THE PRIMARY SOCIAL SETTLEMENT. 545 



simply because they dislike housekeeping and the " bother " of little 

 children, put an inefficient or efficient substitute in the position of 

 family care-taker, while they themselves accept a clerkship in the 

 husband's or stranger's down-town office, under the subterfuge of 

 earning more than enough to pay for the extra service at home. As- 

 suming maternity and shirking motherhood is even more dangerous 

 and condemnatory than assuming paternity and shirking fatherhood. 

 I understand from our Commissioner of Labor, Mr. Carroll D. 

 Wright, that 88.7 per cent of employed women are single. If this 

 is not true, and the majority or even a large minority of women 

 wage-earners are married, then it is a serious matter that may be regu- 

 lated in some degree by sociologists and capitalists. 



The writer is a member of two clubs that are stimulating and 

 helpful to the primary social settlement — the family — and believes 

 that a moderate use of the club, like that of any good thing, is de- 

 sirable. But when the club is ubiquitous and disproportionately 

 valued, so that men, women, and adult children " recognize them- 

 selves more by their badges," and care more for ties of ribbon than 

 ties of blood, then the club is inimical to home life. The remedy 

 for this is in making the family a fraternity — an enlarged fellowship 

 of people and ideas, a comradeship, that shapes itself into forms of 

 mutual helpfulness. When heads of families, who now entertain 

 their gentlemen friends in elaborate, expensive ways of eating and 

 drinking at their clubhouse, are free and willing to bring them to 

 the family house, where eating and drinking shall be the subordinate 

 part of a home welcome; when it is the custom of women to open 

 the doors of their homes and hearts in retail hospitality, instead of 

 disposing of social indebtedness in the lump, as it were, at their club- 

 house ; when the ornaments of a house are " the friends who fre- 

 quent it " and the family who live in it, and when courtesy between 

 the members of the family is as pronounced as that between club 

 members; when family amusements are pleasant and recreative, the 

 home will be as popular as the club. To avoid disintegration and 

 disloyalty, the family must satisfy the reasonable desires of its 

 individual members. 



That very important family function of communicating psychi- 

 cal impulses is too often disused, abused, or transferred. When this 

 function is in normal exercise,* the family conversation at table is 

 not the same category of questions and answers as to individual tasks, 

 or the familiar rehearsal of the grocer's blunders, the servant's in- 

 efficiency, or the children's mishaps. 



* See An Introduction to the Study of Society. By Small and Vincent, p. 246. 

 vol. lii. — 40 



