ABSTRACT
In 1910 the American Federation of Labor issued a lengthy report exploring the merits of vocational training. Here is a remarkably transparent example of the gendered origins of industrial education, origins echoed even today in high-school home economics classes. Yet the history of women’s vocational education is worth a second look. An analysis that pays careful attention to trade school curricula, the sometimes competing, sometimes complementary goals of educators, students, and parents, and change over time yields greater subtlety and complexity. The history of women’s vocational education in Massachusetts involves a tangled web of individuals and organizations, a sometimes confusing mix of public and private initiatives. Indeed, the ethnicity and social status of local needlewomen comprised one of the “industrial conditions” she cited to explain graduates’ failure to practice the crafts for which they had been trained.
