Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/287

Rh many of the most potent influences which fashion the character of the social personality or the social man.

Naturally then the sociologist in considering the factors which determine social welfare must give especial attention to the home and many phases of its life.

For instance, if the physiological chemists prove that the individual requires for full vital development food of certain quality and quantity to produce from 2,500 to 3,000 calories of energy per day and that individual in his home through the ignorance on the part of those who prepare and serve the food consumes a greater or less amount of innutritious food, just to that degree is the home responsible for the weakening of the vital power of the social personality and since vitality is fundamental, the mentality, the morality and sociality of the individual will in time also suffer.

As custom is at present, we all concede that the home is the center of food supply to the individual and woman's main work in the home for which to-day she is specialized by society is the serving of food to her family which in the majority of instances she has herself prepared, for we are told that only ten per cent, of the women in the country have the luxury of a cook other than themselves. If in fulfilling this humanly appointed mission of food center, any individual or group of individuals in the home in carrying out this plan lose from overwork or under education an opportunity for the harmonious development of the four divisions of social personality—the vital, the mental, the moral and the social, the home standing as it does midway between the knowledge of what is best for human nature in its development and the finished product or the social individual in society—is a hindrance to human progress.

Applying the sociological tests of personality to home life we have a right to ask if our homes, as at present conducted, are making mankind better as human beings, more rational, more sympathetic, with an everbroadening consciousness of kind, and whether there is a decrease in the number of the defective, the abnormal, the unmoral and desocialized. We have a right to go a step further and ask if in the development of this social personality there comes to the individual the satisfaction of its own activity and growth or what Giddings calls "cumulative happiness." That is, in the performance of this specialized industry as homemaker is woman enjoying a sense of satisfaction in her own growth and activity and is she happy in her work? Neither men nor women can have a sense of satisfaction or cumulative happiness in their tasks unless they are fitted for them and do not overwork at them.

We are here according to the modern interpretation of the teachings of Jesus to perform our best service to society and we can do this only by the best individual growth and expression. The right kind