The reading habit is now pretty well established; not only the reading habit, but liking for useful reading; and useful reading leads to learning.
Now comes Wide Awake, vigorous, hearty, not to say heavy. No, it isn’t heavy, though full as it can be of practical help along the road to sober manhood and womanhood. Full as it can be! There is need of play as well as of work; and Wide Awake has its mixture of work and rest and play. The work is all toward self-improvement; so is the rest; and so is the play. $2.40 a year.
Specimen copies of all the Lothrop magazines for fifteen cents; any one for five—in postage stamps.
Address D. Lothrop Company, Boston.
You little know what help there is in books for the average housewife.
Take Domestic Problems, for instance, beginning with this hard question: “How may a woman enjoy the delights of culture and at the same time fulfil her duties to family and household?” The second chapter quotes from somebody else: “It can’t be done. I’ve tried it; but, as things now are, it can’t be done.”
Mrs. Diaz looks below the surface. Want of preparation and culture, she says, is at the bottom of a woman’s failure, just as it is of a man’s.
The proper training of children, for instance, can’t be done without some comprehension of children themselves, of what they ought to grow to, their stages, the means of their guidance, the laws of their health, and manners. But mothers get no hint of most of these things until they have to blunder through them. Why not? Isn’t the training of children woman’s mission? Yes, in print, but not in practice. What is her mission in practice? Cooking and sewing!