words, approach their medium. Color,
contour, harmony, contrast. . . . Designing,
then, at its best, is an art, in that the designer
takes known materials, puts them together in a
new and heretofore unknown way, and produces
a thing of beauty.

Shall the girl who thinks that she would like
to become a designer go about it as Peggy Hoyt
did? Yes—even though there are not many with
her superlative gift.

“If you have a way with clothes,” says Peggy
Hoyt, “if you enjoy the very touch of the needle,
if you revel in yards of new material, you may
know that you at least have aptitude for the
work.”

But what comes next?

“That depends,” continues Peggy Hoyt. “Ain ah ta OI

Ag eR EE REE *

Cae oe eee ae or
oat me ha paca

174 Girls Who Did

 

course in an excellent school of design will help
you. There are more such schools today than there
were when I started out, although my alma
mater still ranks high. And there are few large
cities without at least elementary courses in de-
sign.”

Girls of all degrees of education are admitted
to these schools of design. You need not have a
college degree to enter them. High school and
grammar school graduates are equally welcome
provided they have aptitude for this work and a
thorough knowledge of dressmaking. This know]-
edge of dressmaking may be gained through prac-
tical experience anywhere—at home, in a work-
shop, or in a dressmaking course such as is offered
in many schools.

Any excellent course in dress design is shaped
to meet the practical needs of the professional
designer. A designer must be able to plan a gar-
ment in detail, to sketch a model, drape and cut
the material and, in case of necessity, do the
actual sewing. Courses in design teach these steps,
enabling the student to work with all kinds of
materials. Students also study the costumes of
other days, making original designs adapted from
the earlier styles. They visit museums and art
galleries. They attend fashion shows where they
see the most recent creations of world-famous
designers. In short, they study clothes wherever
and whenever they are displayed. They turn tePeggy Hoyt 175

 

paintings and beautiful objects for inspiration
in the motifs of their designs. And as long as they
continue in this field they will study clothes and
beautiful things in this way.

“But whether the shop work comes before or
afterward or ‘with’ a course in design,” says
Peggy Hoyt, “it must come sometime. No girl
who is serious in her wish to progress as a de-
signer can dispense with it. She must serve her
apprenticeship there.”

And so the choice of the shop becomes highly
important. It will inevitably be a workshop in a
large city, for that is where opportunities for de-
signers are to be found. If you can enter one
that is known for the originality and craftsman-
ship of its creations, you are fortunate. Here,
no matter how humble or routine the tasks which
are given you to perform, you will see gowns
and other garments in all stages of construction.
You will see how the work is planned and or-
ganized. You will be able to watch the head de-
signers who preside over the various work tables,
as they go about the details of their tasks. You
will see them combine colors, adapt a popular
style in various ways. Often these heads are
given cost limits beyond which they may not go.
The apprentice becomes acquainted with the
economies which keep a design within those cost
limits yet do not sacrifice effectiveness. The more
capable the head worker under whom a girl works,so bad clea »

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176 Girls Who Did

the more valuable her workshop experience will
be to her.

And if your work is skillfully executed, if in
the opportunities which are given you for making
decisions you show instinctive good taste, you
are taking the first steps toward becoming a head
designer, in charge of a table, as the group of
girls who carry out designs is called.

Many girls in workshops today have a story
not unlike that of Peggy Hoyt, even though they
may not have her ability. Some are girls who,
in their small home towns, enjoyed sewing and
became local dressmakers, later going to a city
for their course in design and workshop experi-
ence. Not all have become head designers. Not
all will ever become head designers. In any field,
there are always fewer heads than workers. But
they have found work to their taste.

Designing is not, however, a field without diffi-
culties. A girl must work in a room where the
noise of whirring machines is sometimes unbear-
able, yet she must bear it. There are rush seasons,
because women buy most of their clothes during
certain limited times of the year and the clothes
must be ready for them to buy. During these
rush seasons, a girl must work feverishly, often
overtime. If mistakes are made, there is some:
times little sympathy from the head of the work-
room, who is herself rushed and tired. Much de-
pends upon the person under whom a girl servesPeggy Hoyt 177

 

her apprenticeship. She may be a sympathetic
woman, interested in helping a beginner and giv-
ing her the benefit of her own experience. Or
she may be a woman jealous of any real ability
in her assistants. Every beginner is apt to meet
injustice and jealousy.

For those who, like Peggy Hoyt, combine
craftsmanship and an instinctive feeling for style
with a desire to sell the clothes that are made,
there is the possibility of later opening a shop of
their own. Peggy Hoyt is an able business
woman. Without becoming the driver into which
many professional women degenerate, she is
never betrayed by her gentleness into bad busi-
ness. It is her belief that a woman, whether she
has a vocation or an avocation, should be, like
the French, “of the salon.” Business is not in-
compatible with femininity, she declares. And
to demonstrate this, she remains the delicate
thing which is, inimitably, Peggy Hoyt.

“Eventually,” said someone—I forget whether
it was Peggy Hoyt or Aubrey Eads—“New
York will be a Mecca of fashions. Americans
have an instinctive good taste in the clothes they
wear. Our designers are original. They are dar-
ing. Yes, before many years have passed, New
York will be a Mecca of fashions.”

Good news, surely, for the girl who is interested
in design.e—May LAMBERTON BECKER

A girl
who liked
public speakingtlMAY
LAMBERTON
BECKER

 

HE boys of

the high school
had a Literary
Club and a certain
girl in the Fresh-
man class envied
them. For she
loved books. A
Club whose meet-
ings were all about
books seemed to her the most delightful kind that
could possibly be. But she couldn’t belong. Only
boys were admitted.

“Then why isn’t there a Literary Club for
girls?” she asked her friends.

None of them knew.

She carried her question to her teachers and
discovered the reason. There wasn’t a Literary
Club for girls just then, but there had been. In
fact, during the twenty years that the boys’ club
had been flourishing, no fewer than nineteen girls’
book clubs had sprung up, only to die out.

“But why?” persisted the Freshman. “Girls
181

 

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182 Girls Who Did

like books as much as boys, if not more so. Why
should the girls’ clubs always stop?”

The more she found out about the unsuccessful
clubs, the more firmly was she convinced she
could see the reason and the more determined she
became that she and her friends would start a
Literary Club that would not die out. For by this
time, not only the Freshman but nine of her most
‘ntimate friends had decided to have such a club
for themselves before they left school.

But when should they start it? At first their
feeling was that they must wait until their Junior
year. Then, as upper classmen, the club would
have a more important start.

The Freshman did some more thinking. Then
she called the nine together. “I don’t think we'd
better wait,” she told them. “The reason the other
girls’ book clubs died out is because they didn’t
get going soon enough. And then when they did
start, they took in only Seniors as members. By
the end of the year, when they took in J uniors,
there wasn’t time enough for the Juniors to get
the hang of planning interesting meetings. I
think we'd better start next year, as Sophomores.
Then when we are Juniors, we’ll—” she paused,
then finished with a rush. “We'll work it like the
Constitution of the United States and the Sena-
tors. Every year we'll take in new members from
the Sophomore Class, so that by the time we
graduate, there’ll be members who have been in
for two years and some who’ve been in one yearMay Lamberton Becker 183

 

and some who are new. And the officers and com-
mittees will all know what’s what.”

Her enthusiasm carried the day. The girls
would have their Literary Club and they would
have it as Sophomores. And this time it would
last. Of that they were certain. Was not their
constitution to be modeled upon that of the
United States?

Their enthusiasm and their confidence were
well-founded. The Alpha Sigma Society, organ-
ized that year by May Lamberton and her nine
friends, was destined to be an important part of
that high school for twenty-five years, dissolved
then only because fraternities and sororities were
abolished and living in spirit today under another
name. Its graduate members were to be widely
scattered, but as women grown they were always
to look back upon their club meetings as hours
that gave them a new understanding of books.

For Alpha Sigma meetings were always inter-
esting. Its first president, May Lamberton, estab-
lished that tradition from the start. Each week
the Club discussed one author, either one then
living or one who had written in the immediate
past. One girl gave a sketch of his life. Another
presented an analysis of his work, based upon her
own reading of what he had written. Another
gave readings of his work, making her selections
herself. For the young President was very stern
about the use of anthologies. Alpha Sigma mem-
bers must do their own reading and thinking.

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184 Girls Who Did

And while what others thought and said about an
author was interesting and to be considered, cer-
tainly, nevertheless those opinions were not
Alpha Sigma’s.

It was a point of view which made each Alpha
Sigma meeting an event. Differences of opinion
were frequent, precipitating lively discussions.
Books and their authors mattered as they had
never mattered before. And membership in the
girls’ Literary Club became a thing coveted.

Although she was then quite unaware of its
significance for her, the organizing and planning
of Alpha Sigma was to the young, fourteen-year-
old Sophomore a definite start upon the work for
which she was later to be known throughout our
own country and in many others. For today there
is no one who has done more to make books real
and vital to people everywhere than May Lam-
berton Becker.

The Reader’s Guide of The Saturday Review
of Literature is May Lamberton Becker. Each
week, her mail bulks large with letters from those
who wish suggestions for their reading. She an-
swers as many of these questions as she can in her
columns in The Saturday Review. The rest re-
ceive her help through the mail.

“What are the most interesting novels laid in
Colonial times?” someone asks her. Or, “What
are the best college stories?’ Or, “What books
give directions for making model airplanes?”
Every question you can imagine comes wingingi

May Lamberton Becker 185

 

in, and many that occur to few of us. May Lam-
berton Becker answers them all.

Each month in The Scholastic, Mrs. Becker
tells about those new books which she has found
most interesting and worthwhile for boys and
girls of high school age. She suggests those that
wil be interesting for book club discussions, with
many a smile to herself over her memory of cer-
tain Alpha Sigma sessions.

She conducts discussion groups on new books.
She lectures on books widely, traveling to many
distant parts of the United States. Through the
years, she has found time to gather her lectures
and writings into books of her own which have
been called guideposts for readers—“The Read-
er’s Guide,” “Adventures in Reading,” “Golden
Tales of Our America,” “Golden Tales of the
Old South.”

And upon the first page of St. Nicholas maga-
zine today there appear the words, “May Lam-
berton Becker, Literary Editor.” The girl to
whom reading was a fascinating adventure is
now engaged in making a magazine for the boys
and girls of today. Every page in it is important
to her, for there must be printed something which
is interesting to read. And just as, in her own
high school days, she was eager to make the Alpha
Sigma meetings something that every member
looked forward to with keenest anticipation, so
today her hopes for each issue of St. Nicholas
are the same. Nor does she forget that, in those

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186 Girls Who Did

 

days of her girlhood, it was this same St. Nicholas
which was her own, adored magazine, coming
through the mails to her each month.

The then eager-eyed young Sophomore had
much to learn and much to do before she could be-
come the lecturer and the author and the editor of
today. And there were important years, too, be
fore her teens. What of them?

May Lamberton Becker cannot remember
when or how she learned to read. But she does
clearly recall the days before she could do so. She
was born into a family of readers. Books were
everywhere about her home. And as soon as she
grew old enough to notice such things, she real-
ized that there was something very special about
a book. Her mother and her father sat down,
opened a book—and something happened to
them. An expression of happiness stole across
their faces and into their eyes. Small though she
was, she was nevertheless old enough to want
that something to happen to her, too.

“What do you do with a book, Mother?” she
asked.

“T read it, dear,” her mother replied.

“T want to read,” said the little girl.

So the reading lessons started.

Do we go up?
We do go up.
Up, up we go.
We do go up so,May Lamberton Becker 187

 

said the lesson book. And the little girl thought
it extremely silly. So silly, in fact, that she soon
lost interest and the lessons were dropped.

What happened next, no one knows, not even
Mrs. Becker. But there came a day, the year she
was four years old, when she sat on her bed with
a newspaper, apparently reading it, as children
do. Suddenly she laughed.

~What are you laughing at, daughter?” asked
Mrs. Lamberton.

“A joke in the paper,” replied May. “About
a man who snored and his wife made him wear a
clothespin on his nose at night.”

May’s mother smiled and went on with her
work. That child always had had a vivid imagi-
nation. But a visiting aunt was curious and
picked up the paper. Then an expression of
amazement crossed her face. “It’s in the paper!”
she exclaimed.

And it was. Somewhere, somehow, May had
learned to read. And read and read and read she
did, from then on. Not to the exclusion of out-
door fun, however. During the years that fol-
lowed, up to the time she entered high school,
young May Lamberton was taught by her
mother. So much time for learning, and fewer
hours, it is interesting to know, than those in the
school day. Then outdoors to play games chiefly
with the boys of the neighborhood, baseball,
hockey, skating, hopscotch—anything that pre-
sented itself. May Lamberton Becker, today, isAe Ree RET me
pnw row ab aoe S aah aed ,
AA a ee Sh ri TO

188 Girls Who Did

equally grateful for the hours with her mother,
for her books, and for her outdoors.

Then came high school, a land of delight to the
girl who had never before been to school. She
loved her classes. She loved being with other girls
and boys, the day long. And for one of her
teachers she cherishes that special loyalty and
appreciation which we all give to those who tell
us what we hadn’t before known about ourselves.

It was for this teacher’s class that May Lam-
berton made a written review of a book dealing
with certain problems in psychology. It was a
difficult book to read and to understand, and to
write a review of it was no small task. But May’s
review was understandable—what is more, it was
interesting. It cleared up many questions which
had arisen in the minds of the boys and girls who
had already read the book itself. It made the
other members of the class think that they would
enjoy reading it.

And to May Lamberton, at the close of the
class, the teacher said, “There is a great need for
those who can interpret to others what writers
and scientists and other thinkers believe and say.
You are too young as yet to know what you wish
to do. But I believe that you are one of the in-
terpreters.”

It was this same teacher who just before May
was graduated secured for her a certain news-
paper assignment. Living in the neighborhood
was a Civil War General who had many interest-nuh

May Lamberton Becker 189

 

ing stories to tell of his experiences. The local
newspaper, eager to publish his reminiscences,
asked the teacher to interview him and write
them. Too busy to undertake the work, the
teacher summoned May and suggested that she
do it.

But May was busy. An Alpha Sigma election
was imminent. Plans for the coming year, when
she would no longer be there, must be made. She
didn’t see how she could possibly find the time
for the interview, she told him.

He looked at her, then said thoughtfully,
“Yes, you are leaving school shortly. Alpha Sig-
ma is important—yet it is bound to go on. What
of you?”

May saw the point—and departed for the in-
terview.

Not without considerable trepidation, however.
“In fact,” she admits, “I was just plain scared
out of my wits. I forgot my pencil. I forgot my
paper. And I was much too frightened to admit
to the General that I didn’t have a thing with
which to make any notes. So when he began to
talk, piling Civil War dates and battles and num-
bers of regiments on top of each other, well——!”

May’s own father had fought in the Civil War.
She knew how important those dates and battles
and numbers of regiments were. She knew that
Many ‘veterans would read the interview most
critically. And she concentrated as she had never
concentrated before.

TLR RAR alice
RNA OMN Eile net in te Bethea tintin sion om onbionationnaduarte doe

iee NSPS RRR RIOR TES earl ner ert

190 Girls Who Did

 

Rushing back to school, she wrote the inter-
view that same afternoon. Returning with it to
the General, she was deeply gratified over his
approval of what she had done. And she was
more than gratified —‘‘Just plain thrilled,” she
says—to have the newspaper editor ask her to
complete the series. The door to journalism had
been opened for her.

Graduated from high school, she was faced
with an important decision. Should she go on to
college—or enter newspaper work at once! She
was now certain that, college or not, newspaper
work was next for her. And she realized that four
years of college would give her much. But four
years of immediate experience upon a newspaper
would also give her much.

She decided upon the newspaper and has never
regretted the step. She wrote society notes and
church news and did any and every odd job that
is assigned to a cub reporter. She went out on in-
terviews. And she put into even the stupid and
commonplace assignments such a verve and
freshness of vocabulary that when the dramatic
critic fell ill, she was given the. chance to cover
the opening of Clara Morris’ repertory season.
Dramatic critic was her next step.

And then, at twenty, marriage. The creating
of a home was significant and fascinating. The
arrival of a small daughter brought added joy.
Mrs. Becker was very busy, but in between home
duties she made an experiment which was even-wong
iy

May Lamberton Becker I9I

 

tually to lead to her profession of lecturer. Mr.
Becker was head of a music school. At his sug-
gestion that she give talks to his students on musj-
cal history, she planned a series of lectures upon
the subject.

She had always enjoyed public speaking. “In
fact,” she tells the story, “one of the outstanding
events of my high school was our Alpha Sigma
debate with the boys’ Literary Club on, ‘Re-
solved, that suffrage be extended to women.’
And it was my looking up the points against suf-
frage that converted me to it!”

Next came a request from a group of her
friends and acquaintances that she give them a
series of ten lectures on books, to be followed by
a period for discussion and questions and an-
swers. Mrs. Becker accepted the opportunity.
Before the first series closed, not only had this
first group requested another, a second group in
New York City wished her for their own pro-
gram.

From the first, Mrs. Becker’s desire and hope
were to make books real to those who came to
hear her. Not to tell them about books—instead,
to interpret books, to bring the life in the author
into the lives of his readers. As she prepared each
lecture, she thought of those who would come to
hear her. And important and precious as books
were to her, life and living were always far more
umportant—the lives and living of her audience.

iat AR ten a athe inn, ia saben

onIO AGERE SAGO I ON ER A
2 Sa ao ai plane ong Nee poneek ie :
eB ee ay ee eee

192 Girls Who Did

“It is amazing,” she often says today, “how
people feel when they find the right book.”

When more and more and more requests came
for her lectures, she found it necessary to have
a manager who would make her engagements for
her. She was constantly critical of her lectures,
both as regards what she had to say and how she
said it. For she did not wish to develop a lecture
manner. No matter how large an audience might
be, she wished to continue to talk with them, as
friend to fxiend.

When the editor of the New York Evening
Post was looking for a new feature for his paper,
a friend suggested that Mrs. Becker start a
“Question and Answer” column about books.
“There are always at least twice as many ques-
tions as she can answer when she throws her meet-
ings open for discussion,” he said.

The suggestion proved a happy one. People
were, indeed, interested in books. And May Lam-
berton Becker became The Reader’s Guide.

“But how can you know so much about so
many books?” people ask her. “You don’t mean
to say you carry all that around in your head all
the time?”

To this Mrs. Becker shakes her head and
smiles. “Of course I don’t,” she replies. “But I
know where to find out. And I respect the spe-
cialist as I do no one else.”

When a question comes in to her that concerns
some special field, before answering Mrs.May Lamberton Becker 193

 

Becker will write for suggestions to a specialist
in that field. Taking the suggestions he sends
her, she goes to the library and reads the books.
Then she selects those which she feels most nearly
answer her inquirer’s purpose. And so on—and
on.

She herself is a specialist in literature, with a
vivid appreciation for the fine books of the past
as well as for those of distinction which are being
written and published today. Her many years of
intimate association with books have given her
an ability to get at the heart of a book in a re-
markably short time.

But always and ever, “People—not books—
are most important,” she reiterates.

Her work in the field of boys’ and girls’ read-
ing had an interesting beginning. The editor of
The American Girl wished to have a book page
for the Girl Scout readers, each month. Who
should do it? Just at this time, Mrs. Becker hap-
pened to publish on The Reader’s Guide page an
account of a literary pilgrimage which she and
her daughter, now grown, took in England. It
was so exactly the kind of writing which the edi-
tor wished for the girls’ book page that she in-
vited Mrs. Becker to lunch and broached the
plan.

Mrs. Becker hesitated. “I have such respect
for the ’teens,” she said. “Do you think they
would like what I write?”

The editor persisted. The book page became a

Hide ROR Daan rate nhan cin mre te

8

Sores tienen enteric teeth
Kids epee haghedan ae194 Girls Who Did

 

reality. And from it, in time, grew Mrs. Becker’s
book “Adventures in Reading,” written especially
for boys and girls in their ‘teens. |

“The title was suggested to me by my pub-
lisher,” Mrs. Becker explains when you mention
the book to her. “And to me it is just right. Read-
ing is an adventure. You explore. You go up and
down highways and byways. You pass by what
doesn’t mean anything to you, however much it
may mean to someone else. You linger wherever
you please. And if anything I say about a book
leads anyone to a new adventure, then I am satis-
fied. Boys and girls know what they like to read.
All anyone need do is to tell them what is there.
They will do the choosing.”

Mention books to Mrs. Becker and her face is
at once alight with animation. “Did you see . . -”
she will eagerly start, her eyes sparkling with the
zest of a new discovery. Ask her about the boys
and girls of St. Nicholas, or the men and women
who write to The Reader’s Guide and she will
welcome you to the circle of their book-loving
comradeship. But question her about herself and
what she has accomplished through the years and
her reply is as brief as may politely be. For there
is in her the humbleness of a wide tolerance and
understanding.

For the girl who likes to write, there is much
of significance in Mrs. Becker’s entrance into
journalism and the years she spent on the staff of
a newspaper. It is in some such way as hers thatMay Lamberton Becker 195

 

many newspaper women have made their start.
Her return to newspaper work came after she
had developed a special service which was useful
to many, the service of guiding them to the kind
of books in which they are interested. This, too,
is a common experience. Many women are writ-
ing regularly for newspapers and magazines to-
day who started in other fields, in the field of
child psychology, of dietetics, of interior decora-
tion, of medicine. Through their years spent in
acquiring their specialty, they discovered in
themselves the ability to do what Mrs. Becker
has done with books, the ability to interpret, to
pass on to others in a vivid and interesting way
the knowledge which they themselves possess. It
is an important work. Each day thousands of
people who have not the time closely to follow
the progress of specialists in the various fields
nevertheless share the results of the discoveries
being made.

So, too, with lecturing. There are many
women lecturers today, going out to club meet-
ings and other gatherings. Like Mrs. Becker,
they have developed an ability for public speak-
ing. Like her, they have something to say which
people wish to hear. What they lecture about de-
pends upon their own specialty and experience.
Some make of their lecturing an avocation, giv-
ing to it only as much time as they can spare
from their profession. Others, starting with lec-
turing as a side issue, have discovered such pos-eR RRR TT Trine Et

me

196 Girls Who Did

sibilities in it that it has become their chief
occupation, in some instances with a welfare
organization such as the American Health Asso-
ciation.

Upon her appointment as Literary Editor of
St. Nicholas, Mrs. Becker once more shifted the
emphasis in her work. Her profession of lecturer
became her avocation, that of editing her voca-
tion. The years which gave her training for edi-
torship were somewhat different from those by
which some have reached similar positions; they
are typical of the editorial training of others. She
did not spend those years in a magazine office.
But she did spend them in activities which di-
rectly touched upon the problems which she is
now facing. She constantly wrote either for
newspapers or magazines. She learned to meet
publishing schedules. She learned what appealed
to a wide variety of readers, such as every maga-
zine numbers among its subscribers. She has long
been in personal touch with the writers of today,
acquiring a knowledge of just what each can be
expected to produce. And because of the very
variety of her own activities, she has learned to
plan what she has to do and to carry a number
of tasks simultaneously through to completion.

And through it all she has closely followed the
prophecy made for her by her high school teacher,
years ago. She has been an interpreter—of books,
because that is the special field of her knowledge.CLARA SIPPRELL

A girl whose brother
was a photographer
and who liked to take picturesCLARA SIPPRELL

HETHER the roads

were gold with au-
tumn, or white with winter,
or green with early spring,
Clara Sipprell loved to walk down them and
dream. Why she loved them is uncertain. Because
the roads were countless years old and Clara was
fourteen? Because she wanted to be alone? Or
because the ever-shifting light did miraculous
things with the orchards and the wire fence and
the acres of barley? Clara Sipprell blames the
walking and the dreaming on the light.

I see her, vividly, on the roads. Her legs are
long, her pigtail is long, and her dreams are long
—long. It is not difficult to imagine her eager
figure, as solitary as a lark on a fence-post. It is
not difficult, even though I first saw Clara Sip-
prell when she was nearer forty than fourteen,
and when the roads around Buffalo had been ex-
changed for a New York studio. I cannot decide
whether I like the girl better, or the woman. She
wore, that day I saw her in her studio, a black
mandarin coat over a sea-green gown that

199200 Girls Who Did

 

matched, in color, her sea-green beads, and
matched, in spirit, the high comb which topped
the red-brown swirl of her hair. Her face was
fine and proud and sensitive, as she told me of
her childhood which preceded her work as a
photographer. She was obviously an artist.

“T just grew like Topsy,” she admitted in her
low-pitched voice. “My brother was a boy and
I was a boy—together. I didn’t care much for
school. I didn’t care much for anything on earth
except walking on the roads around Buffalo, and
dreaming. Those hours alone were the high-points
in my childhood.”

Clara Sipprell’s mouth was whimsical, and her
voice was whimsical, and her whimsicality was
contagious.

“But you went to grammar school and to high
school?” I inquired.

“Oh, yes. But what I loved most were the roads
in the moonlight and the noonlight and the just-
before-dusk light.”

‘“‘And you took pictures?”

“At that time? No, indeed. I didn’t own 4
kodak.”

This, from Clara Sipprell, the woman who has
made photography a full-fledged art!

“You went to art school, then? Or a school of
photography?’

“No. All my early training was in my brother's
studio in Buffalo. Some people learn the prin-PEATE VRE ROR)

Clara Sipprell 201

 

ciples of light and shade and composition in a
school, but I didn’t.”

And she told me the story.

When Clara Sipprell was nineteen years old,
she left school. One morning in May she pre-
sented herself at the studio of her brother. He
was then a photographer of repute in Buffalo.
But he was more than that: he was a sympathetic
person. He had hoped that the sister who was so
dear to him would go to college. But he must have
seen, on this particular morning in May, another
destiny on her face. For he did not argue. He did
not even question. He merely looked at her, and
wondered, and said no word, and let her stay.

So she learned the business of photography
from the ground up. It was exciting. Her brother
bought her a kodak, and she proceeded joyously
to “take” everything and everybody in Buffalo,
sometimes four or five on a plate. Her mistakes
were many; her enthusiasms were many. One day
her brother showed her two pictures and said,
“Which is good and which is bad?” She did not
know. At that time she was absorbed in the
mechanics of developing a picture, retouching
it, printing it, finishing it, enlarging and reducing
it.

Later, she studied the fine points of photog-
raphy. She came to have a discriminating judg-
ment when her brother held up two pictures and
said: “Which is good and which is bad?” By then,

AH Anping heise sans ns mr teen202 Girls Who Did

 

she was the owner of a camera on a tripod and
the humble partner of Frank J. Sipprell.

“T was his partner for ten years,” she said, “and
in all that time the smell of the dark room never
failed to thrill me!”

Those were important years. There being so
many opportunities in the big realm of photog-
raphy, she came, often, to a fork in the road.
Should she continue with her brother or should
she go out into other kinds of photographic
work? Should she, for instance, enter commercial
photography, taking pictures to illustrate stories
in magazines or newspapers? There are many
such photographers, today. Or should she become
a photographer connected with an advertising
concern taking pictures of the latest models in
dresses or furniture or what-not? There are such
photographers, too, and young women among
them. Such work was possible for her, had she
wished it. And it would have been possible for
her to enter photographic work in a museum,
taking pictures of the collections; or work in a
scientific research laboratory, photographing the
results of some scientist’s long hours in the labor-
atory. All of us have seen such pictures in scienti-
fic magazines. Any girl who is well-grounded in
the fundamentals of photography, who has been
willing to spend the hours and days and even
years of time which Clara Sipprell spent in learn-Clara Sipprell 203

 

ing, can branch out into some one of these many
photographic fields.

Clara Sipprell branched into none of them. She
worked steadily on, learning her craftsmanship,
gaining invaluable experience in the smallest
details of taking pictures, laying the foundation
for what she was later to do. In time, she came to
see what it was she really wished to undertake.

It was not “regular” photography, although
she realized that there was real opportunity for
her in Buffalo, particularly if she were to develop
a specialty as many young women have done in
the taking of children’s pictures, of homes or of
gardens. But because she believed profoundly
in the artistic possibilities of picture-making,
because beauty was, of all things, most desirable,
she decided to give her talents exclusively to
portraiture and to the creative photography of
landscapes and still life. Who wants just to
photograph, she thought, when she can photo-
graph the inside soul of a person, or a snow-
shadow, or a Killarney rose in a water jug? And
she decided to continue her work where the art
galleries and the museums and the concerts and
artists themselves would give her a new touch with
beauty and the creating of beautiful things. She
decided to go to New York.

“When I left Buffalo,” Miss Sipprell told me,
“I was known as a photographer. In NewSo ANE TR oss: ¢

204 Girls Who Did

 

 

York—! Well, I kept very quiet for five years.
I didn’t hurry. Nothing good comes from hurry.
In the beginning, I had enough money saved to
finance my plan. Gradually, through my friends,
I secured enough commissions to support myself
and so to continue my experiments.

“T did portraits of as many kinds of people as
I could. My friends were more than generous in
posing for me and in obtaining opportunities for
me to make portraits of interesting people whom
they knew—of painters and business men and
musicians and writers and children. Little by
little, I began to receive requests for my work
from people whom I had never met. And little by
little, I gleaned from my many attempts and
experiments, those methods which more nearly
brought the results I was after. In time, I had
a collection of pictures which, although none was
entirely what I wished it to be, nevertheless were
good. Then I was ready for an exhibit.”

Clara Sipprell paused, glancing quizzically at
the photographs upon the walls opposite and at
the large books which lay upon a nearby table.
“Tt takes such a short while to tell you of it,” she
said, “and it was so long in the doing! There on
the wall and in these books you see the pictures
which I like best of all that I have done. You do
not see the many I rejected, which fell short. You
do not know the hours I spent, only to meet fail-Clara Sipprell 205

 

ure in the end. For there have been such pictures
and. such hours, many of them, and they are no
less part of my work than the others.”

“Tell me about your exhibits,” I asked.

“Exhibits are an important part of every
artist’s life. To go over everything that you have
done, selecting various types of pictures, stop-
ping carefully to consider which are the best of
each type, arranging them together in a large
room where others may come to see them is in
itself a stimulating thing to do. And the oppor-
tunity which an exhibit gives you to show your
work to others is stimulating. From the com-
ments of the visitors who come to look at your
pictures, you often gain great inspiration and
help. The comments, unfavorable as well as fav-
orable, reveal your work to you in a new light.
You get dozens of ideas for new experiments!

“And if those who come like what they see,
there is widened demand for your work. It is
enough, of course, for a real artist to have created
a beautiful thing. Yet artists must live, after all.
And exhibits help them to do so by bringing their
work before the public.

“I have held exhibits in New York and Wash-
ington and other cities in this country. I have
held them in Paris and London. And last year,
when I traveled through Yugoslavia, photo-
graphing quaint landscapes and quaint people, I206 Girls Who Did

 

ended with an exhibit in Constantinople. Oh,
there is so much beauty to be caught with a
camera!”

She showed me, quietly, a group of her pic-
tures. A house with the sun melted and poured
owed is cs ies Coolidge... o>
and their delicate shadows. .. . Rachmaninoff,
the musician. . . . Anold New England farm-
house, taken in Vermont where she has her sum-
mer studio. . . . An English girl, very young
and very wistful. . . An old church. . .
A street in Italy . . . Cloud and wind above
Dalmatian poplars . . . They moved me as a
great poem moves me.

“They are as beautiful as etchings!” said I, en-
chanted. I meant it as a compliment. But Clara
Sipprell took it otherwise.

“You mustn’t compare photography with
painting or with etching,” she warned. “It is true
that an etcher or a painter, like myself, is con-
cerned with the witchery of light and shadow,
and studies the line and mass and contour of his
subject. But the methods are so different. I use
no paint, no pencil. The camera, with its many
limitations, is my medium. In accepting those
limitations and transcending them with beauty,
photography becomes a real art.”

A real art. Looking at her pictures, I did not
doubt what Clara Sipprell said. I was not even
amazed when she added that she never enlargesClara Sipprell 207

 

a picture, now, nor reduces it, nor retouches it in
any way. Neither does she use artificial light.
The natural thing is the beautiful thing, she main-
tains, and if she sufficiently understands her sub-
ject and the light falling over it, the lens can do
the rest.

“Which would you rather photograph,” I
asked, “‘people or things?”

“People !”—without hesitation. “Portraiture is
much more fascinating to me than still life. T try
to catch that essential something which dis-
tinguishes every person from every other person
—Ppersonality, spirit—call it what you will. I call
it (for lack of a better name) ‘the constructive
moment.’ ”

~But some people haven’t a spark,” I said.

"Everyone has a spark,” she corrected. “The
spirit is there, hidden, and the camera must find
the right angle from which to photograph it.”

“Everyone is photographable?” I cried.

“Everyone,” she repeated. “But the gift for
portraiture is a requirement for the work. And
you cannot learn it. You are either born with it
or you are not.”

I wondered why, since she is so greatly inter-
ested in photographing people, she spends so
much time on still life.

“To do anything well,” she explained, “you
must do well whatever is related to it. There are
‘backgrounds’ in many of my portraits and I208 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

must know how to photograph those backgrounds
artistically. Besides, after photographing a lovely
landscape, I come back refreshed to photograph,
say, a great novelist. Portraiture, you see, is not
easy. I cannot do distinctive work in it if I am
tired or rushed or harried.”

She looked so colorful as she sat there talking
that I wondered how she could content herself in
photography, with blacks and greys and whites.

“How can you?” I asked.

For a moment, she stared at the sea-green of
her gown.

“RKasily,” she said at last. “Because I get the
quality of color, the richness of color—or the lack
of it—in these grays and blacks. Do you under-
stand what I mean?”

I was not sure. But I was very sure of some-
thing else. Clara Sipprell is happy, not so much
because she is successful in a wordly sense, not
because she is internationally known, but because
she is doing the work which, more than anything
else, is her work. If she were still experimenting
in Buffalo, she would be happy, I knew.

“You smile,” I ventured, “because you found,
at nineteen, the work for which you were cut out.”

“Ts that an accusation?” she laughed.

At this moment, a vivacious, light-haired young
woman came into the room. “My partner,” in-
troduced Miss Sipprell. “When my work grew,
I found it impossible to attend to all the businessClara Sipprell 209

 

details and my portraiture, as well. It has all gone
much more smoothly since I have had a partner
to attend to my schedule and all my business
arrangements.

“Just now, we are working on a series of pic-
tures of flower arrangements which a women’s
magazine is to publish. My partner has inter-
viewed the editor, planned for the delivery of the
finished photographs and come to an agreement
regarding the remuneration. Since I started with
my work years ago, appreciation of beautiful pic-
tures has grown rapidly, and appreciation of
photography as an art. This magazine connection
is a single instance. The girl who loves to take
pictures will do well to consider the possibility
of entering photography as a profession.”

Books of lovely photographs are available
for the girl who is interested in photography,
Clara Sipprell went on to tell me, as well as books
of practical ways and means. Many communities
have in them those who have taken up photog-
raphy as a hobby, or photographers who are striv-
ing to do beautiful work. Such people will give
a girl many helpful suggestions. There are, too,
a few schools of photography where a girl may
secure training, although Clara Sipprell does
not regret that she came through the school of
studio experience.

Silence fell upon the room with its beautiful
pictures upon every side. Again, in my imagina-210 Girls Who Did

 

tion, I saw the fourteen-year-old Clara Sipprell
walking the roads of Buffalo, watching the morn-
ing light on maple leaves and the evening light
in hedgerows, and dreaming not impossible
dreams. . .MarGcarer EK. Marrsy

A girl
who always
asked “why?”MARGARET
HK. MALTBY

HEN Mar-

garet Maltby
was still in short dresses, she always wanted to
know why. Why did water boil? Why did an eye-
dropper suck up liquid? Why did it snow?

Her parents encouraged her. They showed her
how to run simple machinery, how to drive a
nail, how to put in a screw. They never said,
“Girls shouldn’t do such things. They are for
boys.”

Today Margaret Maltby is a professor of
physics. Who can say whether she inherited her
scientific and mechanical turn of mind from a
father who was fond of mathematics? Her child-
hood predilections were, at any rate, a prophecy
of her life-long interest. How fortunate she was!
So many parents take for granted that their
daughters are unscientific. They provide no
books, no encouragement, no apparatus when a
girl asks, “Why this—why that?” With such
handicaps, it is remarkable that any girls have dis-
covered their taste for things scientific. But high

eio214 Girls Who Did

 

school laboratories have helped. Bicycles have
helped, and machinery to tinker with. Automo-
piles help, with a more intricate engine for
mechanical experimentation. And radio is teach-
ing girls, as well as boys, electricity. But Mar-
garet Maltby had the disadvantage of being
taught, in high school, no science except mathe-
matics. When she entered college and started
seriously upon her scientific studies, she was
handicapped.

Today, at commencement time in Columbia
University, Margaret Maltby says goodbye to
young women who, in their high school days,
studied an interesting variety of science courses
in well-equipped laboratories such as she herself
did not have; who have had college courses such
as she did not have; and before whom is open an
opportunity for entering many more kinds of
scientific work than were available for her when
she, herself, completed her graduate study.

Some of these college girls, who have studied
under Miss Maltby, are going out to enter her
own kind of work—teaching. They are planning
to become teachers of chemistry or physics or
botany or geology, in high schools or boarding
schools or colleges or universities. Whatever the
branch of science which most interests them, if
they are qualified to teach it, an opportunity is
to be found.

Some enter laboratories. And if you are a gitlMargaret E. Maltby 215

 

who gazes bewilderedly about your own labor-
atory with its test tubes, if you are a girl to whom
“Chemistry, required” is, in plain English, dead,
you may look differently upon this laboratory
research done by young scientists when you
know that the laboratory may be in a hospital,
where the tests made will show the doctors just
what treatment some very sick patient needs. Or
in a nutrition center, where thin, badly nourished
children are studied and helped. Or in a public
health laboratory where the tests will show
whether or not the water is pure on some camp
site where several hundred girls are planning to
camp. And if the tests show impurities, without
a doubt those girls are saved from typhoid fever
or other illnesses. Or the tests may be made on
certain milk, with the lives of many babies in
the community at stake. When you realize this,
you see why scientific work is so intensely inter-
esting and worthwhile to so many people.

But there are still further opportunities open
today in the field of science. Perhaps some of
the young students who have studied with Mar-
garet Maltby decide to enter one of the research
departments conducted by our Department of
Agriculture or by our state universities, in con-
nection with their agricultural schools. At these
agricultural stations, they study the soil of the
surrounding region and test out methods by which
that soil may be made more productive. Better=e

St API IEE ESRD oes 4

 

216 Girls Who Did

 

kinds of plants are cultivated by the laboratory
workers, and a knowledge of chemistry as well
as of botany plays its part in their work. And the
results of their work are passed on to the farmers
and gardeners of that vicinity.

Those trained in psychology are finding new
and fascinating work in positions in connection
with schools, where children who are having diffi-
culty in getting along with others are studied and
helped or where unusual and gifted children need
special training.

You can realize what a change has taken place
for the girl who is interested in science, when you
know that over one thousand chemists are em-
ployed by the government at Washington, in
such departments as the Bureau of Mines, the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Depart-
ment of Agriculture—and some of these chemists
are young women.

But even this is not all. One girl who took her
Ph.D. at Columbia, secured a fellowship for
study abroad and now works in the research
laboratories of the General Electric Company at
Schenectady, New York. Manufacturers of
foods, metals, paints, photographic materials,
rubber, soap, textiles and innumerable other
products employ young women scientists, if they
are capable of carrying on the research which is
necessary. “How can this cheese be preserved for
shipping to South America?” “How can we dyeMargaret E. Maltby 217

 

this material so that it will not fade?” “This proc-
ess is too expensive. Can’t we substitute for some
of the ingredients, at the same time keeping the
flavor?” Questions such as these are asked of the
young woman research worker in manufacturing
plants—and she must work out the answer in her
laboratory.

Another friend of Miss Maltby took her Ph.D.
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
won the great honor of a national research fel-
lowship, married, and is continuing her researches
in the Sterling Laboratories at Yale. Without
being required to teach any classes, she is a mem-
ber of the Yale faculty. Marriage has been no
stumbling block to her scientific career. Month
after month, she goes on studying the chemical
structure of certain substances found in the
human body. And she finds satisfaction in re-
alizing that her conclusions, like all scientific con-
clusions, will ultimately find a practical applica-
tion in human life.

Science? To be a scientist is to be an adventur-
ous discoverer. The ways of stars, the ways of
flowers, of birds, of clouds; the ways of men, of
their minds and their bodies; the events of other
ages, traced through rocks and rivers—science has
given us these. Back of knowledge, back of truth,
back of modern achievement stands the scientist
in his laboratory, rejecting all half-truths, seek-
ing the Eternal Fact.218 Girls Who Did

 

Margaret Maltby possesses, in an eminent de-
gree, this sternly scientific mind. Her gray dress
and her gray hair, as she sat talking to me, sug-
gested something maternal; her accurate eyes and
exact phrases left no crumb of doubt that she is a
scientist.

“T am constantly happy,” she said, “that girls
of scientific bent today have a greater oppor-
tunity than ever before both for training and for
scientific work, and that the girls of tomorrow
will have an even greater opportunity. I am
happy that, given a good college course in the
sciences, they can step out into the teaching of
general scientific subjects or into other positions.

“But a girl should not overlook the fact that,
+f she has serious aspirations as a scientist, the
more important and interesting fields of science
lie ahead, open only to those who have taken still
further scientific training after college. ‘There
must be graduate work leading to a doctorate
of science or of philosophy. And, if possible,
study abroad. If a young woman is to do gen-
uinely distinctive work in science, a broad as well
as an intensive education is the first essential.

“That is why I wish every girl who is interested
in science might take all possible scientific courses
while she is in high school. And that she might
acquire French and German along the way, as
well, if she can. For a reading knowledge of both
is required for a doctor’s degree, and the girlMargaret E. Maltby 219

 

a

who has accomplished this study before college—
or in college—is prepared to go on, if she later
wishes to do so.

“Then, too, by studying somewhat in various
branches of science, a girl has an early oppor-
tunity to discover her personal preferences and
she is able to make her choice more readily and
happily when the time comes for her to select
one branch of science in which she shall specialize.

~ But there is no short cut in the field of science.
Thorough training is necessary.”

I expressed pity for the girl who wishes to be
a scientist but who cannot afford the training.
Miss Maltby told me to temper my pity. An
education is now available, she says, for every girl
who has courage and health enough to take it
and brains enough to carry it through, whether
she wishes to specialize in science or some other
field. If she has no money for her college course,
there are scholarships which are awarded to those
who are earnest and who show real attainment in
their studies. A girl can obtain work in college
by which she may supplement what she receives
through a scholarship. Or she may borrow money,
repaying it when she has later stepped out into
a position.

Difficult? It is difficult, Margaret Maltby ad-
mits, to earn one’s way through college—some-
times so difficult that a girl must spend more than
the usual four years doing it. And she will know220 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

many days of utter discouragement. Courage,
health, brains—all three must be called upon
when a girl decides to earn her own way. But
unless she possesses these, the realm of science
should not be the profession of her choice.

So, too, with her graduate study, a young
woman can combine it with work for which she
receives payment. Or before embarking upon her
after-college studies, she may go out into the
scientific employment which Miss Maltby’s
friends among young eollege graduates are en-
tering, there earning the necessary money, gain-
ing practical experience, and returning in a year
or so to her further studies, and to the possibility
of being awarded a fellowship. For fellowships
are awarded to graduate students. And there are
the Guggenheim Fellowships, which are for the
more mature scholars who are engaged in import-
ant pieces of work and who show exceptional
ability.

Miss Maltby herself served a long apprentice-
ship. An A. B., and an A. M., from Oberlin Col-
lege were only the first hurdle. Having surveyed
allthesciences, she decided to specialize in physics.
Her B. S. was procured at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. at the
Universty of Goettingen, in Germany. At the end
of an additional year in research, she became Te-
search assistant to President Kohlrausch at the

.Physikalisch-Technische Reischsanstalt zu Char-Margaret E. Maltby eet

 

lottenburg. This foreign training was supple-
mented by a year of mathematical physics with
Professor Webster at Clark University. At pres-
ent she is an associate professor of physics at
Barnard College, Columbia University. How
faithfully she has followed the Fact!

“Another reason why girls have been slow in
taking up science,” went on this life-long student,
“1s that science required a willingness to grapple
with hard and involved problems, mathematical
and otherwise. No one tells a girl what to do if
she is working upon original research in some
manufacturing plant. All that the head of the
plant has said is, more often than not: ‘Something
is wrong with this process. What is it?) And the
young woman must start out into the Unknown,
deciding that the trouble lies with this ingredient,
or that, and devising experiments which will
show her whether she is right or wrong.

“Nor does the work always consist of original
experimenting. There are routine tasks to be
accomplished, as well. And there are other dis-
advantages—long hours, sometimes of great
irregularity, when an important piece of investi-
gation is going on which cannot be interrupted
even for sleep. A discovery, made when in the
employ of any company, becomes automatically
the property of that company. The work is con-
fining, as all laboratory research is confining.
And it requires inordinate patience, for often antee Girls Who Did

 

 

 

experiment of days’, weeks’, even years’ duration
proves futile in the end and the work must be
started from the beginning once more, and in a
different way.

“Tn the research laboratories of our great edu-
cational institutions, without a desire for the truth
at any intellectual cost, a girl would at the end
of a few intensive months find this exacting work
very irksome.”

She was right. Accuracy can be obtained by
many girls but—“What’s the use?” they ask.
Others seem born inaccurate. But there are ex-
ceptions. And they are the girls to whom science
is apt to call. They are those to whom science
today offers ever-increasing opportunities, even
though the field is as yet more limited than some
others.

The years of the war were important in widen-
ing this field for young women. With so many
men away, it was necessary in many positions to
try out young women of scientific training.
People soon realized that women are as capable
as men of doing scientific work and doing it with
distinction. Manufacturers who employed young
women in their laboratories as well as at their
factory machines discovered what men in many
fields have discovered—that it is the woman her-
self who counts, just as it is the man himself
who counts. Not women in general, nor men in
general.Margaret E. Maltby 225

“But why,” I asked Miss Maltby, “did so few
women assert themselves in the first stages of
science ?”’

“Past generations,” she answered, “had women
who were instinctively scientific. But where could
they obtain training or encouragement to pursue
their scientific careers? And it does require train-
ing. It does require encouragement! Today, this
is changed. The result is that we have our women
scientists.”

But she hastened to point out women of the
past who, despite the almost insuperable difficul-
ties, made substantial contributions to science.
Madame Curie’s discovery of radium, after
years of patient experiment with pitchblend,
opened up an entirely new field of research in
atomic structure and ushered in many important
applications. Madame Curie codperated with her
husband, carrying on the experiments in his
laboratory.

Caroline, the sister of Sir William Herschel,
was his co-worker in astronomy. In the nineteenth
century, Maria Mitchell of Vassar was the first
woman to be elected to the American Academy
of Arts and Science because of her distinguished
work in astronomy. The Maria Mitchell Observa-
tory is gratefully named after her. And during
the recent total eclipse of the sun, this observa-
tory’s powerful glass was important in the scien-
tific recording of that momentous event. Ellen224 Girls Who Did

 

H. Richards won distinction as a sanitary chemist
and social economist and was one of the pioneers
to whom girls of today who en joy their domestic
science courses owe most. For it was she and her
associates who first developed the plan to give
such work in our schools.

“But, Miss Maltby,” I interposed, “every girl
who takes scientific training can’t be a Maria
Mitchell or an Ellen H. Richards—nor as able
as those of your friends whose work you have
described. What of the others, those who will
never be able to do more than satisfactory work,
in some relatively unimportant position?”

From the breadth of her experience, Margaret
Maltby smiled. “Ves,” she said, “of course there
are such young women. But no more in science
than in any other field where girls find work.
The important consideration is—do they enjoy
their work? Is it worthwhile? Is most of it inter-
esting to them? All of it can’t be to any of us,
anywhere. Then—is she making fullest use of
her ability? If she is, why worry about being
one of those who lead the procession? It is never
where you are that counts so much as

“As?”

“As finding satisfaction in what you are doing
and doing it, to the best of your ability.”

“Do you think,” I said, “that women can ever
be as radically original, as pioneering, as men
have been in the sciences?”Margaret E. M altby 225

“Original?” Miss Maltby repeated the word.
“Of course. Why not? Wasn’t Madame Curie
original? Give a well-trained, imaginative woman
scientist a real opportunity and she will be orig-
inal. Up to this time, many women capable of
outstandingly original work have been forced
to direct their ideas and their energy to the attain-
ing and the keeping of any kind of opening in
the field of science, to winning for themselves
and others the right to do their special kind of
work. But as I have said this situation is grad-
ually being bettered and for this reason I believe
we shall have more Important and more original
work from our young women scientists.

“But originality requires, behind and beyond
curiosity and wide and deep knowledge of the
Science, courage, and infinite care in detail work
and constructive imagination. Imagination to see
the scientific problem as a whole, to resolve it
into its parts, to devise experiments which will
eventually lead to the goal of solving the prob-
fem. As in the study of the structure of the atom,
which is fundamental to chemistry and physics,
a girl must first visualize the mechanism of the
atom according to some theory, then predict its
behavior under certain conditions, work out ex-
periments to test that prediction, and finally
modify the theory to fit the facts.”

The facts! How at every turn, she came back
to them. No scientist can talk long without be-226 Girls Who Did

—_——

 

traying a vast reverence for things as they are,
naked and unadorned. Therein lies the truth.
And nothing less than the truth is satisfying to
these brave intellects. They repeat, with the
Dying Grammarian:

“Tet me know all! Prate not of most or least,
“Painful or easy!”

If they renounce much, they gain much.

The “much” gained by years of study and
research in the enchanting realm of physics was
now, at this moment, on the fine and determined
face of Margaret Maltby'Brenpa Purnam

A girl who declared
at twelve she wanted to be
a sculptoreeBRENDA PUTNAM

HUNK of clay.
A mysterious
“shape.”

A rabbit.

“When I grow up,”
said twelve - year - old
Brenda Putnam, “I shall
be a sculptor.”

No one laughed. No
one said, “Brenda! How
very ridiculous!’ Her mother examined the little
clay rabbit which Brenda had modelled that day
in school, and complimented the absurd tail.
Her father showed his pleasure in a more con-
crete way: he bought clay and tools for his ambi-
tious daughter and he gave her as a workshop
his own very private den. A wise father... .
Incidentally, he was Herbert Putnam, who was
then, and is now, librarian of Congress in Wash-
ington.

For the rabbit was, beyond a doubt, alive.
Holding it high before the modelling class,
Brenda’s teacher had said so. Revolving it in his

229eae eee encore : aes

230 Girls Who Did

 

fingers, Mr. Putnam said so. Brenda suspected
it. Maybe, in a moment or two, it would leap, a
brown-white blur, into the greenery, find another
jack-rabbit with the same pointed ears, the same
stubby tail, the same deep fur, and come back—
never.

The rabbit was only a start. He was followed,
in clay, by a menagerie—alley-cats, pigs, a pet
dog, and a golliwock. Every little figure meant
more clay “pinchings” on the floor of Brenda’s
‘studio,” more codperation from Mr. and Mrs.
Putnam, and more determination on Brenda’s
part to be a sculptor.

Today her models are many. Her large, sky-
lit studio is in New York City. Her determina»
tion, rewarded by prize after prize, honor after
honor, is still that hard bright thing which
started her on her career. Her Sundial Figure
won the Barnett Prize at the National Academy
of Design and the Widener Gold Medal at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her
Peter and the Rabbits won the Avery Prize at
the Architecture League. Her memorial to Anne
Simon stands full-sized and winged, in the Rock
Creek Cemetery at Washington. She executed
the bust of Harriet Beecher Stowe which sits,
nobly, in the Hall of Fame at New York Uni-
versity. At present she is at work on a bas-relief
of William Dean Howells for the American
Academv of Arts and Letters.Brenda Putnam 231

 

“But these so-called ‘honors’ are of no import-
ance,” Brenda Putnam insisted, and I had to
agree. Success in “sculping’’ is measured, solely,
in terms of beauty.

Beauty. ... Beauty of form.... Again
and again, in her models of plastiline or clay,
Brenda Putnam achieves a physical and a
spiritual beauty. The combination, and nothing
else, makes for great sculpture. But the spiritual
significance which renders Rodin’s The Thinker
an enduring piece of work and Brenda Putnam’s
Portrait Bust of a Young Girl a praiseworthy
example of modern sculpture comes only after
long years of plugging away at the fundamentals
of this most difficult art—human anatomy, drap-
ery, mass, proportion.

Brenda Putnam’s apprenticeship was not short
and it was not easy. “Five expensive years,” she
said, with a shake of her Italian bob. “And I
wouldn’t have any girl who wishes to be a sculp-
tor, or any other kind of artist, forget them. If
you wish to become an artist, you must take time
for training and that costs money.” She studied
a year in Boston under Bela Pratt. She worked
two winters in New York under James Karl
Fraser of the New York Art Students’ League.
One valuable summer she was a student of
Charles Grafly, pre-eminent in portrait
sculpture.

“Good sculpturing,” said Brenda Putnam,232 Girls Who Did

 

mS

“depends on so much more than inspiration.”
The brick-red of her velvet sport-dress was less
defjant than her voice. And the body from which
++ issued was so small! Her eyes were black and
large and sparkling.

“There are many mechanical considerations.
First, there’s the armiture—a delicate frame-
work, difficult to make, which goes into the too
malleable modelling clay. There is the plaster
case. Each material has very special limitations
which must be kept in mind. Marble, for instance,
is brittle. That is why Michael Angelo said that
a marble statue should be so solidly constructed
that no projection could break off if the thing
were rolled down hill! When I’m working for
marble, I think marble. When I’m working for
bronze, I think bronze.”

Present-day sculptors have the good fortune
to work in plastiline or clay, their original figures
being converted into marble or bronze by 4
modern machine which measures and cuts and
reconstructs. But Brenda Putnam is not always
sure that this is a case of good fortune. Her
instinct, she says, is to work first-hand in the
marble. No doubt she envies Praxiteles, one of
the great Greek sculptors of the Golden Age
who, like all his fellow-Greeks, cut and hammered
and chiselled the marble just as it came, naked,
from the quarries. The challenge of working inBrenda Putnam 233

 

stone! The thrill of conquering, beautifully, a
resistant marble slab!

“Some things are made too easy for us these
days,” said Miss Putnam and I saw in her
staunchness something of the ancient Spartan
woman who had a dream to express—in rock.

And then she laughed, as she always laughs
at the tail-end of her gravity.

“But what I said is true. A great deal of
menial work goes with inspiration, if the inspira-
tion is worth a scratch. Harold Bauer, the musi-
cian, says, ‘Don’t count on inspiration.’ That’s
right—don’t count on it. Why, sometimes I feel
like shouting with Charles Grafly, ‘I’m no sculp-
tor, I’m a brick-layer.’ ”

Brenda Putnam, a brick-layer, Brenda Put.
nam, who plays her own grand piano with almost
professional power, who draws delightful pictures
in black and whiteforachild’s version of Pilgrim’s
Progress! But I understood her point. She was
thinking of the many, many hours of patient,
persistent manual labor which must go into the
making of a beautiful piece of sculpture. With-
out that labor, the sculpture is impossible. Manual
labor follows inevitably upon inspiration if the
sculptor is to realize his dreams in visible form.

“Come,” said this paradoxical person, “and
look at my babies.”

We walked down three steps to the work-shop.eae a ea aa ae
aoe ap iene aR ETT .
ET x ¥

am

234 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

I went a little fearfully. Babies in plaster, I
thought, would be wholly without appeal. But
these were cuddlesome. The famous little Sundial
Figure, riding a sea-horse, had wild hair and inno-
cence and creases in his fat neck and a rambunc-
tious big toe. The little Peter was all wonder and
baby delight. A faun was just escaping from a
garden with an armful of stolen flowers. Over
here was a droll little fellow not yet a year old.
Over there was a portrait of Master Desmond
O’Hara, Miss Putnam’s three-day-old nephew.
He is, apparently, the youngest human being
who ever went into marble. So wizened, so help-
less—yet, in potentiality, a man.

“T never have enough of them,” she exclaimed,
including them all in a sudden gesture. “T like to
create them. I enjoy arranging them in exhibi-
tions, especially outdoor exhibitions where I may
place my fountains in lovely open spaces or
where my nymphs may peek out from the bushes.
And I enjoy selling them, too—because aside
from the fact that I earn my living in this way,
I like to think that other people really are enjoy-
ing them.

“Sometimes I think that I should like to give
all my time to my own work here in my studio.
Yet I enjoy teaching my classes, too, especially
when my students are truly appreciative of
beauty.”

“Most women sculptors are weak in technique, *Brenda Putnam 235

 

went on Miss Putnam when we were again
ensconced in our comfortable seats before the
fire. “But it is not entirely our fault. As yet, we
don’t have the same opportunity as men. After
a man has learned to model the nude figure in a
school of sculpture, he can go into the studio
of some great sculptor. He serves, in other words,
his apprenticeship. He is like a medieval appren-
tice who hired out to a medieval master. He
learns, in this way, what no school teaches—
drapery, lettering, columning and what not. He
sweeps the floor; he arranges the folds of a gar-
ment; he makes the plaster casts. But women, you
see, are not accepted by men as apprentices.
Women get in the way! So to learn these techni-
calities, we must teach ourselves. But it takes
stamina.”

Yes, and will-power. Brenda Putnam has both.
When she was asked to do the bas-relief of
Howells, for instance, she realized she knew
nothing about either bas-relief or lettering. They
just hadn’t taught her those essentials in Boston
and New York. Was she daunted? No! She read
books on the subject, visited the museums, and
made a few experiments herself. In the end, she
knew the fundamentals of bas-relief, and put
them into brilliant practice. The result is this
sagacious-looking William Dean Howells.

The same courage caused Charlotte Bronté
to finish her novels, even though the odds were236 Girls Who Did

(e

all against her. If she couldn’t write openly, she
could write in secret and hide the manuscript in
her sewing basket!

“Yes,” went on Brenda Putnam, “determined
women are making their way in all the arts—in
writing, in music, in painting, in dancing. And I
am proud of our women sculptors for I know
against what difficulties they have won. Laura
Gardine, Malvina Hoffman, Gertrude Vander-
bilt Whitney, Evelyn Longman Batchelder—
their work is distinguished.”

I glanced about the room. On every side stood
the work of a woman who sees beauty. In the up-
curve of branches, in the majestic lift of sky-
scrapers, in the bend of a back or a knee. For
her, beauty is everywhere.

“What a satisfaction,” I cried, “to be able to
put those lovelinesses into permanent form!”

“Yes,” said Brenda Putnam, and for a moment
I saw the artist in her flare up. Then she added
with her characteristically dry humor: “But oh,
the agony of seeing your mistakes in marble or
bronze!”

“Still,” I questioned, “you wouldn’t be any-
thing but a sculptor, would you?”

“No,” she said earnestly, “I wouldn't.”Auicrt Foorr MacDovueath

A girl who was a debutante
and who never expected
to enter businessALICK FOOTE MACDOUGALL

$6 HAD three children,” said Alice Foote
MacDougall.

It was not the answer I had expected when I
asked Mrs. MacDougall how it happened that
she entered the coffee business. But she, herself,
is unexpected. There where I had thought to
find shrewdness only was something very human.
One of the most successful business women in
New York is essentially a mother: first and last
and in between, Alice Foote MacDougall, dealer
in wholesale roasted coffee and owner of restau-
rants, is a mother. Her ingenuity to her is mother-
wit, her power of organization mother-tactics, her
artistry mother love.

“Yes, my children are responsible for my busi-
ness career. If it hadn’t been for them, I should
never have entered it,” she said and tinkered
with the orange beads against her blue serge
dress. “This is my daughter,” pointing to the pho-
tograph of a lovely young person. “And my

239240 Girls Who Did

 

sons,” pointing toward the photographs of two
young men. All three were framed in silver. i
looked at the door of the dingy office near the
New York water front. “Alice Foote Mac-
Dougall and Sons, Inc.,” it read. “Dealers in
Coffee.”

The ramshackle office was in odd contrast to
the delicate woman who dominated it. But the life
of Alice Foote MacDougall has been one contrast
after another. Her grandfather, Stephen Allen,
was mayor of New York. Like most society girls,
she never went to college. Yet today, trigonom-
etry or no trigonometry, she makes her calcula-
tions as swiftly and as accurately as any coffee-
man on the water-front. And they respect her.
She never cheats them; she never asks for favors;
she never says by her actions, “Handle me gently:
I am a woman.” Her philosophy is the philosophy
of the woman who accomplishes. “In a world of
men,” she declares, “I must accept the hazards
of a man’s world. Else how can I hope for the
same advantages?”

She says it gravely, and with conviction.

‘Do you find it difficult,” I asked her, “to
compete with men?”

“Men are men and women are women,” said
Alice Foote MacDougall. “But in the business
world they are neither. They are merchants or
doctors—or jobbers in coffee. I buy. I sell. And
I forget that I am a woman. Completely forget.”Alice Foote MacDougall 241

 

She spoke vigorously, and I became aware that
a person can be both vigorous and gentle at the
same time. Hlere was a woman capable of making
clear-cut decisions. But a woman of charm. No
wonder hundreds—no, thousands of people storm
the upstairs and the downstairs of her one, two,
three, four restaurants. No wonder.

How did those restaurants happen? She had
mentioned roasted coffee, and a grandfather, and
children. But none of these things explained the
terra cotta walls of an Alice Foote MacDougall
establishment, nor the Italian pottery, nor the
delicious butterscotch pie up to its neck in
whipped cream.

“Tell me,” I begged.

And she told me.

“It is simple enough,” she said. “You know
how one thing leads to another. My business
career really started for me long before I
dreamed of entering it. My husband was a jobber
in green coffee. From the time we were first
married, I took great interest in his work. It was
a fascinating world to me. Every night I plied
him with questions about what he had been doing
during the day. He used to discuss all his prob-
lems with me. I always knew his plans and how
he proposed carrying them out. And the day
came when I was more than grateful for this
interest of mine.

“When I was forty, he died. I had three small* Reeds.

242 Girls Who Did

children who must be fed, housed and given edu-
cation and much beauty. I was absolutely on my
own. And I resolved, from the first, to support
my family and ask no favors. It was a challenge.
Coffee was my salvation. For I decided to go on
with my husband’s business.

“T soon found, however, that even though I
had talked with him in such detail about his work,
doing it myself was another matter. Much
remained to be learned. Every day seemed to
me so packed with details that I felt I couldn't
stop to think for one second or I would never
catch up with what had to be done. There was the
mail to be got through with, the orders to be
attended to, people to be seen. And very quickly
I saw there was much, much to be learned about
coffee. How could I stop to learn, to think? Yet
I knew I must or I could never develop the
business.

“In time, I did get the details organized. I
became acquainted with the people who were
working with me. I knew what each could be
counted on to accomplish. I knew what all of us
together must accomplish if the business were to
continue. It took months of hard work. But in
the end I was able to look about me—and think.

“We were dealing in green coffee in bulk. I
studied the situation and decided to try selling
roasted coffee by mail order. I spent many eve-
nings reading everything I could find aboutAlice Foote MacDougall 243

 

coffee, the various kinds, where each was grown,
what the special distinction of each was. To learn
each flavor, I drank coffee until I could recognize
every kind. And I resolved to secure the most
delicious coffee on the market for those who
would come to me to buy.

“Business methods fascinated me. I talked
with every successful business man whom I knew,
whether he was in the paint business or the furni-
ture business or the dress business. I wanted to
see how each one went about his work, for I had
grasped the fact that all business has certain fac-
tors in common. You must know your product—
that is, what you have to sell, no matter what it
is. You must make your product excellent. You
must know why it is excellent, in order to tell
others about it and sell it to them. And, in selling
it and delivering it, you must render service. You
must make them glad they bought of you not only
because your product is good but because they
receive it promptly and in good condition and
because they can rely on your word. Whatever
you promise, you must do. These are the funda-
mental principles of business, as I have learned
them.”

She paused.

“And the restaurants?” I reminded her.

“They followed just as naturally as my other
ideas,” she replied. “Green coffee in bulk had led
me, you see, to roasted coffee by mail order.de srenne iin tag s Tih hpaoenigaya sane yce rowan
essai Pee ae

244 Girls Who Did

 

Roasted coffee by mail order led to hot coffee
over a counter. Coffee over a counter led to selling
coffee accessories like coffee pots and percolators.
Coffee do-dads led to the most beautiful pottery
in the world which, to me, is Italian. And then,
the Italian restaurants. Do you see?”

“But the troubles,” I ventured. “Weren't
troubles thick along the way?”

She narrowed her eyes upon her own past.

“Yes, But I didn’t ask for a perfect day. I
asked for success. They never go together. I
remember so well the cubby-hole in Grand Cen-
tral where I proposed trying my experiment of
serving hot coffee. It was bare and dingy, appar-
ently without the slightest possibility of attrac-
tiveness.

“ ‘Before we open those doors, we've got to
make this a place where people will want to come,
I said to myself. And we started to work. We
decorated the walls. We bought the most attrac-
tive china we could find. But we did not forget
that delicious hot coffee was our reason for set-
ting up shop. We saw to it that it was delicious—
and hot. Soon we were serving waffles, too,
because our customers had asked for them. And
people enjoyed our little place. They crowded in.
It was not long before I was being greeted on all
sides with, ‘Why don’t you take over a larger
place?’Alice Foote MacDougall 245

 

““Why not? I was soon asking myself. And
started my first restaurant.

“Business means, inevitably, competition.
When I started, only one other firm in New York
was dealing in roasted coffee, and it was cheap
and ‘hard drinking.’ Now there are many firms.
Every time I turn around, up springs another.
Each struggles to dominate the market. And as
for the competition in restaurants, everyone
knows how many restaurants there are in New
York. How do I meet this competition? By turn-
ing my mind away from it to the business itself.

“If I give people what they want in coffee
and in restaurants, they will come to me. Busi-
ness is a game. It demands everything in you.
Three courses are open. You have a product. You
ean sell it at a lower price than your competitors.
You can give a better quality for the same price.
Or you can add service and good will to your
article. I aim at the last two. An attitude of
courtesy and conciliation—it is so important. I
learned its importance in that first little coffee
booth I operated. The day I forget its import-
ance, I hope I am forced out of business.”

I looked into her face, and knew she would
never forget these self-found principles. Her
eyes were much too bright and much too
determined.

Determination must have been born in Alice_

246 Girls Who Did

—

 

Foote MacDougall, together with the ability to
execute a dream and the kind of originality which
twists a liability into an asset. That cubby-hole
in the Grand Central Terminal had three walls,
all ugly. She looked upon those walls and des-
paired, but not for long. She began to think. And
she made the Coffee Court into something more
than a bare coffee counter. Eventually, there were
four Italian restaurants.

The delicate-colored and crumbling walls of
the Old World—what is lovelier? Terra cotta
brick, cracked cobblestones, brilliant peppers
hanging, redly, on strings and eager flowers
everywhere. . . . Mrs. MacDougall reproduced
faithfully the Italian details and the mellow-yel-
low effect. And the public! The pubiic has
decided that soup drunk in an Alice Foote Mac-
Dougall restaurant is more than soup, and cauli-
flower with Hollandaise sauce eaten under her
Italian sky, more than a well-cooked vegetable.

I said:

“Do you remember how you happened to get
the Italian idea?”

Surely it wasn’t suggested by the water-front.
That office, occupied so many years by Alice
Foote MacDougall, was as unlovely, as un-
Italian as possible. The stairs were rickety, the
ceiling was low, and the rooms were given over
to a kind of well-ordered chaos.

“TI don’t know,” said the Very Capable Lady.Alice Foote MacDougall 247

 

“I really don’t know. Perhaps it was the pretty
Italian pottery which I sold with my coffee.
Perhaps it was the memory of some sun-covered
wall in Florence. I only know that, once the idea
had formed, it was what I wanted to do.

“And that,” she said, “is my story.”

“I have a question,” I replied. “What sugges-
tions have you for girls who are entering business
today?”

“That is a very large request when you con-
sider the hundreds and thousands of businesses
and the hundreds and thousands of girls in them,”
she smiled. “But it comes down to a few points,
after all. Business is something which extends
into every city and town of our country. The
girl who is interested in it can enter a store or an
office almost anywhere and set to work. If some
special kind of enterprise or any certain kind of
business surroundings attract her, she should do
her best to secure an opening there. As regards
her future, much depends on the nature of the
opening itself, and much depends upon the girl’s
own ability and what she makes of her oppor-
tunity.

“A young woman of my acquaintance declared
she wanted to go into insurance. Her family
smiled at the idea. Where had she got that
notion, they asked her. She didn’t know where she
had got it. She only knew she had it. Having,
besides, a great deal of common sense and know-248 Girls Who Did

 

ing that as yet she had little to offer any insurance
company either in the way of training or business
experience, she attended a commercial school
long enough to learn filing. Then she secured a
position as file clerk in an insurance company of
recognized standing. From the first she kept her
eyes and her ears open for everything about in-
surance that she could possibly learn. She took
books from the public library. She talked with
insurance salesmen. She examined the papers
that passed through her hands. And in time an-
nounced to her surprised chief that she wished to
try the selling of insurance. Which she did. In
other circumstances, she might have attended one
of the courses in selling insurance which some
companies offer. Young women are doing this
today. But this happens to be the way this par-
ticular young woman went at it.”

Mrs. MacDougall paused reflectively, then
continued, “But any young woman, starting out,
finds herself confronted with much that con-
fronted me in my coffee business, that day so
long ago. She will have to learn what needs to be
done and how to get it done in an orderly and
systematic manner. And she must learn to adjust
herself to all kinds of people. With this start, if
she has business ability and circumstances are
favorable, she can go on to acquiring a knowledge
of the business whichis going on around her, later,Alice Foote MacDougall 249

 

perhaps, branching out either there or elsewhere.

“I would not convey the idea, however, that
every young woman is destined to become head of
a business, or head of a department. There are,
after all, but few heads compared to the great
number at work. Nor would I even suggest the
thought that every opening in business is splen-
did. It isn’t. There are many blind alleys. And it
sometimes requires a girl’s utmost ingenuity and
strength, not to mention money, to venture out,
if she is to extricate herself and to find a real
opportunity. Too many girls are permanently
side-tracked in business blind alleys, and that is
a very real tragedy in our business world. But I
do say that more rests with a girl’s own alertness
than many realize. And with the variety of work
which is carried on in the business world as a
whole, it is often possible for the alert girl eventu-
ally to find that which approximates her capa-
bilities, her interests and her strength.

“Why, think of the variety of work right here
in my own business! I have young women stenog-
raphers, young women office managers, young
women who sell the pottery and coffee at retail,
young women who act as hostesses in the restau-
rants seeing that people are promptly and com-
fortably seated, young women who are waitresses,
and I buy articles which have been made by young
women. In one day’s work I touch, I would say,250 Girls Who Did

 

at least twenty-five kinds of work which girls
are doing and may do in business. But no matter
what a girl does .

She paused. I waited.

“Tet her never expect the perfect day nor the
perfect job,” said Alice Foote MacDougall.
‘There aren’t any.”Mary Kinessury SIMKHOVITCH

A girl who liked folks
—and music
—and bookssy
ni

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

MARY

== ipaq KINGSBURY
i’ 4 SIMKHO-
VITCH

 

 

» when she
was fifteen,
you had asked
Mary Kings-
bury what she
— most enjoyed
she could not have told you. She might have said,
~My music.” But then, remembering something
else, she would have stopped, for there were her
books. Yet mentioning books, she would have
hesitated again, for there were people. How she
did love folks!

Mary’s father was on the staff of the Governor
of Massachusetts and many fascinating guests
came to enjoy the generous hospitality of the
Kingsbury home. Cheeks rosy from a game of
ball with the girls down the street, Mary was
always glad if company was there when she came
in. Best of all was the fact that most of their
visitors treated her as somebody, including her in

e053254 Girls Who Did

 

their conversation, often even asking her opinion
on some matter under discussion. Being with
people certainly was fun!

And yet—there was her music. The f ather who
was her pal on larks at her grandfather’s farm
was her special comrade in music. When he sang
in his lyrical voice, Mary played his accompani-
ments. And the evenings were not few when she
and he sat up gorgeously late, to sing and to
play. It is not recorded whether the rest of the
family slept!

Yes, music was entrancing—and yet, there
were books. Mary’s mother loved books and to
her young daughter she communicated a love of
them no less deep than her own. Books from the
library in the Boston suburb where they lived,
the family’s books, her own books in her own
room, these, too, were a cherished part of Mary’s
life.

But which she most enjoyed, she couldn’t have
told.

One can think of many things which, as she
grew older, a girl like Mary could find to do, to
do well and to greatly enjoy in the doing. Per-
haps that which most of those around her in her
girlhood naturally thought would attract her was
music. One music teacher, especially, had this
in mind for her, a teacher so wise and entertaining
that to this day Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch
cannot mention her without an affectionate lightMary Kingsbury Simkhovitch 255

 

in her eyes. For this teacher did far more than
show Mary the technique of finger exercises. She
brought her books about great musicians. She
played duets with her. She took her to concerts.
She taught her to read orchestral scores. And
with it all, she gave the young girl a glimpse
into the infinite beauty of music and the dreams
of our great composers who have brought us that
beauty for our own. |

Yes, perhaps Mary would have chosen music,
after all, but for an overwhelming discourage-
ment she soon met. In time, she had another
teacher, quite different. One week this teacher of
opera would tell her that her voice was one of
great promise, and the girl would go away filled
with happiness. The next week, this same teacher
would throw up her hands in despair, assuring her
pupil that her voice was quite hopeless. Bewil-
dered, Mary nevertheless persisted until at length
the discouragement became too great. And she
turned elsewhere, always, however, to cherish her
deep love and appreciation of music.

It was a clear, brisk autumn day when I
crossed the teeming street in front of Greenwich
House, on my way to talk with Mary Kingsbury
Simkhovitch. I knew that for twenty-five years
she has acted as director of this settlement house
—Neighborhood House, she prefers to call it
—with its clubs and its classes and its nursery256 Girls Who Did

 

school and its music school and its many other
activities. I myself had once come there to see
exquisite Christmas pantomimes acted by the
children of the neighborhood in the Greenwich
House Children’s Theater. Again I had come to
see an exhibition of colorful pottery, made in the
pottery room.

But I had never before come to ask Mrs. Simk-
hovitch how it was that she had found this work,
so vital to others, so satisfying to herself.

Serenely the brick building that is Greenwich
House rises above the honkings and the confu-
sion that is Barrow Street, New York City.
Widely its doors swing in welcome to the men
and the women and the boys and the girls who
crowd the sidewalks there. And friendliness
greets you when you, yourself, step inside. No
matter who you are, they are glad that you have
come.

I enjoyed the few moments’ wait while the
woman at the desk in the hall announced me.
Over in a corner, four little Italian boys were
absorbed in a game. Their legs wound about the
rungs of their chairs, their heads bumping over
the table, they were oblivious to all passers-by,
for it was their game, in their house, where they
belonged.

An Italian woman with a very small black-
eyed daughter, an Irish woman with a very small
blue-eyed son hurried by me. The Italian womanMary Kingsbury Simkhovitch 257

 

opened a door and as the cavalcade passed
through, I caught glimpses of a whole roomful
of small boys and girls riotously engaged in
something. Was it more pantomimes, I wondered.
Another play for the Children’s Theater? What-
ever it was, it was fun and the mothers didn’t
want their children to miss it.

A house of friendliness, belonging to the
neighbors.

“Come in,” greeted Mrs. Simkhovitch, cor-
dially welcoming me to her own apartment on the
third floor.

I settled myself comfortably in a corner of a
davenport, grateful after the noise of the city
streets for this room of rest and peace, with its
lovely old furniture, its fireplace, its pictures.

“Tell me about your plan,” said she of whom
I had come to ask questions.

And I knew at once that the friendliness of
Greenwich House is none other than the friendli-
ness of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, that the
feeling of belonging in the little Italian boys
down by the door was real because she, herself,
is real.

And I knew it must be characteristic of her
that before I could ask her about herself, she
would speak first of this book.

“It is for girls,” I said. “There are many girls
who are interested in your kind of work, or would258 Girls Who Did

be if they knew about it. It will help them if they
can hear how you came to do this and have your
suggestions for those who are starting out in it
today.”

“You are sure it will help?” she asked, simply,
directly.

“Very sure,” I replied.

How has it all happened? Mrs. Simkhovitch
smiled. “Just as things do happen in this world,”
she said. “Not all at once, not without a great
many mistakes on my part. Nor without days
that were so hard it seemed as though I couldn't
go on. Yet, after all, one thing led to another,
almost casually.”

And she told me of fifteen-year-old Mary
Kingsbury, the girl who liked music and. books
and folks. “Looking back,” she continued, “I
can see the real significance of much that hap-
pened when I was a young girl. I clearly remem-
ber, for instance, the first time I ever saw how the
very poor really live. A Sunday school teacher
took several of us to the city, one Thanksgiving
time, to present a turkey to a poor woman. We
arrived at the ugly tenement, climbed the stairs
through refuse and at last entered a stone-cold
room. Very self-consciously, we placed the turkey
upon the table and left.”

Unexpected amusement twinkled in Mrs.
Simkhovitch’s eyes at the recollection. ““Tmagine
that!” she exclaimed. “No fire. Apparently noth-Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch 259

 

ing there to build a fire with. And we depositing
an uncooked turkey triumphantly! But even if
ill-advised, that visit left a deep impression upon
me. It seemed so unfair to me that some people
should be forced to live as that woman was doing,
while I and my friends were so comfortable.

“It was a picture which was later to return to
me forcibly. But meanwhile, I continued with
my schooling, eventually graduating from Boston
University and entering teaching. I taught in a
high school but soon decided that I did not care
for it. The work was so rigid. There were too
many papers that had to be corrected.” Mischiev-
ously, she leaned toward me. “Sometimes I threw
them all in the waste basket without looking at
them,” she whispered.

“So, because I did not like it, I left teaching.
And because I did like books and study, I entered
Radcliffe for graduate work. It was at this time
that I did some church visiting among the poor
of Boston and the picture of our Thanksgiving
visit so long before came back to me. It seemed
to me that conditions were no better than they
had been then. And the more I saw of poor peo-
ple and their ugly and uncomfortable homes, the
more disturbed I became over it.

“Why did we have such a state of affairs?
What was the cause of it? Was it necessary? I
thought there must be some reason for it all
and I wanted to know that reason. As collegeCasa po areas ne

260 Girls Who Did

 

girls do, I turned to my studies and my professors
for the answer, especially to my courses in eco-
nomics. And I found that the question I was ask-
ing about injustice was an age-old problem, one
that stretched around the world. My history told
me that it was an injustice which had always
existed.

“Tt was bewildering. Yet I never doubted that
I and my friends could do something about it!
By that time, I remember, I was acting as leader
of a club of colored girls. The Primrose Club,
we called it. When I knew the girls well, they
invited me to their homes and I became familiar
with the way in which colored people were forced
to live. I next made a far more disturbing discov-
ery—that the very tenements which were so de-
plorable were actually owned by several of my
fellow church-members.”

Mrs. Simkhovitch paused, lost in memory.
Then, continuing——

“T decided upon still further study,” she said.
“I wanted to know more and more and more,
you see, of how the world as it is came to be.
Undoubtedly, this was my mother in me, whose
respect was unbounded for what books can give.
So, being awarded a fellowship for foreign study,
I went to Berlin, taking courses there chiefly in
economics, and meeting Mr. Simkhovitch, who
was also engaged in graduate study.

“Oh, how I loved the music in Berlin! AndMary Kingsbury Sinikhovitch 261

how I did enjoy my study there. But I returned
at the end of a year, to continue at Columbia
University. Again my old question would not
let me alone. I wished to engage in some prac-
tical work. Yet the visiting of the poor which I
had done while a student was now not enough.
I became convinced that the conditions which so
distressed me could not be remedied by intermit-
tent visits, by this plan or that plan made for
people without consulting them. I came to feel
that I must live among those in whom I was so
deeply interested, getting acquainted with them
as my neighbors, studying their desires and the
things they themselves could do and wished to do.

“So I entered the College Settlement House.
I often think of the group of seventeen and eight-
een-year-old boys who used to meet with me there
on Sunday evenings. They called themselves the
Economics Discussion Club and how they did
enjoy grappling with tough questions! They were
splendid boys, now grown men whom I meet here
and there. Just the other evening, after I had
been broadcasting, one of them came up to me.
He holds a distinguished position in the govern-
ment service. His brother is a physician. Another
former member of this club whom I recently saw
is successfully associated with a Spanish-Ameri-
can business firm. His was a good mind and real
ability and he has made good use of both through
the years. As I looked at them, I contrasted their262 Girls Who Did

 

surroundings now with those of the tenements of
their boyhood days. And I was happy to have
them tell me that there in our Economics Club,
they found something of vital help to them,
which has proved a useful part of their own
education.

“But to continue. From the clubs and the
classes and the too-busy days and nights of the
College Settlement House, I became head worker
of the Warren Goddard House in New York.
While I was there, Mr. Simkhovitch and I were
married. And more evenings than not, we used to
sit up late together, discussing plans.

“In three years, we decided to try out those
plans. And we came to Jones Street and settled
down among the people who interested us so
deeply. It wasn’t different, however, from settling
down anywhere in a new place. We ran out to the
corner store. We gradually got acquainted with
our neighbors. We were invited to their parties
and their weddings. And we started a kinder-
garten. A kindergarten, because we realized that
there are few people who do not wish to give
children the best possible of everything, and so
we felt it would be welcomed.

“Little Willie Zimmerman came as our first
client. I can see him yet, the son of a nearby deli-
catessen proprietor. Willie tried us out, liked us,
came again. And Willie and Willie’s mother
spread word of the games and the songs and theMary Kingsbury Simkhovitch 263

 

paper cut-outs that Willie so ardently enjoyed.
So more mothers came with more children and
our kindergarten was launched.

“From the first, everyone concerned with
Greenwich House had a share in making our
plans: those of us who lived here or who came
in to do the work, those of our friends who helped
us raise the necessary money, and the neighbors
themselves. Our aim was high. We wished to
make this part of the city the best place in which
to live and work. But just what to do in order to
reach our aim was to be a matter of all of us
working and making plans together.

“And that is the way it has come about. As
soon as the neighbors realized our genuine
interest, they told us what they wished to have
for their part of the city. We organized the
Greenwich Village Improvement Association,
with Italian members and Irish members learn-
ing to work harmoniously together. And little
by little we worked for, and got, such things as
a library and a public bath. Those about us came
to feel that Greenwich House was indeed theirs,
until now we have a nursery school for the chil-
dren of mothers who must go out to work; visit-
ing doctors and nurses to give health examina-
tions and to suggest remedies. And clubs innum-
erable! Of course the boys and the girls wanted
their own clubs with singing and dancing and
entertainments and discussions and summer camp264 Girls Who Did

 

trips. And the grown-ups were not far behind
in organizing clubs of the kind that especially
appealed to them.

“Tt was natural, too, that others should want
classes of various kinds. English for the foreign-
born, for instance. And the arts—it has never
seemed enough to me for us merely to be well
and strong and living in comfortable homes.
There must be meaning in our lives, a responding
to beautiful things. Our music school has been
one answer to this. And our wood carving. And
our pottery.”

“May I see some of it all?” I asked.

She led me to the room in which boys, under
the supervision of an Italian expert, were draw-
ing and modelling and carving, like medieval
apprentices, for pleasure and to order. On
another floor girls of all ages were modelling
clay into pottery shapes, glazing it with Persian
blues, and bitter-berry orange, and Chinese red,
and firing it in the kiln preparatory to the selling.

Forgetting me, forgetting everything but the
glowing blue bowl before her, Mrs. Simkhovitch
stopped still . . . then, remembering, she smiled.
“Isn’t it beautiful!” she said—and opened the
door for me.

And downstairs, in the nursery school, was
Juleen, with hair like young grape tendrils and
eyes as dark and as big as black grapes. Juleen
herself was no bigger than a minute. If that. ButMary Kingsbury Simkhovitch 265

 

she was big enough to sit in a little red chair, at
a little red table, and drink her little jug of
orange juice. Over it all, she made a little chuck-
ling sound and held out her jug with no uncertain
meaning to the nurse in charge.

“More,” said Juleen, juicily. “More.”

Back again in the quiet of the apartment, Mrs.
Simkhovitch spoke of their music school, where
some of the finest musicians of New York City
give lessons at moderate cost to boys and girls of
talent.

“Our pupils pay all that they can afford,” she
explained. “Just as everyone does, in any of our
clubs or classes. But we do not turn away those
of talent because they have not the money for
the lessons.”

The work of twenty-five years—the busy build-
ing—her book, The Settlement Primer, pub-
lished by the National Federation of Settlements
in Boston and giving so much of all that she her-
self has learned through the years—there still
remained much that I wished to ask her. Yet I
wished to know, too, how she would start out in
this field of work that is hers, were she young,
here and now.

Into the story, I injected my question. “If you
were a young girl today, Mrs. Simkhovitch,” I
said, “how would you start out in social work?”

“How would I start out today?” Mrs. Simk-
hovitch smiled. “Perhaps it would be better for meESE
CA eae

266 Girls Who Did

 

to answer another question and that is—how
does any girl who is interested in this kind of work
start out? I would say that whether she wishes
to be a worker on a playground or a visiting
nurse or a club leader in a neighborhood house
such as this or a church visitor or a personnel
worker in some factory or store, she should ask
herself honestly, ‘Do I enjoy being with people?
Am I really interested in them? If what seems
romantic in the work attracts her, but if the
thought of being among people so constantly
annoys her, I would say that social work is not a
wise choice for her.

“But if she does enjoy folks, what then? Any
one of a number of plans! In general, I think she
should get the best and most thorough education
which she can afford. The more she has within
her, the more wisely she will be able to go among
people, working out with them plans which will
make their living broader, more healthful and
more enjoyable.

“Tf she can go to college, so much the better.
But whether she goes to college or whether she
does not—and a college degree is not necessary
for entering the field of social work—she should
learn before she starts how to do some one thing
well. Just as the young woman who wishes to
enter the world of business has a definite opening
wedge if she is proficient in stenography and
typing, so the girl who is interested in social workMary Kingsbury Simkhovitch 267

 

can create an opportunity for herself if she knows
folk dances and games and can direct a group in
them; if she can lead clubs of girls and boys; if
she can assume charge of the production of plays;
if she is trained in public health work; if she has
learned how to conduct special investigations—if
she can do well any one of a wide variety of
activities.

“If she wishes to develop a specialty, she can
do so in the many schools which give special
courses of training. Dancing and the directing of
games and sports are offered in schools of recrea-
tion and physical education. Courses in public
health work are offered in an increasing number
of educational institutions in this country. And
sO on.

“If a girl thinks she will be interested in carry-
ing on special investigations for a charity organi-
zation society or a church, if work such as that of
a probation officer in a court appeals to her, there
are schools which offer training in it. Such work
is commonly called ‘case work’ and practise in it,
as well as instruction in its deeper significance,
is to be had in the schools of social work in Phila-
delphia, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta and
elsewhere. There are certain requirements for
entering these schools which may be easily
ascertained.

“There are openings, too, for the young woman
who can direct the work of others, the good268 Girls Who Did

 

administrator. This week, we are adding to our
staff a new head of our art work. She herself
is a writer and an artist. so that she understands
what those under her will be doing. She has had
excellent experience as an executive secretary so
that she knows how to be in charge of others.
“Since social work includes so many kinds of
activity, it is difficult to mention them all. But
further possibilities occur to me. Suppose a girl
is especially interested in Y. W. C. A. work, in
church work, in the work of the Camp Fire Girls
or the Girl Scouts, in the club work which is
carried on by the Department of Agriculture in
Washington, in playgrounds—the national
organizations sponsoring these fields have na-
H tional headquarters and special training courses
My; , for their workers. All that a girl need do who is
interested in any one of them is to write to those
national headquarters, inquiring about the quali-
' fications necessary for a young woman who
wishes to enter their work as a profession.
“So I cannot say to girls that social work
requires a college degree or training in a school
i for social work. The question resolves itself into
i the girl herself and what she can do and wishes
a) to do. If she is still in high school or college and
| is thinking about this field but wondering
| whether, after all, she really wishes to enter it,
hii she may try herself out. As a member of a Camp

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Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch 269

Fire Girl, Girl Scout, Girl Reserve or club
group, a girl learns how to work and play with
others. She learns to develop herself as a leader.
Later, she may go to a settlement house or to her
church or other organization and serve as a vol-
unteer leader of a group. Here at Greenwich
House, we have many such volunteer leaders who
have not yet completed their college studies but
who think they may wish to enter work of this
kind when they do graduate. The hours they
spend here each week with their boys and girls
are not only helping us but are showing them
something about themselves and what they can
do. If, later, they decide to enter this work as a
profession, they will be making that decision on
a foundation of actual experience.

“More and more, I am hearing that girls still
in school are spending their summer vacations
in various kinds of work, experimenting with this
and that, trying to discover what they best like to
do and for what they are best fitted. It is a splen-
did plan! And one that is readily put into prac-
tice in social work what with summer camps con-
ducted everywhere by settlements and other
organizations, in which a girl may act as coun-
selor; what with playgrounds always eager for
assistants; what with the summer play schools
in our large cities. There are many opportunties
fo be found by the girl who is alert.270 Girls Who Did

 

 

“Yet, after all, to do any one kind of work well
is not enough in this field. In social education, as
I prefer calling it, there must be human under-
standing. Without this understanding, it is arid.
But with it—” she paused, her eyes alight.

“With it,” she concluded, “there is neighbor-
liness.”

=

wl

: ae

ea RI RP et oe casesMaria JERITZA

A girl who could
sing but who
was very shyhe

ROE

Sp atpieMARIA. JERITZA

HE gods were lavish when they made Maria

Jeritza. A great beauty, a consummate
actress, a voice out of heaven—all meet in one
international opera singer. It is too much. She is
Brunhilde, turned gentle. She is Juno, made
mortal.

Am I extravagant in my praises? No doubt.
But I have heard Jeritza sing Thais in the Metro-
politan Opera House and I have talked to her
in her suite at the St. Regis. Both times she was
queenly—on the stage, in a flowing costume and
a crown; in her apartments, in a simple dress and
no make-up. Perhaps I liked her a little better in
private. The dramatic soprano voice which
stirred, first Europe, then America, was locked
away in her throat. But to compensate, there was

assii
4
5
4
'
+}

274 Girls Who Did

 

informality coupled with a very blond gaiety. I
remember wondering, on that afternoon, whether
the prima donna had knowingly chosen the
sherry-red of the curtains, rug, and upholstered
chairs as a background for her gold-and-white
self. No, I decided—Maria Jeritza is too natural
to calculate her background. Nevertheless, the
sherry-red, the tall Viennese vases, the long mir-
ror, and the red china berries on little china
bushes were a delightful setting for her loveli-
ness.

I asked her the old, old question, “Did you
dream, as a child, of grand opera?”

Her blue eyes looked between the fringe of her
dark lashes. Her hands moved expressively.

“T dreamed much,” she said with a slight Aus-
trian accent. “In Moravia, where I was born,
everybody sings in the schools and in the church.
But I took my singing very see-riously.”

“Ves?” said I. “And that was 0”?

“When I was twelve.” said Madame Jeritza.
“T took private lessons from a Professor Krejci
at that time, and he taught me the very first
principle of singing—never to scream and never
to force a tone. When I was fourteen, I began
lessons with Professor Auspitzer of Brunn, my
home town. In between my singing, I pretended
that I was a great actress performing in the fairy
tales which I and my old calico doll enacted
together. I was the heroine. My cat was theMaria Jeritza 2715

 

wicked ogre. Yes, yes, I dreamed much. And at
fifteen, I had a very great ambition to go on the
stage.”

She told me, then, of her shyness. If any
stranger listened to her singing, a nervous fear
contracted the muscles of her throat and shut out
the sound. How could she ever give an audience
to a manager? Professor Auspitzer solved the
problem by concealing, behind something or
other, the director of the Olmutz Theatre, while
the eighteen-year-old Maria ran through her rep-
ertoire of opera selections. At the end of this
inadvertent exhibition, the director emerged and
engaged the girl for his opera!

At dress rehearsal she had stage-fright. But
the stage-fright somehow fell from her when she
stepped forward in her first public appearance.
She was a success. She was an instant success.

After five months in Olmutz, she went to
Vienna. When the director of the Volksoper
heard her sing Micaela’s aria from Carmen, he
was even more hasty with his contract than the
Olmutz director. There was no mistaking the
extraordinary quality of this voice.

The career of Maria Jeritza from then on was
a fairy tale more astonishing and more real than
the fairy tales which she dramatized as a child.
Because a broad education is necessary for the
highest attainments in grand opera, she perse-
vered in her studies. History—an opera star must2/6 Girls Who Did

 

know the historic setting of each opera, if her
characterizations and her costumes are to be ac-
curate. Languages—an opera star must sing In
all the major languages, German, French, Ital-
ian and English and, if her singing is to escape
being a blur of syllables, enunciate perfectly.
The art of acting and the art of dancing are
often as important in opera as singing. It was
Max Reinhardt who taught Maria Jeritza how
to handle her body on the stage.

“We are required to do more and more acting,”
she said. “A prima donna used to sing an aria,
and let it go at that. . . . To-day she is called
upon to act highly emotional roles.”

I remembered Fedora and Marguerite and
Tosca—memorable for that golden voice, filling,
for the first time, the Metropolitan Opera
House, and the avalanche of roses which fell at
her feet. No European capital had given her a
more cordial welcome. And that welcome has
never worn thin. Since the historic year of her
first American appearance, Jeritza spends every
winter, from November to February in New
York. America, which is not preéminently a
music-loving nation, senses the deep sincerity of
the woman and loves her.

But sunlight casts, somewhere, a shadow.
Jeritza, too, has known her shadows. In the begin-
ning, her mother opposed her going on the stage;
her brothers and her sisters laughed at her dream-Marta Jeritza 2717

 

ing. Once, in Hamburg, the critics were scathing
in their denunciation of her voice. In Vienna she
was tempted by an offer of a career on the legiti-
mate stage. Joan of Arc was the role which a
manager flourished before her—and which she
rejected.

Even her world-wide triumphs did not end her
troubles. 'The life of an opera star has its distinct
disadvantages. Self-denial is all along the way.

“I am never master of my time,” said Jeritza.
There was no petulance in her voice, only an
infinitesimal regret. “My manager maps out my
dates one year, two years, three years ahead. I
go about my business like a soldier or an official
fulfilling his duties. If I don’t eat well, sleep
well, and exercise sufficiently, my voice suffers.
But the worst part of being an opera singer is
being continually an object of public curiosity.
I cannot go shopping, or attend the theater, or
walk on the streets, but I am stared at.”

Poor woman—for she is, after all, just a
woman. How painful to have people forever
pointing, and whispering, “Look! 'There’s
Jeritza!” and asking, “Do you think the hair on
her head is false?”

“I can never stop work on my voice nor my
studies,” she went on. “Since I began my stage
appearances, I have studied harmony, counter-
point, canon and fugue, composition and orches-
tration. In each opera, I must be familiar with278 Girls Who Did

 

every note my partner sings as well as with my
own role. I must know what the orchestra is to do,
for how could I tell them to tune up or down if
I didn’t know all the opera, as well as the diffi-
culties and the possibilities and the technical
capacities of each instrument?”

Jeritza in the flowing robes, Jeritza in the
queenly crown and the lavish setting of the Met-
ropolitan—and Jeritza studying diligently. Days
of hard work. Years of constant striving. Since
she was twelve, she has persisted in this one art.
Until she gives her last public performance, she
must think chiefly of it, if she is to maintain the
high quality of her singing.

“What of the girls who wish to enter music?”
I asked her.

She spoke at once of teachers. “Teachers have
so much power to hurt or to help,” she said. “In
vocal work, wrong exercises can ruin a voice.
Correct exercises strengthen it. So with the piano,
so with the violin. Pity the young musician who
learns incorrectly. Good teaching—every girl
who studies music should have it.”

“And what then?” I asked.

Again her hands stirred gently in her lap.
“More study. And more work. It is for the girl
herself to discover what next. If she is a singer,
she will learn the quality of her voice through
her studies. In time she will know whether it
is for singing in a choir or on the concert stage4 KS }
ah
wl aR

|
i
|

Maria Jeritza 279

 

or in the theater or the opera. It is so with the
piano or the violin or other instrument. Every-
thing depends on her talent and how she de-
velops it.”

“But there are so few who can do what you
have done, Madame Jeritza,” I said.

She considered it frankly. “Yes,” she replied.
“The opera is for the so very few. Ah, the disap-
pointments I have seen. So many work. So many
dream. And so few succeed as they have dreamed.
But what if a girl is not what you call a star?
Perhaps she will become a most excellent
feacher.”

We talked of music in Europe and in America.
Madame lamented the fact that America, unlike
Kurope, has no opera houses in her small-sized
towns.

“There should be more music, lovely music
everywhere if America is to have many beautiful
musicians and composers. To listen when you are
a child does so much for you. Music becomes what
shall I say—part of your very life. Much music
enters into the very soul. And when it is in the
soul—ah!”

“What role do you like best?” I asked tritely.

She smiled. But she did not answer my ques-
tion. Instead she said:

“If I don’t like a part I don’t sing it. How
can I render a role beautifully if I hate that role?
An audience is quick to sense lack of sympathy280 Girls Who Did

 

 

in a singer and quick to resent it.” Thus did she
refuse to name specially a single-beloved aria.
They are all beloved!

She was moving toward the door now, tall and
self-possessed. A great success bestows upon a
woman—if she is made of enduring stuff—not
only a sense of fulfillment but an invulnerable
poise. For a moment she stood motionless against
the sherry-red of the full-length curtain.

Then, “Goodbye,” she said graciously, and was

gone.

I pushed my way through the crowd on the
sidewalk below and thought of Jeritza’s days.
Days of rigid requirements, of never ceasing to
pay the price for excellence in her art. Moments
of supreme satisfaction because of what those
days enable her to do.

Jeritza—the genius. But what of those who are
not?

Impulsively I turned down a side street. As I
approached a certain door, a small boy bounded
out and down the steps.

“Goodbye, Teddie,” said a warm friendly
voice.

“Goodbye,” returned Teddie with a grin.

I went in. “How was Teddie’s music lesson
this time?” I inquired of my friend.

She shook her head. “Pretty poor. Teddie is

not a musician, you know.”Maria Jeritza 281

“Don’t you get frightfully bored?” I asked,
although I knew better.

She reproved me with a look. “Why, no. My
pupils interest me, even the Teddies. I know it
looks boring to you, my sitting beside that piano
day after day, listening to the struggles of begin-
ners. '‘I'o you, not to me. That is the difference.
And here is another difference—I must admit
that your enthusiasm for writing, your working
hours to find just the right word, looks like noth-
ing but hard labor to me!”

“Oh, no!” T protested.

“Exactly,” said my friend. And we laughed
together.

“I have been to see Jeritza,” I told her.

“A sincere artist. And now I suppose you are
thinking of the price of achievement and how
hard she must work to hold what she has won and
to go on?”

I started. “Yes, I am,” I admitted.

My friend leaned forward. “Of course she
works hard! Of course we all work hard. I do.
You do. The only thing that is different is the
degree of our talent. Jeritza is simply paying the
price everyone must pay for doing something
well. She is outstanding because she has out-
standing talent. But there are many girls——”

I interrupted. “That is what I wish to ask
you,” I said. “What about the many girls who
are talented musically? You were born in the282 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

United States. You know what such a girl must
do to develop her talent. Or shall she develop it?”

“Develop it? Yes, if she wishes to and can
afford to. If a girl is naturally attracted to music,
she will enjoy developing the ability that she has.
And it may be she will find in it her permanent
work. That was my experience. As you know, I
found my piano teaching.

“Byom the start, a girl must face the necessity
for musical training. A good teacher is essential.
Girls are too often handicapped by poor teachers.
Yet it is sometimes very difficult to learn just
who is a good teacher. In a small town, the choice
is limited. In a city, the number of teachers is
bewildering. If only there were some sure method
of finding your way to a good one! I can only
suggest that a girl proceed carefully, perhaps
consulting someone in whom she has confidence.
such as a musician who is already doing excellent
work—a pianist or an organist or a choir director.

“When she has exhausted the possibilities of
musical training where she lives, there comes the
question of going away for further study—and
where. The department of music in her state
university is an excellent source of reliable infor-
mation for a girl, whether or not she plans to
attend the university itself.

“Tow I wish I might warn every girl, who
has saved her money and who plans to go to a
city for her musical education, of the necessityMaria Jeritza 283

 

for investigating the teacher or the school where
she plans to study! Many unscrupulous teachers
encourage a girl until her money is gone, then tell
her that her voice or her playing talent has not
come up to expectations. A good teacher does
more than teach well. He evaluates the ability
of his pupils. He tells a girl frankly when he
believes her talent does not justify the invest-
ment of further time and money. Being inter-
ested in a certain kind of work never necessarily
means that you can do it well. A girl must be
ready to face facts.

“A musical education costs money. A girl
needs it for her lessons from the outset. She needs
it if she decides to study in Europe as I did.
There are, to be sure, some musical scholarships
which help with these expenses, when a girl can
secure one. And it is possible to continue with
her training in relays, studying for a certain
length of time, then teaching for awhile in order
to earn more money for more study. That has
been my plan, Teaching—studying—teaching
—studying. Even now I use part of my income
for further study.”

“And you chose teaching music because it
appeals to you more than anything else?” I
asked.

“Ves,” she replied. “I never regret my teach-
ing. I enjoy it. A teacher has such an opportunity
to develop not only musica} ability but musical284 Girls Who Did

 

appreciation. I shall never be able to make a
musician of Teddie, I know. But he will come to
enjoy music and to discriminate in it, I feel sure.
And the more people we have in this country whe
enjoy and discriminate, the greater will be the
demand for lovely music in America and the
greater will be the opportunity for splendid
musicians and the better music we shall have. It
is a cycle—and the Teddies are needed.

“But to return to my own choice. Concert work
interests me, too, although I myself should never
care to give my entire time to it. For that matter,
most of the musicians of my acquaintance who
play in concerts or who compose, also teach.
Others give their entire time to teaching, either
privately as I do, or on the staff of a public
school, a private school, a normal school, or in the
school of music of a college or a university.

“There are some doors that are still closed te
women in the musical world. Women rarely play
in our large orchestras, almost never direct one.
Yet they may direct a chorus or a choir or an
orchestra in a school, a church, a club or similar
organization.

“Yes, there are opportunities for young women
who are musically talented and trained. There are
opportunities in public performance and com-
posing as well as in teaching. And there will be
still wider opportunities.”

She spoke with conviction. She had, I knew,Maria Jeritza 285

 

met the hardships with which a girl who has but
a limited amount of money is confronted in secur-
ing her musical education. But she does not regret
her effort. She has her piano. She has her pupils.
She has her occasional public performance. And
there in her book-lined studio, with its welcom-
ing fireside, she finds satisfaction in what she is
doing.
The same satisfaction which I felt in Jeritza.You

A Girl
who is wondering
about herselfYOU

What about you?

It is interesting to read about women who are
doing all kinds of things and to know what they
were like when they were girls, yet after all—
“What about me?” you ask.

“I am different from every one of them,” you
think. “It was easy for them. They had talent. I
haven’t a sign of it. And as for being a
genius re

Isn’t it just possible that your idea of talent
is too limited? For talent means more than ability
to write or sing or draw well. There is a talent
for system, for keeping things in order. The girl
whose bureau drawers are always neat, who never
forgets an appointment has this talent and may
make an excellent office manager or secretary.
There is a talent for people, for getting along
with them, for inspiring them, for making them

289290 Girls Who Did

believe in themselves and for teaching them. This
talent is of greatest use in social work and in
teaching. There is a talent for growing things
which can lead girls to successful work in some
kind of agriculture.

Often a girl is unconscious of the very thing
in herself which should point the way for her to
her logical profession. One girl was exceedingly
popular with her small nieces for her story-telling
and the delightful little games which she orig-
inated. But the idea of becoming a kindergarten
teacher never occurred to her until someone else
suggested it. And she often wonders, now, how
she could have been so blind, for today her small
pupils, as well as she, herself, greatly enjoy her
kindergartening.

It is for you to discover yourself, to try your-
self out in as many ways as you Can. Your experi-
ence as a high school girl is Just as important and
just as significant as any you will ever have. If
you are a member of a Camp Fire Girl, Girl
Scout, Girl Reserve or club group, take part in
their various activities. Do not limit yourself to
one or two. And as you work upon the badges or
the honors, who knows but that you will discover
an unsuspected ability in yourself? Almost with-
out exception, each woman in this book has
spoken of things which you, as a girl, may do in
order to try yourself out in her particular field.

But this, of course, is only the start. What ofYou Zol

 

the training you must have? And how much will
it cost? How can you find out just where and
how you may enter the kind of work in which
you are interested?

You realize that these questions must be
answered and you feel truly discouraged because
your problems seem so much more real and so
much greater than those which these women faced
when they were young.

If the achievement of these women seems easy
to you, it is because in one book it has not been
possible to tell the entire story of each. But if you
will look back at what they have said of the way
in which they got their start, you will find men-
tion of, “It was necessary for me to earn money
at once, so I ”, “Three years later, I us
“Then in five years, I a

Can’t you imagine what happened during those
years? There were mistakes and hard work and
discouragements, as well as days of accomplish-
ment. Indeed, accomplishment itself is made up
of failures and discouragements, as well as suc-
cesses. If you could talk with each of these women
yourself, you could know intimately of all that
those days and years held for them and you would
realize that while you are different from every
one of them and that while your problems are
your own and nobody else’s, nevertheless what
you must do and what they did are not so differ-
ent, after all.292 Girls Who Did

 

 

 

 

By no means all of them knew from the first
what they wished to do. Some had special talent,
to be sure. A few had genius. But others groped
their way along, trying first this, then that. And
here again you will find them mentioning years
in their discovering. Eventually, some who had
not realized that they had any special talent
found that they did. Others have never discovered
any. But they have found a kind of work and
surroundings which appeal to them and where
their interest in what they are doing and. their
persistence have brought them to their present
position.

And just as you have your personal problems
to face, so did each of them when they were girls,
so have they today now that they are women.
Some, as girls, were shy and hesitant and. self-
conscious. Some were impatient. Some had heavy
responsibilities and could not use the money they
earned for their own further training, but must
give it to their families for rent and food and
clothes.

In high school you are associated with all kinds
of girls and boys. Some you like and some you
do not, but you must continue to go to school
with those who are there. You will find the same
situation when you enter your work. And the girl
who learns to get along with all kinds of people
has a valuable asset in whatever she may decide
to do.You 293

The real responsibility for discovering yourself
and for finding an opportunity rests with you,
yourself. If there is something which you can do
well, something which you enjoy doing, look
around and see whether there is not a kind of
work in which your special tastes and abilities are
needed. The fields described in this book are but
few of those which are open to women today.
Every public library has books and magazines
which will give you many more. Ask your libra-
rian for them.

Talk with the vocational adviser in your school,
if you have one; with your teachers; with women
you know who are engaged in various kinds of
work. Ask them the questions which were asked
the women in this book: “How did you start?
What are the qualifications necessary in a girl
who wishes to do this work? What training should
I have? Where can I get it? How much will it
cost? What opportunities are apt to be open, once
I am ready to start out?” Be your own inter-
viewer !

As you talk with them, you may find that their
advice and suggestions are different from those
given here—concerning the same fields! This
will give you a basis for comparison. What is sug-
gested here may not be best for you in your cir-
cumstances. Each story is, after all, but that of
one woman and so gives you only one way of
entering and progressing in any particular field.294 Girls Who Did

 

 

It is, however, the story of a woman who has
achieved and so is significant to you.

It is never too soon for you to inform yourself
about any field, especially since certain training
may be required for entering it and you will then
wish to be planning for that training. It is always
important for a girl to secure her training in the
best available school. Where shall you go? Where
can you go? It may be necessary for you to take
your training in the town where you live, because
you cannot afford to go elsewhere. Make the
most of what you have, remembering that there
is always the possibility of later saving your
money and continuing somewhere else. On the
other hand, it may be possible for you to go to any
school or college which will offer you the best
training available. But what is the best school!

The girl who wishes to secure information of
this kind may go to her teachers or the librarian
in the public library. One list of such schools and
colleges is published by the United States Bureau
of Education. And other lists are available in
books. A librarian will look up for you the names
and addresses of the places which offer the train-
ing you desire, or she will tell you where you may
go for further help. The registrar in your state
university or in the normal school which is nearest
you is ready to give you suggestions if you will
tell what it is you wish to know. The graduates
of schools are always willing to tell you aboutYou 295

what they did there. Don’t hesitate to ask for
information!

But with the question of what training is neces-
sary comes the inevitable, ““How much will it
cost?” Don’t forget that many scholarships are
available, which help in no small way with
expenses. Ask about these scholarships and how
you may apply for one of them. Remember, too,
that new ways of earning money are constantly
opening up for the student who wishes to go on
with her education. Most colleges and many
normal schools have “Self Help Bureaus” and
the dean of any college or university will be
pleased to tell you of the ways in which the
students are helping to pay their own way. Posi-
tions are also open to students during their sum-
mer vacations. These are possibilities which
should be considered by the girl who must face
financial ways and means, with the encouraging
thought that since other girls have done it and
are doing it, why not you’

Don’t overlook the fact, however, that the girl
who earns her own way through college or special
school must be a girl with excellent health. For
it is not easy to pay your own way, at the same
time keeping up with the class work of your
courses. For this reason, some girls work for a
year or two between high school and college,
saving money and at the same time gaining
experience in holding a position which serves296 Girls Who Did

 

them in good stead in earning money at college.
One girl who was graduated from high school
not long ago and who is now earning her way
through college, attended a business college im-
mediately upon completing high school. She then
entered upon work as a stenographer, saving her
money and gaining experience in stenography
and typing. The money that she thus saved
helped to make her freshman year somewhat
easier and her experience gained for her a part-
time position which she has now held for two
years and which fits in with her college schedule.

Another plan which many college presidents
consider wiser than for a girl to attempt to earn
her entire way through a special school or college
is that of borrowing money for the course. 'This
is more widely customary in Europe than in this
country, but already girls here are finding the
plan feasible, repaying the debt when they have
been graduated and have a salaried position. By
this plan, their health is not so severely taxed.
And if the amount borrowed is not too great,
the time needed for its repayment is not discour-
agingly long.

“This is the kind of investment which business
men make every day,” said Dr. Henry Noble
MacCracken, president of Vassar, recently.
“Why shouldn’t young women invest in their
futures?”

For the girl who cannot, for the life of her,You 297

 

discover any one thing which she can do especially
well or any one thing which appeals to her more
than anything else, there is the thought of the
many other girls who have been in just that situ-
ation. Some have found it necessary to go to
work. Others have tried staying at home, have
decided that work would be more interesting and
useful—and have started out.

To learn to do one thing well is an opening
wedge. This opening wedge may be obtained in
a trade school or in a business course. If a girl
can type well, do filing or operate a machine, she
has something to offer. A position awaits her.
From this start, she can look about, possibly
studying in an evening school to prepare for a
better position, at the same time acquiring experi-
ence right where she is. And, like Mabel Stewart,
she is quite likely eventually to find the atmos-
phere and the work which appeal to her.

After you have completed your training and
entered upon your work, what then? You may
like it—and you may not! If you are unhappy,
study carefully to discover the reason and then
decide what to do about it. You may have chosen
the wrong thing for you. Marion Durell did, at
first. Or you may merely be working in an un-
congenial situation, with the work itself that
which you wish to do. Before you make a change,
decide which it is.

Or it may be yourself. Some girls expect to298 Girls Who Did

 

find impossibly congenial surroundings. And
they never will. Others are discontented when
any part of what they do is distasteful. Every
kind of work that exists has its “ornery” parts.
As Alice Foote MacDougall says, “Don’t look
for the perfect job. There isn’t any.”

Ability to get along with all kinds of people is
an asset. But there is such a thing as jealousy
and you may meet it. Some jealous person may
block your advancement. There is much beside
the actual work itself which can make a girl
unhappy.

No girl should forget that a change is possible.
Neysa McMein changed her work. Gertrude
Hawley did. Minna Hall Carothers did. But
before you actually make a change, ask yourself
—just why am I discontented? Is it my work?
My surroundings? Or myself? Sometimes a girl
can transform an unfavorable situation into a
favorable one by being a more generous, a more
understanding or a more efficient person.

Don’t change hastily. And don’t forget that
a change is possible. Some girls are like grass-
hoppers, jumping from one position to another
whenever they find something wrong with the
position in which they happen to be at the time.
Other girls plod on and on in uncongenial work,
not taking time to apply their intelligence in
analyzing what is wrong and what the best way
to remedy it.Sane Tnene,

You 29

 

All along the way are new adventures and new
problems to be solved and new difficulties and
new successes—for that is the way of life.

Yes, you are a girl who is wondering about
herself. But you are not alone. Girls in the Near
East are wondering. Girls in Europe are wonder-
ing. Girls in South America. Girls in the Orient.
And girls in all parts of the United States.

Everywhere, girls are confronted with a world
vastly different from that which their grand-
mothers knew, vastly different from that which
their mothers knew, as girls. You are the dis-
coverer of yourself. And you are a discoverer
of a new world. There has never been a time when
it was more interesting and worthwhile to be
alive.

But there is more before you than the discover-
ing. There is the making. Whatever you decide
to do, you will not be alone. Other girls will be
with you, and men and women and boys. You will
have your family, those whom you love and care
for. And what you do—what other girls do—will
be an important part in the making of a new
world.

Because she knows a great deal about what
girls everywhere are doing and what they are
facing, we asked Miss Mary Van Kleeck to tell
you abovt some of those things of which she300 Girls Who Did

 

thinks, as she looks out from the high windows
of her office.

When Mary Van Kleeck was a senior in Smith
College, she was awarded a fellowship from the
College Settlements Association to investigate
the number of hours which factory girls in New
York were then working. She was attracted to
the plan. She liked the idea of making investiga-
tions which would help girls to better the condi-
tions under which they were employed. So she
accepted the fellowship and became acquainted
with girls in many different trades. She met them
at their work. She talked with them in their clubs.
She visited them in their homes. They liked
her because of her friendliness and because they
saw that she was interested in what they were
doing.

Mary quickly realized that these girls were
working too hard—sometimes thirteen hours in
one day. She watched them lift heavy rolls of
paper and realized that they couldn’t possibly do
it without harm to themselves. She learned of
their poor pay and knew that they used that pay
not only to buy food and clothes for themselves
but for other members of their families.

And she wrote of what she found in order that
others might help these girls to better the condi-
tions of their work. Today, Miss Van Kleeck
and others like her still work to extend yet more
widely these better conditions which have gradu-You 301

ally come for girls and women and men who are
employed. But that has taken time.

Meanwhile, Mary Van Kleeck turned to the
study of other kinds of work that girls and
women were doing. When the Russell Sage
Foundation took over the investigations, she
became associated with the Foundation, enlarg-
ing her research to include the work of men as
well as of women. During the war, it was Mary
Van Kleeck who was summoned by the United
States Department of Labor to act as director
of the Women’s Bureau.

And from this Women’s Bureau to every plant
engaged in war work in this country, where
women and girls were employed, went her plans
for the hours they could best work and the kinds
of work which they could undertake without harm
to themselves. For she knew that if the girls and
women were harmed not only would the work
itself suffer, but the children of whom these girls
and women were to be the mothers would suffer.
It was a responsibility for the present and for
the future. And thousands of girls who never saw
Mary Van Kleeck during those war days, who
perhaps never even heard her name, owe much to
her careful planning in Washington.

Today, back at the Russell Sage Foundation
as head of the department of industrial studies,
she finds time to act as trustee of Smith College
and to go out to meetings of girls in many parts302 Girls Who Did

 

of the country. Because she is so deeply inter-
ested in girls everywhere, she has written to
you.

To You, From Mary Van Kleeck

Do you want a career? What kind of work
interests you? Must you work for a living? Is
your first duty to your parents, or will you plan
your vocation and, if necessary, leave home as
freely as your brother?

You have read these stories of women who have
been successful in many fields of work. Not all
are famous, but all have been useful, all are
today enjoying what they are doing, and several
have achieved something quite original. Perhaps
you have imagined yourself in the place of one
of them, or all of them, one by one. You may have
sung on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera
House with Jeritza. You may have devoted your-
self to the cause of social justice with Mary
Simkhovitch. You may have coached a hockey
team with Gertrude Hawley; nursed a sick
patient with Marion Durell; written a story with
Inez Haynes Irwin; or run a restaurant with
Alice Foote MacDougall.

But you will soon close this book and, as you
awake from your day dreams, you will ask,
“What have these to do with me? How do their
experiences help me? I am not like any one ofYou 303

these interesting women. I must be myself. But
what is ‘myself’ and what work is mine?”

You are right. You must choose for yourself.
But you are not the only girl in the world who
must face the problem of choosing an occupation
and of carrying it on after it is chosen. So I am
writing to you today to suggest some things that
are common to all girls, to tell you what others
are thinking about the very questions which are
puzzling to you.

I think one of the first things which you should
realize is that there is no neat, simple rule by
which you can decide on the work which you will
most enjoy and which is best suited to the kind of
girl that you are. You are living in a world in
which the whole economic organization is chang-
ing. The very forms of work are changing, con-
stantly. No field of work, no vocation remains
exactly the same from one year to the next.

If I were to attempt to make a list of all pos-
sible kinds of work that you may enter, and to
tell you what would be required of you if you
were to enter each of them, it would take hun-
dreds more pages than can be put into one book.
And in the end, all that I could say would be that
what I had told you was approaimately true for
the present moment. The important thing for
you, the girl of today, to know is that vocations
and all the conditions in which we live are chang-
ing. How to plan your life in a changing world,304 Girls Who Did

 

not how to fit your life into a fixed order of
things, is your problem and mine.

Girls all over the world are meeting this same
situation, not only on this continent but in all
the countries of Europe and indeed in the Near
East and the far Orient, just as their mothers
are meeting it. The homes in which our great-
grandmothers lived were far different from our
homes today. Our great-grandmothers, helped
by everyone in the household, spun the wool,
made the clothes, made the soap, made the
candles, cured the meat—in short, did many
things which are today done for us in factories.

And when the work which was formerly done
in the homes began to be done outside, at that
moment the position of girls and women began
radically to change. The home was no longer
to be a place where food and clothing could be
provided by the family for its own needs. And
today no family lives to itself. Goods are pro-
duced on a large scale, outside the home.

You can readily see what this change means
for us. Yesterday, the girl at home found her
time entirely filled with the many activities there.
Today, some girls, released from their great-
grandmother’s tasks, have too much leisure.
Others go out from their homes to work for
wages, making in factories the very articles
which were formerly made at home. And in be-
tween these two groups of girls are those whoYou 305

 

are planning to enter the movement of women
into the many tasks which society also needs—
teaching, art, social service, civic work, medicine,
law and other occupations outside the economic
organization for the production and distribution
of goods.

So it is that whatever the field of work in
which you are interested, it is a changing field
today as trains and boats and automobiles and
airplanes and the radio bring different parts of
the world closely together and your clothes and
your food are supplied for you without the effort
of making them on your part. You pay for them
with the salary which you earn.

It is important for you to remember that all
these changing economic conditions are drawing
girls and women out from their homes and into
the great field of work outside the home. Work
for wages or salary is becoming less and less a
matter of choice and more and more an inevitable
part of the ways of life in the world about us.

In a sense, it is desirable that it should be so.
Work is and always has been important to the
happiness of everyone. Without useful work, a
girl is incomplete, undeveloped—not the girl she
can be and should be.

Although the many changes which I have men-
tioned are also influencing the world of work
for men and boys, and although your brother is
faced with your same problem of choosing what306 Girls Who Did

 

he is to do, of securing training for it and of de-
ciding just where he shall enter it, you have
another problem to face. You have the problem
of what you, as a daughter, shall do about your
vocation. Most often I call it “the problem of
codrdination,” a large phrase but I think you
will understand what I mean.

If you are still living in your parents’ home,
you are quite likely to be confronted with the
question: “Shall I go to work or stay at home?”
This confuses you. You are pulled here and there
by circumstances. Some girls do not face the
question, but go to work without any planning,
in order that they may earn money to help out on
the family’s expenses. They take whatever posi-
tion is at hand, with the result that their work is
never the interesting or developing thing which
it might be for them.

Or, if there is no real need for a girl to earn
money, she may be led into believing that her
parents need her at home, and she lets precious
years slip by without developing her own talents
and without preparing herself for useful work.

Every girl must face her own personal situa-
tion. Every girl must work out her own prob-
lem. Yet I suggest that you try to eliminate the
either or from your own thinking. I suggest that
you, as a girl, accept the idea that it is desirable
for every woman, including yourself, to have a
vocation. Let the question which you are tryingYou 307

 

to answer be no longer the “EKither-or,” but
“How?”

Your parents have claims upon you but—how
shall you fulfill your obligations as a daughter
and at the same time enter the work which attracts
you? You have now accepted a vocation as a fact
in your life—how shall you fit your home life and
your work together? Is it not a much simpler
question to answer than to leave your choice of
vocation to the changing fortunes of your father
or your brother and always to be an accident
at work rather than a girl who makes her own
plans?

This may be a new idea to you. It is but one of
many which you will inevitably meet in this great,
changing world. Whether you will make wise use
of all these new ideas will depend upon your own
attitude toward life. The choice of work and the
doing of work are only part of the business of
living. We have to discover the power within
ourselves and find out how to lay hold of it. All
work, all the hours which we spend outside our
work, everything that we do with other people—
our home life; our good times with our friends:
the parties, the picnics, the camp trips, the club
meetings; the social service that we do in our own
communities—everything—offers opportunity
for practice in human relations. And in the prac-
tice of human relations individuality has its high-
est development.308 Girls Who Did

 

Bertrand Russell has told us his conclusion
that the good life is one inspired by love and
guided by knowledge. By love and by knowledge
we may bring in the kingdom of God. Another
name for the kingdom is “the commonwealth of
work.”ESE. ce Bese heeessons z= ee sca Bs a ae ey aera ee ees SERB based See a ae
A ——— — . Pome aerns cI - rae} n 5 Fa i iia
SEIS Sn ent taser ane
?ALDERMAN LIBRARY

The return of this book is due on the date
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DUE

 

 

 

Usually books are lent out for two weeks, but
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