By Jane Addams
This war is destroying the home unit in the most highly civilized countries in the world to an extent which is not less than appalling.... At the present moment women in Europe are being told: bring children into the world for the benefit of the nation; for the strengthening of future battle lines; forgetting everything that you are taught to hold dear; forgetting your struggles to establish the responsibilities of fatherhood; forgetting all but the appetite of war for human flesh. It must be satisfied and you must be the ones to feed it, cost what it may; this is war’s message to the world of women.
The Home
By Mrs. Laura P. Young
It is the home, and specifically the mother, who, with taste and tact, experience and wisdom, and above all, with love and faith, must guide and steady and inspire these lives. If we want our boys and girls to be free from discontent, free from hard commercialism, free from vulgarity and false ideals, we must enter their lives and quietly guide them into a youthful brotherhood and sisterhood of service.
Honest Partnership in the Home
By Mrs. Fred Dick
(From speech before Congress on Welfare of the Child.)
The homemaking of the future ... must be founded in this day and generation on financial independence. The girl of the past used to go from financial dependence in the girlhood home, to financial dependence as wife. She now goes from the independence of a wage earner to financial dependence as a wife, which relationship creates friction, and leads to incompatibility and divorce. There should be an adjustment of the responsibilities of home life before marriage on the basis of honest partnership. The children coming into the home should be taken into partnership financially and occupationally. They should be paid for their work on the basis that “If you don’t work you can’t eat,” and held responsible for their share in the home-making.