It was well that after centuries of repression and subjection woman sought emancipation.  She needed it.  But the wildest flight of fancy cannot long conceal the ultimate fact.  Woman is the mother of the race.  “The female not only typifies the race, but, metaphor aside, she is the race."[2] Emancipation can never free her from this destiny.  In the United States, where woman has the largest freedom to enter the industrial world and maintain herself in entire independence, the percentage of those who marry is higher than in the countries where woman is a slave.  Ninety per cent of the mature women in our country become homemakers for a certain period, and probably over 90 per cent are assistant homemakers for another period of years before or after marriage.

Any vocational counselor who fails to reckon first with the homemaking career of girls is therefore blind to the facts of life.  All education, all training, must be considered in its bearing on the one vocation, homemaking.  The time will come when the occupations of boys and men must likewise be considered in relation to homemaking, but that problem is not the province of this book.

Women will bear and rear the children of the future, just as they have borne and reared the children of the past.  But under what conditions—­the best or those less worthy?  And what women—­again, the best or those less worthy?  Has woman been freed from subjection, from an inferior place in the scheme of life, only to become so intoxicated with a personal freedom, with her own personal ambition, that she fails to see what emancipation really means?  Will she be contented merely to imitate man rather than to work out a destiny of her own?  We think not.  When the first flush of freedom has passed, the pendulum will turn again and woman will find a truer place than she knows now or has known.

Two obstacles to the successful pursuit of her ultimate vocation stand prominently before the young woman of to-day:  first, the instruction of the times has imbued her with too little respect for her calling; second, her education teaches her how to do almost everything except how to follow this calling in the scientific spirit of the day.  She may scorn housework as drudgery, but no voice is raised to show her that it may be made something else.  With the advent of vocational guidance, vocational training of necessity follows close behind.  And with vocational training must come a proper appreciation, among the other businesses of life, of this “business of being a woman.”

Must we then educate the girl to be a homemaker, and keep her out of the industrial life which has claimed her so swiftly and in which she has found so much of her emancipation?  No, we could not, if we would, keep her from the outside life.  We must rather recognize her double vocation and, difficult though it seem, must educate her for both phases of her “business.”  She will be not only the better woman, but the better worker, because of the very breadth of her vocational horizon.