The Warriors

by Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay

What social recognition can be given to servants who lie, steal, who shirk every duty that can be shirked, and who are both incompetent and unfaithful? The here-and-there one faithful helper receives her meed of appreciation and affection. The whole aspect of household work will change when honor-work is given: when home-helpers come up to us, from the truthful and honor-loving class.

The school-room is the place in which the principles of work are implanted: thoroughness, grasp, speed, decision, and definite purpose. The shop is the apprentice-place of work, before one takes up individual responsibilities. The man who wishes to rise in the railroad service goes into the shops and roundhouse. The man who wishes to take charge of an important department in a department store is put to tying packages.

Teachers' work will not be rightly done until certain advantages are given to teachers that are now largely withheld. Teachers need more society, more hours of play, freer opportunity of marriage. Instead of being tied up to exercise-books and roll-books, in their home-hours, they should have a chance to spend their time on the golf-links, at afternoon teas, in visiting and in entertaining friends. Take away society from any man or woman, and you take away the possibility of a growing, happy, and helpful life. We need friends just as we need air. Teachers need admiration and affection, just as much as the society girl does.

Universities should have, in their faculties, men and women who represent the best social as well as the best intellectual life of the world—who are not only, in the highest sense of the word, society men and women, but who are social leaders, inspiring truth, inculcating larger social ideals of the best sort.

The problem between capitalist and laborer, however, only affects a portion of the world; that of domestic service a still smaller proportion; that of teachers affects only a class. There is another problem, which affects nearly all married women, and therefore a large section of the human race. It is the problem of mother-work. Here is where the economist should next turn his attention. First, What is Mother-work? Second, What are the best economic conditions under which this work can be done? When we have solved this question, we shall have solved a great human problem.

Mother-work includes the bearing and the rearing of children, the conduct of a home, and the placing of that home in the right social atmosphere and relations. It includes manual, intellectual, and spiritual labors. The one who lives and works, as God meant her to live and work, will never feel over-fatigue. Why do mothers often look so tired? It is because they too often do not have what every mother ought to have: education, rest, change, a Sabbath-day, individual income, intellectual interests, society.

Whether in the simplest home or in the stateliest, there are certain manual things to be done in regard to the care and bringing-up of children, and the conduct of a home. To make the conditions of a woman's life easier, the very first thing is this: 1. Women should be educated primarily for home-life. By this I do not mean that a woman should be taught cooking, and not political economy; that she should be instructed in dressmaking and nursery-work, but not in chemistry and logic. I mean that the very fullest education that schools, colleges, universities, and foreign travel can give, should be given to the woman who is fortunate enough to have them at command, and that every woman, according to the degree of her possibilities of education and opportunity, should have the best. But always this education should be thought of as a part of her preparation for a woman's life. When boys are in a business college, the principal of that college does not forget that among the boys there may be more than one who will never have a business life, but who will go out into other interests and pursuits. Yet he turns the thoughts of all boys in his school specially toward business problems. In schools and colleges for women, not all the girls will marry, not all will be mothers, but most of them will be. Is not, then, the normal education of a woman that which, while it does not cramp her life in one direction, nor mould her in a set way, yet keeps always in mind the fact that the normal woman is being educated for a normal woman's life?

This would not necessarily change the curriculum of our colleges in any way; it would change the spirit and atmosphere of some of them at once. Instead of the spirit being: "My mind is just as good as a man's. What a man can study, I can learn! What a man can do, I can do!"—the spirit would be this: "I am going out into a woman's life, and it is my business now to take to myself all the wisdom, counsel, experience, and inspiration of past ages, that I may be the very grandest woman that history has yet seen! I will be a land-mark in time: I will be a pivot in history around which the earth shall turn. Because of my life, women to the end of time shall be able to live a truer, freer, better life!"

With this thought in mind, all the academic subjects would still pass into her mind and life, but they would be much more naturally set and their value would be greatly enhanced. Then we would not have the too-ambitious woman stepping out of college, or the restless and discontented one. We would have the large-minded, earnest, noble, public-spirited one, who would go out into the world as a fine type of woman, to live a woman's life and do a woman's work. Married or unmarried, she would still have a woman's interests, a woman's influence, a woman's charm.

This higher education may or may not include practical studies in domestic science, nursing, and household emergencies, but she should learn somewhere the elements of these studies, so that when she goes into a home of her own her duties and responsibilities will not be met in a half-hearted and untrained way.