The great advantage of factory work, as the untrained girl sees it, is that it is usually easy to obtain and that it promises some return even from the start.  Hence a large proportion of untrained girls who leave school as soon as the law allows enter the factories near their homes.

The great disadvantages of factory work, laying aside for a moment many minor disadvantages, are that it not only requires no skill in the beginner, but that it produces little if any skill even with years of work and offers practically no advancement for a large proportion of the workers.  It should therefore, be reserved for girls of less keen intelligence, and other girls should if possible be guided toward other occupations.

Teachers must make themselves thoroughly familiar with working conditions in local factories, since there will always be girls who, because of their own limitations or the limitations of their environment, will find themselves obliged to take up factory work.  Under the teacher’s guidance girls should make definite studies and prepare detailed reports of local conditions with respect to working hours, character of work, wages, possible advancement, dangers to health, moral conditions, advantages over other occupations open to girls with no more training, and disadvantages.  Girls should at least go into factory work with their eyes open, that they may pass their days in the best surroundings available.

Dressmaking.  The possibilities for the girl entering upon work connected with dressmaking with the ultimate object of becoming a dressmaker herself are far wider than in the case of the machine worker in shop or factory.  The immediate return for the untrained girl is far less, but the farsighted girl must learn to look beyond the immediate present.  Not all girls, however, will make good dressmakers.  Not all, even of the producing type of girl, will do so.  Certain definite qualities are required.  The girl who would succeed as a dressmaker must possess ingenuity, imagination, and the visualizing type of mind.  She must see the end from the beginning, and must be able to find the way to produce that which she visualizes.  She must be a keen observer.  She must have confidence in her own power to create.  She must possess manual dexterity, artistic ideas, and, if she aims at a business of her own, a pleasing personality and keen business sense.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  A millinery class.  Millinery requires of the girl a certain degree of creative ability]

Millinery.  Millinery requires in its workers the same general type of mind required for dressmaking, and in addition a certain millinery faculty or creative ability.  The girl who can make and trim hats usually discovers her own talent fairly early in life.