I How often we change our jobs is the subject of another analysis in the Association's study. From this it appears that 44 per cent of the women and 33 per cent of the men are on their first jobs; that 65 per cent of the women and 57 per cent of the men are on their first or second. Ninety-one per cent of the women and 88 per cent of the men have not had more than four jobs. In view of the fact that this survey was made in the period after the war, when so much change and readjustment had gone on, this does not indicate an excessive amount of flitting from job to job. Not the least significant points brought out in this portion of the Association's study are that about one-fourth of the executives, both men and women, have had no connection with any other social agency, and that over half have had but one other job. With those facts in regard to education, experience, age, and turnover before us, let us look again at this question of salaries. We said that the median salary for women is $1,680, and the median salary for men is $3,000. The median salary for men with no educational qualifications is $2,200, and $2,880 for those who have had ten to fourteen years' experience, but no special education. So far as this latter group is concerned, I can see no special reason why we should not relate these salaries to the general distribution of income in the United States. The top 1 per cent of incomes in the United States comes down to about $8,000 per year; the top 5 per cent, to $3,300-$3,200; and the top 20 per cent reaches down to $1,800. Now we see that salaries for those positions which seem to require no special preparation are not so ill-favored after all. That is, people without expenditure for preparation are managing to land in the upper strata of incomes. Next, let us review the salaries for those with some preparation. The median salary for the man college graduate with ten to fourteen, years' experience is $4,560, and for the woman college graduate, $2,220. For those with a year or more of special training, the salaries are $4,000 for men and $1,800 for women. As you will see, all of these people have landed in the top 20 per cent of the incomes of the country, though the ladies have barely reached the line. On the other hand, social work is not without its representation in the upper 1 per cent. It has managed to get almost all of its people, whatever their educational attainments, into the top 20 per cent within a ten-year period of service. The median man who has either a college degree or school of social work training has attained a salary that puts him in the top 5 per cent. I confess I am at a loss to know how we should interpret this situation. Certainly we want to do nothing to pull down such standards as we have. It does seem to me, however, that we should begin to ask ourselves some pretty definite questions on this matter. How can we, who know so well the implications of the distribution of income, explain this situation to the community at large? I find myself asking how we are going to show that we belong to the 5 per cent of most useful citizens. I am also asking myself whether there is such terrible competition from other professions and occupations that we must push salaries higher, especially in the executive group. Now what have we to say about the salary range of the staff worker? We seem to be in this position: We are now, on the one hand, demanding higher and higher standards of professional preparation for the beginning worker, and on the other hand, adhering to salary scales based upon no requirement of special preparation. The result is that median salaries for staff workers who perform professional services now compare unfavorably with school teachers and private secretaries. This is a condition with which we must reckon very soon. Another question that we must face is this problem of sex discrimination. In Philadelphia the median salary for a woman executive is $2,500, and for a man executive, $6,000. In Minneapolis only six-tenths of 1 per cent of the women were receiving $3,000 or more per year in 1919, while 10.6 per cent of the men received that amount or more. In Cleveland, among 124 executives and assistant executives, the median salary for women was about $2,350. For men it was $3,600. We have already seen the figures for the big group of 1,258 social workers: $1,680 the median salary for women, and $3,000 for men. It is a bald, blatant fact that in a group which presumably stands before the community, pleading for the square deal for everyone, we do have some very suspicious interior circumstances. I know this is not a popular subject, and I would not venture to discuss it were it not for the fact that I feel myself one of the relatively few women who have not been subjected to it, and therefore able to speak without personal rancor. I have seen it, however, working in its most unpleasant form, and somehow I feel that as a profession we would do well to begin with the injustices in our own dooryard. I accept no simple explanation of this situation as an example of the workings of an automatic, natural law of supply and demand. Rather, I look for the manipulation of the psychological factors on both sides. One of the simple remedies which I wish to recommend to some of my men colleagues is the modification of that attitude of mind which assumes, when a job paying more than $3,000 is to be filled, that an ordinary man will be worth that much, but it will take a whale of a woman to earn it. It seems to me that another way we can go about straightening out this situation is to do a little more thinking on this question of recruiting and training young men for the profession. I confess to considerable boredom with the discussions of whether social work is a woman's or a man's profession. It is the profession of those who are interested and devoted to its purposes. I am not ashamed of its record so far, and I see no reason to fear that minds of the caliber of Jane Addams, Mary Richmond, Mary Follett, Miss Breckinridge, and the Abbotts would not make a go of it, even though some young college boys do not see a fortune in it. Some of them will see more in it after they have tried to make a fortune at something else. In short, it seems to me we must stop trying to get men into the profession by offering them a short cut to an executive job and a good salary. It's bad for the profession, not especially good for the man, and is a rank injustice to the women who are willing to begin at the bottom. And now let us return to the objectives of a professional organization, from which we have seemed to stray so far. That has only been an appearance, however, for the facts I have been trying to exploit and explain were gathered by our professional organization. I have also been illustrating another one of the objectives of a good professional organization, and that is, affording an opportunity for frank discussion. We have found in Philadelphia that our chapter is an admirable place to discuss professional questions with absolute freedom. There is no other meeting ground which compares with it in its ability to make people of all ranks in social work get in the game and say something to the point. Another objective of the professional organization is to serve as a spear head for protecting the professional social work in public service. This is such an obvious objective that I will not elaborate it. And finally, it seems to me that our professional organization has a job in which ground has already been broken in getting before the training schools of social work some conclusions about what and how a young person should be taught in preparation for these jobs. May I summarize the objectives of our professional organization as follows: first, to persuade people to prepare; second, to demonstrate the value of preparation to prospective workers and the public; third, to engineer the preparation of young people to fill the openings, through vocational information and a knowledge of the demand; fourth, to gather and interpret facts regarding working conditions; fifth, to furnish a meeting place for frank discussion of professional problems; sixth, to protect social work in the public service; seventh, to find out and set forth what people should be taught in preparation for a professional career; eighth, to show the world that we are fit to survive because, among other reasons, we are capable of organization which will express our ideals. CULTURAL VALUES IN THE SOCIAL SERVICE CURRICULUM The establishment of a new division on professional standards and education within the National Conference of Social Work is a departure which ought to promise well for the future of social work in the United States. It means a stronger alliance between our educational institutions and the men and women in the field. In certain respects it is true to say that social work was conceived in the universities; for in England, as well as in the United States, in the closing decades of the last century it was university men who instituted the social settle ment, which may justly claim to be at least one source of modern movements for social amelioration. It is not unnatural, therefore, that these far-flung efforts that we now call social work should lead back to the centers of learning. It has been a well-established tradition here in America that education would solve our social problems. What else could account for the millions which are poured into our schools and colleges? Yet is it not our dismay in these latter times that our hopes in the educational process have been shattered? To be sure, the commencement orators are now busy attempting to re-establish the faith, but there are other conditions besides the heat which interfere with their success. The fact of the matter is that education, up to the present time, has not been able to prevent war, class strife, religious and racial intolerance, poverty, crime, and other social ills. No doubt it was too much to ask of our educational system to avert these calamities, even though democracy requires that it should. Two ways lie open before us: to carry on in the usual way, and justify our money and our efforts on other grounds than that they make for social peace; or to keep our early faith, introducing into education new elements by virtue of which our social hopes may be better sustained. Most of us here are committed to the latter of these two ways, believing that the educational process can be modified so as to function more directly in the interests of social welfare. This quest for new elements in education is, if I mistake not, no exclusive concern of the social workers. In religion we have the new schools of religion cutting loose from the traditional theological seminaries and establishing themselves in close proximity to our state universities. In the field of labor we have the workers' colleges, which have the dual function of preparing men for leisure and of training leaders in the labor movement itself. At Antioch College we see a bold attempt to make a synthesis of academic and manual work. In England the British Institute of Adult Education is making successful efforts to reach the educationally disfranchised of many different classes. In secondary education our experimental schools are developing new technique which aims to release the energies of children and foster their creative abilities. In New York the New School for Social Research endeavors to orient for inquiring laymen the social backgrounds of existing civilization. In this group of educational experiments belong the schools and curricula of social work, except that in many cases these are to be found within established educational institutions. But in a broad way they are sympathetically allied with those other attacks on the social order through the process of education. Perhaps it will not be amiss to describe these new educational ventures as so many quests for a new culture. The lack of a socialized culture underlies many of our modern problems. The world of things moves on in greater complexity; the world of ideas hangs back. Hence, the "cultural lag" of which Professor Ogburn speaks. Efforts toward anything really fundamental in social and political reform in American life have failed again and again, due to the lack of the necessary mental equipment among the people. Forward movements in religion, "progressive" groups in politics, efforts to abolish child labor or to reduce armaments-all end in failure, not because the people cannot vote, but because they cannot think; or, at least, because they lack the essential data for thought. Professor Patten used to say that war was due to a fear psychology surviving in a new age when the economic bases for fear have disappeared. The new culture which we need, and with which education must concern itself, is a compound of knowledge and will. It involves an apprehension of the facts of social living, an appraisal of human values, and an effort to orient oneself with respect to one's social responsibilities. If social work is to be a culture in this new sense, and not merely a trade, or even a profession, it must involve intellectual and appreciative faculties of a high order, and it must engender capacities for democratic fellowship in the common efforts toward a better type of social life. It could be shown, I think, that social work as a system of ideas and attitudes represents a convergence of several streams of culture, more or less traditional. Into it has gone something of the grace and emotional idealism of primitive Christianity. An analogy might be drawn between the attitude of the early Christians toward Roman society and the attitude taken by the modern social workers toward the pagan survivals of our own day. Lecky points out that one of the great moral achievements of Christianity was to enhance the sanctity of human life. Human conservation and rehabilitation has been the cornerstone of social work. Another tradition that social work has drawn heavily upon is that of democracy. It has believed in equal opportunity for all for self-development. It has held the faith of Emerson that "the only vulgar people are they whose poetry has not been written." Finally, social work embraces the teachings and methods of science, and especially of social science, in its application to problems of human living. In short, if one looks over the programs of social work set forth in a conference such as this, one sees that they are, on the whole, conceived in the interests of humane, democratic, and scientific living. This claim that social work, in its system of ideas, includes religion, democracy, and science may seem ambitious, but it is the fact; and it is this very fact which makes the term "social work" difficult to define. Our problem, however, is not to get a more accurate definition, but rather to be aware of the intellectual and spiritual origins of the movement and to make the most of them. If we have given an accurate summary of the cultural foundations of social work, one may justly ask why it is, since its presuppositions are so generally accepted, that its achievements are so slow? One answer is, of course, that society in general may approve of the principles of religion, democracy, and science, and yet show no interest in their application. Most people will approve of the ten commandments, provided that they do not interfere with their habits! The civilized culture which social work would implant, and to which we render lip homage, is confronted by the seven devils of barbarism which |