bound together by love that there is no question of self-protection in terms either of work or of money; and the man, being freed from the burdens of maternity, should mainly earn the in

come.

We need also to determine, by careful study and experiment, the kinds of work that are specially fitted to women's gifts and limitations. The specialization so rapidly going on in industry means infinite variety if we look at the whole field of human activity. No intelligent division of labor, from the point of view of the special qualities of men and women, has been attempted in the period since all work was transformed by our modern inventions. Possibly men should do most of the dress-making, and women should make men's clothing; but no intelligent man or woman can doubt that most work falls naturally into the hands of one sex or the other. Some day we shall know enough so that there will be little or no industrial competition between men and women.

IV

If a happy home were the universal destiny of women, our problem would be greatly simplified; but this is far from being the case. Not more than one half of all women over fifteen are married at any one moment. From 20 to 35, one half are married; but it is only from 35 to 55 that as many as three fourths are married; over 55 there are less than one half married, and most of them are widows. The majority of the women who are not married must work outside the home; and no girl, rich or poor, should be allowed to reach maturity without being prepared to face this possibility. As we have said, work is not a curse, but a blessing; it is an indispensable part of every well-ordered life; and without it,

to

the individual and the group will certainly degenerate. Rich and foolish parents who cannot realize this basal fact should nevertheless see that, even as insurance, their daughters must be able pay their way in life, if need comes, without selling themselves either in marriage or out of it. Even if the woman marries happily, she is never sure that she may not some day have to face self-support, and possibly for more mouths than her own.

But the woman who marries during her adolescent period must also work between the ages of twenty-five and fifty, and here we meet the hardest problem of all. More money is often needed than the man can earn; the wife may bring an industrial or professional equipment which is too valuable to discard; often the demands of the home, especially where there are no children, do not call forth the best energies of the woman, and she needs the larger life of outside work. Hence, many married women must continue to work away from the home. In any of these cases the problem is difficult. Bearing and rearing a child should withdraw a mother from fixed outside occupation for at least a year. Arguments born out of conflict cannot change this primitive fact. Women should not do shop- or factory-work during the last months before childbirth, and babies should be nursed from seven to nine months. A baby should be nursed for twenty minutes every two or three hours of its waking time, and since it does not always waken regularly, the nursing mother is debarred from continuous work even if it does not interfere with her effectiveness as a milk-producer.

The question of maternal care for children after they are weaned is more difficult to settle, but notwithstanding certain statistics gathered in Birmingham in February, 1910, which showed

that infant mortality among working mothers was one hundred and ninety per thousand, while among those not industrially employed it was two hundred and seventy per thousand, it seems certain that infant mortality is extremely high in foundling asylums and in factory homes. In Fall River, where out of every one hundred women forty-five are at work, three hundred and five babies out of every one thousand born die before they are a year old; while even in New York City but one hundred and eighty-nine out of a thousand die. The natural location of Fall River should make it a very healthy city. One remembers, too, the classic statements that in Lancashire, the home of women factory-workers, deaths among little children fell off steadily during the six months' strike in 1853, as they did in Paris during the four months' siege of 1870-71. Little children seem better off in time of war with the mother at home, than in time of peace with the mother in the factory.

All logic breaks down in the presence of growing things, as inexperienced city farmers and chicken-growers know. Little children need love and constant personal adjustments. Love does for them what sunshine does for plants; it is an indispensable condition of good growth for minds and feelings. So, too, the social instinct, being among the earliest and most important of our powers to develop, needs constant personal adjustment as the condition of its best growth and realization. Nine hundred and ninety-nine mothers out of a thousand give these conditions to their babies, while the best-trained and most sanitary nurse cannot secrete love for several children any more than one mother can secrete milk for a group of children. It is not a matter of good-will; it is a matter of human limitations.

A few years ago we turned to pasteurized milk and other prepared baby foods as the solution for unhygienic feeding of infants; to-day we know that even a dirty and ill-conditioned mother secretes better milk for her baby than can be bought in any laboratory. We must wash the mother and feed her the milk, and then let her give it to her baby, instinct with her own. life. It is quite possible that our talk of ignorant mother-love and of the necessary substitution of sanitary nurseries, canned care, and pre-digested affection, must go the same way. We shall probably get better results by cleaning up the home, enlightening the mother, and then letting her love her child into the full possession of its human qualities.

Economically, too, at least with factory-workers, it is questionable whether wages will support sanitary day-nurseries with intelligent nurses for small groups of children, and at the same time pay some one to cook and scrub at home. If the mother must still cook and care for her own house, in addition to her factory-work, the burden is too great; and if the money for nurses must come from the state or from charity, then we all know the danger of such subsidies to industry in its effect on wages.

The only way to secure absolute economic independence is for the state to subsidize all motherhood. This seems a reasonable thing to do, but in that case let the subsidy be paid directly to the mother for the whole unproductive period of the child's life. Already some of our states are considering a pension for widows, regulated by the number of dependent children; and this principle once admitted will be easily expanded.

Surely the ideal toward which we must work is that the mother, during the period when she is bearing and

rearing children, should be supported by the father of her children, or by the state, doing the work meanwhile which will best care for her children and at the same time conserve and strengthen her powers for the third period of her life.

This period of woman's life, from fifty to seventy-five years, is now more shamefully wasted than any other of our national resources. If one visits a state federation of women's clubs, he will find nearly every delegate of this age. They are women of mature understanding and of ripe judgment, still possessing abundant health and strength, and where relieved by economic conditions from the necessity of manual work, the relations which they maintain to life are such irregular and uncertain ones as inhere in the careers of mothers-in-law, grandmothers, club secretaries, and presidents of town improvement societies. Remove all restrictions on woman's activity, and these strong matrons would vitalize our schools, give us decent municipal housekeeping, supervise the conditions under which girls and women work in shops and factories, and do much to clean up our politics. Even debarred from real power as they are, they are

still making us decent in spite of ourselves.

For the future, then, it seems that we must accept working-women in every path of life. We must remove all disabilities under which they labor, and at the same time protect them by special legislation as future wives and mothers. All girls must master some line of self-supporting work; and, except in the case of those who have very special tastes and gifts, they should select work which can be interrupted without too great loss by some years of motherhood. During this time the mother must be supported so that she can care for her own child, though she must also maintain outside interests, through work, which will keep her in touch with the moving current of her time.

Industries must be humanized and made fit for women. The last third of a woman's life must be freed from legal limitations and prejudices, so that we may secure these best years of her life for private and public service. And meanwhile, it is well to remember that every step we take in making this a fit world for woman to live in, makes it a fit world for her father, her brothers, her children, and her husband.

And send the godly in a pet to pray. MRS. JACKSON came out on the front porch and looked down the street, between the strings on which the morning-glories had sent up long twining shoots. But there was no man in sight, except the rural delivery driver from Number Six route, in his covered wagon, and the cashier of the bank moving comfortably homeward, with the assurance of supper in his easy gait. Mrs. Jackson went back impatiently into the kitchen. She turned down the flame of the gasoline stove to the very lowest point, and set the creamed potatoes back on it with an asbestos plate under them. Then she opened the oven door and, drawing out a pan of nicely-browning biscuit, turned up a corner one and tapped its inside surface with an experienced finger. After that she went through the hall and looked out of the front door again.

Still there was no one in sight. Now, even the children along the block had responded to calls from their various doors. It was fifteen minutes after six, and in Washburn everybody had supper at six precisely. It was a poorlyregulated family that was lax in the matter. Mrs. Jackson went back and stirred the potatoes, to be sure they were not scorching. Then she got out a folded tea-towel and tucked it in all over the biscuit, though at the same time she murmured murmured impatiently, impatiently, 'They'll be spoiled!'

Presently she went back to the front door. This time she did not go out on the porch. It was nothing less than

humiliating for a housewife to wait on the porch for her husband when all other husbands along the street were already presiding at the heads of their tables. But she recklessly held the screen-door open a few inches, regardless of flies, while she pressed her cheek against it to look sidewise up the street. She could see for two blocks, all but one little place in the next square where two tall snow-ball bushes and a spreading box-elder quite hid a gateway. William was not in sight, either on this side of that place or beyond it.

Then suddenly she saw him, on the nearer side of the snow-ball bushes. She had not seen him approach them from beyond, and the deduction to be drawn was evident. She shut the door with a snap and went back into the kitchen. When William came in she was taking up the biscuit, and to his sprightly 'Hello!' she responded only with an unsyllabled murmur, a murmur that did not commit her to a mood — and did not look up from the

oven.

William took a second look at her back; then without saying anything more went into the neat little lavatory that opened from the kitchen, to prepare for supper. After splashing a few moments at the bowl, he laid his dripping hand on the rack of fresh-folded towels beside him, but on second thoughts wiped on the roller-towel instead. Mrs. Jackson, glancing sidewise as she filled the tea-pot, noticed the propitiatory action, but she only

compressed her lips a little, and in nowise relaxed her reserve.

'No, everything's here.'

'I guess I'm a little late,' William went on as he sat down, in a distinct effort to establish a pleasant atmosphere. Jens Peterson came in to get a gasoline stove, and he stayed looking at the fireless cookers. It beats all how those Swedes take up with things when they get started. He said, "I tank I won't take no fireless stove dis year." But he took the best gasoline range we had.'

William knew he could not imitate the Swedish brogue, but he was trying to make sprightly conversation. He ended his little speech with a sort of inquiring glance at his wife, out of keeping with the ease of his manner. But she did not look up or respond, and he meditatively opened a biscuit while he tried to think of something else to say.

Presently, without lifting her eyes from her tea-cup, Mrs. Jackson said, 'Was that why you were late?'

William hesitated a bare instant, and then said, 'Yes - he kept me until six, and then I stopped to talk to some one after I left the store.'

Mrs. Jackson said nothing. She was quite sure the delay had been made beside those snow-ball bushes. That was where Mrs. Cora Jessup lived. Three times lately William had stopped there on his way to supper; Amanda knew, because the first two times he had mentioned it. Mrs. Cora Jessup had a great way of being on her porch or in her yard when people passed. She had no one to get supper for but herself, and they did say that she took the care of her household lightly. Be

Mrs. Jessup was an indefinite sort of widow, of the kind of widowhood that seems to carry but little recollection of a previous condition of matrimony. There had been a Mr. Jessup, to be sure. But he had been so little of a personage during his life and had taken himself out of the way so completely, that he seemed to have left no perceptible trace upon Mrs. Jessup. She had, however, earned the right to maintain a separate establishment, and to bear herself with the certified importance of a married person, and yet escape the real burdens of matrimony. And the experience that bestowed on her the position of widow had given her an easy manner in establishing relations with men, and an assured familiarity with them. She might have been the widow of twenty men instead of the one pale Henry Jessup.

At some time she had been a milliner, and had acquired from that experience a certainty and enterprise in personal adornment, far surpassing that of the other women of Washburn. She was much given to veils, veils that hung and veils that clung, veils that floated coquettishly on the breeze, and veils that drooped demurely to the shoulder. The Washburn women did not wear veils much except on windy days. Moreover, there was a notion that Mrs. Jessup used her clothes too much as a means of calling attention to her very good figure. In Washburn circles clothes were worn to cover the figures, not to display them. But Mrs. Jessup's dresses had a fit that made it impossible to forget the flesh and blood beneath them. Some women thought it rather vulgar. Besides that, having