Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/293

Rh the commissary departments of our homes are suggested by means of education.

2. Suggestions are made of a practical and natural method of developing the efficient social personality of the child in the home, and an attempt is made to show how a woman following out the industry for which mankind has specialized her can develop her own social personality.

3. At least one preventative of divorce and unhappy home life is suggested.

Let us bear in mind the fact stated before that the home and its caretakers stand as a connecting link between the knowledge of what is best for the individual and the finished product of personality as we find it in society. Or, in other words, the function of the home and of those who minister there is the adjustment of the individual to society through the utilities of the home which are both economic and cultural. Certainly such important work should require some special training. While primarily woman's work is that of dietitian in the home, she must not specialize in this capacity at the sacrifice of her effectiveness as a teacher or the cultural size of home life will suffer. Neither must her training as a dietician and a teacher exclude the training necessary as a financier and as an employer of labor in a broad sense, for the home is in direct touch with the labor problem on all sides. The liveliest imagination and inventive genius she will need also to develop to enable her to meet with discrimination and equanimity the daily complex problems of home life.

It is to be hoped that as yet woman's education is in a transitional stage. The last half century has been given up to proving that women can learn the same lessons as men if they wish to do so. It is very desirable that the next half century may mark a much greater triumph in woman's education by making plain and popular the fact that although she can learn the same lessons as a man she, as a woman, has more important ones to learn of an entirely different nature, bearing on her profession of home making.

N"o man without special training is likely to be employed as consulting engineer on so important an enterprise as the Panama Canal, yet women the country over are intrusted with the vital, the mental, the moral and social welfare of the individuals who make up the state, without any preparation whatever beyond an inheritance of tradition and such additional information as can be gained from home magazines or such other literature as their minds are able to grasp.

There is a sentiment current in respect to woman's higher education that if she is given culture studies, ability will in some way come to her for her life's work. Culture studies are good, but they are only part of the preparation needed by her. She needs for her life's work