women in such positions as research or control chemists, that applicants
were "badly prepared." As hand workers, too, women are handicapped by
lack of knowledge of machinery. In this tool age, high school girls are
cut off from technical education, although they are destined to carry on
in large measure our skilled trades. I am told that in Germany many
factories had to close because only women were available as managers,
and they had not been fitted by business and technical schools for
the task.

If women individually are looking for a soft place, if they are afraid,
as one manager expressed it, "to put on overalls and go into a vat,"
even when their country is so in need of their service, it is futile for
them to ask collectively for equal opportunity and equal pay; if they
individually fail to prepare as for a life work, regarding themselves as
but temporarily in business or a profession, their collective demand
upon the world for a fair field and no favor will be as ineffective as
illogical.

The doors stand wide open. It rests with women themselves as to whether
they shall enter in.

To the steady appeals of the employment bureaus, backed by the stern
facts of life, the colleges are yielding. On examination I found that
curricula are already being modified. None but the sorriest pessimist
could doubt the nature of the final outcome, on realizing the pooling of
brains which is going on in such associations as the Intercollegiate
Bureau of Occupations and the League for Business Opportunities. They
work to the end of having young women not only soundly prepared for the
new openings, but sensitive to the demands of a world set towards
stern duty.