Turning From Compulsory to Attractive Methods of Reform.—To undertake that social task, the psychology of social effort must be turned from compulsive methods of prevention of legal divorce, when such divorce is sought, to ways of making marriage choices wiser, marriage experience more sane and better balanced by sense of obligation to the nearer and more remote of social relations, and by putting at the command of all, the helpful sympathy and the social guidance that can alone hold to firm and noble lines the wavering and the weak.

QUESTIONS ON THE BROKEN FAMILY

1. Is the admitted increase in divorce wholly a testimony to moral degeneracy? If so, what can be done about it? If not, what else does it indicate?

2. What are the main points to work for in order to reduce the number of divorces, and to remove the social evils of which divorces are only the symptom?

3. Should the social psychology be directed principally toward preventing people from getting divorce or from remarrying after divorce, or toward making marriage so generally successful that fewer people want to separate?

4. What is specially needed in education both of youth and the adult in the United States in the interest of family stability and family success?

5. Make a list of causes that in your opinion justify legal separation or divorce and find out whether or not these causes are named in the statutes of your State. If they are not, what should be done about it?

6. What is done for and with the children of legally separated and divorced persons in your State?



CHAPTER XIII

THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS

"It is all work, and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred world. For the thistle a blade of grass, later a drop of nourishing milk, later a nobler man. Man perfects himself as well as the world by working."—CARLYLE.

"Every man's task is his life preserver."—EMERSON.

"What was his name? I do not know his name. No form of bronze and no memorial stones Show me the place where lie his mouldering bones. Only a cheerful city stands, Builded by his hardened hands; Only ten thousand homes, Where every day The cheerful play Of love and hope and courage comes; These are his monuments, and these alone,— There is no form of bronze and no memorial stone." —EDWARD EVERETT HALE.

"Let us now praise the artificer and the workmaster Who is wakeful to finish his work. These put their trust in their hands And each becometh wise in his own work. Though they sit not in the seat of the judge, Nor understand the covenant of judgment; Though they declare not instruction nor utter dark sayings Yet without these shall not a city be inhabited Nor shall men sojourn therein. For these maintain the fabric of the world And in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer." —ECCLESIASTICUS.

Changes from Ancient to Modern Forms of Labor.—The change from the domestic and handicraft stage in industry to the capitalized, power-driven, machine-dominated, and highly specialized work-system of the present day has been often described and is a part of all the economic problems of modern times. We do not need here to rehearse the details of that change or to speak of its effect upon workers in general. What we must do, however, is to trace specifically some of the results of that industrial change in the constitution and in the development of family life.

In the old order the worker owned his tool, selected his material, controlled the process of his task, and often was master of the sale of the finished product. Hence, as has so often been shown, the character of a man was so obviously a part of the stock-in-trade of the worker, his judgment, probity and skill were so clearly causes of his success in handicraft, that the ethical training of life came definitely through the exercise of work-power. Now, as we are often reminded, the worker is divorced from the management and control of his work-process and is a "hand," merely attached to a machine that others must choose, buy and install, the product of which is in only an infinitesimal part his responsibility and of the profit from which another takes the lion's share. This has made many feel that ethical training in life must come to the worker from his leisure hours only, and that his task must be always merely a routine one, to be got through with as soon as possible each day in order that he may "live" in the hours left from work. This idea cannot be accepted by anyone who realizes the character-drill that may inhere in any form of useful labor. The need is to permeate the methods of modern industry with the creative spirit, to mix the management of all business and manufacturing with the brains of workmen as well as of directors and to make a new connection, strong, obvious, and thought-compelling, between the worker and the control and responsibility of his work. While this is being accomplished the results of the change from handicraft to machine work in the family order must be understood and unsocial elements in that change minimized. It must be remembered that among the opportunities of character-training in work lost by the man, the woman and the child and youth, by the change in industrial methods, is the constant influence of the home life while at work. The old industries clustered about the fireside. It made the household a work-place, and some feel that this was a detriment to home life and that we have a better chance to make real centres of love and happiness now that we have taken out of the domestic field almost all the elements of manufacture and of trade. However that may be, this much is sure, that when father and mother worked together, and children learned how to work while still within the family influence, it was easier than it is now to make the daily task one of mutual cooeperation and mutual service within the family circle.

The Old Household a Work-place.—We have passed laws now, forbidding "home industries" because so many "sweated trades" find their last and often impregnable fortress in the crowded rooms of the tenement living-places. This may be necessary and may be well to do, but the fact remains that something inhered in the old domestic training of children and youth in useful work within the home which was lost when the factory was built and the young workers had to seek their jobs outside the family circle. And that something of work-drill and habit-forming in the interest of self-support and family usefulness we are now trying to reintroduce into the education of children and youth by elaborate and costly "manual training," "Pre-vocational and Vocational courses" and similar departments in the schools.

Welfare Managers in Modern Times.—The fact that hours of work and conditions affecting the workers can be standardized more easily when those workers are massed in large numbers under one recognized owner and manager of a great industry has sometimes blinded us to the need of each young person to have constantly near at hand a personal representative of society's interest in the development of his character; some interpreter of social customs and ideals to follow which will make for his advantage. We are trying now to get "Welfare Managers," paid chaperons, nurses and teachers, into business concerns to take the place of older forms of social direction and care for youthful workers. These functionaries often do much good and are recognized expressions of the social interest of employers. Since they are installed avowedly for the purpose of making conditions better for the younger, weaker, less trained and more needy of the workers, "Welfare Managers" often find a hostile or at least indifferent attitude toward their efforts on the part of the higher paid, the better established, and more competent women workers, especially those organized in Trade Unions with the slogan of "Not Charity, but Justice." They do, however, reach with light and leading some of the darker sides of modern industry as related to the younger workers.

Child-labor.—The student of industrial history knows that child-labor is not a new evil. Children were often overworked and cruelly driven when parents, guardians, and those to whom they were "bound out" as apprentices were the only taskmasters and their labor was wholly within the household. Indeed, Hutchins and Harrison, in their History of Factory Legislation, declare that "it is not easy to say whether children were really worked harder in the early factories than under the domestic system which they replaced." Edith Abbott, in her excellent summary of The Early History of Child Labor in America, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work, constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil. "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact. This feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages between seven and twelve years.

We are now able to see and remedy some evils of child-labor in the factory system which passed unnoticed and for which no prohibitive law was in existence in the handicraft stage. It is true, however, as all must recognize, that the modern specialization of labor and modern use of machines allows a wholesale exploitation of youth and of physical weakness impossible in older forms of industry. Hence the facts of modern industry justify and make necessary the "Child Labor Movement." Yet vital and strong as that movement is, we have to-day, as has been stated in another connection, a misuse of children by millions in industry. We have also a dangerous overuse of youth in industry, and we have a reckless waste of mothers and of potential mothers in unsuitable work. We have also certain dangers to family life in the turning of attention and of ambition of young people away from family interests into fields of industrial activity which are inimical to family success. This makes the problem of the family and the workers one of great difficulty and one to be given the most serious attention on the part of those who are themselves above the economic conditions which operate to complicate that problem among the poor and struggling.

Increase in Women Wage-earners.—In the first place, we must note the tendency toward rapid increase of the numbers of women listed by the census as in "gainful occupations." Without noting in this connection the conditions just before and during the Great War, conditions not at all indicative of normal increase in the numbers of working-women, we trace in the period from 1880 to 1910 a rise from 2,647,157 to 8,075,772 of the number of women in receipt of salary or wages for work outside their own homes. The estimate of 1920, now given, of nearly 41,609,192 "persons of both sexes and of ten years old and over engaged in gainful occupations" shows us 8,549,399 "females." Of these, over a million are engaged in "Professional service" (a larger proportion than of men so listed and, of course, indicating the great majority of women in the teaching profession). More than two millions are listed in "Domestic and Personal service." That leaves over three millions working in "agriculture, forestry, animal industry, manufacture and mechanical industries," and nearly a million and a half in "clerical occupations." The use of ten years of age in such lists is now obsolete as an indication of custom in employment of youth. Fourteen years of age is the norm in the listing of youthful workers and the age limits should be revised to suit that rise in the legal age of the child wage-earner as generally practised now in the United States. With that understanding, the statistics for "Child Labor Certificates" issued by the large manufacturing cities of our country show an army of young workers, more than twenty thousand in New York City alone, annually entering the competitive industrial field with full consent of society. This all means that millions of women and very young persons who under the earlier forms of industrial life would have been employed (however steadily or with whatever handicaps or even cruelty) within some family circle, are now under the full control of mass-direction, mass-standardization, and mass-influence in their daily work.

Social Pressure on the Individual Worker.—This pressure is in itself almost a sufficient reason for the family instability now seen. To divorce all the working-time, and all the work-tendency, and most of the work-training from home life is to weaken the hold of the family upon the average worker. Members of a family in which each has definite and firm relation to some different requirement and control connected with a daily task are likely to acquire an independent relation to society in general. In such eases it requires a far more vital and enduring affection, a distinctly superior mutual understanding and sense of justice, and a far larger natural equipment of tact and power of adjustment than was required in other economic conditions, in order to make the family life enduring and happy. The economic self-interest of each member of the family in the domestic circle was obviously that of every other member when the household was a workshop. Even, the land and all which it implied was a family possession in primitive days. And the worker's equipment, owned privately, was limited in the early days. We read that "tools, weapons, slaves and captured women and the products of some special skill were generally private possession, but products of group-work, such as the capture and killing of buffalo, salmon, and all larger game among the North American Indians, and the maize which individual women tended but which belonged to the household or the tribe in common, were all shared as community property." When to this communal possession of products of group-activity were added control over marriage portions, however those might be appropriated, and the management of all property thought to be of group-value, we can see that all of economic weight of influence now so individualized once went into the family asset.

In the mediaeval times, when laborers were gaining slowly a class consciousness outlined by Guilds and Unions of special groups of workers, the family was still the main centre of work-direction and of united profit from work, and hence it was evident to the dullest mind and the coldest heart that members of a family should work and save together. Now the whole trend of industrial relationship is toward making independent and individualistic connection between the worker and his job outside of family unity. Even movements for legal protection of the worker against exploitation by masters in industry often take little account of family relationship or the varying inherited family ideals. Setting the well-being of one member of the family against what is supposed to be the well-being of other members of the family, as in the case of some child-labor laws, may be necessary and socially wise, but it surely does not lead to family stability.

Demands of Family Life Upon Industry and Labor Legislation.—The demands of family life should at least be stated and have some weight in any further attempts to make the lot of the individual worker better, and should be considered in any drastic attempts to enforce labor legislation which sets the parent and the child against each other in the courts, or which hampers a mother in what she deems of vital necessity in the carrying out of her parental duty.

"The Code for Women in Industry," issued by the division of Women in Industry of the Department of Labor, in cooeperation with the "War Labor Board" and the "War Labor Policies Board," when the questions concerning standards for employment of women in war plants were acute, as published in the Survey of January 4, 1919, is in brief summary as follows: No woman employed or permitted to work more than eight hours a day or forty-eight hours a week. One day of rest a week demanded for all and no night work for minors or women. The basis of the wage-scale to be form of occupation, not sex; and no lesser wage for women permitted unless it can be proved that their employment lessens the output of work. A legal minimum wage for all women, which should include cost of living of dependents as well as of individuals. All work conditions to be good and safety adequately secured. Women to be prohibited from working in occupations where exposure to heat or cold or to poisonous substances, or where bad position or too great muscular strain, endanger health. Home work prohibited.

Should Adult Women and Children be Listed Together in Labor Laws?—There is grave question whether some of these items listed as essentials in the protection of women in industry, and certainly useful in the peculiar conditions of munition manufacture into which women rushed in such vast numbers in answer to the call of war, should form a permanent outline of the relation of law to women workers. Some of them have, and clearly, a place in any future code in peace time. The requirement for one day of rest in seven; the demand that quality and power of labor, not sex, shall set the wage-scale; and the legal requirement for sanitary, safe, and moral conditions in workshops and factories, all are vital to sound social demand in the interest of women workers. Are these not also demands for just labor conditions of men? The eight-hour day is now fixed as a standard for men and women alike, with the forty-eight hour a week definition. A minimum wage, including cost of living for dependents as well as for individuals involved, has justice at its base, but requires for its application less a blanket sum indicated by law than a wages-board or other form of discriminating commission with power to adjust flexibly, with due consideration of place and of quality of work, the wages to the task. Conditions of labor should be "good" in all cases, and what is good should be fixed by disinterested persons. Physical safety and moral protection must be secured at all hazards, and in the case of women special protection, particularly for those under twenty-one years of age, is needed. Any work which is peculiarly a menace to health and to the race-life for mothers or potential mothers may well be forbidden by law. The absolute prohibition of night work and of home work to adult women may well be left in the background, however, until the industrial situation is clearer for all women workers. The evils of night work for the "sweated" woman, untrained for any lucrative labor and who has to catch on to the labor wheels at any point open to her effort at middle age, must not blind us to the fact that one of the most precious things in the inheritance of brave and loyal natures is the determination to earn for one's own support and for that of one's dearest. The tenement labor, which is such an evil in many of our cities and one so impossible to deal with adequately by ordinary inspectorship provision, is not all there is to "home work." It may well be that, as has been before indicated, the new uses of electrical power may return to the home, and in ways to the advantage of the family, some of the processes now wholly under factory control and provision. The point is that while there cannot be too much protective legislation for children and youth, the place of adult women in the labor world must not be too firmly and exclusively held by the side of children lest we add to the difficulties women still experience in finding and keeping a place in the world of modern industry.

Women in War Work.—In England, we are told, there were one million women employed in war plants during the great struggle with Germany. In every variety of munitions manufacture women were found in great numbers, often furnishing eighty per cent, or more of the total number employed. It is a fact that they "made good." It is also a fact that the average of health among the working women of England rose in many localities where women were employed at these unwonted tasks. The reason given for this by one keen observer being that the higher wages earned enabled many thousands of women, before undernourished because of their poverty, to have "three square meals a day." When we remember that in England there are nearly two million more women than men, and that the men who served in the army and have returned physically and mentally able to take back the jobs they left for army service are clamoring for them, and when we remember that the struggle for a standard of living never goes backward and that women workers once used to good wages will not willingly take poor ones again, we can see what difficulties the war has made in our sister country for both men and women in industry.

In our own country the one and a quarter million women engaged in industrial work directly or indirectly connected with the war service when the first investigation was made in fifteen states, under the auspices of the National League of Women's Service, were but a section of the army of women who were enlisted in war work, paid or unpaid and of various kinds. Now we have an unemployment problem of our own with something of the same complaint of the men of England that the returned soldier finds a woman in his place, a woman who is still wanted, perhaps, by the employer and who does not wish to relinquish her job.

When Mrs. Muhlhauser Richards took charge of the Woman's Division of the Department of Labor in the effort to make a clearing house of women's work in the interest of help to the government it was not simply a measure for temporary use or of temporary value. The idea still persists in peace as well as in war, and justly, that the interests of women in industry require a special division of the Labor Department in order that we shall be able to know what is needed for their protection in the interest of family life as well as understand what individual women require in justice when they are wage-earners. A minimum wage is demanded and in several states made a legal requirement, but to name a definite sum per week puts a stated figure where a movable and changeable condition inheres in the situation. Experts in labor reform, therefore, urge the passage of legislative bills providing for "wage commissions to determine living wages for women and minors," and such have been secured in several states.

The linking of women of all ages with minors may be necessary for protection of individual women from exploitation, but again, it must be insisted that such a blanket cover for women workers of all ages may not be for the ultimate good of the adult, competent yet struggling women, who are trying to compete with men for a place in the world of labor. The fact is that we often approach the problems of work and wages and general labor conditions from the angle of the most needy, the most exploited, the least trained, and the poorest in opportunity. This may be the highway of philanthropy and to be travelled in the interest of social helpfulness, but it is not all the roads labor reform must use.

Minimum Wage for Fathers of Families Real Need.—When we study questions of labor as related to family well-being we must begin with an ideal of what the normal family requires of its members, men, women, and older children, and place in the first position of economic requirement the family demand upon the husband and father. He must, we have said, be in position to be a "good provider" for his group. That means he must be trained to be a worker, faithful, efficient, intelligent, who does something which society needs to have done and for which employers can and will pay adequate wages. That means vocational training, guidance, and opportunity. That means, also, an economic system not easily convulsed by bad times and ups and downs in the industrial world. That means, again, ease and cheapness of transportation in order that families may live in decent homes and yet the chief wage-earner go back and forth to his work without too great strain of strength or purse. That means some social control of housing facilities, food supply, public sanitation, and educational facilities which will secure the essential of human living to all workers and their families. To work harder to secure these vital elements of family well-being is the task of all. If we were as anxious as citizens to secure opportunity for the men and women who make up the great army of average workers, self-supporting but at cost of struggle often too severe, as we are anxious as philanthropists to ease the burden and protect the weakness of the more backward members of the industrial army, the current of upward movement of all in gainful occupations would be stronger and more socially helpful. The family is most of all concerned with the minimum wage of adult men who marry and have children.

The Attitude of Women Toward Labor Problems.—The family is concerned next with the attitude of women who are wives and mothers, or daughters partially supported from the family purse, toward the whole area of industrial problems. It may be always right, as it is often necessary, for married women, even when mothers of young children, to earn in the outside labor world. It is, however, always a social crime for women who try simply to piece out an insufficient family income to do it in ways to bring down or to keep down wages in the specialty of work they take part in, especially to bring down or keep down the wages of men in that specialty of work. It may be best (it usually is) for young daughters to earn wages even if they do kinds of work which in the labor market will not secure a return adequate for full self-support. The work may be educational in its quality; much that young girls do in department stores is of that character; but wages too low for full self-support must be reckoned as part pay for a work-opportunity mixed of training and service, not one that lists the worker in full competitive position.

Necessary Protection for Children and Youth in Labor.—Where young boys or young girls enter into the industrial world they should step from either a Trade School, and if so, with the guidance and care of some representatives of that school to aid them in making physically, morally, and vocationally helpful alignment, or else should be given half-time employment in the factory or shop that takes them on as helpers and find in some "Continuation School" a right use of the rest of the work-day. The right sort of protective aid to boys and girls between the ages of fourteen, when the law allows some form of wage-earning, and that of sixteen to eighteen years, when they may safely shift for themselves, should halve the wage-earning hours (four instead of eight each day or twenty-four instead of forty-eight a week or alternate weeks at work or study); should double the numbers set to each stated task in shop or factory; should treble the supervisory control of society, in a union of Health Board, School Board, and Employers' and Employees' Council; and should quadruple the fitly trained teachers, the school sittings, the adequately equipped recreation centres and all incitements to higher uses of leisure time. The early years of every child should be held sacredly apart from the whir of wheels and the din of machinery; he should then rehearse in some degree, as will be later shown, the handicraft age of industry and its personalizing influence. His entrance into the world of modern labor should be not a plunge or a tumble but along a regulated highway of well-outlined endeavor, with social influences on either side to make his passage into wage-earning safe for himself and useful to others.

Social protection should be less a club marked, "Thou shalt not," and more an opportunity inscribed, "Chances to rise, win them!" For the woman, married and a mother, there must be not so many new ways of enforcing prohibitions of what are deemed for her harmful forms of labor, as more ingenuity in providing half-time work, better adjustments of earning facilities to domestic duties, far more cooeperative machinery for reducing the cost of living and for securing the family against economic exploitation in food, clothing, and shelter.

Women and the Cost of Living.—There is a field of family conservation which has been until lately almost wholly neglected by women; a field which must be mastered by them, the field of combination of all family interests in behalf of each family need. The attitude of the new voters among women who have organized into a League to enable them to become better and more efficient citizens is eminently encouraging. When the League of Women Voters takes hold definitely, consciously, and with intelligent devotion of the problems of cost of living, market supply, distribution of essentials of life and the whole range of economic interests which lie next to family well-being, it means that women are taking into the electorate a new and vitally needed form of social control and social service. That in itself, alone, would justify the struggle of women to obtain the franchise. More and more men in political life will come to understand what a League of women, for the most part "home-women" and family-serving-women, will demand of officials in the area of basic essentials of comfort and security in the home.

The Family Demand upon Unmarried Women.—The social demand upon women who are at work in any field of personal endeavor, whether that be professional, clerical, manual or artistic, has been outlined before in this treatment of the relation of the home to society in general as involving sortie special consideration of family needs. This may seem a negligible quantity to many women, unmarried, with relatives all self-supporting or well-to-do. There is no reason why a daughter should be called "undutiful" or "selfish" who is absorbed in her own work than why a son should be so esteemed when there is no special reason why other members of the family should hold that daughter's time and effort at their disposal. The selfishness may be on the other side, and often is where parents or near relatives within the family bond try to burden the young woman with odds and ends of family service, which others might as well assume, and leave her with no ambition or opportunity for personal achievement. There are, however, in this complicated life of ours many contingencies of family experience which still demand from daughters a share in time and strength which sons may more easily concentrate upon their own work. This fact, often operating unconsciously, leads many young women to choices of types of work which have fixed hours and easy adjustment to frequent absences from work. These give little chance for rising in wage or position and often give low wages from the start. This tendency keeps many women from success in work and is often a reason why men distrust and oppose their entrance into a new field of industry.

The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate solution of problems of commercialized prostitution includes for each girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete self-support. Hence, the family has no right to take from its members some present advantage which will handicap potential workers, either boys or girls, in their struggle to meet adult responsibilities of economic life. Hence, again, the whole question of vocational preparation for girls, as well as for boys, has right-of-way as against any temporary or easily dispensed-with helping in family emergencies which may seriously hamper the future wage-earner. This is now being seen clearly; and the consequence is that parents do without for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children. This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on many of the common fields of effort.

Farming and the Farmer's Wife.—There is one great area both of man's work and of woman's work which supremely needs better understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life, farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife, and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States more seriously than ever before.

The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work than their mother's kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and often do. It is the lack of workers to adequately aid those in command of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep adequate numbers on the farms. The effect of the drift away from the country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any intensive statement here. The congestion of cities, the street life of children which makes legal offenses of acts natural and necessary to free play, the walking of city streets by armies of unemployed fathers and those who might be fathers while harvests are lost for want of laborers, the lack of food in one stratum of society while in another there are no people to eat what nature provides so abundantly—all this and more rises in the mind of everyone who understands that in the right adjustment of agriculture to the people's needs lies the best interests of all. The sorry picture of the haggard woman, widow, deserted, or divorced, scrubbing on her knees all night long the marble floors of a vast office-building, to hurry back to her locked-in children in the early morning hours, to fall exhausted on the bed until the call of the alarm clock to get breakfast and send the little ones to school—this picture has been portrayed often to Consumer's League and Women's Club audiences and has made many women of position and of influence call for drastic prohibition of such overwork of mothers. It has also made women work diligently until they secured forms of help from the public purse to subsidize such mothers and give them state aid until the children were able to earn something for themselves. There are many who can visualize that scrubwoman, and who can place beside her as needing social aid the sewing-machine operator, the garment-finisher or the flower-maker in the tenement sweatshop, who can not see that the farm-house mother is often subjected to labor conditions that sap life and health and doom her children to weakness. These opposite poles of woman's work both call for better social understanding and more intelligent and devoted social work. The scrubwoman, or the poverty-bound tenement worker may be proper subjects for public or private philanthropy; the farm-house mother is or should be the prime object of social justice and social engineering for ends of social well-being. Upon the farmer and his wife and also upon the miner and his wife and the forest worker and his wife rest the very foundations of economic stability and industrial security. Those who procure at first hand the raw material of manufacture and of commerce are too precious to social order for any neglect of conditions in their work. In many foreign countries the land seems to shrink dangerously as population grows. In our vast country and in the stretches of Canada, North America seems, as Lowell said, to have "room beside her hearth for all mankind." And yet, in New York City and in other centres of population, there are swarms of people, many of them of foreign birth, of varying races and of different nationalities, crowding each other to suffocation and many of them holding out hands for charity, who might, if rightly aided toward a different environment, work to full support of themselves and their families in the fresh air and healthful surroundings of the country. The need is to transfer city advantages to the country in far greater extent, and to transfer the people who cannot find or make a human chance in the city to the wide spaces and work needs of the country. Rural life must be urbanized, city life must be relieved of those who hinder the making of a beautiful and noble civic life, not because they are incapable but because there are too many of them who have not yet arrived at full capacity for vocational achievement and cannot do so in the crowd with which they have to contend.

Domestic Help and Family Life.—For the relief of family life in the matter of domestic help there must be an intelligent and an earnest attack of educated women upon the problems involved. The admirable suggestions of Professor Lucy Salmon in her Democracy in the Household[16] indicate the chief difficulty in getting and keeping the right sort of domestic worker. The personal relation is not that of equals but of superior to inferior, and the helper in the home is isolated socially from the group he or she serves. This is felt peculiarly in cases where but one helper is employed within the household. The petition of many housewives recently sent to Washington to beg that "the restriction upon immigration now in force may be lifted in the case of women who seek to enter the United States to engage in domestic labor" on the ground of a household need, dire and widespread, is an indication that many women, perhaps most, look forward to a continuance of the present conditions of domestic work but with ever-new sets of domestic workers from other lands. Their attitude in this particular is wholly mistaken. Even if the races from all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to even learn how to do good work in those kitchens. The first chance they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open field of harvest would take them away. And this is not because the work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will long accept it. Miss Salmon's ideas, if carried out, would stay the rapidity of the current away from domestic service. But a quite new approach to the whole problem must be defined and realized by women of light and leading if we would have adequate and efficient help In household work. The fact that most professional or business women find it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept, than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take a place where there were women in the family who could do the housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them."

The absurd hypocrisy that in one breath praises all work done for the comfort of the family as the highest form of service and in the next demands that the family "servant" accept all manner of inherited insignia of social inferiority must be outgrown. In the city and suburban towns the hour-service and the various forms of commercial aids to household tasks may work, as has been before indicated, to gradually do away with the servant class, in the old sense of those words and without much social consciousness of the change. In the small towns and in the rural districts, where is now the most acute suffering and need of housemothers, there must be a conscious and a wholesale movement to reinstate domestic service on a plane compatible with democracy and amenable to high standards of intelligence and efficiency. When one thinks of the rural need for teachers, for nurses, for doctors, for kindergartners, for recreation managers, for community leaders, one is tempted to call for a social conscription that shall make all graduates from normal and teacher-training schools, from all schools for social work, and all hospitals, from all playground classes and settlements, serve for a period of one year or two in the country districts as their part in social organization. Surely if a government has the moral right to force youth to serve in war for purposes of destruction of enemies, it has a right to compel youth to serve in peace for purposes of human conservation and for the just sharing of social advantages by all the people of a common country!

The Application of Democratic Principles to Life.—Finally, the problems which inhere in work as related to the family have at their base the same great demand for equality of educational and economic opportunities which inhere in all that relates to the application of democratic principles to actual living. This is not an essay on economic theory or a statement of the results of special studies of economic condition. Still less is it an attempt to make an appeal for one or another type of economic reform. It is simply a partial view of certain work conditions as they come closest to family life. There is to this writer no more merit or demerit in any form of economic dogmatism than in any special theologic creed. We may all differ, and with reasons sufficient to our thought and without blame, on questions of how we can best attain a true democratization of the industrial order. We cannot now be of two minus as to the righteousness of such democratization. We must all believe in giving all human beings a fair chance at the best things of life; security against want, homes that offer conditions for family well-being, educational entrance into our common social inheritance, and leisure to enjoy the things that make for happiness. The baptism of religious idealism by the social spirit is now accomplished. As Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch, that great prophet of a new social order, well says in his last thought-compelling book, "The social gospel has become orthodox."

Women Must be More Democratic.—Women have been so long held within family interests that they, less than men, have had the discipline of democratic life within the labor world. They are often the vicarious expressions of man's remaining aristocratic feeling, as Veblen has acutely outlined in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Husbands still wish their wives to be more "select" than they find it wise longer to be themselves and more tenacious of inherited conventional forms than business or inclination longer allow for themselves. Hence, women have not, as a rule, organized their households on as democratic principles and methods as men have organized their own work. Women, now that they have attained the democratic position in the state which they have long worked for must apply the principles they have preached in that crusade for political equality in the very stronghold of social caste and rigid class-feeling, the family life itself. And even if they have to educate their husbands in the process.

Woman may do this, first, by wiping out and forever the stigma that attaches or has attached to any woman who earns money outside her own home. They may do it, second, by so relating themselves to professional, clerical, manual workers among their own sex as to show that they really believe in equality of rights and mutuality of duties among all classes. They may do it, third, by taking hold of the household service problem radically and from the basis of actual knowledge of its importance to personal and family well-being. They may show actual regard for the dignity of the functions implied, by the treatment accorded the competent, faithful, and often indispensable domestic helper. There is a big social job waiting for women in matters concerning the work of their own sex both within and without the family circle; and the social power of women will be best shown, perhaps, in settling the worst problems of domestic service by the wiser and more efficient use of better educated, more socially respected, and more definitely standardized workers within the home.

The Social Effect of Trade Unions.—No study of the relation of modern industry to family life, however brief and inadequate, can ignore the question, "How has the Trade Union organization of wage-earners affected the home?" The immediate and direct effect has often been disastrous when strikes and lockouts marked the course of industrial warfare. All war is bad for family life and especially injurious to the development of children. And economic war lacks the appeal to the imagination and the ceremonial prestige of war between nations or of civil war in one country. We have had in our race-experience for untold ages the linking of military training with military defence of political ideas and of the fatherland. To fight for one's country seems highly honorable. This lift of the sense of community unity into the area of supreme struggle gives to men often what no other experience so far accomplishes, namely, a feeling of spiritual union with all other men who also struggle for what they believe to be right. In labor wars; in the strife between employer and employed, that sense of race unity even when struggling against a national enemy, that which gives what Professor James well called the "mystic element in militarism," is lacking. It is a fight between men who have and those who have not and feel themselves defrauded of just due. Hence, although the fight may be bitter even unto death, and the sacrifices of immediate comfort for ultimate ends beyond measure heroic and even wise, there can be little of the pomp and circumstance that accompany national and international warfare. The Decoration Days when heroes of past conflicts are praised and receive from all the reverence which patriotism pays to those believed to have saved some precious inheritance from harm do not yet, perhaps will never, include heroes of labor struggles for equal right and mutual justice. Yet the history of industrial changes shows beyond cavil or doubt that in this field, as in others, he who would be free himself must win his freedom. The basic principle of the Trade Union, the right and usefulness of collective bargaining, inheres in the conditions of machine-dominated and capitalized industry. In this form of labor organization the individual worker cannot bargain individually; his place in the factory is too infinitesimal and his power measured by that of his employer too invisible for such personal alignment. This fact is now not questioned by any but those so enamoured of old methods of control of the worker by those who hire him that they cannot see what has really happened both to the employer and the employed. The labor struggle had to come. The right of workers to combine and to work together for what seems to them their best interests is as inherent a part of modern democratic ideals as is the right of all citizens to vote. And since modern industry has given enormous power to a few master leaders and requires so many wage-earners to carry out its enterprises the struggle has necessarily been hard and long. No one can justly place all good behavior on one or the other side in this conflict. No one can fail to see that power attained by the Trade Unions has at times been used as selfishly as the power of the employers has been. But when we remember that until the first quarter of the nineteenth century combinations of workmen, even to respectfully ask an increase of wages or a bettering of work conditions in lessening of hours and in sanitary and moral provisions in work-places, was legally a "conspiracy," and liable to harsh punishments, we must be glad that at any temporary cost the main army of laborers has been organized from a mob of oppressed individual workers. But what a cost to the family has been often paid! Mothers already overworked and under-nourished still further starved by the "strike relief" that only serves to maintain wretchedness, not to abolish it. The sufferings of children who miss even the meagre family comfort which the too small pay of the father when at work was able to supply. The greater suffering of children shunned and ill-treated by school mates when the father is called a "scab." The deeper tragedy of experience of men who take work that their labor comrades have refused because of the claim of wife and children, and are abused, both in body and in denial of sympathy and respect, because they are thought to be traitors to their striking fellows. What is hinted at in these few words could be made into one of the great dramas of the ages if only the social imagination could take into understanding and show without partiality both sides of the picture. The time may come when it will be seen that in all wars some heroes fall on the side that is called wrong and have right to meed of deferred praise. When that time comes, the history of labor conflicts will show that in the struggle between the father's duty to his children and the wife who shares his service to them, and his duty toward the democratizing of labor by force of battle for justice and a fair chance for all his class, heroes and martyrs have fallen on both sides of the line. Meanwhile, the encouraging thing is that Labor Commissions and permanent Boards of Investigation and Arbitration and many government devices for securing a more even justice all around the circle of wage-earning activity are increasing in evidence as a sign that we are on the way to bring the common need for peace and order in industry to bear upon its warring elements. It only needs that the great consuming public, the final and the worst sufferer when labor wars are waged, shall understand and use its overmastering social power to bring order out of the chaos of opposing interests.

Women's Trade Unions.—The entrance of women into the Trade Union field is a significant feature of modern industry. Denied in many men's Unions the right of membership and in many fields of work competing only with those of their own sex, yet obviously in need of the same declaration of rights and the same class support of each other in securing better conditions of labor that men realized before them, the Women's Trade Union members have much the same spirit and many of the same methods that men have used in similar bodies. They, as a rule, stand, however, for more protective legislation for women than men demand for themselves and have one element unique in such bodies. That element is the membership within Women's Trade Unions of women of social position, of financial security and even of wealth and of broadest culture. These women who join the Trade Union League not to benefit their own class, which is usually the professional or the employing class, but to help wage-earning women to better conditions, have often been the laboring oar in the organization and maintenance of such Unions. Nothing analogous to this is found in the Men's Trade Union movement in the United States. It bears witness to two elements, one that women of the so-called privileged classes are growing very sensitive to the claims of social justice as these are related to wage-earning women, and the other that the average age of wage-earning women is so much younger than that of men employed in similar work that the need for help from without in any effective effort for relief from bad conditions is more apparent. The transitory character of much of women's work makes the permanent personnel of any Trade Union League of women a smaller minority of its membership than in the case of men. It is said that in any trade where both the men and the women are well organized the membership of the men's Union will be fairly stable for twenty years, that of the women's Union will show a radical change each five years, making almost a complete turn-over in the twenty years' count. That is, of course, due to the fact that most women use for wage-earning only the period between leaving school and marrying, usually about four and a half years. That makes the term "working-girls" most appropriate and is a contrast to the working man's longer hold upon his trade.

The New Solidarity of Women.—The fact that women of all types of social advantage and disadvantage are already linked together in the Women's Trade Union movement, has, however, deep social significance, especially as wage-earners' organizations relate themselves to family life. No woman who has had right opportunities for education and family life in her own experience can work in intimate comradeship with those who have been denied such advantages without aiming directly for social arrangements in labor which will no longer cheat any young life of its joy, its culture, or chance for its possibility of right relation in the home. The signs are full of hope that more and more members of each class will feel that society as a whole has claims upon them above all that any group may attain by working only for its own advantage. No law of justice will stand the test of time save that which ordains an order in which "Each for All, and All for Each" will be the rule in industry as in the nobler state!

QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS

1. What is most important to the success of the modern family, a minimum wage for working women or a minimum wage for men which can supply decent living for a man, his wife, and at least three children?

2. What effect has the wage-earning of married women and mothers in gainful employments outside the home had upon the stability and happiness of the family?

3. What effect have the laws protecting women and children in industry had upon family life?

4. What effect would the proposed increase of legislation placing men and women, married and single women, and unionized and non-unionized labor upon an identical legal plane be likely to have upon family life? As, for example, in the case of "deserting husbands," or in work especially inimical to women's health?

5. How can the admitted evil of industrial exploitation of children be best and most surely prevented?

FOOTNOTES:

[16] See American Journal of Sociology for January, 1912.



CHAPTER XIV

THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL

"To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge, and we judge the value of any training solely by reference to this end. For complete living we must know in what way to treat the body, in what way to treat the mind, in what way to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of others."—HERBERT SPENCER.

"The final value of all institutions is their educational influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight, judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of regard."—JOHN DEWEY.

"Socialized education has four aims:

First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods of social intercourse,—language, number, social forms and conventions.

Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and through participation in present social life.

Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation.

Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized."—GEORGE ALBERT COE.

"The unbeliever says, 'You can never construct a true society out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be.' But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last culture shall absorb, chaos itself."—EMERSON.

"At the present time it may be that only the least effort is needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public opinion become established in conformity with the existing conscience and the entire social organization become transformed. It depends upon us to make the effort."—TOLSTOI.

New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry.—When the power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the journeyman's right and public recognition to give distinction to the skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be called upon by kings and nobles to give assent to wars and to furnish the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there has as yet developed in modern government no substitute for this older and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work, to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal service from each class to each class above to the tax system of modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash instead of in such personal service, took place in the era of handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on class distinctions, and class distinctions as wide and deep as those which modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred.

When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr. Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in doing.

The connection between these movements in education and the family well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the dignity and power of the worker or makes him seem but a machine for others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated.

Education a Social Process.—These elements are attempts to socialize education. We say that education is a process in the development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life.

Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people, in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education, have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor Todd in his book, The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency.

The Three Learned Professions.—When there were but three learned professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action, soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those of selected classes. Now the social need is for trained talent in a far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most part on a par with each other.

New Calls for Trained Leadership.—This pressure of the new subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new conceptions of common social need. All this movement in the educational world has a direct and immediate influence upon family life. What was good in the old domestic training for individual life-work we are trying to put into the school, and what is needed for skill and leadership in the modern industrial order we are trying to put into the college and university. This means not only that the family rule is less deferred to in the education of even the youngest child, it also means that if we would save the family influence in education we must bring the parents and teachers together in council and in united control as never before. This is being attempted; the Mothers' Club and the Parent-Teacher Associations now in evidence being impressive symbols of a larger social movement through books, pamphlets, magazines, reports, and "Foundations," together with clubs of more general social type. The value of the Trade Unions and of other special forms of organization of workers in the matter of securing rights and opportunities in the labor world has been alluded to, but the definite educational value of such class organizations must not be ignored. It is true that there is a loss of emphasis upon skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one class is ignored, as "hands," not heads, is still more detrimental to democratic government. The class consciousness of the worker was strong in the days when the Guilds had political power, and it was a wholesome check upon the claim of divine right of kings and nobles to rule. The class consciousness of wage-earners is needed in modern times and should have its due representation in halls of legislation where it could meet naturally, in healthful competition and debate, the class consciousness already there in the persons of employers of labor and managers of legal interests of great corporations. The education that will finally unite in better understood cooeperation all class interests in public well-being is to be found in such use of the school as will show how we are all bound together in industry, as in the political body; in work as in voting power. That education which, with more or less intelligence and with deeper or more shallow understanding, society is now working toward will make the home life more secure as well as the state more united.

The Special Education of Girls.—The application of new educational ideals and methods to the training of girls and young women is of first-rate importance in the matter of home relationship to the school. And this is the case not only because there are far more women than men at work in carrying out those ideals and methods in the schools but because if there is to be made valid and useful, conscious and definite, union of school and home in one educational approach to childhood it must be largely through the mothers and women-teachers that such union can be effected. The reasons for this are too obvious to require explanation.

There are those who believe that there is no question of sex-differences in education, that all that is needed is to open all educational opportunities to boys and girls alike and give both precisely the same instruction. There are also those who still believe that some varying elements of child-training and the instruction of youth should be retained and further developed in the case of boys and girls. Some basic facts must be in mind when we attempt to answer the question, Shall we try for somewhat divergent schooling for the two sexes?

First of all, we must remember that we have inherited the fruits of a long race-experience in which men and women were for the most part so separated from, each other in functioning that the education of boys and girls was made wholly unlike after sex-differentiation began, and sometimes, as in Sparta, before that period. The difference in ideal and in method of training was not, as some have said, that "boys were trained for human and socialized work" and "girls were fitted for personal and generally menial service alone." Both were trained for personal character and for social ends. The men were tied to the land, and the political order, and the family responsibility for parenthood, and some distinct personal service in behalf of the group life, as were the women. The difference, the tremendous difference, was this: that the service demanded of men, whatever their part or lot might be, was early seen to require a definite schooling for some particular vocation, demanding some measure of intellectual concentration and technical skill; while the service demanded of women was supposed to be of a nature requiring only general apprenticeship within the family life. The specialization of labor, as is often shown, took from that family apprenticeship of women, one by one, its vocational elements of manual work until the housemother seemed to need only that general ability which can quickly and wisely use the fruits of others' expert knowledge and technical training. It as surely added for men, in every division of vocational alignment, an increasing differentiation of training and of labor. The reaction upon the educative process of this specialization and organization of industrial and institutional life has been distinct and far-reaching. The girls were left to the experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculture manufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation, women were again left out of control of the processes which man's organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any conception of the need for sending girls to school. In point of fact, as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were denied formal school training so long after such denial became actively injurious to the family and group life was because the popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to fit boys for "a man's part in the world."

Formal School Training of Women New.—When the principle of democracy began to work in women's natures with an irrepressible yeast of revolt against longer denial of opportunity for individual achievement, and the vitally necessary and too-long-delayed "woman's rights movement" was born, its first pressure was against the closed doors of the "man-made" school. Enlightened women now demanded equal chance with men for preparation for vocations. The school they sought to enter was inherited from a past in which not only sex lines but class lines held the opportunities of higher education for a small clique. The ancient college and university did indeed lead towards vocations, but only the three "learned professions" and general training for commanding leadership in state and industrial affairs. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born the study disciplines they introduced into higher education appeared in answer to an imperious social demand that leadership should be provided in a vastly more varied range than the older civilization required. At first the leaders in the higher education of women, like all nouveaux riche, showed determination to prove themselves adept in the traditions of the scholastic world into which they had so recently entered. Classic curricula were strictly adhered to and all "practical" courses viewed with open distrust except those leading to the inherited professions, and to teaching, as these were pushed upward toward college professorships. Happily, however, almost coincident with the entrance of women into larger educational opportunity came the broadening of that educational opportunity itself to which reference has been made; and the marvelous growth of the State Universities in the United States rapidly increased both the more varied vocational stimuli and the wider preparation for leadership now opening in our country for women as for men.

New Training for Social Service.—Two movements have resulted from the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease, poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack of rational social consciousness and effective social control, then it speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture and of social organization for common human welfare. This conviction led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply, housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment. It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers, doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for the most part women are true to their sex-heritage now that they have a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life, the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the wayward, and the undeveloped—these, which have been their special tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their main business in the more complex situations of modern life.

Departments of Household Economics in Colleges.—When the departments of household economics were added to college courses they were hailed on one side as a needed attempt to "make the higher education fit women for wifehood and motherhood;" and on the other side they were opposed as a base concession to conservative views of woman's position, and as leading toward a lowering of standards in women's higher education. They were, and are, neither of these. The college courses in subjects related to the scientific improvement of human beings and their environment are courses leading toward new vocational specialties, which the newly outlined science of race-culture demands. Women who excel in these specialties do so as paid functionaries and are oftener unmarried than married. Nor are these studies limited to feminine students, although far more women than men choose them. The interrelation of the present social order by which a milk or a water supply has to do with "big business" and with law, and "a garbage can is a metal utensil entirely surrounded by politics," requires some knowledge of these things on the part of men; especially if they are to be "heckled" in political campaigns by women voters. There are, to be sure, now outlined school training "departments of homemaking" intended to help individual women in their work in private homes, but such departments are generally of the nature of "extension courses." Regular college courses, especially those of four years and leading to a special degree, in household economics, as in other groups of studies, lead directly toward a vocational career, standardized and salaried, related to general social organization, and subject to the "factory" tendencies of the modern industrial order. Students in such courses, generally speaking, graduate either to teach household arts in schools and extension work, or to take positions as expert dietitians, managers of hospitals and other public institutions, directors of laundries and restaurants, as trained nurses, assistants or directors in chemical laboratories, architects, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, and what not. All these specialties are essential to social progress, and all are linked to family life in general, but none of them is particularly related to any one family group of one father, one mother, and their children. They, therefore, while tending to make family life in general far more successful than of old, fit no woman surely for wifehood and motherhood; and they cannot do so unless omniscient social wisdom can tell in advance what girls will marry and have children and social control becomes despotic enough to oblige such girls to take these courses in preference to any others; or unless society returns to its old drastic compulsion for all to marry and bear active part in the race-life as parents.

Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership.—Any study of the needs of the family in relation to the school, especially in relation to the tax-supported, free, and compulsory educational system, must take account of two outstanding facts: namely, first, that the whole arrangement of society as we have inherited its condition is based upon the economic leadership of the husband and father in the home partnership. This continues to be the rule even in social strata where the sense of justice gives both parties a common purse and where finest quality of affection and of comradeship makes it a negligible matter which one makes the larger contribution to the united treasury.

Women Socially Drafted for Motherhood.—The second fact which must have its recognition in any study of education in relation to the family, is that no married woman is exempt from all demands of motherhood unless some "selective draft," more delicate in its evaluation than any we have yet evolved, shall indicate her right to exemption, and that if marriage is to continue on anything like its present basis commonplace women cannot have all its advantages without paying some adequate price.

Father-office and Mother-office Still Differ.—We are now in the midst of a social order in which the father-office and the mother-office do differ essentially in their requirements in the vast majority of families. The father-office leads directly toward specialization and achievement in some one calling. To be a good father is, in ordinary family conditions, not so much to give constant personal attention to his children as to do something well which the world wants done and will pay for and by which he may maintain and improve the economic and social standing of his family. To "give hostages to fortune in wife and child" may, indeed often does, hamper a man's idealistic relation to his vocation and oblige him to work for money when he wants to work for fame or for higher usefulness, but it serves almost always to keep him steady to his job. For the average mother this is not the case. Where there is a family of children more than large enough to make good the parent's share in life's ongoing stream, or where physical, mental, or moral peculiarities demand special attention to one child or more, or where aged, delicate, or incompetent members of the family circle call for special consideration, or where the environment does not provide, or the income cannot pay for elaborate aids to domestic comfort from without, the average conscientious housemother must give the best of strength and the most of time in the service of the private family for many years of life. That is to say, getting a group of children up to adult independence and saving the community most of the intimate duties of care of the aged and of the weak, while it calls upon the man-head of the family for greater activity in his special line, calls upon the woman-head of the family for a general and personal service as a primary duty. This puts any vocational specialty she has chosen in a secondary place while the family obligation is most pressing. The result of this obvious fact is that the average woman does still have a double choice to make when marriage offers; a choice for or against the man, and a choice for or against her vocation. In proportion as women are highly educated or industrially trained they have been pressed toward some one calling for which they can be definitely prepared and in which they may hope to rise in personal achievement and in financial compensation. On the other hand, marriage and motherhood appeal to the deepest instincts of human nature; and if the man seems worth it a woman will generally risk vocational impediment and awkwardness of economic adjustment for the sake of a congenial mate and children of her own.

Should the Education of Girls Include Special Attention to Family Claims?—These facts indicate that social prudence must at least ask the question, Should not the education of girls include some distinct recognition of special problems to be met, often in acute experience of contrary currents of personal desire and social pressure, in the lives of young women? As has been shown in other connection what we are witnessing now in domestic life is the passing of the servant caste, of the ordinary "hired girl" and of the unpaid family drudge; not the eclipse of the housemother or the waning of the homemaker's power or charm. In this household change and in the demand that goes with it upon any woman who would have or make a home, and with clear understanding of the new responsibilities which the new freedom of women place upon them, certain fundamental principles should be held firmly in mind as we deal with special problems of adjustment created by new social situations. First of all, let us admit, and never cease to emphasize the fact, that the social education of women demands from now on the most scrupulous regard for the training of every normal girl for self-support. This cannot be too much emphasized. This is the only sure foundation for socially helpful sex-relationship and for that democratization of the family without which social progress is now impossible. The social education of women in general demands, also, the cultivation of domestic tastes and of some measure of household technic, not as a concession to the past, but as a safeguard of the future, in such fashion that the call to personal service of the family life may recall familiar and pleasant educational activities. These educational activities should precede those which tend directly toward vocational preparation for self-support. This point, too, is vital. The age when almost all little girls like to do things which concern the family comfort is from the eighth to the fourteenth year, a period too young for proper vocational drill. Then, when they are most likely to be ordered out of the kitchen if there is a paid cook to give the order, and most likely to be thought "in the way" if trying to help in domestic process of any sort, is the period of all others when to "learn by doing" what they are interested in will give them a background capable of easy adjustment to the later demands of family life. The training of boys of the same ages has an analogue in farming and handy use of common tools; and in the "work, play, and study school" boys and girls learn much together which fit both for mutual aid in the private family. The new education of the grade schools, therefore, is coming to the rescue of the housemother's task, as the high school and college have come to the aid of those who would provide vocational careers for women. They may meet in helpful alliance just as soon as a few social principles, which can make a bridge between them, are outlined and accepted.

Adjustment of Family Service and Vocational Work.—First, most women should allow for marriage and maternity first place for the years socially required. Second, women cannot afford to lose entirely out of their married lives vocational discipline, by the use of leisure time left them by new easing of household service, even in odd jobs of unpaid "social work," as is now so much the custom. The very multiplicity and variety of ancient crafts practised in the home make some one activity, held to rules of specialization, essential to the housemother's development. The chosen vocation retained as an avocation, during the housemother's active service, must not, however, be a chief dependence for either her own or the family support lest the family or herself suffer. It must be in the nature of a leasehold upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty hours to the old familiar task. This is not an impractical plan, as many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than any other of its treasures. Third, as has been before indicated, married women with young children must learn to combine in "team work," as they have never yet done, and to make engagements by two's or three's for the work one unmarried woman may take alone. This is especially called for in the great social task of teaching, "woman's organic office in the world," as Emerson called it. The evils charged against a "feminized school," where they really exist, are those due not so much to the sex of the grade-teachers as to the celibate condition in the "permanent supply" and to the too rapidly changing personnel of those who marry. The same suggested team work would operate well in all the higher professions; and the success of "continuation schools" proves that half-time and third-time labor schedules are perfectly feasible in manual work. The fourth social principle to be accepted in the interest of women and the family is one little perceived at the present time: namely, that which marks the limitations of social usefulness in the specialization of labor itself.

Dangers of Specialization in Professional Work.—We are beginning to see that this process may be carried so far that a shallow and a cheap person may so fill the exacting and narrow routine of a specialty of manual work or professional service as to check ambition and power to achieve a full and rich personality. Last of all, the social principle, by which the claims of personality and the demands of social solidarity (now so entangled in friction) may work smoothly to individual and social well-being, the principle yet to be clearly outlined and helpfully applied, should receive interpretation and guidance through the race-experience of women. For that service the social education of women must be lifted to a far higher plane of intellectual and ethical culture. Deeper than all the problems which the booming of the guns of this world war has forced upon the dullest social consciousness is the question, How may the individual conscience and personal ideal of the spiritual elite be harmonized with, not destroyed by, the levelling process of democracy? Saints and sages have always marked out the pathway of the future. How can they still dower a common life pressed insistently toward uniformity of action? May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not, however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual role in social order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as truly as without the family. No one has doubted the claim of society upon man to be a useful worker and a competent manager of affairs in the world. Until lately, however, few have seen that, as the "Declaration of Eights and Duties" set forth in 1795 by those who willed the freedom of France, "No one is a good citizen if he is not a good son, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good husband." It has been enough for a man to be able to achieve something of value; his personal character has not been, held of such great moment throughout the ages of the past.

Now we are beginning to demand that men be good in the sense they have long demanded that women shall be, and that women shall be strong in what they do as well as in what they are. This new demand strikes at the roots of what has been called the "social evil," but which is the most unsocial of all the pathological conditions of modern society.