for convents, but for a working world; therefore well graded and interesting manual training should run through all these years and should furnish a well-developed base for later special industrial preparation of some kind.  In the second place, the girls should be taught by men and women, married and unmarried, and fine ideals of actual womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in school-rooms, and in professions—­but also in homes, should be constantly held before them.  Our present education leaves this training mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic rich nor our eight million wage-earning women, when mothers, can or will attend to it.

After the girl reaches the age of fourteen, she should have at least two years of further education in which she could master the details of some necessary work which would enable her to look the world in the face and offer fair payment for her living.  With most girls, this work would be connected with children and the service of the home; for domestic service, no matter how organized, must always occupy a multitude of women.  All girls should have at least rudimentary training in these matters.

During the period of transition from schools to their own family life, the girls might well give a half dozen years to work in factories and stores where the conditions should be as good, and as well guarded, as in our best school buildings—­in factories, in a word, where the employers would be willing that their own daughters should work.  This is surely a fair standard.  Work which is not safe or fit for me to do, is not fit for me to hire done.  If this principle fails, then democracy is but a dream.

But during all this period of preparation we should never forget that, as Madame Gnauck-Kuehne so admirably points out, “women’s work has to a large extent an episodic character."[39] All women confront romantic love, marriage and children; and any woman who misses them misses the crowning joy and glory of her life.  Vicarious realization may save the soul, but it can never fill the place of reality.  The man fronts these same experiences, but they are not related to his work as they are related to the work of women.  Surely there can be no doubt that the ideal solution, in this period, is a man and woman so deeply bound together by love that there is no question of self-protection, either in terms of work or money; and the man being freed from the burdens of maternity, should mainly earn the income.  We shall discuss the new type of home and family in a later chapter, but in any home where there are children there is need of an intelligent mother’s very constant care.

[39] Madame GNAUCK KUeHNE, Die Deutsche Frau.