Women professional workers : a study made for the Women's Educational and Industrial Union

Front matter

This Home Reading Course, devised primarily for men and women in business and the professions, is published by Chautauqua Institution at Chautauqua, N. Y. It is not a course of technical business training, but is intended to render persons in business and the professions the same service that the Home Reading Courses conducted by the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle have supplied for the general reader. It provides books and editorial helps which busy people may use systematically but without tyranny of requirement. The selection of books has been oflacially indorsed by the Federation of Business and Professional Women^s Clubs, and the Federation cooperates with the Institution in awarding credit for completed courses. The certificate awarded to any member on completion of the course will be officially signed both by the Institution and by the Federation.

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A STUDY MADE FOR THE WOMEN'S EDUCATIONAL AND INDUSTRIAL UNION

Table Of Contents

Chapter Page

I. Who are Professional Workers? i

11. Women as Professional Workers i8

Chapter I Who Are Professional Workers?

There has never been a time when it was so necessary for professional persons, men or women, young or old, novices or veterans, to ask themselves honestly and thoughtfully: Why do I call myself a professional worker? What am I doing to justify the title? The unprecedented demand for experts of many sorts during the war magnified the importance of the professions while at the same time it challenged many of their comfortable assumptions. Old professions have changed places in the scale of values ; new professions have emerged and are emerging. The temper and methods and outlooks of all professions are undergoing profound alterations. For the first time they are beginning to consider seriously their relations to one another, to other groups of workers, and to the social order as a whole. Women in far greater numbers are looking to professional careers. The very term "professional" has acquired a widespread and easy popularity. To answer the first two questions, accordingly, we must attempt to answer two others: Who, to-day, may justly be considered professional workers? What, to-day, may justly be considered professional occupations ?

To get at the distinguishing marks of the professional worker, it is the part of wisdom to look first at the historic "learned professions" of medicine, law, and divinity. All three involve: (i) a considerable period of special prepa-

2 WOMEN iPkOFESSIONAL WORKJlRJ

ration and training, tending to become more exacting; (2) a public and frequently legal recognition of professional status, by examination, registration, ordination, and the like ; (3) eligibility to membership in professional societies and associations carrying with it the obligation to maintain professional standards of skill and conduct; (4) a consequent position of responsibility in and to the community; (5) practice of the profession as a permanent calling providing an adequate livelihood.

Dictionary definitions agree substantially, although in far more majestic language, upon these marks of a profession. They all point out that the derivation of the word emphasizes the public and active character of the occupation, the original Latin word meaning open or public avowal, a sense retained in speaking of the profession of a monk or nun, public admission into a religious order. They likewise call attention to the social responsibilities flowing from the special training and public recognition involved. A profession is a "vocation in which a professed knowledge of some department of science or learning is used by its practical application to the affairs of others either in advising, guiding, or teaching them, or in serving their interests or welfare in the practice of an art founded upon it." The Oxford Dictionary quotes Frederick Denison Maurice as saying in 1834: "A profession in our country is expressly that kind of business which deals primarily with men as men and is thus distinguished from a trade, ^ which provides for the external wants or occasions of men." They mark off a profession negatively from other occupations. It is not purely mechanical, commercial, agricultural, or the like, although it may concern itself with all these fields; it is not mere skill; it is not mere study and investigation; it is not mere pursuit of one's own purposes. The old description of a profession as involving mental and not manual work has lapsed with the growth of the scientific and technological professions and the use of instruments of precision and

^ For suggestive comparisons between a profession and a trade, see Trades and Professions, by Prof. George H. Palmer. Riverside Educational Monographs (1914) and Teaching as a Profession, by Frank Roscoe, in Cambridge Essays on Education (1917).

techniques of manipulation. But the insistence upon intellectual direction and control is stronger than ever.

Even the secondary use of the term professional as opposed to amateur, in speaking of a professional coach or a professional entertainer, carries with it the idea that the occupation is follow^ed as a calling and not as a mere avocation or pastime. The Oxford Dictionary emphasizes the ethical obligations of a profession in saying that the adjective professional is "disparagingly appHed to one who makes a trade of anything that is properly pursued from higher motives, as a 'professional politician.' " The popular estimate of unworthy professional practitioners is reflected in such epithets as quack doctor, shyster lawyer, sham minister, and in the slight distrust attaching to a person who has fitted himself for one of these three professions and then fails or ceases to follow it — witness the gibes that our legislatures are made up of unsuccessful lawyers and that the most glittering oil and mining stocks are offered by exclergymen. On the other hand, the popular belief that a certain prestige is given by the term "professional" accounts for its use by dancing-masters, chiropodists, masseurs, fortune-tellers, and so on, constituting a pseudo-professional fringe.

A careful analysis of the characteristics of a genuine profession is given by Dr. Abraham Flexner in an address delivered before the National Conference of Charities and Correction, entitled "Is Social Work a Profession ?" ^ Dr. Flexner's six criteria are as follows: (i) Professions involve essentially intellectual operations with large individual responsibility; (2) They derive their raw material from science and learning; (3) This material they work up to a practical and definite end ; (4) They possess an educationally communicable technique; (5) They tend to self-organization ; (6) They are becoming increasingly altruistic in motivation.

Dr. Flexner drives home the necessity of intellectual mastery and consequent assumption of responsibility in a profession. "A free, resourceful, and unhampered intelligence applied to problems and seeking to understand and ^Proceedings, 1915.

master them — that is in the first instance characteristic of a profession. . . . Responsibility follows from the fact that professions are intellectual in character, for in all intellectual operations the thinker takes upon himself a risk. . . . The execution or application of a thought-out technique — be it crude or exquisite, physical or mental — is, after all, routine. Some one back of the routineer has done the thinking and therefore bears the responsibility, and he alone deserves to be considered professional."

His fourth criterion is a concrete and practical test amid the multitude of new activities calling themselves professional and the flourishing crop of "intensive" and "special" courses sown by the war. "Each of the unmistakable professions . . . possesses a technique capable of communication through an orderly and highly specialized educational discipline. Despite differences of opinion about details, the members of a given profession are pretty well agreed . . . as to the amount and kind of training, general and special, which should precede admission to the professional school ; as to the content and length of the professional course. These formulations are meant to exclude from professions those incapable of pursuing them in a large, free, and responsible way ; and to make sure that those potentially capable are so instructed as to get the fullest possible benefit from the training provided." The importance of this criterion as a measure of the assured standing of a profession is illustrated by the evolution of professional training in medicine and law from apprenticeship with some old doctor or lawyer to institutions like the Johns Hopkins Medical School or the Harvard Law School. The development within a decade or so of schools of social work, schools of journalism, schools of commerce and business administration, schools of pubHc health, are significant indications of growing professional standards in these fields. Everywhere professional schools of reputation are requiring at least two years of college work for admission. They advise college graduation, and a small but increasing number insist upon it. Nowadays no occupation can justly claim professional standing if its speciaHzed training is based upon anything less than a full high-school education as an irreducible minimum. No worker, moreover, who is not equipped with a generous Hberal education and the best professional training is prepared to advance to positions of full professional responsibility.

Dr. Flexner takes a hopeful view of the tendency of professions to self-organization. "Professional activities are so definite, so absorbing in interest, so rich in duties and responsibilities, that they completely engage their votaries. The social and personal lives of professional men and their families thus tend to organize around a professional nucleus. A strong class consciousness soon develops. . . . Organizations of physicians, lawyers, and teachers may find the personal interests of the individuals of which they are composed arrayed against those of society at large. On the whole, however, organized groups of this kind are, under democratic conditions, apt to be more responsive to public interest than are unorganized and isolated individuals. In any event professional groups have moje and more tended to view themselves as organs contrived for the achievement of social ends rather than as bodies formed to stand together for the assertion of right or the protection of interests and principles."

Professor Palmer ^ presents the group spirit of the professions even more winningly. "It is significant that we do not say *a professional.' . . . Our common term is *a member of a profession,' plainly indicating that he who deserves to be called such is no longer a merely individual person. He has merged his individuality with that of others and now belongs to a troop, a company, a brotherhood, who possess a common stock of knowledge, common purposes, common standards which are continually growing and to which each member of the brotherhood is expected to conform and contribute."

It is undoubtedly true that the contributions of the professional groups during the war did much to quicken their sense of public and social responsibility, and that they are now confronting larger obligations and opportunities. But the fact remains that their close organization in the past has too often made them exclusive and self-satisfied, taking

* Trades and Professions, pp. 22, 23.

their '^public" character in a narrow and conventional sense. There has been a certain snobbery about many professional persons; and the much vaunted systems of "professional ethics" have often become in practice hardly more than rules of professional etiquette, operating against flexibility of mind and breadth of outlook. Each profession has been a world in itself, learning little from other professions and indifferent to the world at large. The spirit of the times and their own progress are doing away with these limitations ; but professional customs and habits of mind are strongly entrenched, and cannot be transformed in a day.

Medicine has taken the lead in adopting a more social and cooperative attitude through its new emphasis upon prevention and public health. That it is prepared to go still further is indicated by the present active discussion of "group" medical practice, as illustrated at one end of the financial scale by the Mayo Clinic and by certain hospitals and dispensaries at the other. But all professions are facing demands upon them for public service and are cooperating in public enterprises. The new ideas at work found expression in the program of an inter-professional conference held in Detroit in November, 1919, where the three main topics for discussion were: (i) Professional organizations; their functions and interrelations; (2) Relations of the professions to the public; (3) Educational obligations of the professions. Detailed topics proposed for discussion were as follows: The possibilities of cooperation among the professions for the common good; comparison of the ethical standards of the different professions — in how far are they socially minded, in how far self-regarding; can the professions be made more democratic? Should they become professional gfuilds? How can the idea of the obligation for public service be extended among the professions? Can the enthusiasm of the war-time service to the Government be perpetuated to any appreciable degree ? To what extent do the professions now supply the quality and scope of service needed by all classes of society? How can the professional man get into right relations with all salary and wage earners who come under his direction? Can the professions represent the public interest in matters of labor adjustments?

How can education for the professions be made more real as to problems of the day? How can the average professional establishment be made more democratic, and so advance the education of both masters and men? What can be done to spread, in the high schools and colleges, knowledge of the significance, ideals, and functions of the several professions?

A practical attempt to distinguish professional and non-professional workers was made in instructions sent out in February, 1919, to field offices of the women's service of the Professional Section of the War-Emergency United States Employment Service: —

"Applicants for professional registration shall present satisfactory evidence that they are doing, or are qualified to do, work of a professional character; and that their needs cannot be met through other sections of the U. S. Employment Service.

"Workers doing routine work under the direction of others, using a simple mechanical operation or any simple skill or practice easily learned and not requiring long education and experience, or the exercise of any considerable initiative or independent judgment in dealing with either people or things, shall not be registered as professional workers, unless they are undertaking such routine work with a definite professional purpose and for a limited period of time as apprentice workers. Among such non-professional workers shall be grouped, unless they present evidence to the contrary, the following types of worker: — bookkeepers ; cashiers ; clerks ; collectors ; commercial machine operators ; foremen ; inspectors, testers, etc. ; retail salespeople ; stenographers ; telegraph and telephone operators ; typists.

"In general, a worker shall be considered professional who is equipped by ability, education, and experience to maintain and to improve standards of operation in the work in which she is engaged; to know both why it goes right and what to do when it goes wrong. She is therefore qualified to assume positions of increasing responsibility in one or more of the following capacities :

"(i) Administrative, executive, and managerial work: planning and supervising the carrying out of serious undertakings.

"(2) Expert work of a technical character : medicine, law, engineering, laboratory science; investigation and research of any kind — economic, industrial, educational, social, statistical, scientific ; mastery and use of a special subject-matter and technique.

"(3) Special services not falling under (i) or (2) : teaching, library work, social work, journalism, advertising and publicity, wholesale salesmanship, etc.

"While the type of work done, rather than any specific kind and amount of education, shall determine professional standing, education is important evidence in registering workers as professional. . . . College education is at least presumptive evidence that an applicant is a professional worker. College graduates without experience or professional training shall be registered as professional apprentices and be given professional information and guidance.

"No applicant with less than a full high-school education or its equivalent shall be registered as a professional worker without careful inquiry into her subsequent training and experience."

A mark of the professional worker too often considered of minor importance is practice providing adequate livelihood, although, as we have seen, it is theoretically held that pursuit of a profession in the spirit of trade or the making of profits seriously compromises professional character. Further reflection shows that this is an essential and not a superficial attribute, bound up with the maintenance of professional integrity, responsibility, and intellectual freedom. The stress falls upon the adjective "adequate," since both shortage and surplus interfere with the highest professional accomplishment. Inadequate livelihood hampers the professional worker by distracting his mind from professional problems and interests and by restricting his opportunities for professional and personal growth and satisfactions. Pursuit of profits hampers him equally in another way, by substituting a different set of problems and interests for his professional problems and interests. In spite of workers who have achieved professional distinction and reputation under conditions of great poverty or great wealth, it remains psychologically true that both unpaid bills and fat dividends are hostile to the soundest professional development. **It may be doubted," says Graham Wallas, ''whether the life of the professional writer without other resources has not destroyed as much thought as it has produced." ^ The growing number of research foundations and research fellowships in this country; the European practice of government grants to especially promising young workers ; the belated recognition that college and university teaching cannot be fruitfully carried on by faculties perpetually harassed by the struggle to educate their children, to present a decent personal appearance, to secure needed vacations or opportunities for further study — all illustrate this position.

Professor Palmer thus describes the professional attitude toward the matter of livelihood: *'It is seen that the professional man must live while doing work which is manifestly of value to the public, and accordingly a stipend, fee, honorarium, or salary is provided to cover that mode of life which is thought appropriate for him, the kind of life and the consequent scale of salary being designed to secure three essential elements in his work, namely, freedom, efficiency, and dignity. These elements and not money are what the professional man and his public regard. ... So long as he has a due degree of freedom, is able to work with full efficiency, and can maintain the dignity which his calling demands, his mind is discharged from monetary considerations." ^ The professional worker, he says, sells experience, judgment, advice. **We have no other merchandise than ourselves." He is not working for profits nor on a rate basis, so much work for so much pay.

It is a sign of the times that the term ''private practice" is coming to have a faintly obsolete sound, as a term incompatible with the non-competitive and public character of professional work. We hear more of "independent practice" or "consulting practice" or "group practice." Profes-

^The Great Society (1914), p. 187. ^ Trades and Professions, p. 9.

sional workers are becoming in much larger numbers salaried persons ; and where they charge fees do so increasingly in accordance with a rate agreed upon by their group and publicly known. The idea is becoming established that they are workers in the public interest and officially or unofficially in the public service, earning a livelihood commensurate with their professional value, but not concerned with profits. H. G. Wells writes thus of the motives and the rewards of professional workers : *The real necessary work of the world — I don't mean the labor and toil only, but the intelligent direction, the real planning and designing and inquiry, the management and the evolution of ideas and methods — is in the enormous majority of cases done by salaried individuals. . . . All the engineering design, all architecture, all our public services, the exquisite work of our museum control, for example, all the big wholesale and retail businesses, almost all big industrial concerns, mines, estates — all these things are really in the hands of salaried or quasi-salaried persons. . . . For all who really make, who really do, the imperative of gain is the inconvenience, the enemy. Every artist, every scientific investigator, every organizer, every good workman, knows that. Every good architect . . . can tell of time after time when he has sacrificed manifest profit and taken a loss to get a good thing done as he wanted it done; every good doctor, too, has turned from profit and high fees to the moving and interesting cases, to the demands of knowledge and public health ,* every teacher worth his or her salt can witness to the perpetual struggle between business advantage and right teaching; every writer has faced the alternative of his aesthetic duty and the search for beauty on the one hand and the 'salable' on the other." ^

This growing detachment of professional workers from the competitive struggle for profits gives ground for an affirmative answer to the question posed by the Inter-Professional Conference : "Can the professions represent the public interest in matters of labor adjustments?" In many ways they seem to stand at present as the ideal mediators between capital and labor and to be preeminently the group

* New Worlds for Old ( 1908) , pp. 95, 98,

WHO ARE PROFESSIONAL WORKERS? ii

thus described: "The Public is the name of those who in any crisis are seeking the truth and not advocating their dogma. The idea of the Public is simply a short way of expressing the great faith that a group of men and women will always disentangle themselves from their prejudices and will be sufficiently powerful to summon the partisans before the bar of reason." ^ But it is only fair to say that neither party to the controversy is fully ready to admit their competence.

To secure some basis for an answer to our second question: W^hat, to-day, may justly be considered professional occupations? — it is well to look briefly at the social origins and social functions of certain professions. Students of social evolution have pointed out that the "learned professions" originated as groups charged with the repairing of tribal damage and injury: — ^the medicine-man the damage of disease and bodily hurt, conceived of as due to evil spells; the judge the damage of violations of tribal code ; the priest the damage of violations of tribal ritual. All dealt with lapses and interruptions, with what may be called pathological social conditions. Only gradually, of course, were their functions differentiated. From this point of view, the tribal artist contended against disintegrating influences of individual emotion and behavior through' stirring group feeling and group action by means of tribal song, dance, dramatic representation, and decoration. The teacher emerged from the group of elders as the person charged with repairing the damage done to the adult standards of the tribe through the constant introduction of immature members, in this case a biological rather than a pathological deviation. Professor Palmer says that all professions are "redemptive" in character. They arose as agencies for the restoration and maintenance of group integrity and well-being, and became directly concerned with group regulation and control. It is no wonder that they have often become conservative in the false as well as in the true sense of the term.

To-day, however, the professions are laying stress upon their constructive as well as their reconstructive functions. Medicine is increasingly preventive, concerned with the task * Walter Lippmann. New Republic, November 12, 1919.

of keeping people well and raising health standards as well as with the task of curing disease ; law is striving to strengthen the conception of justice and to make people law-abiding and law-respecting as well as to punish law-breakers ; the church upholds the pattern of the righteous man rather than the horrible example of the sinner; the school seeks not only to bring the young to the educational level of their elders but to work through them for a higher level. Positively or negatively, therefore, professional workers have to do with the maintenance and improvement of organized society and the individuals composing it. Their primary concern is always with "men as men"; and the professionally-minded person keeps this idea alive under the technicalities and details of his active professional work. He is always in a deep and large sense a humanist.

From this point of view of the professions as agencies of social regulation and improvement, they may be classified as : ( i) Professions directly regulating and improving human behavior, dealing directly with people: government, law, the ministry, medicine and nursing, teaching, social service, personnel service, other types of applied psychology. (2) Professions indirectly regulating and improving human behavior through supplying the conditions for satisfactory living: scientific agriculture and forestry, engineering in all its forms, architecture, applied biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, scientific organization, management, and research. (3) Professions indirectly regulating and improving human behavior through supplying concrete incentives to thought, emotion, and action : journalism and publishing, literature and the other arts, religion in its more personal aspects.

In any such classification the overlappings and interlacings are obvious, and reveal the close and intricate pattern of modern life and work. Government is concerned with the dissemination of information and with the regulation of material conditions quite as much as it is with the direct regulation of people. The ministry is shifting from direct control through constituted church authority to indirect control through religious ideas, emotions, and examples. Architecture stimulates aesthetic feeling as well as providing material shelter. All the material processes and operations of modem life are on so vast a scale that multitudes of people are occupied in the different stages of making things ready for human use. The forester, the engineer, the chemist, have to deal not only with timber and machinery and chemical substances and reactions but also with the innumerable workers through whom these things result in marketable products. They have to meet complicated matters of human behavior at almost every turn. Some of the leading schools of forestry and engineering are giving serious attention to the human aspects of these professions, the "behavior patterns" and "behavior controls" involved in them. All professional schools need to do so, to realize that every profession has its human and psychological side as well as its technical side. All professions are social services, and "professional relations" need to be studied as carefully and impartially as industrial relations.

This line of thinking leads to three further considerations, which can be only presented here but which will be developed in succeeding chapters. They are (i) the extent to which professional workers shall regulate the conditions of their own employment; (2) the extent to which professional workers shall regulate the conditions governing the employment of other groups of workers, industrial and commercial; (3) the extent to which certain workers in the fields of industry and commerce are entitled to be considered professional.

Light on the first point is supplied by the fact that the professional worker is essentially a person capable of assuming responsibility and of forming independent judgments and plans. Otherwise he is a subordinate, a "routineer." With the modern professional tendency toward salaried positions and away from independent practice, there is a real danger of loss of professional freedom. Teachers and government workers, two exclusively salaried groups, have long been subject to this limitation. In both teaching and government service, however, a vigorous movement is on foot to give the workers a share in the administration of their institutions, school systems, or departments.^ * See National Education Association, Report of Council on Na-

Eight on the second point is supplied to a considerable extent by what has just been said. While the expert has never been so greatly in demand in all aspects of modern activity, he can no longer do his work successfully as an autocrat, but must in some way secure the intelligent and willing cooperation of the other workers through whom alone he is enabled to carry out his plans and policies. Sidney Webb said in 1917 to a gathering of British "works managers": ''First, let me remind you that you belong to a brain-working profession, just as much as do the doctor, the architect, the engineer, though your profession is only now becoming conscious of itself as a distinct profession, the profession of management. . . . What the manager has principally to handle is not wood or metal, but human nature, not machinery, but wills. He will remain for all time an indispensable functionary, whatever may be the form of society." ^ H. L. Gantt, the well-known industrial engineer, has recently maintained that industry in the future must be conducted for production and service and not primarily for profits ; that democratic management must be in the hands of the engineer, the professional man who knows "what to do and how to do it." ^

Light on the third point comes from the views just quoted. In so far as those regulating industrial and commercial enterprises and working for their improvement are salaried experts, interested in efficient production and distribution for the common good rather than in the accumulation of profits; in so far, even, as they are owners and proprietors with these qualifications, they are entitled to rank as professional workers. Both industry and commerce have long employed many persons belonging to recognized professions — lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants, scientists. To-day, they are developing their own professions of industrial management, commercial management, personnel management. They are setting up their own bureaus of

tional Emergency in Education (1919) ; Report of Congressional Joint Commission on Reclassification of Salaries in the Washington Civil Service (1920), pp. no, in.

^ The Works Manager To-Day (1918), pp. 2, 4, 5.

* Organizing for Work (1919).

commercial and industrial research, their own training systems for every type of worker. They are cooperating actively with universities and colleges in programs of both training and research. The Associated Technology Clubs ^ have recently inaugurated a movement whereby some three hundred industrial corporations representing the major industries of the country are cooperating with a large number of higher institutions to ''eliminate educational waste by drawing joint specifications for men; industries to set forth the qualifications that college graduates should have and the colleges to state their facilities for meeting these needs." The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has research arrangements with a large group of industries. Ruskin long ago saw the merchant as a professional worker ; ^ Glenn Frank writes to-day on "Making Business a Profession." ^ Industry and commerce conceived in these terms may accordingly be included in our second group of professions, those indirectly regulating and improving human behavior through supplying the material conditions for satisfactory living.