Working Girls' School

On Bryn Mawr's maple-shaded campus last week gathered a clothing worker and a shoe worker from England, an automobile worker from Kansas City, a rubber worker from Akron--65 working girls all told. Their clothes did not come from Fifth Avenue nor their manners from a finishing school, but for seven weeks they will enjoy the luxury of Bryn Mawr's capitalistic dormitories, swimming pool, tennis courts and learning. They are students in the college's Summer School for Women Workers, which last week began its 18th year.

A pioneer in workers' education in the U. S., which is scarcely a generation old, Bryn Mawr's summer school was started in 1921 by Bryn Mawr's brilliant late president, Miss M. Carey Thomas. Since then similar schools have been opened at University of Wisconsin, in North Carolina, in Berkeley, Calif, and in Chicago. They are now associated with the Affiliated Schools for Workers. Bryn Mawr supplies buildings and helps plan the summer school. The teachers come from high schools and colleges. Labor unions, college girls, Y. W. C. A.s, settlement houses and alumnae contribute the scholarships, $250 for each girl. A committee scouts the country for likely students of 20 to 35, for whom the only requirements are a sixth-grade education, three years' working experience and enrollment in local study groups. Some students get leaves of absence from their employers; a few give up their jobs to take the course.

Nearly all the students are union members, but the school does not try to sell unionism or Marxism, merely endeavors to help students see all sides of a problem and learn how to hunt facts. The method of learning is reading and discussion. The Bryn Mawr school teaches its students economics, politics, English, dancing, dramatics, music. The girls go on hikes, are fattened on well-balanced meals.

Directors of the school are Misses Marguerite Gilmore and Jean Carter. Stocky, blue-eyed Miss Gilmore, besides directing workers' education for the State of Illinois, has worked in factory towns herself. On the staff is a labor representative to interpret the students' questions to the faculty, explain the answers. This year the school will deal especially with the Wagner Act, Social Security, and what they mean to workers.

Of the Affiliated Schools' 3,000 "alumnae," nearly all have gone back to their old trades. There many of them do missionary work, start local classes. But several have gone to college after the summer course and one made Phi Beta Kappa. To show "what Bryn Mawr meant to me," one alumna led a former director of the school into a new, glistening, modern bathroom in her tenement flat, boasted: "There's not another bathroom for miles around."

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