On the contrary, wherever women have left their kitchens and nurseries, whenever they have gone out into the world of action and of affairs, they have increased their effectiveness as mothers.  I do not mean by this that the girl who enters a factory at fourteen and works there ten hours a day until she marries increases her effectiveness as a mother.  Industrial slavery unfits a woman for motherhood as certainly as intellectual and moral slavery unfits her.

Women who are free, who look on life through their own eyes, who think their own thoughts, who live in the real world of striving, struggling, suffering humanity, are the most effective mothers that ever lived.  They know how to care for their own children, and more than that, they know how to care for the community’s children.

The child at his mother’s knee, spelling out the words of a psalm, stands for the moral education of the race—­or it used to.  A group of Chicago club women walking boldly into the city Bridewell and the Cook County Jail and demanding that children of ten and twelve should no longer be locked up with criminals; these same women, after the children were segregated, establishing a school for them, and finally these same women achieving a juvenile court, is the modern edition of the old ideal.

Woman’s place is in the home.  This is a platitude which no woman will ever dissent from, provided two words are dropped out of it.  Woman’s place is Home.  Her task is homemaking.  Her talents, as a rule, are mainly for homemaking.  But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home.  Home is the community.  The city full of people is the Family.  The public school is the real Nursery.  And badly do the Home and the Family and the Nursery need their mother.

I dream of a community where men and women divide the work of governing and administering, each according to his special capacities and natural abilities.  The division of labor between them will be on natural and not conventional lines.  No one will be rewarded according to sex, but according to work performed.  The city will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household.  Everything will be as clean as in a good home.  Every one, as in a family, will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on.  There will be no slums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenement rooms.  There will be no babies dying because of an impure milk supply.  There will be no “lung blocks” poisoning human beings that landlords may pile up sordid profits.  No painted girls, with hunger gnawing at their empty stomachs, will walk in the shadows.  All the family will be taken care of, taught to take care of themselves, protected in their daily tasks, sheltered in their homes.

The evil things in society are simply the result of half the human race, with only half the wisdom, and not even half the moral power contained in the race, trying to rule the world alone.  Men’s government rests on force, on violence.  Everything evil, everything bad, everything selfish, is a form of violence.  Poverty itself is a form of violence.