“The so-called bread-and-butter studies, now being inserted into women’s education, have the 209 merit, superficially paradoxical, of raising the mind to the duties of citizenship. The simplest mother, immured in her home with her small children, will in the days to come realize, as she does not now at all realize, what the freshness of the milk supply, what the purity of the city water, what the efficiency of the health department, mean to those children. She will know—and when she knows she will care.
“Let me give you one illustration of the extent to which certain teachers of Home Economics recognize the future civic responsibilities of their pupils.
“In a little town far up in the Northwest there’s a famous Homemakers’ School. It is far from the social pressure of packed populations. Nevertheless, along with all the housekeeping details which crowd its two-year course, you’ll find a series of lectures on ‘Home and Social Economics’ based on a theory which I’ll try to give in almost the very words used by the school itself in its public announcements of policy. It’s this:
“‘The growing wealth of different communities, the application of modern inventions to 210 home industries, the passing of many of the former lines of women’s work into the factory have brought to many women leisure time which should be spent in social service. Civic cleanliness, the humane treatment of children, the city beautiful, education, civic morality, the protection of children from immoral influences, child labor, the organizations to protect neglected children and to reform delinquent children—all are legitimately within the province of motherhood, and the attempt to improve conditions is a part of the duty of the modern woman.’
“Is that radical? Surely not. Surely it’s conservative. There’s not a suggestion in it of any change in woman’s interests. There’s only an awakening to the fact that her interests are now diffused throughout the community, that what could once be comprehended in a wilderness cave is now spread abroad through all the lands of all the world.
“I said I taught housekeeping in that cave. I wonder if I could teach better housekeeping to the whole world.
“I know I could if I would. But——
“I’m thinking now of the millions of women who, after all their home duties are done, still have some time they could give me for a more livable world life. Will they? I can’t say. But I will say this:
“Either their public spirit will grow or their private character will decline. One of the two. Because they carry, along with that leisure of theirs, not only its blessings but also its curse. They must sanctify it or perish by it.