Teaching and nursing may be grouped together as excellent preparation for the prospective homemaker.  It may be contended that the teacher and the hospital nurse spend years outside the home environment and that their minds are turned to other problems than those of housekeeping.  This contention is undoubtedly true; and if we were striving merely to make housekeepers, it might be worthy of serious consideration.  The home, however, as we have defined it, is a place in which to make people, and both the nurse and the teacher serve a long apprenticeship in this sort of manufacture.  Expert workers in either line concern themselves with the bodies and the minds of their pupils or patients.  They, together with physicians, lawyers, and social workers, have opportunities which can scarcely be equaled for learning by observation and experiment about the human relations that will confront them in their own homes.  They learn to be resourceful and to meet the emergencies of which life is full; they have the advantage of trained minds to set to work upon the administrative problems which underlie successful home life.

[Illustration:  Copyright by Underwood & Underwood Women medical students.  Physicians and surgeons have unusual opportunities for learning by observation and experiment about the human relations that will confront them in their own homes]

A question may arise as to the physical fitness for marriage and motherhood of the girl who has given her nerve force to the exacting and often depleting work of nurse, teacher, or physician.  It is unquestionably true that nurses and teachers do often wear out after comparatively few years at their vocation, although of the majority the opposite is true.  This merely means that conditions surrounding these vocations should be studied with a view to their improvement, if necessary, since we believe the vocations to be suited to women and women to the vocations.

Office work may prove an excellent training for certain phases of homemaking work.  Neatness, accuracy, precision, the doing again and again of constantly recurring tasks, all find their place and use in the housekeeper’s routine.  The calm atmosphere of the well-kept office even when typewriters and calculating machines are rattling is a better preparation for an orderly home than the rush of the department store or the factory.  Purely routine workers, who put little or no thought into their daily tasks, will enter upon homemaking lacking the initiative that homemakers need.  But the able office worker is not merely a follower of routine.  The greatest lack of office work as preparation for a homemaking career is that the girl’s interests during so large a part of her day are led away from the home and all that pertains to it.  She works neither with people nor with the things which go to make homes.  Probably, on the whole, office work in a general way may be classed as a neutral occupation, which neither adds to, nor reduces, in any great degree the girl’s possibilities as a homemaker.