example.  It sends forth yearly teachers and original investigators, but quite as great and important a product are the hundreds of farmers and farmers’ sons who come fresh from field and dairy to take their six weeks’ training in the management of cattle or of crops, and to field and dairy return, carrying away with them the garnered experience of others, as well as increased intelligence and self-reliance in handling the problems of their daily toil.

Anna Garlin Spencer, in her “Woman and Social Culture,” points out how our much-lauded schools of domestic economy fail to benefit the schoolgirl, through this very overthoroughness and expensiveness how they are narrowed down to the turning out of teachers of domestic economy and dietitians and other institutional workers.  Domestic economy as a wage-earning vocation cannot be taught too thoroughly, but what every girl is entitled to have from the public school during her school years is a “short course” in the simple elements of domestic economy, with opportunity for practice.  It is nothing so very elaborate that girls need, but that little they need so badly.  Such a course has in view the girl as a homemaker, and is quite apart from her training as a wage-earner.

When again we turn to that side, matters are not any more promising.  If the boy of the working classes is badly off for industrial training, his sister is in far worse case.  Some provision is already made for the boy, and more is coming his way presently, but of training for the girl, which shall be adequate to fit her for self-support, we hear hardly anything.  We have noted that women are already in most of the trades followed by men, and that the number of this army of working, wage-earning women is legion; that they are not trained at all, and are so badly paid that as underbidders they perpetually cut the wages of men.  Nay, the young working-girl is even “her own worst competitor—­the competitor against her own future home, and as wife and mother she may have to live on the wage she herself has cheapened.”

And to face a situation like this are we making any adequate preparation?  With how little we are satisfied, let me illustrate.  In the address of Mrs. Raymond Robins as president of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America before their Fourth Biennial Convention in St. Louis, in June, 1913, she told how “in a curriculum of industrial education we find that under the heading ‘Science’ boys study elementary physics, mechanics and electricity, and girls the action of alkalies, and the removal of stains.  While under ‘Drawing’ we read, ’For boys the drawing will consist of the practical application of mechanical and free-hand work to parts of machinery, house plans, and so forth.  Emphasis will be placed upon the reading of drawings, making sketches of machine parts quickly and accurately.  For the girls the drawing will attempt to apply the simple principles of design and color to the work.  The girls will