[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  A road in DeKalb, Illinois, before improvements were made.  Through the agency of improvement societies, homemakers may often bring about community reforms]

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  The same road after repairs were made through the efforts of members of the community]

Sometimes it will happen that the homemaker finds work to be done in the line of community reform.  Perhaps the roads are out of repair, or the cemetery is neglected, or the school building insanitary.  Perhaps the water supply is not properly guarded, or milk inspection not thoroughly looked after.  Perhaps industrial conditions in the town are not what they should be.  Perhaps laws are not being enforced.  New conditions require new laws.  There may be loafing places on streets and in stores which are dangerous.  The billiard halls may need a thorough moral cleaning and a moral man placed in charge.  The public dance halls may need proper chaperonage.  The moving pictures need state and national censorship to eliminate the careless suggestions leading toward both vice and crime.  The homemaker must know under such circumstances how to stir public opinion, how to make use of her existing organizations, how to set on foot the various movements necessary for reform.

In connection with the subject of the homemaker’s place in the community we must return to the thought of woman as the buyer for the home and of her consequent influence upon the economic standards of the community.  It is not unusual in these days to read or hear such statements as the following:  “The woman was no longer producer and consumer....  She became the consumer and her entire economic function changed....  The housewife is the buying agent for the home.”  Like many statements in regard to woman and her function, this seems overdrawn, since woman in her capacity as homemaker is still a producer as well as a consumer in thousands of cases.  That she will become, economically, merely a buying agent, some of us not only doubt, but should consider a certain misfortune, should it occur.  The fact remains, however, that as buyer of both raw materials and finished products the woman spends a very large percentage (some say nine-tenths) of the money taken in by the retail merchants of the country.  This gives, or should give her, a commanding position in the producing world.  If the women of America should definitely decide to-day that they would buy no more corn flakes, or mercerized crochet cotton, or silk elastic, the factories now so busy turning out these products would be shut down to-morrow until they could be converted to other uses.  Women often fail to realize their power in this direction.  When they do realize it, they are able to accomplish quietly all sorts of reforms in the mercantile and industrial worlds.  There need be no crusade against adulterated foods other than real education and the refusal of homemakers to buy from merchants who carry them in stock.  The same remedy will apply to overworked and underpaid workers, to insanitary shops and factories.  That it is the woman’s duty to control these matters is a necessary conclusion when we consider her power as the “spender of the family income.”  Who else has this power as she has it?