THE INDUSTRIAL POSITION OF WOMEN. 395 



Still more important a change would it be were marriage, to women, 

 only the entrance into a wider and happier social state, and need never 

 be regarded as the only recognized business opening. 



2. It would bring more varied ability to the service of domestic life. 

 Despite the many kinds of work which have been gradually taken 



out of the housekeeper's hands, her position still calls for a variety of 

 faculties rarely combined in one woman ; and household life is in most 

 families correspondingly imperfect. The business ability that makes 

 a good housekeeper, in the sense of a good provider for material needs, 

 of a capacity to use money to advantage, and to secure order and per- 

 fection of work, is one thing. To be a good educator, to possess the 

 faculty of understanding and training children, is another. Neither 

 of these qualifications is necessarily connected with the gifts and tastes 

 which are required to make the home a social center, to bring its in- 

 mates into the friendly and easy relations to other families upon which 

 its social standing depends, and which, under the present state of things, 

 are so essential to the welfare of its young people as they approach the 

 age for marriage. The mother of a family, whether rich or poor, must 

 be a sort of " Jack of all trades," and often goes through life with the 

 discouraging sense that, in one or other of these important depart- 

 ments, her good intentions will never supply the lack of natural fac- 

 ulty. The less complicated and extensive the work that necessarily 

 devolves upon a woman in her household, the more chance for its 

 successful accomplishment. The more she can call upon skillful help, 

 the less likely the family will be to suffer from her deficiency in any 

 direction. 



There is nothing which would seem more absolutely dependent 

 upon the mother than the care and training of very young children. 

 Yet the careful study of the best modes of training these early years, 

 which has come in with the Kindergarten, shows how far the nursery 

 alone is from meeting their needs ; how early and how much skilled 

 teachers, other children, a variety of apparatus, that is, outside help, 

 are desirable for the best interests of the child, as well as for the as- 

 sistance of the mother. 



3. Another great advantage that would come from a general recog- 

 nition that the occupation of women in non-domestic work tends in- 

 evitably to increase, would be the impulse it would give to the indus- 

 trial training of girls. Parents do not think it worth while to educate 

 their daughters for any pursuit, because they consider industrial occu- 

 pation for a girl an undesirable exception, not to be provided for. An 

 immense amount of misery would be avoided did custom require that 

 every girl should be taught some paying work. It should be consid- 

 ered more obligatory in the case of girls than of boys, thus to guaran- 

 tee them the possibility of independence, both because they are less 

 able to make opportunities for themselves when unexpectedly called 

 upon to do so, and because of the greater dangers to which helpless- 



