[Illustration:  Keystone View Co.  Linen-mill workers.  Spinning and weaving, whether of cotton, linen, silk, or wool, are more satisfactorily done by factory workers than in the home]

  A woman lived in our town who wasn’t very wise. 
  She had a reputation for making homemade pies. 
  And when she found her pies would sell, with all her might and main
  She opened up a factory, and spoiled it all again.

Nonsense?  Yes—­but with a strong element of sense, nevertheless.

Entirely aside, however, from the industrial status of the home, unless we are to see a practical cessation of childbearing and rearing, homes must apparently continue to exist.  No one has yet found a substitute place for this particular industry.  It is a commonly accepted fact that young children do better, both mentally and physically, in even rather poor homes than in a perfectly planned and conducted institution.  And we need go no farther than this in seeking a sufficient reason for saving the home.  This one is enough to enlist our best service in aid of homemaking and home support.

From earliest ages woman has been the homemaker.  No plan for the preservation of the home or for its evolution into a satisfactory social factor can fail to recognize her vital and necessary connection with the problem.  Therefore in answer to the question “What ought woman to be?” we say boldly, “A homemaker.”  Reduced to simplest terms, the conditions are these:  if homes are to be made more serviceable tools for social betterment, women must make them what they ought to be.  Consequently homemaking must continue to be woman’s business—­the business of woman, if you like—­a considerable, recognized, and respected part of her “business of being a woman.”  Nor may we overlook the fact that it is only in this work of making homes and rearing offspring that either men or women reach their highest development.  Motherhood and fatherhood are educative processes, greater and more vital than the artificial training that we call education.  In teaching their children, even in merely living with their children, parents are themselves trained to lead fuller lives.

“The central fact of the woman’s life—­Nature’s reason for her—­is the child, his bearing and rearing.  There is no escape from the divine order that her life must be built around this constraint, duty, or privilege, as she may please to consider it."[1] It is the fashion among some women to assume that it is time all this were changed, and that therefore it will be changed.  They look forward to seeing womankind released from this “constraint, duty, or privilege,” and yet see in their prophetic vision the race moving on to a future of achievement.  The fact, however, ignore it as we may, cannot be gainsaid:  no man-made or woman-made “emancipation” will change nature’s law.