The Woman’s Business has always suffered from lack of facility in adapting itself to new forms of expression.  The natural task found, a method of handling it in a fashion sufficiently acceptable to prevent family revolts mastered, and the woman usually is as fixed as a star in its orbit.  She resents changes of method, new interpretations, and fresh expressions.  It is she, not man, who stands an immovable mountain in the path of militant feminism.

In this course she is following her nature.  An instinct more powerful than logic tells her that she must preserve the thing she is making, that center for which she is responsible, that place where her child is born and reared, where her mate retreats, to be reassured that the effort to which he has committed himself is worth while, where all the community to which she belongs is served and strengthened.  If this place is preserved, she must do it.  Man, an experimenter and adventurer, cannot.

Changes she fears.  She sees them as disturbers of her plans and her ideals.  But the changes will not stay.  They gather about her retreat, beat at the doors, creep in at the windows, win her husband and children from her very arms.  The home on which she depended to keep them becomes impotent.  While she stands an implacable guardian of a form of truth, truth has moved on, broadened its outlook, and clothed itself in new expressions.

It is entirely understandable that the woman who sees herself left behind with her dead gods should cry out against change as the ruin of her hopes.  It is equally understandable that those who find themselves adrift should doubt the home as an institution.  At the bottom of the revolt of thousands of our “uneasy women” of to-day lies this doubt.  The home failed them, and with the logic of limited experience they cast it out of their calculations.

But the home is one of the unescapable facts of nature and society—­unescapable because the child demands it.  One of the earliest convictions of the child is that he has a right to a home.  To him it appears as the great necessity.  He cannot see himself outside of it.  To be at large in the world throws him into panic.  The sacrifices and pains very young children suffer uncomplainingly, particularly in great cities and factory towns, is a pathetic enough demonstration of what the word means to them.  Mere children by the hundreds support families terrified by the thought of their collapse.  The orphan forever dreams of the day when a home will be found for him.  The child whose parents seek freedom, leaving him to school or servants, never fails to nourish a sense of injustice.  Whatever one generation may decide as to the futility or burdensomeness of the home, the oncoming child will force its return.

To keep this permanent place abreast with growing truth, that is the obligation of the woman.  It is the failure to do this that produces what we may call the homeless daughter; that girl who loved and often served to the point of folly, finds herself in a group where none of the imperative needs the day has awakened in her are met.