It is interesting to see how completely both teacher and pupils take to their hearts the mother who really does get acquainted them.  How easy it is to appeal to her for advice and help; and what a sense of familiar ownership she comes to have in the school.  It is no longer merely “what my child is learning” or whether “my children are getting what they ought to get in school,” but rather “what we are doing in our school.”

The activities of women in the church usually follow along well-worn paths.  The women help as they have always helped by their attendance at service, by their ladies’ aid society or guild, by their missionary society, and by their aid to the poor of the town.  Many struggling churches depend almost solely upon their women’s work for support.  That the woman whose problems we are studying should enter upon her church duties armed with wisdom is quite as necessary as that she should be earnest and enthusiastic.  The church is not primarily a neighborhood social center.  It is first of all a means for spiritual uplift.  It must not, in a multiplicity of humanitarian activities, lose its character of spiritual guide.  Its women will therefore be animated by a spiritual conception of the church and will base their activities in church work upon such a conception.  The church built upon such a foundation will be foremost among local forces devoted to community service and will be a true force in the individual lives of its people.  The women of the church need to use the church as an effective instrument for community betterment—­not merely material welfare, but actual increase in spiritual worth.  Perfunctory church attendance has little part in such a program.  It calls rather for intelligent understanding of church problems and an application of spiritual ideals to everyday life.

Outside the organizations common to all communities the homekeeper finds that she must keep in touch with her particular neighborhood through its social life.  It is here that her children are growing up, here that they find their friends, here that they give and take knowledge of themselves, of people, of ways to enjoy life and to meet its problems.  Here perhaps they will find their life mates and will start out to be homemakers themselves.  The mother of a family must know her community thoroughly.  She must do her share toward making it a safe place and a pleasant place in which her children and other children may grow up, and in which she and her husband, other women and their husbands, may spend their lives.  The mother who knows her children’s friends, who makes them welcome at her house, who “gets acquainted” with their qualities good and bad, who is a “big sister” to them all, will not find herself shut out from her children’s social life.  If all the mothers were “big sisters” and all the fathers were “big brothers,” neighborhood society would be a safer thing than it sometimes is.

Nor should all the social life center about the young people.  The woman’s club, the village improvement society, the men’s civic league, all have their places.  Club life will menace neither the man nor the woman whose first interest is the home; and every man and woman needs the stimulus of contact with other minds.