Manhattan Trade School for Girls
About Manhattan Trade School for Girls
Girls apply and then enter the Manhattan Trade School at 209–213 East 23rd Street. Inside, the one-year course shows hand sewing, garment machines, paste-and-paper design, and hat millinery, plus an exercise class and cooking. An intertitle says the students also study factory laws. At the end of the year an employment bureau is said to place the graduates.
More about Manhattan Trade School for Girls
The National Film Preservation Foundation lists the production company as unnamed. The school had moved to East 23rd Street in 1906 and then had about 500 students. Benefactors had spent $185,000 on the building. Yearly operating costs were about $50,000, and no tuition was charged. A Students' Aid fund paid stipends when a family's per-capita income was under $1.50 a week.
Themes
Background
The school's first annual report, in 1903, called the plan an experiment meant to give girls who had to go to work at 14 a few employable skills.
Making
Jennifer M. Bean's notes for the National Film Preservation Foundation say the picture was apparently unseen for 95 years and was likely used to raise money for a school that still lived on private gifts.
Look
The surviving picture was copied at 16 frames a second from a 35mm negative. George Eastman House made that negative from a 28mm print.
Music
Elena Ruehr wrote a new score for girls' chorus and string quartet, played by the QX Quartet and the Winsor School Small Chorus, for the Treasures III release.
Preservation
It survived as a 28mm print. George Eastman House restored it to 35mm with a Save America's Treasures grant and National Film Preservation Foundation support.
Notes
- Cooking classes in the film began in 1908, after the 1907 panic threw women out of work.
- The curriculum named on screen includes tenement-house laws, child-labor laws, and trade unions.
- Silent Era lists Millie Spiro, Rose Pasquale, Miriam Levy, Sadie Smith, and Mary Johnson.
- It is a one-reel picture, public domain in the United States.
- 28mm prints were made on nonflammable diacetate and were often shown in schools rather than theaters.
- The film is on the DVD Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934, with a score by Elena Ruehr for girls' chorus and string quartet.
Scenes
- Applicants walk into the school at 209–213 East 23rd Street.
- Students run garment machines, trim hats, and drill in the exercise class.
Also available
- Internet Archive (silent-manhattan-trade-school-for-girls)
- Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934