In the United States, a highly mechanized nation, the proportion of the population ten years of age and older in
gainful occupations has varied only six or seven per cent from its average figure during the 50 years from 1880 to 1930.
All too often highschool students are tracked into college oriented curriculums when their natural talents, abilities, interests (and perhaps even their family's financial circumstances) would be better served in finding and entering
gainful occupations that do not require a college degree.
Men, women and even children engaged in
gainful occupations find themselves in a position to spare from their earnings something for storing away against the rainy day.
The census of 1911, for example, netted just over 20,000 Calgarians credited with
gainful occupations, and depending on the statistical source, 40-odd manufacturing enterprises then employed a payroll of anywhere between 2,000 and 3,500 people.
Reflecting his era, he couched this in terms of the patriarchal wage earner, asserting, "It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father's low wage to be forced to engage in
gainful occupations outside the home to neglect of their ...
