Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fitting Women to Their Work: The Vocational Vision of Helen M. Bennett

2021; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23283335.114.3.4.04

2328-3335

Lisa Lindell,

American History and Culture

“A WOMAN CAN DO ANYTHING IF SHE PUTS HER MIND ON IT.”1 This conviction propelled the career choices of Helen Marie Bennett in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the vocational message she communicated. Bennett commenced her wide-ranging life's pursuits in western South Dakota, where she was raised, and brought them to culmination in Chicago, where she became a leader in the emerging field of vocational guidance. She firmly believed that all paths should be open to women and that women had a responsibility to find and follow their own vocation. Bennett's life experiences and interests sparked and shaped her career counseling work and led her to stage the Woman's World's Fair, held annually in Chicago from 1925 to 1928. The all-female enterprise stood as a visual portrayal of the achievements of women in an expanding range of occupations. “We are simply trying to show women what they can do . . . [and] to point the way for the women of tomorrow,” she stated.2 The story of Bennett's work to help women name and fulfill their life's callings demonstrates the significant role she played in the vocational guidance movement as it developed in the early twentieth century. Her background, formed through the westward expansionist experience and its legacy of dispossession, would color and complicate her outlook and the imagery she used as she lectured and wrote on vocation. Her message, taken to its full potential, however, evinced a vision of inclusivity and equal opportunities for all.Born September 17, 1872, in Washington, Iowa, Helen “Halle” Bennett was the second daughter of Granville Gaylord Bennett and Mary Dawson Bennett. In 1875, the family moved to Dakota Territory, where Granville was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court and, in 1877, judge for the Black Hills Judicial District established after the United States’ appropriation of traditional Lakota lands. In 1881, having completed a two-year term as the territory's delegate to the US House of Representatives, Granville Bennett brought his family to Deadwood, where he practiced law and served as a county judge.3 Helen's older sister Estelline later wrote an account of the town's early years, Old Deadwood Days, in which she described the arrival of the railroad in 1890 as transforming the tumultuous mining camp into “a surprised town with civic and moral obligations.” The Bennett sisters grew up sheltered from much of what Estelline termed Deadwood's “highly colored drama.”4 Drama, though, would hold an abiding interest for Bennett. She was always prone, as she put it, “to dramatize every activity that came my way,” and she would find that dramatic bent to be of future use to her.5After graduating from high school in Deadwood in 1888 and the normal school in nearby Spearfish in 1890, Bennett both followed and broke with the typical paths for women who worked. While accumulating earnings to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts (where she intermittently pursued her studies as finances allowed), Bennett taught in the Deadwood public schools and, less conventionally, served as a reporter for the Deadwood Pioneer, where Estelline was working as city editor. The Bennett sisters’ entry into the newspaper field placed them among a small band of female reporters and editors pursuing that profession in the late nineteenth century, especially in the West.6Higher education opportunities for women were expanding by the time Bennett enrolled at Wellesley in 1891. National statistics from 1890 show fifty-six thousand women registered at institutions of higher learning, comprising about one third of the total college student population. Of these women, 70 percent attended coeducational institutions and 30 percent attended women's colleges. Wellesley had opened as a women's college in 1875, offering a liberal arts education primarily designed to prepare women for their domestic roles or teaching. The reality of an industrializing nation and broadened expectations from women themselves brought gradual societal shifts in outlook and pursuits. Coexisting with progressive attitudes were social anxieties over women's perceived abandonment of their traditional sphere.7 As Barbara Miller Solomon writes in her history of women and higher education, the college woman's challenge was “how to live up to the promise of her education and at the same time fulfill her female role.”8 Wellesley, like other institutions of the time, provided scant vocational assistance. The college did offer some courses related to various professions, including, in the mid-1890s, a course in journalism that drew Bennett's eager interest.9Upon receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley in 1898, Bennett returned to Deadwood with the desire to find fulfilling work. She continued to intersperse teaching with newspaper reporting, until she seized the opportunity to run for superintendent of schools of Lawrence County, of which Deadwood was the county seat. Bennett ran a vigorous campaign and was elected in 1900 and again in 1902 on the Republican ticket. She played an active part in county and state school affairs during her two terms, while enthusiastically taking on other roles, most notably the management of the Deadwood opera house. The job included engaging and managing a stock company to play among the small Black Hills towns in the summer months.10Responsibilities for both her jobs brought Bennett to Chicago in the spring of 1901. Earlier that year, a school library law had taken effect in South Dakota requiring that a sum equal to ten cents per capita for each school-age child be spent on library books.11 On her Chicago trip, Bennett bought books for the county's school districts and simultaneously booked theatrical attractions and the stock company for the coming season. The unusual combination of positions generated coverage in the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers, especially garnering attention because of Deadwood's notorious reputation. “It is a long cry from the days when the theatrical business in Deadwood meant only the old Gem Theater to the time when it can be controlled by a college girl,” commented the Tribune. Both of Bennett's commissions were deemed a success: her selected entertainers commended for their “strong combination of talent” and the books for their “quality.”12Bennett continued to follow and build upon her vocational interests after her stints as superintendent and theater manager ended (the latter, she noted, running “true to form—much gay experience, no money”).13 She returned to reportorial work, chiefly at the Deadwood-Pioneer Times (consolidated in 1897 from the Deadwood Pioneer and Black Hills Times). The job expanded into managing and editing the paper during a protracted absence of publisher Willis H. Bonham.14 Among her editorials, Bennett wrote in defense of the intellectual capacities of women. She took issue with the views of Professor William I. Thomas of the University of Chicago, who stated in his book Sex and Society that “the world of modern intellectual life is a white man's world; few women and perhaps no blacks have ever entered this world in the fullest sense.” Such an entrance would need to occur, he maintained, before their “mental efficiency” could be judged. Focusing on women, Bennett forcefully argued against Thomas's premise. Women were and had long been a vital presence in intellectual life, with their attainments every bit as real and significant as those of men, she declared. Their contributions might differ but were by no means lesser or contingent upon exceptional circumstances.15In 1910, Bennett went into the newspaper business for herself, leasing the Hot Springs Times-Herald. Simultaneously, she acquired land, buying a half section and homesteading an adjoining quarter near Hot Springs, South Dakota. In June, her father, who had also homesteaded a quarter section, died from ongoing health issues, and in the fall, Bennett relocated to Chicago to work at the Chicago Record-Herald. Though she would continue to return to South Dakota, Chicago became her primary residence. There, she joined her sister, who worked as society editor for the Record-Herald. Bennett covered women's club and suffrage news for the paper. In 1913, her widening acquaintance with women throughout the city led to her first venture into the field of vocational guidance—as manager of the new Chicago Collegiate Bureau of Occupations when it opened in April of that year with the mission of finding jobs for college-educated or specially trained women.16Bennett entered the vocational guidance field in the early stages of its development. The movement arose in conjunction with the Progressive Era reform movement and its concern for the welfare of vulnerable populations as the nation experienced a rapid expansion in industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Civic reformer and teacher Frank Parsons is generally considered the father of vocational guidance (or career counseling) in the United States, with his establishment of the Vocation Bureau, a part of the Civic Service House in Boston, in 1908 and the posthumous publication of his Choosing a Vocation in 1909. The Civic Service House, founded in 1901 by philanthropist Pauline Agassiz Shaw, was among the many settlement houses established in the Progressive Era by social reformers who lived and worked with the urban poor in an effort to improve conditions. The mission of the Vocation Bureau, the nation's first vocational guidance agency, was to help immigrants and the newly urbanized find work. In his book, as in his vocational work, Parsons included both sexes, though young men were the primary focus.17At this same time, women college graduates brought the vocational guidance movement to college women. The Association of College Alumnae (ACA) and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) both played important roles in the movement. Even as increasing numbers of women enrolled in American colleges and universities (eighty-five thousand in 1900 and 140,000 in 1910) and pursued their own careers, teaching continued to be the path followed by most women entering the workforce. An ACA survey of nearly seventeen thousand alumnae of eight women's colleges and a coeducational university (Cornell) revealed that of those who had ever been gainfully employed, 83.5 percent had taught. Other surveys showed similar percentages. The popularity of teaching led to concerns of oversupply and low pay and a resolve to educate women about other options. In 1909, the ACA formed a Committee on Vocational Opportunities Other Than Teaching; and in 1910, the WEIU opened an Appointment Bureau in Boston to advise and place college-educated women in non-teaching careers. In 1910 and 1914, the WEIU published volumes highlighting careers for women outside the schoolroom, including social service, science, domestic science, agriculture, business, and clerical work. Chicago's launch of its women's occupational bureau in 1913 followed bureau openings in New York City in 1911 and Philadelphia in 1912, all with the purpose of assisting college and other trained women to find congenial, non-teaching careers.18The emergent movement resonated with Bennett's own deepening interests in women and work. Her experiences and observations fueled a desire to inform women of the variety of career paths they could pursue and to advocate for their receiving an adequate wage. As Bennett took up her managerial work at the Chicago Collegiate Bureau of Occupations, she was eager to spread the message that women could be other than teachers. She herself had not enjoyed or been very good at teaching, she claimed, and, as school superintendent, had encountered many other teachers who were unhappy or unqualified and unaware of other options.19 “Until the last few years there has been but little that the college girl could do with dignity except teach,” she stated, an outcome which, besides causing misery for the teacher, could be harmful for the pupils and an “insult to a great profession.” Happily, the growing acceptance of women's higher education was opening the way for widened aspirations.20Under Bennett's leadership and promotional efforts, the bureau quickly found a clientele and implemented a threefold agenda: to provide vocational advice to women, to investigate and open new fields of vocational opportunity for women, and to connect trained women job seekers with positions matching their wishes and abilities. Prospective employers who contacted the bureau were seeking women workers in almost every kind of occupation, Bennett noted. She cited calls for laboratory technicians and chemists, advertising and research workers, pen and ink fashion artists, translators, indexers, and investigators, though the most popular request was for secretaries. Women who registered with the Chicago Collegiate Bureau of Occupations came from throughout the United States and even Europe. In fiscal year 1916, the bureau reported over eleven thousand visitors, with 520 registrations, 688 requests from employers, and 408 placements. A move to larger quarters in that year provided for more comfortable working space and the opportunity for expansion. Bennett was gratified by the number of women who had attained permanent positions with increases in salary and responsibility; she was also pleased to see women returning to the bureau who were now managers and employing assistants for themselves. Beyond the actual job placements, she saw the bureau's prime mission as helping women to choose and prepare for their life's callings.21While at the bureau, Bennett achieved widespread recognition through travel and writing. In her vocational guidance role, she made herself available to speak at any college or school that invited her and paid her expenses. She typically arranged two-day visits so she could hold personal interviews with students. A calendar on Bennett's wall tracked her crowded travel schedule for months in advance. She described herself as “extravagantly busy and equally happy.”22 In addition to her many college visits, Bennett was increasingly sought out as a speaker at high schools and at gatherings of college alumnae and business and professional groups. She was thus in a position to offer advice to a wide spectrum of women, encouraging students to begin preparing for a career, colleges to build vocational programs, job seekers to seek compatible work, and those in established roles to support and foster women's expanding contributions. A week-long trip to Colorado illustrated Bennett's impact. Members of the Denver branch of the ACA reported that she not only aroused great enthusiasm among students at the University of Colorado, Colorado State Teachers College, Colorado College, and Denver University, but also inspired their branch to spring immediately into action to open an occupational bureau of its own.23As Bennett met and worked with college women and contemplated their place in the world, she crafted a practical and motivational philosophy. She believed every woman should choose a vocation, and she should choose carefully. Financial independence, self-development and self-expression, and the responsibility of putting a college education to good use were all of vital importance. Bennett urged women not to drift into an occupation but to carefully consider where they could do their best work and whether their occupation would be of service to the world. She acknowledged that there were still some professions difficult for women to enter, but hundreds of others were open or opening.24 “Choose the work which you want to do, which you can do, and which is practical for you to do,” Bennett counseled.25 “Do not choose an occupation because it is popular. [And] do not choose a job because it is easy, for it will not be so at all. There are no easy jobs. A task is easy because you make it so by pure love of the task.”26 There was nothing more important than finding the right fit. The job helped make the person, and the person helped make the job.27Bennett's vocational philosophy reached a sizable audience through her writing. In 1917, she published the book Women and Work: The Economic Value of College Training; and in subsequent years, her articles on vocational topics appeared in Woman's Home Companion and other publications. In discussing the value and desired outcomes of higher education for women (issues raised as college attendance swelled), Bennett assigned responsibility to the colleges and to the students. She called for colleges to provide specialized training and vocational counsel and for students to purposefully seek this guidance and follow their callings with an understanding of the hard work required. She saw these commitments as increasingly important as growing enrollments and changing times resulted in a less focused student body and a more fluid curriculum than in the earliest years of women's higher education.28As social and economic change brought new opportunities for women, Bennett emphasized the significance of the job of vocational advisor. She recommended that the college student should have an idea of her potential occupation by the end of the sophomore year or beginning of the junior year and begin to prepare.29 Bennett described the advisor's task as “instill[ing] into the mind of every girl the absolute necessity from a financial, economic, intellectual, moral and social standpoint, of having an occupation for which she is adequately trained.”30 An effective advisor helped individual women find their chosen path while awakening them to the vast field of work and their role in extending the opportunities for all women.31In Women and Work, Bennett approached her subject from the standpoint of the individual and what she specifically could offer the professions. Frank Parsons had laid the groundwork for the idea of matching careers with talents and traits. Bennett expanded the study of personality, identifying various temperaments (dramatic, philosophic, and scientific) and associating them with compatible lines of work. She considered an affinity for drama, for example, as suited for the newspaper profession. The occupation, with its “breathless pace” and use of words as a form of dramatic expression, was “a calling for the imaginative, expressive temperament in action.”32 Bennett also conceived the dramatic disposition as suited for secretarial work and nursing. Both professions called for adaptability, sensitiveness, and imagination. Careers requiring a scientific bent included the medical profession, salesmanship, and home economics; and a philosophic temperament lent itself to teaching, law, and social work.33 This latter field included settlement-house work, and Bennett recommended that college preparation include economics, industrial history, sociology, and psychology. She cautioned that low salaries were to be expected and promoted the work as an opportunity for experience rather than as an occupation in itself.34Bennett underscored that low and unequal wages were a constant issue, regardless of a woman's education level or place or type of employment. Many women were employed in subordinate positions, and others received lesser pay while performing the same work as men and with little opportunity to advance. Bennett dismissed the argument that men were entitled to higher salaries because of their presumed family responsibilities. Women, too, frequently had such obligations. Both sexes should be compensated according to the value of their work.35 Bennett attributed lower pay to prejudice, concerns about women's physical capabilities, lack of training opportunities, and, notably, to women themselves. Women, she maintained, often failed to wholeheartedly pursue a career due to expectations of marriage or other family claims. She contended they need not give up marriage for a career. They could do both with the time modern conveniences saved them. By finding a fulfilling means of self-expression, they would benefit themselves, family, and society as a whole.36Bennett's personal reasons for remaining single are unknown. Statistics show that only about half of women who graduated from college in the 1890s ever married, a figure significantly lower than the national marriage rate for all women. Driving this statistic was the increase in employment opportunities and income for young, educated single women. In subsequent decades, college women increasingly married at higher rates and at lower ages—due, among other factors, to a growing acceptance of married women in the workforce and shifting cultural norms. Family ties were important to Bennett. She and her sister Estelline, who also remained single, lived at the Plaza Hotel in Chicago. Their mother resided with them for a number of years until the time of her death in 1925. A niece also lived with the Bennett sisters for a period prior to her marriage.37The entrance of the United States into World War I in April 1917 brought new work options for women and significant changes at the Chicago Collegiate Bureau. Bennett reported that many college women were ready to take the places of men called to the front and were applying for work in munitions factories. In her visits to colleges in the Middle West and West in the spring of 1917, she found women training for civil engineering, aviation, and other technical occupations.38 Bennett cautioned against a general assumption that men's war service would “release a great group of important positions which women would be straightaway called upon to fill.”39 There was an urgent call for women, but often to serve in lesser jobs vacated by male employees promoted to the positions of those gone to war. Bennett appreciated, though, that many of these jobs would eventually grow in importance and that a number of good positions were already available.40 By the end of 1917, the bureau had sent dieticians and secretaries to serve in France, chemists to work in laboratories, and secretaries and translators to aid in war work. In addition, they had placed numerous women with the Red Cross, the Women's Division of the Council of National Defense, and many other allied agencies.41Throughout the war, women proved their usefulness, demonstrating their ability, adaptability, and physical stamina. With many women now engaged in carpentry, munitions, and other such work, Bennett declared, “It is no longer strange to think of woman in relation to the job. Fifteen years ago . . . great fear was felt for women in masculine occupations but this fear has been found to be without basis.”42 In the war's aftermath, a sizable number of women who had obtained positions due to the war continued in their work. Bennett was pleased to report in January 1920 that a large industrial plant in Chicago that had never employed women in its chemical laboratories before the war had decided to retain the women hired to fill the places of men, even after many of these veterans had returned.43As Bennett continued to travel the country delivering lectures, she increasingly focused on women's achievements and their essential role in the world of work. “Our social, our industrial, our business life would hang by the thinnest thread if the efforts of women were drawn away from them.”44 She attributed women's industrial advancement to the advent of mechanical production and the experience of the war. “Machinery drove women out of their homes. . . . It was no longer necessary to spin and weave and later it was not necessary to make bread, because it could be done more easily by means of machinery. . . . And the final thing that set us as a group free . . . was the last great war, when women went overseas and drove ambulances and carried on work behind the lines and did the work of farmers and worked in factories.”45 Bennett identified another consequence of the war experience—that of waking women up to wage discrimination. In order to retain them in their newly acquired work, she believed, it would be necessary to compensate them fairly and to offer them opportunities to advance. Women had accomplished much, while yet having much further to go.46College vocational guidance programs, too, had further to go. The News-Bulletin of the Vocational Bureau of Information made this point in its February 1923 issue, urging that colleges devote more than “casual irregular attention” to vocation. Needed were well-developed vocational guidance programs, full-time vocational advisors, and active follow up. In the meantime, as colleges worked toward this goal, visiting vocational advisors such as Bennett were a welcome option and stimulus. “It would be difficult to find any individual who has done more to arouse intelligent vocational thinking among young college women than has Miss Bennett,” the News-Bulletin stated.47In the mid-1920s, Bennett ventured once again into politics, a decision that would indirectly open the way for her staging of the four Woman's World's Fairs. In 1922, Bennett was a candidate for county commissioner in Cook County, and though unsuccessful in her bid, her effective campaigning led to an offer in the fall of 1923 to work for the Republican Party of Illinois. Bennett's ten-year managerial tenure at the Chicago Collegiate Bureau came to a close as she took on the management of the women's campaign committee for the re-election of Senator Medill McCormick. The senator was the husband of Ruth Hanna McCormick, with whom Bennett had worked closely on women's suffrage campaigns and, after the successful passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, in organizing Republican Women's Clubs throughout the state.48 The November 1924 election resulted in the defeat of Senator McCormick and a dismal financial outlook for the Republican Women's Clubs, who had expended much of their resources in campaign work for the party. Ruth McCormick's quest for a means to recoup club finances gave Bennett the impetus to share a long-cherished dream of holding “a great show” to highlight the ever-widening work of women. McCormick enthusiastically supported the idea, and preparations for a fair promptly commenced.49The Woman's World's Fair would be an annual Chicago experience each spring from 1925 to 1928. Bennett brought to the enterprise both her theatrical flair and her zeal for promoting women's vocational choices and potential. She had conceived the idea as she traveled the country speaking to college women. “Finally . . . I came to the conclusion that we were talking too much. I decided . . . to show these girls visually what the opportunities were—to present to them concretely what other women were already accomplishing.” She would draw in audiences through the medium of theater, “a fair, with color, music, programs and radio—something glittering, and active, and interesting.”50 What the fairgoers would experience was a kaleidoscopic display of women's work—what Bennett termed “the visualization of the vocations of women.”51The fair took form through the collective efforts of women steered by a board of directors comprised of prominent Chicago women, who, Bennett and McCormick stipulated, must be willing to work. Women sold space, designed floor plans, handled the insurance, and publicized and broadcast the event as Bennett's practical executive ability brought the undertaking to realization. April 18, 1925, marked the fair's debut. The week-long exhibition was held in the American Exposition Palace, occupying the lower floor of the large multi-story Furniture Mart overlooking Lake Michigan. The fair received wide coverage and the railroads offered reduced rates to fairgoers. Through the personal connections of Ruth McCormick, the fair's planners recruited the participation of two males in the virtually all-female production: President Calvin Coolidge launched the fair via a radio address as First Lady Grace Coolidge pushed a button from the White House to ceremonially open the doors of the hall, and Vice-President Charles Dawes delivered the closing address on April 25.52The fair incorporated some 280 exhibits in a “glorious jumble.” Helen Burling, writer for the weekly Woman Citizen, described two acres of closely set booths and aisles “filled with jostling crowds of men and women and children, flags and streamers above, all the colors of the rainbow in every lane, clothes, furniture, whirring machinery, good things to eat, flower girls, bagpipes and bands.”53 Women representing dozens of occupations provided demonstrations of their work in education, science, industry, commerce, the arts, and civic and domestic life. The fair had no need to compare or contrast the value of women's work with men's, noted the women's editor of the Decatur Herald. “Outstanding women have just shown what they have done.”54Thursday, April 23, 1925, was designated as famous women's day. Guest of honor was Wyoming's Nellie Tayloe Ross, first woman to be elected governor in the United States. The idea of a Woman's World's Fair “has been to me most intriguing from the first moment I heard of it,” Ross declared. “It will, I am sure, inspire pride in all women who are fortunate enough to attend, and gratitude that they live in the present age.”55 Among other distinguished women present were social reformer and founder of Chicago's Hull-House Jane Addams; Harvard Medical School faculty member and specialist in occupational diseases Dr. Alice Hamilton; collector of internal revenue Mabel G. Reinecke; Unitarian minister Dr. Rowena Morse Mann; well-known cookbook author considered to be the nation's first dietician Sarah Tyson Rorer; and first federally appointed female judge in the United States Kathryn Sellers. Famous women's days and luncheons became an annual fair event honoring notable women in the arts, professions, industry, government, social welfare work, and even big game hunting.56 Bennett empha