Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/295

Rh A proper education in the fundamentals, the purposes, the methods and the results of home work would no doubt go far to lessen the dislike for that form of labor. The difficulty with the "Man With a Hoe" and the woman with a broom is often the mere fact that they see no connection between present effort and remote results, and thus have no sense of satisfaction or happiness in their work.

Until by a process of evolution some plan of farther combination or socialization of home industries is worked out, in order to raise the standard of home industries it is necessary to take immediate steps to improve conditions in our homes. A wholesale campaign of education of our girls, beginning with the grade schools and extending through our colleges, is the most hopeful means available for improving our homes in their work of developing and maintaining individual and social welfare through the proper adjustment of the individual to society.

One of the difficulties of our educational system to-day is that educated women seem to feel that when they assume the responsibilities of home work they have been made to surrender to disuse whatever mentality they possess. Indeed, one very capable woman said to the writer soon after her marriage, when she was wrestling with the difficulties of domestic management, "Do you not feel your mind becoming atrophied with all this petty round of duties?" In order to be loyal to our little home nest, I replied, "No indeed, I find that my domestic science takes as much mentality as my political science did." I have been trying ever since to live up to that remark, and I have found that the homemaker by following out her path of duty can have an opportunity for mental, moral and social development in proportion to her desire for growth.

The whole world of science centers around the daily work of preparing food. The housewife who wishes mental expansion in this line can begin by perusing the numerous food bulletins of the Department of Agriculture which are provided free. She can hang her kitchen walls with the food charts furnished by the Department of Agriculture for a consideration and learn while at her work the relative values of foods. This knowledge will prepare her to be interested in the many food experiments of the large experiment stations, and while following them through the publications she can add to them by carefully kept records of similar experiments in her own home, and if she is of a literary turn of mind she will find a ready sale for such articles as she chooses to write on the subject. Personal experience has verified this in the study of the food requirements of growing children.

Her interest in her own growing family can lead her to a study of the development of the family, primitive culture and the development