Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/540

522 wholesome food and clothing adapted to climate, upon the future health and mental development of her children. It seems to be only just now dawning on women that domesticity—that is, the care of the household and children—is in itself a profession for which the best training and the fullest development attainable are not too much.

The education of women has tended to develop along the same lines as that of men. The classical education for the gentleman has changed to the general education for the average man, and to the specialized education for the industries as well as for the professions. A similar change is taking place in the education of women, but has reached only the second stage. Those who first insisted upon the value of a higher education for women thought it sufficient that they should have the same opportunities as men. This experiment has been tried now for a generation, and it is found that all women do not need the same kind of training as men any more than all men need a purely classical or a purely scientific education. In other words, individualism is breaking up all the accepted lines of education for women as it has for men. As a result, differentiation of courses within the higher training is demanded to meet the practical needs of a life in which no two individuals can possibly do precisely the same things. The fact that one third of all women in the United States are married sets them aside as needing a peculiar training for their profession.

In domestic life women need at least two things: first, the greatest general culture attainable to enrich the home life and to retain the sympathies of children, as well as to store up for themselves resources in hours of difficulty, loneliness, or sorrow; second, they need an education adapted to the everyday business, especially to the emergencies, of domestic life. No education is complete nor, indeed, of great permanent value that does not teach how to live contentedly and to economize nerve energy. To be contented, one must feel sure that one is in the right place, and must have spiritual and intellectual resources to tide over life's emergencies whose end one can not see. To be economical of nerve energy, one must learn a finely balanced self-control and a large-minded discrimination between the values of competing duties and attractions.

It is a significant fact that of one hundred and eighty-four living children of two hundred and twenty-eight almshouse women, less than one third are self-supporting. One fourth are lost—that is, they have been separated from the mother in one way or another, and she no longer knows where they are. The women themselves give all sorts of plausible reasons why their children do not support them; but the fact is, as the stories show, that nineteen women were cast off by their relatives or children because of their drunken.